As death toll climbs from California fires, investigators face grim task of finding remains

Fires burn toward the pacific ocean from a helicopter over Santa Monica, California. Photo / AP

In the devastating aftermath of the deadliest wildfire to hit California in 85 years, authorities are struggling with a grim task: searching for more than 200 missing people, some of whom are suspected to have been killed in a blaze that burned so hot that it melted metal.

Search teams in Butte County have recovered the remains of 29 people; most of them were found inside burned-out homes in and around the town of Paradise, or in cars that were overwhelmed by fire as locals desperately tried to outrun the fast-moving flames.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said that 228 people are still unaccounted for; many of them are probably in shelters, and authorities are working to resolve those cases, he said.

But the death toll is likely to climb further. The practical challenge, Honea said, is finding the rest of the remains.

"I'll tell you, it's very, very hard," he said, according to the Chico Enterprise-Record. "One of the things that I saw when I was up there is that there is so much debris in some of these areas that it's very difficult to determine whether or not there might be human remains there."

"In some cases the fire burned so intensely that it burned everything to the ground, and in some cases it melted the metal. In those cases, it is possible the temperatures were high enough to completely consume the body."

The sheriff, who is also the county coroner, announced yesterday that the remains of six more victims had been found.

The death toll - 29 - ties the Camp Fire with the deadliest in state history, the 1933 Griffith Park wildfire in Los Angeles. The Camp Fire burned nearly 7000 buildings and is the most destructive individual fire in state history.

In the wake of the devastating Camp Fire, sheriff's deputies and officials from the coroner's office have been searching charred homes that have been too hot for body-sniffing dogs.

The sheriff said that authorities have received more than 500 calls about friends and family members who are missing, and that 107 of them have been located. However, in cases in which missing people are not found alive, he said relatives may be asked to provide a DNA sample to help authorities identify the remains. In some cases, investigators have found only bone fragments.

Honea's office has ordered an additional DNA lab truck and received help from two teams of anthropologists from California State University at Chico for the time-consuming and daunting task of searching for and identifying victims. An anthropology team from Nevada will join the efforts today.

"What I will say is we are very early in our efforts," the sheriff told reporters. "There is still a great deal of work to do."