California Wildfire: Death Toll Now at 42, Expected to Rise
The death toll to the recent California wildfires has risen to 42 after the remains of a man were discovered in a home last Tuesday.
"We had a missing person report in that (Fountaingrove) area and went to that home and found them dead in the house," Sgt. Spencer Crum of the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office told CNBC yesterday, Oct. 18.
As of this writing, the death toll has already reached 42 as confirmed by Sonoma County Sheriff's Office. However, as 53 people are still missing in Sonoma County alone, the number of casualties is expected to rise, much more that there are also wildfires in Napa, Mendocino, Lake, Butte and several other Northern California counties.
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In a press conference, Sonoma County Sheriff Robert Giordano said that he and his crew members are focusing on search and rescue at the moment and that they are searching all burned structures to retrieve possible victims.
Meanwhile, as of yesterday, tens of thousands of firefighters in California were still working on containing the wildfire as there were still 12 large blazes raging the Golden State, whose 245,000 acres of land were already burned as of Tuesday.
While The Tubbs Fire that ravaged 36,000 acres of Napa and Sonoma was already 82 percent contained, the Nuns Fire that burned down 53,000 acres of Sonoma County was only 68 percent contained as of Wednesday. However, weather forecasters have predicted that rains would come in by today, Thursday, which means that the firefighters would be getting the much-needed aid in containing the wildfires.
The recent California wildfires started on the evening of Oct. 8, with the first fire, the so-called Atlas Fire starting at 9:20, followed by the Tubbs Fire at 9:45, and the Redwood/Potter Fire at 10:36. While the cause of the wildfires is still unclear for now, experts claim that strong winds were a factor in their rapid spread.
"When we have a wind event like this ... where you have 50-mph winds bearing down on an area ... every fire that starts has a significant potential to grow into a large fire very, very quickly," Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, explained earlier.
