Wildfires Live Updates: Evacuations Ordered as Fires Near Portland Suburbs

Portland declares an emergency as fires burn toward its suburbs.

The wildfire crisis on the West Coast grew to a staggering scale on Friday, as huge fires merged and bore down on towns and suburbs, state leaders pleaded for firefighting help, and tens of thousands of people were told to evacuate.

Oregon, Washington State and California are enduring a wildfire season of historic proportions, with the firefighting effort compounded by the coronavirus pandemic and misinformation online. At least 15 people have died in the fires, with more expected as teams search through burned homes.

The fires have consumed more than three million acres in California, almost a million acres in Oregon and destroyed entire towns in Washington. The blazes have torn through idyllic mountain towns, reduced subdivisions to beams and embers, and spewed foul smoke-filled air across a region that is home to millions of people.

“Unfortunately, the weather system is not yet giving us a reprieve,” Ms. Brown said at a news conference Thursday, adding that the winds were “creating unpredictable movement of the fires.”

Satellite images of the West showed a coastline smothered in thick smoke, and residents woke up, again, to warnings of hazardous air, and, in some places, raining ash. The National Weather Service said a huge cloud of smoke would descend on Washington State on Friday, creating unhealthy breathing conditions around the state. “For Western Washington, it will get worse before it gets better,” the service said.

Heavy smoke was also predicted down the California coast, in many places mixing with fog and seriously reducing visibility, as dozens of fires burned throughout the state. Though firefighters have gained 20 percent containment over the North Complex fire, which has burned almost 250,000 acres east of Sacramento, the Creek Fire east of Fresno was still almost completely uncontrolled on Thursday night, burning more than 175,000 acres.

Gov. Gavin Newsom pleaded with residents to listen to evacuation orders, stressing the magnitude of the fire season. “Six of the 20 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in 2020,” he said on Twitter. “If you are asked to evacuate please do so immediately.”

False rumors are complicating the fight against the fires around Portland.

2Every natural disaster has its holdouts. But the political fear-stoking that accompanied a tumultuous summer of racial-justice protests in Oregon has become a volatile new complication in the catastrophic wildfires that pushed closer to Portland on Friday, as authorities try to evacuate thousands of people.

Law-enforcement officials across the state said they had been swamped with calls about social-media misinformation and begged people to “STOP. SPREADING. RUMORS!” In the line of fire, the swirl of rumors actually helped goad some people into defying evacuation orders so they could stay and guard their homes.

As a Level 3 evacuation on Thursday urged people to “leave now,” an eerie stillness fell over Molalla, an old timber town of 9,000 an hour’s drive south of Portland, and the holdout residents girded themselves for two threats. One was the very real 125,000-acre Riverside Fire burning just east of town. The other was the imagined invasion of left-wing mobs and arsonists that multiple law-enforcement agencies have sought to refute.

“I’m protecting my city,” Troy McNeeley said as he stood in front of the 900-square foot home he shares with his son, his son’s partner and several cats. “If I see people doing crap, I’m going to hurt them.”

The rumors played into some conservative residents’ fears and anger over months of protests in Portland, where left-wing and right-wing groups have occasionally clashed.

On Wednesday, the police in Portland warned protesters about lighting fires — a seemingly innocuous public-safety message that was followed by waves of rumor about arsonists and mayhem. Sheriff’s offices and fire departments already coping with wildfires that have consumed 900,000 acres were flooded with phone calls.

“We are inundated with questions about things that are FAKE stories,” the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office in Medford posted on Facebook. “One example is a story circulating that varies about what group is involved as to setting fires and arrests being made. THIS IS NOT TRUE!”

Law-enforcement agencies in southern Oregon announced on Thursday that they had begun to investigate whether the Almeda fire had been deliberately set. The fire has burned hundreds of homes around Medford and is tied to two deaths. But the police chief of Ashland told the Oregonian that there was no evidence pointing to anti-fascist activists.

‘This is a fathomless loss’: Some searches for the missing end in tragedy.

As the blazes rage across California, Oregon and Washington, family and friends are desperately searched for missing loved ones who remained unaccounted for.

Zygy Roe-Zurz, whose family lives in Berry Creek, Calif., said he had been waiting for days for news from his mother, his aunt and his uncle. On Thursday, he learned that his aunt was killed as the Bear Fire ripped through the community, and that his mother remained missing. Authorities told the family that Mr. Roe-Zurz’s uncle was likely dead as well, he said.

“I feel barren — this is a fathomless loss and I will never be the same,” said Mr. Roe-Zurz, 37, who is in Arkansas and last spoke to his mother on Tuesday night, before the flames intensified. “This cruel fire took everything.”

He said that his family members staying at the property in Berry Creek had been under the impression that the fire was getting under control, but that the situation changed dramatically as the Bear Fire jumped an astonishing 230,000 acres overnight Tuesday into Wednesday.

“It’s pretty much a nightmare scenario,” Mr. Roe-Zurz said. “I’m devastated.”

There was better news for other families who found out that loved ones they believed to be missing were found safe on Thursday.

Katy Carmel said her daughter, Natalie Anderson, had been on a camping trip with her boyfriend near the McKenzie Bridge east of Eugene, Ore. But when the Holiday Farm Fire broke out on Monday evening, Ms. Carmel could no longer reach Ms. Anderson.

Ms. Carmel could not sleep, fearing the worst. Days passed and the anxiety built. On Thursday, authorities notified the families that both Ms. Anderson and her boyfriend, Enmanuel Rodriguez, were safe and evacuated.

Ms. Carmel said she was relieved to hear the news, but added, “I’ll be better once she’s actually home.”

Climate change is a real and urgent threat in California.

Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face.

The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.

“You’re toppling dominoes in ways that Americans haven’t imagined,” said Roy Wright, who directed resilience programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency until 2018 and grew up in Vacaville, Calif., near one of this year’s largest fires. “It’s apocalyptic.”

The same could be said for the entire West Coast this week, to Washington and Oregon, where towns were decimated by infernos as firefighters were stretched to their limits.

California’s simultaneous crises illustrate how the ripple effect works. A scorching summer led to dry conditions never before experienced. That aridity helped make the season’s wildfires the biggest ever recorded. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in modern California history have occurred this year.

If climate change was a somewhat abstract notion a decade ago, today it is all too real for Californians. The intensely hot wildfires are not only chasing thousands of people from their homes but causing dangerous chemicals to leach into drinking water. Excessive heat warnings and suffocating smoky air have threatened the health of people already struggling during the pandemic. And the threat of more wildfires has led insurance companies to cancel homeowner policies and the state’s main utility to shut off power to tens of thousands of people pre-emptively.

Getting prisoners out of harm’s way raises the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

Officials in Oregon’s state corrections system this week began moving hundreds of inmates out of the path of the wildfires creeping toward some of their prisons. But the introduction of large groups of prisoners into different facilities may be exposing them to another risk — contracting the coronavirus.

Juan Chavez, a lawyer with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, said that relocated inmates were sleeping on mattresses crammed close together, but it’s “picking your poison.”

“You have two crises that are stacked on top of each other — Covid-19 and these fires — and they’re out of good options,” Mr. Chavez said. He added that he fears the relocated inmates could contribute to a superspreader event for the virus in the prisons.

But few other options exist for the Oregon Department of Corrections, which has evacuated four prisons so far.

As the Beachie Creek and Lionshead wildfires raged in an area southeast of Portland, officials hastily relocated 1,450 inmates from three prisons in Marion County — Oregon State Correctional Institution, Santiam Correctional Institution and Mill Creek Correctional Facility. Inmates were moved west, to emergency beds in the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem on Tuesday, according to the agency.

On Thursday officials sent 1,303 inmates from Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, a prison north of Salem in Wilsonville, to the Deer Ridge Correctional Institute more than 100 miles to the southeast, said Jennifer Black, a spokeswoman for the prison system.

Those inmates were moved to avoid a third blaze, the Riverside wildfire, which is north of the Beachie Creek and Lionshead wildfires. Each of the three blazes is more than 100,000 acres in size.

Inmates will be “housed with others from their home institution whenever possible,” and officials are aware of the potential coronavirus spread, Ms. Black said.

“We are taking all available steps to mitigate that impact,” Ms. Black said. “As we have said from the beginning, prisons were not constructed to allow for optimal social distancing.”

The coronavirus has already ravaged the state prison population. In June, Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon commuted the sentences of 57 inmates who were vulnerable to the coronavirus. There have been 829 confirmed coronavirus cases in prison system facilities, including staff members and inmates, according to the department’s records. Six people have died.

At the Oregon State Penitentiary, 36 staff members and 143 inmates have tested positive for the virus.

States are in a desperate search for help battling the fires.

As wildfires began consuming communities across Oregon this week, leaders at the state emergency management office fired off an email to counterparts around the country, pleading for 10 firefighting strike teams that could bring 50 extra engines to the region.

The state got one commitment: Utah would send a team with five engines.

Facing a historic year of wildfire destruction across the West Coast, including more than three million acres consumed in California, the national emergency systems that rely on state-to-state assistance have been buckling under the strain. That has left emergency responders struggling to keep pace with fires that have destroyed entire towns and led to at least 15 deaths, with seven more people found dead on Thursday from a fire north of Sacramento.

“I don’t know that we have any fires where we can say we have got enough resources to do what we need to do,” Andrew Phelps, the director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management, said.

Fires continued to rage in southern Oregon, where hundreds of homes have been razed, as well as east of Salem, where two bodies have been found, and along the state’s coast. More than 900,000 acres have burned, nearly double a typical season. Hundreds of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate, including parts of the Portland suburbs, where fires were still on the move.

In California, firefighters continued to battle the blazes of a remarkable wildfire season, including the August Complex burning in the Mendocino National Forest that is now the largest fire in the state’s recorded history.

In Washington, hundreds of homes and other structures were at risk of wildfires that continued to burn, even as a deadly stretch of dry winds from the East began to ease. Hilary Franz, the state’s commissioner of public lands, said the state was searching for help from elsewhere in the country.

So many state aid requests have gone to the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group, which helps direct wildfire resources, that the group has been left to decide which ones get priority. Dan Smith, a member of the group who is also fire director for the National Association of State Foresters, said that as of Thursday morning there were over 300 requests for support that could not be fulfilled.

Wildfire smoke is dangerous to your health. Here’s how to protect yourself.

Smoke from wildfires, which can include toxic substances from burned buildings, has been linked to serious health problems.

Studies have shown that when waves of smoke hit the rate of hospital visits rises and many of the additional patients experience respiratory problems, heart attacks and strokes.

The health effects of wildfire smoke don’t go away when skies clear. A recent study on Montana residents suggested a long tail for wildfire smoke exposure.

Erin Landguth, an associate professor in the school of public and community health science at the University of Montana and the lead author on the study, said research had shown that “after bad fire seasons, one would expect to see three to five times worse flu seasons” months later.

If you can’t leave an area that has high levels of smoke, the C.D.C. recommends limiting exposure by staying indoors with windows and doors closed and running air-conditioners in recirculation mode so that outside air isn’t drawn into your home.

Portable air purifiers are also recommended, though, like air-conditioners, they require electricity. If utilities cut off power, as has happened in California, those options are limited.

If you do have power, avoid frying food, which can increase indoor smoke.

Experts say it is especially important to avoid cigarettes. They also recommend avoiding strenuous outdoor activities when the air is bad. When outside, well-fitted N95 masks are also recommended, though they are in short supply because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Some other masks, particularly tightly woven ones made of different layers of fabric, can provide “pretty good filtration,” if they are fitted closely to the face, said Sarah Henderson, senior scientist in environmental health services at the British Columbia Center for Disease Control.

The Bobcat Fire is moving into the forest and away from homes in Southern California.

Southern California residents are keeping a nervous eye on the Bobcat Fire, which is burning across roughly 24,000 acres in Angeles National Forest about 25 miles northeast of Los Angeles, triggering evacuation warnings for a number of populous suburbs to the fire’s south, including the city of Pasadena.

The fire, which began burning Sunday, is now 6 percent contained, but is spreading rapidly, fueled by extremely dry brush in areas with “little to no fire history on record,” according to the U.S. Forest Service. On Friday morning, the fire was moving northeast, farther into the forest and away from the foothill communities.

“The wind has been very mild,” said George Klass, an emergency response volunteer, speaking from the city of Arcadia. The mild winds are helpful for firefighters, but have left smoke hovering above the Los Angeles area, he said.

The burning was slowed slightly to the east, the Forest Service said, where the Ranch2 Fire started burning last month, spreading across more than 4,000 acres.

Other communities on alert include Monrovia, Arcadia, Bradbury, Sierra Madre, Altadena and Duarte. No evacuation orders have been issued in those communities.

The cause of the Bobcat Fire is under investigation. It likely won’t be fully contained until the middle of October, Mr. Klass said.

Reporting was contributed by Davey Alba, Tim Arango, Mike Baker, Kate Conger, Richard Fausset, Marie Fazio, Christopher Flavelle, Thomas Fuller, Jack Healy, Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio, Bryan Pietsch, John Schwartz and Alan Yuhas.