Several people have been killed in wildfires in the US, where tens of thousands have been told to flee their homes as firefighters battle dozens of major blazes across large parts of California and its neighbouring state of Oregon.
Oregon governor, Kate Brown, has said hundreds of homes have been destroyed and the devastation could become overwhelming.
“This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Mrs Brown told reporters, calling the fires “unprecedented”.
Firefighters were struggling to try to contain the blazes and officials in some places were giving residents just minutes to evacuate their homes. Three prisons have also evacuated.
“It was like driving through hell,” Jody Evans told reporters after a midnight evacuation from Detroit, about 50 miles west of Salem, Oregon’s capital.
The fires trapped firefighters and some residents and levelled an entire small town in eastern Washington. Winds of up to 75mph helped to fan dozens of fires across Washington state and Oregon that rarely experience such intense blazes because of the Pacific Northwest’s cool and wet climate.
Sheriff’s deputies, travelling with chainsaws in their patrol cars to cut fallen trees blocking roads, went door to door in rural communities 40 miles south of Portland, telling people to leave.
As many as 16,000 people have been told to abandon their homes.
“These winds are so incredible and are spreading so fast, we don’t have a lot of time,” said Clackamas County Sheriff Craig Roberts.
In Washington State, Governor Jay Inslee said more than 330,000 acres burned in a 24-hour period.
The fire was suspected of causing at least one death outside of Ashland, said Rich Tyler, spokesman for the Oregon State Fire Marshal. A 12-year-old boy and his grandmother also died in a wildfire near the Santiam Valley community of Lyons.
Police as well reported a one-year-old boy was also killed and his parents severely burned fleeing a fire in Okanogan County, Washington.
Hundreds of miles away in northern California, the remains of three people were found in two separate locations, according to Sheriff Kory Honea, bringing the total death toll from this summer’s spate of wildfires in the state to at least 11.
One of the victims was found in a car, apparently attempting to flee the fires, California Highway Patrol Officer Ben Draper told reporters.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, conservatively estimated the fire had burned about 400 square miles in 24 hours.
“The unbelievable rates of spread now being observed on these fires – it is historically unprecedented,” he tweeted.
The US Forest Service, which had taken the unprecedented measure of closing eight national forests in Southern California, ordered all 18 of its forests in the state to close for public safety.
California has set a record with nearly 2.5 million acres burned already this year, and historically the worst of the wildfire season does not begin until the autumn.
