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. He said they would likely “not be the only ones.” Lyons is in Marion County.Īnother wildfire hit Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, where residents were being evacuated to a community college to the south. Marion County Sheriff Joe Kast confirmed two fatalities but had no other details. KOIN reported a boy and his grandmother died in a wildfire near Lyons, Oregon. They were transported to a Seattle hospital with third-degree burns. The child’s injured parents were discovered in the area of the Cold Springs Fire, which is burning in Okanogan and Douglas counties, Hawley said. In Washington, a 1-year-old boy died after his family was apparently overrun by flames while trying to flee a wildfire in the northeastern part of the state, Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said Wednesday. “Quite frankly, we are not even able to get into these areas,” she said. The precise extent of damage was unclear because so many of the fire zones were too dangerous to survey, said Oregon Deputy State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple. Brown said some communities were substantially damaged, with “hundreds of homes lost.” “This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” the governor said.Īt least two people were killed in Oregon fires, along with a small child in a Washington state blaze. 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 windstorm. 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 firefighters struggling to contain and douse flames fanned by 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.