One missing person was found and two may be dead after a devastating wildfire in Colorado, which destroyed entire swaths of cities and forced thousands of people to flee their homes, officials said Sunday (2).
Of the three missing, “one of the people was found alive and well,” Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle told reporters, adding that searches of the other two are continuing.
Ruins that were still hot and covered by snow have hampered restoration work, he said.
The so-called Marshall Fire, which started in a region affected by drought, was swept away by wind gusts of more than 160 km/h on Thursday.
As the flames raged through the cities of Superior and Louisville on the outskirts of Denver, the state’s largest, tens of thousands of people were forced to flee immediately.
Shocking aerial footage showed entire streets reduced to little more than piles of smoking ash, a wreckage that looked almost total but somehow left a few houses intact.
The cause of the fire is still being investigated and a warrant to search a location was announced on Saturday.
“There is still no news on the ongoing investigation into the origin of the fire,” Colorado Governor Jared Polis told CNN on Sunday. “It has been carried out professionally, in conjunction with FBI and forensic expertise.”
“Of course, if there is someone responsible for starting this fire, we hope they will be held fully accountable under the law,” he said.
A total of 991 structures, the vast majority residences, were destroyed by the flames, Pelle said. Some 127 were destroyed.
“It’s a very difficult search because of the wreckage, the heat, the snow,” Pelle said.
In order to find the missing, “they are trying to use dogs to help pinpoint exactly where to work, but it’s even more difficult to get the dogs to the scene,” he said.
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Deanne Criswell told CNN on Sunday that “it was shocking to see firsthand on the ground today the sheer devastation these communities have experienced.”
Within the burned area, about 1,000 consumers remained without electricity this Sunday, said Alice Jackson of energy company Xcel Energy, while more than 11,000 remain without gas.
While fires are part of the natural climate cycle and help clear dead vegetation, their scale and intensity are increasing.
Scientists say global warming, caused mainly by human activities such as the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, is altering weather patterns.
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