I've been shot down and shot at but this - last night, I'm still not over it," said Lloyd Dean Holland, a Vietnam veteran who barely escaped his home in Estacada on Tuesday night. "I've been through hell and high water but nothing like this. "These winds are so incredible and are spreading so fast, we don't have a lot of time," said Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts. Since Tuesday, as many as 16,000 people have been told to abandon their homes. Sheriff's deputies, traveling with chain saws in their patrol cars to cut fallen trees blocking roads, went door to door in rural communities 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Portland, telling people to evacuate. But Northwest officials said they did not recall so many destructive fires at once in the areas where they were burning. The Pacific Northwest scenes of lines of vehicles clogging roads to get away from the fires were similar to California's terrifying wildfire drama, where residents have fled fires raging unchecked throughout the state. The department imposed mandatory evacuation for the northern half of the city of roughly 10,000 residents, which stretches alongside U.S.
He said some buildings had been burned but had no details. "The fire is in the city," said Casey Miller, spokesman for Lincoln County Emergency Management. The blazes were thought to be extremely destructive around Medford, in southern Oregon, and near the state capital of Salem. "Everyone must be on high alert," Brown said. Kate Brown warned that the devastation could be overwhelming from the fires that exploded Monday during a late-summer wind storm. Officials in some western Oregon communities gave residents "go now" orders to evacuate, meaning they had minutes to flee their homes.įires were burning in a large swath of Washington state and Oregon that rarely experiences such intense wildfire activity because of the Pacific Northwest's cool and wet climate.įlames trapped firefighters and civilians behind fire lines in Oregon and leveled an entire small town in eastern Washington. The blazes from the top of the state to the California border caused highway closures and smoky skies and had firefighers struggling to contain and douse flames fanned by 50 mph (80 kph) wind gusts. Deadly windblown wildfires raging across the Pacific Northwest destroyed hundreds of homes in Oregon, the governor said Wednesday, warning it could be the greatest loss of life and property from wildfire in state history. Kate Brown discusses the devastating wildfires in the state on Wednesday, Sept.