For nearly a week, Laura Cartwright and her brother looked for their 71-year-old reclusive uncle from Helltown, a small community just north of Paradise.
They tried calling him by phone when the Camp fire broke out, but they couldn’t get through. Even on normal days, cell service there is spotty. They checked the American Red Cross shelter’s online list to see whether their uncle had marked himself safe. He hadn’t.
By Day 3, they were worried. By Day 5, they couldn’t sit at home anymore and drove up from Concord to the disaster zone. They ended up roaming a tent city in a Walmart parking lot, asking if anyone had seen their uncle.
The number of structures destroyed in the Woolsey fire soared to 1,452 on Sunday night, according to the latest figures from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
That’s an increase of about 400 structures since a count released Saturday.
As more evacuees were allowed to return to their homes Sunday, firefighters increased their progress on containing the fire, which swept from Ventura County to Malibu.
Jeff Evans is one of a handful of people left in Concow, a mountain hamlet tucked deep in the woods that has been under mandatory evacuation orders since the Camp fire tore through here on Nov. 8. If he leaves, he can’t get back in.
His neighbors stuck on the outside have been emailing him requests. Because the gas in the generator powering his electricity — and his internet — is limited, he hops online for a few minutes each day, answers their questions and gets going.
“Every single morning until the afternoon, I’m huffing it,” Evans said. “I’m going and going and going. There’s pigs to feed and goats and ducks and chickens.”
As more evacuees were allowed to return to their homes Sunday, firefighters made more progress on containing the Woolsey fire.
The fire is 91% contained, according to the L.A. County Fire Department. It has burned 69,949 acres in Ventura County and Malibu, destroying more than 1,000 structures.
At least three people have died.
A small brush fire was reported Sunday afternoon in Shadow Hills after a car rollover.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said the fire was burning around 8300 W. La Tuna Canyon Road.
In Southern California, there’s about a 50% chance of rain over the areas charred by the Woolsey fire as early as Wednesday, said David Gomberg of the National Weather Service. Forecasters say the area could see a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of rain.
“It doesn’t look like a real heavy rain producer,” he said. “In San Bernardino County … it’s very high certainty you’ll get some rain, and going south into Ventura and Los Angeles counties, the probability weakens.”
Even so, forecasters warned of potential rock slides and debris flows across roadways below fire-ravaged slopes, especially along Highway 1 and canyon roads.
Evacuation orders were lifted for some parts of the Malibu Colony Cove neighborhood on Saturday and others were expected to be allowed back into the community at 2 p.m. Sunday. Check here to determine what properties remain under evacuation.
But some people couldn’t wait any longer to return home. Around noon Sunday, Valerie and Edward Nalbentian walked north along the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway near Zuma View Place in Malibu, heading to a home they said they knew had burned down.
“We haven’t seen it yet,” Valerie said, her expression grim. “But we’ve seen plenty of pictures.”
Finland’s president isn’t sure where U.S. President Trump got the idea that raking is part of his country’s routine for managing its substantial forests.
Trump told reporters Saturday while visiting the ruins of the Northern California town where a fire killed at least 76 people that wildfires weren’t a problem in Finland because crews “spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things” to clear forest floors.
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said in an interview published Sunday in the Ilta-Sanomat newspaper that he spoke briefly with Trump about forest management on Nov. 11, when they were in Paris for Armistice Day events.
The latest forecast from the National Weather Service on Sunday confirms rain moving into the Paradise, Calif., burn area by Wednesday.
Meteorologists have “very high confidence” that Butte County will get four to five inches of rain from Tuesday night through the weekend, with the heaviest rain Thanksgiving night, said Eric Kurth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Fire-ravaged schools in Butte County are expected to reopen Dec. 3.
The Butte County office of education said in a statement that it needs the equivalent of 100 portable classrooms to handle the students whose schools were burned in California’s worst fire.
“The greatest need is in Paradise where the Paradise Unified School District and a thousand charter school students are now displaced because multiple school sites were damaged or destroyed,” the office said in a statement.