Joe Biden has branded President Donald Trump a "climate arsonist" for failing to acknowledge global warming's role in deadly wildfires sweeping the western United States, while Trump said the crisis stemmed from lax forest management.
Joe Biden speaks about the urgent need to address climate change Photo: AFP
Dozens of conflagrations have raged with unprecedented scope across more than 1.6 million hectares in Oregon, California and Washington state since August, laying waste to several small towns, destroying thousands of homes and killing at least 35 people.
The fires also have filled the region's air with harmful levels of smoke and soot, bathing skies in eerie tones of orange and sepia while adding to a public health crisis already posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Ten deaths have been confirmed during the past week in Oregon alone, the latest flashpoint in a larger summer outbreak of fires accompanied by catastrophic lightning storms, record-breaking heat waves and bouts of extreme winds.
Those incendiary conditions gave way over the weekend to cooler, moister weather and calmer winds, enabling weary firefighters to gain ground in efforts to outflank blazes that had burned largely unchecked last week.
Fire managers cautioned that the battle was hardly over. Thunderstorms forecast for later in the week could bring much-needed rain but also more lightning. Officials also braced for a rise in the death toll.
As disaster teams scoured the ruins of dwellings engulfed by flames amid chaotic evacuations last week, Oregon's emergency management authorities said they had yet to account for 22 people reported missing in the fires.
At least two dozen people have perished in California wildfires since mid-August, and one fatality has been confirmed in Washington state.
Fires focus campaign on climate
Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee slammed by Republicans for not visiting disaster areas, spoke from his home state of Delaware on the threat of increasingly frequent weather extremes that scientists have pointed to as evidence that climate change is supercharging the fires.
Trump, who trails Biden in national polls ahead of the 3 November election, met with firefighters and officials in California after Democrats blasted the Republican president for remaining mostly silent on the wildfires.
"I think this is more of a management situation," Trump answered, when asked by a reporter if climate change was a factor behind the fires. Without mentioning large wildfires that have raged elsewhere around the world in recent years, from southern Europe to Australia and Siberia, Trump asserted that other countries "don't have this problem".
"They have more explosive trees, meaning they catch fire much easier," he said. "But they don't have problems like this."
Donald Trump Photo: AFP
The president and his administration have sought to pin the blame for large wildfires on state officials, saying fuel-choked forests and scrub need to be thinned, more firebreaks need to be cut and flammable debris cleared from forest floors.
Trump said improved forest management was something that could be tackled quickly, whereas climate change would take more time and require international cooperation that he said was lacking.
"When you get into climate change, well is India going to change its ways? And is China going to change its ways? And Russia? Is Russia going to change its ways?" he said after landing in McLellan Park, California.
'It'll get cooler'
Trump has referred to climate change as a "hoax," and in 2017 pulled the United States out of the Paris accord that laid out an international approach to global warming. Biden, the former vice president, has included climate change on his list of major crises facing the United States.
Calling Trump a "climate arsonist," Biden said: "If we have four more years of Trump's climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned by wildfires? How many suburban neighbourhoods will have been flooded out?"
California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged more needs to be done to better manage forests to reduce fire risks, while more than a century of aggressive fire suppression has allowed fuels to build up.
A man looks for items in the remains of his mobile home after a wildfire swept through the R.V. park destroying multiple homes in Estacada, Oregon Photo: AFP
But he countered that global warming was nevertheless a driving factor in newly extreme wildfire behaviour, and he reminded Trump that 57 percent of forest land in California is under federal ownership.
"We come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident: that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this," the Democratic governor said during a meeting with the president.
Trump, who has authorised federal disaster aid for both California and Oregon, questioned that science.
"It'll start getting cooler, you just watch," he said. "I don't think science knows."
Arson arrest
As improved weather conditions allowed firefighters to go on the offensive, tens of thousands of displaced residents continued to adjust to life as evacuees.
Around the devastated southwestern Oregon towns of Phoenix and Talent, some people set up food stations in parking lots, while others guarded homes from looters who tend to appear at dusk, according to a Reuters photographer.
Seeking to reinforce local law enforcement resources strained by the disaster, Oregon is deploying as many as 1000 National Guard troops to fire-stricken communities.
A man was charged with arson on Friday in connection with a blaze set near Phoenix, Oregon, and another man was arrested in Portland on Monday on suspicion of starting six small fires that did not burn any structures, authorities reported.
Police across Oregon have cautioned against fake social media accounts blaming wildfires on left-wing anti-fascists or right-wing Proud Boy activists.
- Reuters