US: Deadliest fire in California history now contained

By Umar Farooq

WASHINGTON

The Camp Fire, which took the lives of many and left behind trails of destruction and ashes, is 100 percent contained, officials said Sunday.

The Camp Fire torched the town of Paradise in northern California and surpassed state records, becoming the most deadly and most destructive fire the state has ever seen.

The death toll was raised to 85 as officials found more remains while searching through the debris left behind by the fire

The blaze burned through a total of 153,000 acres, destroying nearly 14,000 homes and nearly 5,000 other buildings. The fire also injured three firefighters in the process.

Throughout the fire, the number of missing people reached a peak of over 1,000 individuals, as the Butte County Sheriff's Office regularly updated the list. Currently, the sheriff's office said that 249 people are still missing in the area.

Fire personnel and local authorities pushed through the last few days to fully contain the fires and continuing the search efforts to locate missing persons.

"We haven't taken the day off," Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said on Thanksgiving Day.

Officials have still not given a cause for the fire, some researchers say that the changing climate along with logging, which was intended to reduce fires, helped the fires grow.

“When it got to the logged area, it spread very rapidly and people just didn’t have much time to evacuate in Paradise, so this whole notion that logging — so-called hazardous fuels reduction — was going to save the town is a dangerous falsehood,” Chad Hanson, a fire ecologist at the John Muir Project, an environmental group critical of logging practices, told The New York Times.

The Woolsey Fire in southern California also took three lives and injured three firefighters. The blaze was fully contained Wednesday, after burning through 97,000 acres and destroying 1,500 structures.

The fire season in California usually runs from mid-summer and lasts until around the middle of October, however experts now say they may now be expected year round.