The frantic relatives of hundreds of people who remain missing since the Camp Fire razed the city of Paradise last week are appealing for information to find their lost loved ones.
More than 200 people remain unaccounted for since the wildfire torched the city last Thursday and over the weekend.
It is still not entirely contained and firefighters are working round the clock to put it out.
Forty-eight people have died but the number is likely to rise with every day that passes with no news from the 228 people still missing.
Many of the people who are still missing are elderly and do not have cell phones.
Greg Gibson searches a message board for information about his missing neighvirs in Chico, California, on November 13.
Their relatives have taken to social media to try to find them and are posting heartbreaking messages asking for any information that could help.
Kayla Alton, who is missing three relatives, wrote in one post that was shared on a missing person Facebook group: ‘Please share! We are searching for family missing from Paradise. I ask everyone to please share and keep my family in your prayers.’
Tammy Fulton’s aunt and cousin had been missing. She returned to social media after learning that they had died. She had been looking for seven relatives.
Two were found dead, four were found safe and one remained missing when she last posted on the group.
In a chaotic attempt to gather up-to-date information, people are also circulating a spreadsheet where they are trying to keep up with the number of those missing, dead and found safe.
‘Our uncle (my moms brother) is still unaccounted for. All our other family has checked in. His name is Carl L Stewart…He’s 72 yrs old. He doesn’t drive, no cell phone. He recently was in the hospital with pneumonia, but he was home with a care giver checking in on him.
‘If anyone comes across him please have him check in somewhere; Red Cross, Butte County Sheriff, one of these sites, one of us…. I’m sorry I don’t have a pic (sic),’ said another person in a heartbreaking post on another site.
Local broadcaster KDRV.com shared a chilling newsreel of many faces of those who cannot yet be found. They include the elderly like Mary Loucille Marso and tragically young faces like Eli Moor.
Message boards are also up at shelters across the affected area.
‘I hope you are okay,’ reads one hand written note on the board filled with white and yellow sheets of notebook paper. Another had a picture of a missing man: ‘If seen, please have him call.’
Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Teal Gunter is being asked to contact her desperate family
Linda Dighton is also being reported as one of several missing in Northern California
Marcie Clark, 51, with her friend Harry Junior Gramps, 61, whose son Chaz is missing
National Guard troops were due to arrive on Wednesday to help search for more victims in the ash-strewn ruins.
The Guard contingent, about 100 military police trained to look for and identify human remains, will reinforce the coroner-led recovery teams, cadaver dogs and forensic anthropologists already scouring the ghostly landscape of a fire that has killed at least 48 people.
The grim, painstaking search is concentrated in what little is left of Paradise, a Sierra foothills town in Butte County, California, about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco, that was overrun by flames and largely incinerated last Thursday.
People also took to Facebook to beg for information. Pictures is 95-year-old Dorothy Burns who was last seen in her car
The killer blaze, fueled by thick, drought-desiccated scrub and fanned by fierce winds, capped a catastrophic California wildfire season that experts largely attribute to prolonged dry spells they say are symptomatic of global climate change.
The Butte County disaster coincided with a flurry of blazes in Southern California, most notably the Woolsey Fire, which has killed two people, destroyed over 400 structures and displaced about 200,000 people in the mountains and foothills near the Malibu coast west of Los Angeles.
The origins of both the Camp and Woolsey fires were listed as under investigation.
But two utility companies, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric, reported to regulators they experienced problems with transmission lines or substations in areas around the time the blazes were reported to have started.
By late Tuesday, with the help of diminished winds and rising humidity levels, fire crews had managed to carve containment lines around more than a third of both fires, easing further the immediate threat to life and property.
U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and California Governor Jerry Brown were scheduled on Wednesday to pay a visit to the areas, which President Donald Trump declared a disaster areas, making federal emergency assistance more readily available.
After touring some of California’s earlier wildfire zones in August, Zinke blamed ‘gross mismanagement of forests’ because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by ‘environmental terrorist groups’.
While prospects for suppressing the flames grew more hopeful, authorities pressed on with the task of accounting for those listed as missing.
Some of those who had appeared for information returned to social media to sadly update the community that their loved ones had been found dead
Friends appealed on behalf of others who were looking for their relatives including this woman whose friend’s father was missing
County Sheriff Kory Honea said he requested the Guard troops, along with ‘disaster mortuary’ crew, portable military morgue teams and specialists from a private DNA laboratory to speed the detection and identification of additional remains.
‘We want to cover as much ground as we can,’ Honea said at a Tuesday evening news conference where he announced that the six latest sets of remains had been recovered in Paradise earlier in the day.
The fatality count of 48 already far exceeds the previous record for the greatest loss of life from a single wildfire in California history – 29 people killed by the Griffith Park fire in Los Angeles in 1933.
Honea said that in some cases victims were burned beyond recognition, or even beyond the use of fingerprint IDs. Dental records will be needed to positively identify some, but ‘dental records might not be available if the dentist office burned to the ground’, he said.
The heartbreaking posts were among hundreds written online and on message boards
‘We’re finding remains in various states,’ he told reporters. ‘People have been badly burned. Some of them, I assume, have been consumed.’
He said it was possible that some remains might turn up only once residents with homes still intact are able to return. More than 50,000 remained under evacuation orders.
Honea had previously said 228 people were listed as missing. However, he said on Tuesday night those numbers were highly fluid and that his office planned to publish a new list of missing persons soon and would ask the public to help account for them.
He said it remained unclear how many individuals whose whereabouts were unknown had perished or fallen out of touch in chaotic evacuations.
Wind-driven flames roared through Paradise so swiftly that residents were forced to flee for their lives with little or no warning. Bodies of some victims were found in and around the burned-out wreckage of vehicles engulfed in the firestorm as evacuation traffic ground to a half in deadly knots of gridlock hours after the fire erupted.
By late Tuesday, the Camp Fire had blackened 130,000 acres (52,600 hectares) in all.
The Woolsey fire by comparison has scorched 96,000 acres (39,000 hectares) of chaparral-covered rolling hills and canyons spanning Ventura and Los Angeles counties, an area roughly the size of Denver.
On Tuesday, white-clad forensic teams fanned out to pick through the barren, fire-scorched lots in a town once home to 27,000 people.
On a residential street in Paradise lined with obliterated houses, a 10-member search crew wearing white protective suits and red helmets used a dog to scour the debris.
‘Look for skulls, the big bones,’ one forensics worker said to others as they used metal poles and their hands to sift through ruins.
At a nearby community swimming pool, recovery workers stirred green, darkened waters with long poles to probe for bodies.
