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Project consists of rewriting/reorganizing portions of the Camp Fire (2018) article, particularly the fire progression section.
The Camp Fire directly killed at least 85 people. The official death toll first rose over the course of several weeks, as search and recovery personnel discovered remains throughout Butte County, and then it fluctuated over time as victims passed away from injuries and forensic analysis determined the identities of the remains.
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Five more sets of remains were discovered on November 17, bringing the number of dead to 76. The number of missing reached 1,276.[1]
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On November 26, 2018, the death toll was raised to 88 after three sets of remains were each re-analyzed as those of two people. The number of missing people by this point was 203.[2]
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The death toll rose to 86 on December 11, 2018, after authorities reported the November 25 death of an 80-year-old man from burn injuries.[3]
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The official death toll dropped to 85 on February 8, 2019, after remains originally assessed as that of two people were identified as belonging to just one person. By this point, two people remained unaccounted for.[4]
The death toll rose again to 86 in August 2019 when a 72-year-old man who had suffered third-degree burns and severe lung damage in the fire eventually passed away in a care facility in Sacramento.[5] In the same month, one of the two remaining missing persons—a 47-year-old woman—was found alive in Oroville by a Butte County Sheriff's Office detective. She had known she was listed as missing but had avoided contact with authorities because she believed she had "unresolved legal issues".[6]
The death toll was adjusted for a final time to 85 in September 2019, when anthropologists determined that an unidentified fragment of bone had been warped in the fire and in fact was that of an already-identified victim.[7]
The last missing person, a 51-year old woman whose last known address was in Paradise, had reportedly been spotted at a motel in Yuba County in December 2018.[6] She remained, officially, a missing person as of March 2024[update].[8]
The Chico Enterprise-Record analyzed wrongful death claims against PG&E and identified an additional 50 people not included in the official death toll, but whose passing was linked to the fire by the doctors and lawyers retained to vet each wrongful death claim.[9][10]
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Paradise lies between 1,500 and 2,000 feet (460 and 610 m) in elevation, 25 miles (40 km) from the crest of the Sierra Nevada, in the range's western foothills.[12]: 169 The Los Angeles Times described the local geography underlaying the town as "a system of volcanic ledges bisected by a fan of deep ravines emptying into the Sacramento Valley", with a chaotic street system—containing almost 100 miles (160 km) of privately-owned roads—that maximized the amount of land that could be developed upon.[13]
The whole town got steamrolled. That's a rare event. If you look at the urban interface conflagrations, they usually assault on a city and peter out like in Oakland and in Bel Air, but this one hit the town mid-rib, flanked around it and then by contagion the whole town burned up.
— Dave Sapsis, Cal Fire fire behavior research specialist[14]
Trump's visit to the Camp and Woolsey Fire sites was his second ever trip to California since becoming president in January 2017.[1]
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The Camp Fire's rapid spread was enabled by climate and weather conditions combination of extraordinarily dry vegetation and strong katabatic winds. [needs citation]
The winter of 2016–2017 saw above-average precipitation across much of California, ending a six-year statewide drought. One of the effects of the wet winter was the second spring in a row with an above-average grass crop. That winter was followed by that of 2017–2018, which was both hotter and drier than average, allowing for 'fine fuels' such as grass to carry over from the previous year. A third consecutive above-average grass crop developed following a warm and wet March 2018. This was followed by the cessation of rain in late April, and a hot and dry summer in Northern California.[15]
Paradise received only 0.88 inches (2.2 cm) of rain between May 1 and mid-November, when it typically received more than seven inches (18 cm).[16] The U.S. Drought Monitor had logged Butte County in the "Abnormally Dry" category beginning in late June.[17]: 14–15 By November 8, Butte County's lower elevations had gone more than 200 days without receiving one-half inch (1.3 cm) of rain. The energy release component (ERC), a metric for the dryness and flammability of vegetation, was above average all summer. As summer turned into fall and significant rain had not materialized by early October, ERC levels were well above average, and on the day of the start of the Camp Fire, they were setting records for the date.[18] The National Fire Danger Rating System had four reporting stations in Butte County. On November 8, all of them reported fire danger ratings of "Very High" or "Extreme".[17]: 14–15
At the time of the fire's ignition, an upper-level atmospheric ridge (an elongated region of high pressure) was positioned off the coast of California. Its placement, allowing for northerly atmospheric flow, created an east–west pressure gradient. At the same time, a shortwave trough (a smaller-scale 'kink' of low pressure embedded in the flow) was moving over California, acting to intensify the pressure gradient. This created katabatic winds in many valleys in the western Sierra Nevada.[11]: 8–9 Such winds form when the cool, high pressure airmass in the Great Basin spills through the narrow canyons that cut through the Sierra as it moves towards the warmer, low pressure airmass closer to the coast.[19] The National Weather Service (NWS) described this as a "common synoptic pattern for strong winds and very dry conditions".[11]: 8–9
The NWS office in Sacramento issued a fire weather watch on November 5, which was upgraded to a red flag warning on November 6.[11]: 14 The warning was effective for the night of Wednesday, November 7, through the morning of Friday, September 9, and it called for relative humidity levels in the single digits and wind gusts of up to 55 miles per hour (89 km/h).[20][17]: 16 The meteorologist-in-charge at the Sacramento NWS office called it "a significant red-flag event and one of the stronger ones of the season". PG&E informed 70,000 customers, residents of Paradise among them, that the utility company was considering shutting off their power to lessen the fire risk from downed power lines. PG&E eventually decided that conditions did not warrant it. The planned outage would not have prevented the Camp Fire's ignition, as the company did not de-energize transmission lines.[20]
The downslope winds that formed on November 8 were particularly intense through Jarbo Gap,[11]: 8–9 an area where air squeezes through the Feather River Canyon from the northeast. These "Jarbo Gap winds" commonly developed in the autumn, and in the fifteen years prior to the Camp Fire, records showed 35 days with wind gusts higher than 100 miles per hour (160 km/h).[13]
Gusty winds at Jarbo Gap began at about 7:00 p.m. on November 7 and increased over the next two hours.[17]: 16 By 4:00 a.m. on November 8, a remote automated weather station east of Paradise was recording sustained 32-mile-per-hour (51 km/h) winds and 52-mile-per-hour (84 km/h) gusts.[20] By the time of the Camp Fire's ignition, the Jarbo Gap weather station was recording 18-mile-per-hour (29 km/h) winds out of the northeast with 40-mile-per-hour (64 km/h) gusts. The relative humidity level was 23 percent.[17]: 16
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