Thousands of evacuees displaced by deadly wildfires across Oregon settled into a second week of life in shelters and car camping as fire crews battled on against the blazes
With state resources stretched to their limit, President Donald Trump approved a request from Oregon’s governor for a federal disaster declaration, bolstering U.S. government assistance for emergency response and relief efforts.
The conflagrations, which officials and scientists have described as unprecedented in scope and ferocity, have also filled the region’s skies with smoke and soot, compounding a public health crisis already posed by the coronavirus pandemic. Weather conditions improved early this week, enabling firefighters to begin to make headway in efforts to contain and tamp down the blazes.
At the height of the crisis there, some 500,000 residents - at least 10% of the state’s population - were under some form of evacuation alert, many forced to flee their homes as swiftly advancing flames closed in on their neighborhoods. More than 1,700 structures, most of them dwellings, have been incinerated
Marcus Welch, a food service director and youth soccer coach in Phoenix, said he was helping a group of high school students whose homes were spared to run a donation center set up to assist evacuees from a mobile-home park reduced to ash. “It’s like it cherry-picked - it burned down a house, then skipped two, then burned down another. I guess that’s the way they kind of work with the embers flying around,” Westover said.
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