Wildfires scorching the West Coast have devastated the small city of Detroit, Oregon – located about 120 miles southeast of Portland – where a majority of the structures in the rural enclave have been flattened by fire.
“We have approximately 20-25 structures still standing, and the rest are gone,” officials with the Idanha-Detroit Rural Fire Protection District said on their Facebook page.
City Hall, where the fire department’s district office is based, was one of many buildings that burned down.
“Our primary focus is protecting the structures that are still standing,” the officials said on their Facebook page. “Several of our firefighters have also lost their homes. They are working through their own losses while also fighting to protect homes still intact.”
Resident Elizabeth Smith lost everything in the wildfires.
“Our homes are absolutely destroyed. I’ve seen a few videos and photos and my lovely little house that we remodeled 12 years ago in this beautiful canyon area is absolutely flattened. It looks as though a bomb went off,” Smith told CNN affiliate KATU-TV.
Detroit Mayor Jim Trett compared his city’s devastation with that of Paradise, California, which was destroyed in the Camp Fire two years ago.
“It’s the same topography: three canyons coming down like a funnel into the city of Paradise at the bottom of the funnel,” Trett told KATU. “When I heard that two years ago I said, that’s Detroit.”
Major fires spanning several states have burned 4.6 million acres, national fire officials say. That’s an area roughly equivalent to Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
While the 94 major blazes are burning mostly in rural and forested areas, major cities along the West Coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, among them – are also feeling the impact.
Smoke from the blazes is making air quality unhealthy, which can irritate lungs, cause inflammation and affect the immune system, heightening the risk of lung infections such as coronavirus. In Oakland, California, where many businesses and facilities are closed because of statewide Covid-19 precautions, officials have opened “clean air centers” for those with nowhere else to go, CNN affiliate KGO reported.
Of the people killed since some of the fires broke out in mid-August, 22 have been in California, many in recent days. Ten people have been killed in Oregon, and a child was killed in Washington state.
The majority of the fires are in California (25), Washington (16), Oregon (13) and Idaho (10), though blazes have also emerged in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the National Interagency Fire Center said Sunday morning.
“More than 30,000 firefighters and support personnel are assigned to incidents across the country,” the center said Sunday.
President Donald Trump is planning to visit McClellan Park, California, Monday for a wildfires briefing. There’s no indication whether Trump will visit any wildfire stricken areas during his trip.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden will deliver remarks on the wildfires Monday from Delaware at 1 p.m. He “will discuss the threat that extreme weather events pose to Americans everywhere,” according to the Biden campaign.
‘It’s all gone’
The Holiday Farm Fire east of Eugene, Oregon, which has torched more than 160,000 acres in the Willamette National Forest – an area slightly larger than the city of Chicago – is growing rapidly. It spread 5,000 acres Friday alone, officials say.
Caught in the middle of the forest is the town of Vida, where Nailah Garner had to flee her dream home last week, she and her husband forced to scramble “like the Keystone Cops,” she told CNN affiliate KOMO.
“We didn’t know what to grab. We didn’t pack. Who knows what to do when you’re going through this?” she said.
Authorities have shut down the main road into the town of 1,200 situated on the picturesque McKenzie River. Only residents who need to retrieve their pets or emergency medications are allowed past the roadblocks, the station reported.
Garner could hear the sadness in her friend’s voice when she reported that Garner’s dream home was no more, KOMO reported. Wearing donated clothes, Garner explained she had lost everything.
“It’s all gone, and it looks like a war zone hit it,” she said.
In Clackamas County, Oregon, residents are being asked to reconsider their travel plans and restrict their water usage as fires continue to burn in the area.
“Please limit your water use. Every drop is needed for our firefighters in order to use the water to save someone’s home,” said Nancy Bush, director of disaster management in Clackamas.
Three California fires reach historic proportions
In California, firefighters are battling more than two dozen major fires, but officials expressed hope that improving weather conditions will boost efforts to control the flames.
Three of the five largest wildfires in state history are burning now, officials say. One of those blazes, the LNU Complex Fire, which was about 96% contained as of Saturday, has burned more than 363,000 acres.
