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.
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