At a Glance
- More than 95 large wildfires are burning.
- One firefighter was critically injured.
- The fires are being driven by hot, dry and windy weather.
- All national forests in California were set to close due to the fires.
This article is no longer being updated. For the latest on the wildfires burning in the West, click here.
Hundreds of homes, businesses and other buildings have burned to the ground, a firefighter was critically injured and tens of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate as hot, dry and windy weather across the West left parts of California, Oregon and Washington under siege from what's being called an unprecedented fire season.
More than 96 large wildfires are currently burning over 5,400 square miles of land, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. About half of the fires are in Oregon, Washington and California.
Residents in and around Medford, Oregon, fled their homes in darkness as fire burned through the towns of Talent and Phoenix.
Daylight video showed some of the destruction left behind by the blaze, known as the Glendower or Almeda Fire.
Many of the blazes started on Monday and Tuesday amid record heat, drought and sometimes windy conditions.
"It took an extreme confluence of weather factors to lead to the magnitude of this latest wildfire siege," weather.com senior meteorologist Jon Erdman wrote Wednesday.
Those factors include worsening drought and the hottest August since 1895 in some western states, including California. Then came the extreme heat over Labor Day weekend, followed by high winds that created red-flag fire conditions and fueled the flames of both new and existing fires.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown called the fires "a once-in-a-generation event."
“This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told reporters Wednesday.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths in Oregon, but Brown said hundreds of homes were lost.
She previously declared a state of emergency for the entire state.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee tweeted that more than 500 square miles of land burned in his state in a single day, more than the total consumed during 12 of the last 18 fire seasons.
In California, at least 20,000 people were told to evacuate Wednesday morning after the Bear Fire exploded in size Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the Sacramento Bee reported. The fire is burning near Oroville in Yuba and Butte Counties, not far from Paradise and other areas destroyed by the Camp Fire two years ago.
Here's a look at some of the major fires raging in parts of the West:
Oregon
The two biggest fires in the state were burning in Marion and Clackamas counties. The Santiam Fire, formerly known as the Beachie Creek Fire, has consumed more than 200 square miles of land while the Lionshead Fire has burned about 143 square miles. High winds grounded firefighting aircraft Tuesday afternoon.
About 45 people were at a shelter inside a building at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem, a Red Cross volunteer told the Oregonian. Others were sleeping outside in recreation vehicles, cars and tents. Many were accompanied by family, pets and livestock and about 200 horses were being boarded in the fairgrounds' stables.
(WATCH: Buildings Go Up in Flames as Fire Rips through Southwestern Oregon)
The Oregon Department of Corrections evacuated 1,450 people from three Salem-area prisons, according to the Salem Reporter.
The National Forest Service said in a news release that many communities in and around the western slopes of the Cascade Mountains were under mandatory evacuations, including parts of Marion and Lane counties.
“It’s pretty nerve-wracking to think you could lose everything in a heartbeat,” Virginia Brockman, who lives in the Marion County town of Aumsville, told the Salem Reporter as she packed to evacuate. “I don’t even know how to express myself, to be honest.”
A large portion of Clackamas County was under an evacuation order, and residents in the rest of the county were told to be ready to go if needed.
Officials said protecting people and homes was the top priority for fire crews, and they worried that fires south of Portland could merge into a much larger, and more challenging, blaze.
“We’re really at the mercy of the weather right now,” Clackamas Fire District Chief Fred Charlton said, according to the Associated Press.
California
Smoke turned the sky orange over San Francisco Wednesday, as dozens of fires burned across the state.
Two of the largest blazes in the state's history were sparked by lightning last month and are now mostly contained. The largest in a slew of newer fires is the Creek Fire, which has burned more than 254 square miles in the Sierra National Forest and destroyed 60 homes in Madera County.
Several communities in Madera and Fresno counties were under evacuation orders.
Military helicopters manned by pilots wearing night-vision goggles rescued hundreds of campers and hikers trapped by the flames.
One disaster expert said she couldn't ever recall such dire fire rescues.
“This is emblematic of how fast that fire was moving, plus the physical geography of that environment with one road in and one road out. It’s scary enough to drive there when nothing is burning,” Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College who has written extensively about wildfires, told the AP. “Unless you wanted an absolute human disaster, you had to move fast.”
Steve Lohr, a spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service, defended the agency's decision not to close some national forests sooner. Lohr said the flames moved extremely fast.
“We can second-guess ourselves, but I’ll say that we didn’t take the situation lightly," Lohr said. "When you have a fire run 15 miles in one day, in one afternoon, there’s no model that can predict that. And so we can look at those things and learn from them, but the fires are behaving in such a way that we’ve not seen.”
Several firefighters were injured, one critically, after a group of more than a dozen had to deploy a safety shelter while fighting a wildfire in Southern California's Los Padres National Forest.
The firefighters were overcome by flames Tuesday morning in the Dolan Fire, according to an update posted late Tuesday afternoon. Three were transported by Life Flight to Community Regional Hospital in Fresno. A hospital spokesperson told fire officials that one firefighter was in critical condition and the other two were in fair condition.
The Dolan Fire has burned more than 114 square miles since it started on Aug. 18. It is 40% contained, but the Forest Service said that very hot weather over the Labor Day weekend led to increased fire activity.
The fire prompted evacuation orders for several communities along the coast in Monterey County.
The state is entering peak wildfire season but a record of more than 3,900 square miles — about 2.5 million acres — have already burned. The previous record was set in 2018 when 3,067 square miles burned. That season included the state's deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire, that killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. In an average season, 486 square miles burn. Since 2000, the average area burned has been about 1,150 square miles.
Wildfires in the state this year have killed eight people and destroyed 3,700 structures, according to CalFire.
At a briefing Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state has seen more than 7,600 wildfires so far in 2020. By this time last year, there had been 4,927 wildfires that burned 184 square miles.
Since Aug. 15, the state has had more than 900 wildfires. Twenty-five of those have been major wildfires. The fires have forced the evacuation of more than 42,200 people, Newsom said.
More than 14,000 firefighters are battling the current blazes.
More than 157,000 homes and businesses were without power across the state Wednesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us. More than 70,000 power outages were being reported in Oregon and about 24,000 in Washington.
Washington
Eleven large fires were burning in Washington Wednesday morning, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. In total, more than three dozen fires are burning across the state, including many smaller ones sparked on Monday and Tuesday.
The small town of Malden was nearly wiped out by flames on Memorial Day.
Idaho
Eight large fires were burning in Idaho, including at least one that destroyed several buildings and prompted evacuations near Orofino. The Clover Fire, part of what officials are calling the Sunnyside Complex, damaged or destroyed at least 13 homes, 31 outbuildings, 26 vehicles, and 1 Sheriff’s patrol vehicle, according to an update Tuesday night. The fire has burned about 4 square miles.
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