Devastating toll on lives and homes emerges as Western US wildfires break records

Wildfires continue to burn without containment up and down the length of the West Coast on Thursday, with smoke blotting out the sun in parts of Oregon and California in particular. In Oregon, officials are beginning to take stock of the damage, particularly from the Glendower Fire, also known as the Almeda Fire, that has threatened parts of the city of Medford, and largely destroyed the towns of Ashland, Phoenix and Talent to the southeast of the city.

Red Flag warnings for critical wildfire weather remain in effect for parts of Oregon and Washington through the early morning hours Thursday, but after that, weather are expected to improve, with slackening winds compared with the howling gales that caused the fire outbreak to feature so many rapidly spreading fires at once.

At least seven people, including a 1-year-old boy, have died in California, Oregon and Washington state amid the dozens of wildfires burning throughout the varied landscapes of the American West, officials announced Wednesday.

Oregon Democratic Gov. Kate Brown sought to prepare her state for sobering news about the fires' toll at a news conference Wednesday, stating: "We expect to see a great deal of loss, both in structures and in human lives.

“This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.”

Officials in northern Washington state announced that a 1-year-old boy died in the Cold Springs Fire and his parents were severely burned in the blaze. Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said in a news conference that his office received a call Tuesday afternoon about Jacob and Jamie Hyland, a young couple from Renton, Wash., who were reported missing while visiting Okanogan with their son.

Hawley said the family attempted to escape the fire as it approached the property where they were staying. Rescuers first found their truck, which was burned and wrecked, and then located the family on the bank of the Columbia River on Wednesday morning.

The parents had third-degree burns and were flown to a Seattle hospital for treatment.

The smoke from the siege of blazes was fouling air quality in California, Oregon, and Washington state. The U.S. government’s Air Quality Index showed large areas of code red or “unhealthy” air quality in all three states. In California and Oregon, pockets of code purple and amber, signifying very unhealthy and hazardous pollution levels were present. Pollution levels near Salem, Ore. were the highest on the planet, based on values reported to the international database at the website waqi.info.

In southwestern Oregon, wildfires continue to burn across thousands of acres, including in timber-dominated ecosystems where such fires are relatively rare in this part of the typically rainy state.

The remains of one person were found in Ashland, and the Glendower Fire that affected Medford, Talent and Phoenix is now a criminal investigation to determine if it was deliberately sparked.

In addition, in Mehama, Ore., a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother were killed trying to flee the Santiam Fire on Wednesday, which stood at 159,000 acres and zero percent containment as of Thursday morning.

Family members confirmed to KPTV that Wyatt Tofte and his grandmother, Peggy Mosso, died inside their car next to the family’s home. (Officials also found the remains of the boy’s dog in the vehicle.) Wyatt’s mother suffered severe burns and remains in critical condition, family told KGW.

The National Weather Service forecast office in Medford is predicting shifting winds and continued hot and dry conditions Thursday, but the strong winds that have characterized the past few days of historic fire spread are finally dying down. There is even some rain in the forecast for early next week, though it won’t be enough to squelch the flames.

“We’ll see winds shift from east to southeast or northwest to west to northwest in the afternoon,” the NWS stated in a technical discussion. “It will remain dry today with plenty of smoke covering most of the forecast area.”

The forecast high for Medford is 100 degrees, but in a sign of how dense the smoke is, the NWS said that may not be reached because the smoke is absorbing and scattering much of the incoming solar radiation, preventing it from heating the air near the ground.

To the south, in California, at least three people have died and another 12 remained missing in the Bear Fire that advanced about 25 miles in 24 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday, threatening to burn into Oroville. The fire is part of the larger North Complex Fire, which has rapidly became the state’s ninth-largest blaze on record, burning about 252,000 acres through Wednesday with 24% containment. This fire burned through timber, much of it dead trees that were weakened or killed off by the five-year drought that affected the state from 2011 to 2017. In a single day, it consumed more than 200,000 acres.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said in a news conference Wednesday that two of the three dead were found in the same location. The other victim was discovered near Berry Creek, Calif., by a California Highway Patrol officer who suspected they fled from their car in an unsuccessful attempt to escape the fire, the San Jose Mercury News reported. The sheriff’s office was working to identify the victims and notify their families, Honea said.

Smoke from the blazes was so thick that it turned the sky orange across the San Francisco Bay area Wednesday, with birds failing to sense daybreak.

Uncharted territory

As of Wednesday, California had seen more than 2.5 million acres burned this year, the largest amount of land on record - with the heart of the Southern California fire season still to come.

In 2020, California has seen its second, third, fourth and ninth largest fires in the last 90 years.

The simultaneous outbreak of fires across such a large expanse, plus the staggering speeds with which these fires advanced, have led wildfire experts to say this was an unprecedented event in modern times. In fact, the only comparable event mentioned is the Great Blow Up of 1910, when a massive blaze swept across parts of Montana and Idaho, according to Nick Nauslar, a predictive services meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

“Multiple fires made 20-plus mile runs in 24-hours over the last few days in California, Oregon and Washington,” Nauslar said. Such distances traveled so quickly may not be all that rare in grassland fires, Nauslar noted.

“However, most of these fires are making massive runs in timber and burning tens of thousands of acres and in some cases 100,000-plus acres in one day,” Nauslar said. “The shear amount of fire on the landscape is surreal, and no one I have talked to can remember anything like it.”

This wildfire event “rivals the past fire season in Australia,” he said, noting that more acres burned overall in Australia’s devastating fire season, however.

In addition to the 2.5 million acres burned in California, 672,000 and 500,000 acres have been lost in Oregon and Washington state respectively.

The wildfires come after a record-shattering heat wave that sent temperatures across the region soaring through the triple digits, and amid human-caused climate change that is heightening fire risks in the West.

These blazes have been driven by strong, dry, offshore winds that contributed to extreme fire behavior, which can produce everything from mushroom cloudlike plumes of smoke that reach 40,000 feet in height and manufacture lightning of their own, to fire tornadoes that make it impossible for firefighters to contain an advancing fire.

After a mid-August heat wave and wildfire outbreak in California, the heat wave that struck the region in the past week dried vegetation out to a record extent, priming vegetation for burning.

John Abatzoglou, a climate researcher at the University of California, Merced, noted one key fire index that measures the thirst of the atmosphere showed record-setting conditions across a vast expanse of the West this week. As he explained on Twitter, the vapor-pressure deficit “is the difference between how much moisture the air can hold (which increases nonlinearly with temperature) and how much moisture is in the air.”

Extremely low vapor pressure means conditions are hot and the air is extremely dry. This, combined with an early-season down-sloping wind event, helped lead to this wildfire outbreak - once sparks lit new blazes and winds hit preexisting fires.

A study published in August shows climate change is increasing the risk of extreme wildfire conditions during the fall season in California. The state’s frequency of fall days with extreme fire-weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s, the study found.

The unprecedented fires have forced authorities to take previously unheard of actions.

Following the rescue of hundreds of stranded hikers, campers and others from the advancing Creek Fire earlier in the week, the U.S. Forest Service announced the closure of all 18 national forests in California on Wednesday afternoon in response to “unprecedented and historic fire conditions.”

The closures cover more than 20 million acres of forest, an area about 26 times the size of Rhode Island.

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The Washington Post’s Jason Samenow and Matthew Cappucci contributed to this report.