Four cities on the West Coast are now among the ten most polluted places in the world. That includes Portland, which as of Sunday had the worst air of any big city on the planet
Photo: AFP via Getty Images Wildfires are currently scorching the West Coast at unprecedented levels. At least 35 people have been killed so far; hundreds of thousands have been displaced, half a million fleeing their homes in Oregon alone; and more than 17,000 firefighters have been deployed to battle blazes that have spread at never-before-seen rates.
In Oregon, 36 active fires are burning more than 1 million acres up and down the western coast of the state, according to the Oregon Office of Emergency Management. To the south, the Obenchain and Alameda fires devastated whole towns. The Riverside Fire in Clackamas County, near Portland, and the Beachie Creek Fire in Marion County are burning within a mile of each other but are no longer expected to merge, as officials feared.
Twenty-four deaths have been reported in California. In Butte County alone, where the town of Paradise was destroyed by the Camp Fire in 2018, at least 14 people have died in the North Complex Fire. At least 20,000 people are under evacuation orders in Northern California. “The school is gone, the fire department’s gone, the bar’s gone, the laundromat’s gone, the general store’s gone,” one 50-year resident who fled the town of Berry Creek told the Sacramento Bee.
However, some of the fires, including the August Complex Fire, were caused by lightning strikes in extremely dry areas. Others in Oregon and California were started by downed power lines. Unusually strong winds in Oregon have helped spread the fires rapidly there while typical winds in California were made even worse by a sudden winter snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains, which sent cold air blasting into the Sierra and Cascade mountain ranges.
Red flag warnings remain in south central Oregon, however, as they do in Northeastern California, where reports predict extremely gusty winds and low humidity, creating extremely dangerous scenarios for fire. In Southern California, the Bobcat Fire in the Angeles National Forest has dropped in containment from 6 percent to 3 percent, and is threatening the 116-year-old Mount Wilson Observatory.
Oregon governor Kate Brown described the fires there as a “once-in-a-generation event” and potentially “the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfires in our state’s history.”
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