The death toll in the California wildfires rose to 21 Wednesday, and authorities fear more bodies may be located in the coming days.
There has been minimal containment of the fast-growing wildfires in California’s Wine Country, where officials are focused on saving lives and preserving property. Cal Fire officials fear by day’s end Wednesday multiple fires will merge.
The death toll rose Tuesday to 17 in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino and Yuba counties while officers in Sonoma County — where at least 11 of the deaths occurred — searched evacuation centers and homes for 670 people, finding 110 of them as of Tuesday evening.
Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordano said Wednesday he expects the number of people who perished in the fast-moving wildfires to increase.
Unable to search home-by-home through rubble and debris, authorities are using police detective work to locate the missing. A 30-person team is tracking down relatives, friends and searching through data to determine the last known whereabouts of each person unaccounted for, the sheriff said.
“The devastation is enormous,” Giordano said. “We can’t even get into most areas. The 11 we found have been found for other reasons. We’re not doing searches to find them. We’re getting called there for for x, y or z and finding them.”
“So when we start doing searches, I would expect that number to go up,” he said.
As of Wednesday morning, mandatory evacuation orders remained in effect in areas of Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties, according to Cal Fire. Authorities advised residents to head south through Marin County.
Early Wednesday, the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office issued additional mandatory evacuation orders at the same time Cal Fire issued additional mandatory evacuations orders for areas of Calistoga and Geyserville.
As the fire climbed toward Calistoga, one Sonoma sheriff deputy drove through flames on Franz Valley Road, where the deputy was met by 35 people near Mark West Lodge, Sheriff Giordano said. A terrifying video posted to the sheriff’s Facebook page shows the deputy driving through the “ominous fire.”
“Those 35 people sat there and watched the fire burn around them,” Giordano said.
The sheriff said he expects no one will be allowed to return to evacuated areas of unincorporated Sonoma County until at least next week.
Tens of thousands of people remained out of their homes and more were evacuated Tuesday afternoon in northern Sonoma County and Napa County as the out-of-control firestorms have destroyed more than 2,000 structures and threaten many more.
Wednesday morning, ABC7 reported that seven Santa Rosa firefighters lost their homes in the wildfires.
David Debolt, Erin Baldassari and Katy Murphy contributed to this report
