PARADISE, Calif. — Teams of firefighters, search and rescue personnel and anthropologists fanned out within the still-smoking scar of the Camp Fire on Monday, searching for the remains of anyone who was unable to escape the flames.
The Camp Fire has so far claimed 42 lives, far surpassing the number killed in the 1933 Griffith Park Fire in Los Angeles, which with its 29 deaths had been California's deadliest wildfire.
In the 27,000-person city of Paradise, which sits in the wooded hills just outside Chico, the destruction has been near complete.
Mark Beveridge, a press and information officer with Cal Fire, said it’s impossible to tell how much progress searchers have made in sifting through the rubble of the 6,500-plus homes destroyed in the area.
It’s unclear how long it will take searchers to make their way through all the rubble.
“It’s a crapshoot,” he said. “I couldn’t even ballpark it … the damage is just ungodly.”
And on top of the search effort, firefighters are still battling a very much still active fire. As of Monday evening, the Camp Fire had torched 113,000-acres and is 25 percent contained.
While searchers fanned out across the burn area, a mobile home park had yellow-clad search teams in it all day Monday.
The park, which had dozens of plots situated among tall pines and small hills, had been obliterated by the flames.
Fire crews first entered the area to mitigate “widow-makers” and other potentially dangerous obstacles Beveridge said, pointing to a charred tree leaning precariously over a road.
Those fire crews worked in tandem with the searchers and had to be extremely careful not to taint the still unsearched plots. More than 220 people are unaccounted for in the wake of the Camp Fire, and any one of those unsearched structures could contain remains.
Searchers spent almost all of Monday in the destroyed mobile home park. A sniffer dog hit four or five times in various parts of the park, indicating it may have picked up a human scent in the rubble.
By the end of the day, a hearse was stationed at the entrance to the park, waiting in case one of the search parties located remains.
But the dog’s hits aren’t enough to confirm human remains have been found. Their noses can be fooled by the scents of burned chemicals, food and sometimes the remains of household pets.
The dog picked up scents multiple times at the mobile home park on Monday, but none of those have yet been confirmed as human, according to Beveridge.
Anthropologists from nearby universities and their students were the last to visit the mobile home park Monday. They systematically sifted through each plot searchers thought could have held remains, but they found nothing.
As the sun fell low on the horizon Monday and the smoke-choked sky burned orange, the troupe of anthropologists and their students filed back onto a bus and left the mobile home park. The empty hearse followed them, back toward Chico.