Local authorities have announced that one person was found dead inside a burned-out house in northern California on Friday after a wind-stimulated wildfire made its way through a rural community in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The deadly case represents a rather rare situation among the hundreds of fires that have burdened firefighters for weeks.

Sgt. Steven Pelton, the county's deputy coroner-sheriff, said that officials deem the victim died in the blaze in the town of Concow. However, an autopsy will be carried out on the dead body in order to discover the precise cause of death.

In spite of the fact that inhabitants of the town had been ordered to evacuate their homes early on Tuesday, when it was clear that the blazes were advancing towards the area, not everybody chose to leave, according to Sgt. Steven Pelton. It looks like the victim was one of those people.

A series of wildfires in Butte County has devastated approximately 50 properties in Concow by now and constrained almost 10,000 residents of the adjacent town of Paradise to abandon their houses.

Fire crews struggling to suppress the unmanageable blazes in the Sierra Nevada foothills believed they had some time to breathe on Friday when tough winds they feared could aggravate the blazes and destroy the fire lines that guarded thousands of homes did not instantly occur. Furthermore, the northeast winds forecast for the morning were estimated to be comparable to those that made the fire burst out earlier this week.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger requested a supplementary 2,000 National Guard troops to lend a hand to firefighters all around the state. President Bush scheduled a visit next week to examine the Golden State’s wildfires, which have burned more than 1,100 square miles and annihilated about 100 houses.