On the California Wildfire Missing List, Name After Name After Name

CHICO, Calif. — There’s a desperate plea on the message board for Sheila Santos, who went missing after wildfires ripped through her home: “Call your kids.”

There are hundreds of other names posted outside the shelter for fire evacuees at a church in Chico, the nearest city to the front lines of the still-roaring fire. There’s Rosemary Poushard, William Goulridge and Vernice Regan, all of whom remain on the official missing list.

“I’ve seen grown men walk up to that board and just start to cry,” said Tena Quackenbush, 51, a Red Cross volunteer from Black River Falls, Wisconsin. “There’s something about seeing all the names and the way these people might have been consumed by fire that just brings the tragedy home.”

The Camp Fire, 70 percent contained as of Tuesday morning, has burned through more than 150,000 acres, killing at least 79 people to date. But the true scale of the human catastrophe will only be clear months down the line, once search crews finish turning through thousands of burned homes and businesses, some of which have been reduced to mere ash. Experts fear the final number of fatalities could reach well into the hundreds.

For now, nearly 700 people are listed as missing by the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, a shocking and fluctuating number that underscores the chaos sown by the blaze. The number peaked at more than 1,200 over the weekend and was revised as survivors were located.

Still, there are so many names.

The wait is excruciating, say those who have yet to hear from relatives or friends who were directly in the fire’s path.

Among those missing is Terry Poliquin, whose family has not heard from him since the fire came through Magalia, where he lived alone in a mobile home. Like many living on the margins in Magalia, Poliquin, 62, did not have a car, and his health “was not great,” according to his daughter, Alysha Martin.

Martin reported him missing Nov. 12, four days after the fire, but she still has no information about him even after speaking to sheriff’s detectives on three occasions. As they wait for official news from county investigators, she and her siblings have done everything they can think of to find him on their own; they checked the Red Cross website, shelters, hospitals. They also reached out to friends on his Facebook profile, hoping someone had seen him.

They are losing hope that he is alive, she said.

“He would have contacted us,” she said. “At least he would have tried. It’s just not like him. I just want answers, and if he did pass away, at least that would let me know what happened to him.”

The official list of the missing is a bucket of grief, gleaned from the anguished recordings of family members who called 911 during the confused hours when Paradise and neighboring towns were engulfed by fire. Sheriff Kory L. Honea of Butte County said the list includes every person declared missing; he stressed it was a raw, preliminary list. With every opportunity he has repeated that he needs the public’s cooperation to help whittle down the list, removing those who are safe.

Thomas D. Allman, sheriff of Mendocino County who lived through the wine country fires last year, said he expects the true human cost of the Camp Fire to continue growing in the weeks and months to come.

“I think we are going to have a lot of elderly people who were wiped off the face of the earth because they were sleeping and they never got awakened,” the sheriff said. The death toll, he predicted, would “clearly go into the hundreds unfortunately.”

Allman dispatched a team to Butte County that is charged with identifying potential homes that have remains. With around 13,000 homes destroyed, most of them incinerated, the search has been painstaking. Allman, who has conferred regularly with Honea, predicts the search will continue well into next year.

“We are going to be finding people into the spring,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

But experts are also careful to note that experience suggests the number on the missing list does not necessarily correspond to the total number of fatalities.

In the aftermath of last year’s wildfires in Northern California’s wine country, the list of the missing swelled. Sonoma County alone received reports of 2,269 people unaccounted for as distant relatives called from faraway states with vague stories that their family members may have been in the area. A team of dozens of detectives and probation officers pared down the list by using what Sgt. Spencer Crum of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office called “good, old-fashioned detective’s legwork.” It took between one and two months to close out the list of the missing, Crum said. The death toll in Sonoma County was finalized at 24.

Many people whose loved ones are still missing — particularly if they are elderly — have held onto hope they made it to safety but have been unable to call for various reasons, because they do not own a cellphone or lack familiarity with social media.

In the shuffle to flee and find temporary shelter, many may not even realize they are on the county’s missing person list, let alone unofficial ones.

The many missing people mean many distraught relatives, not sure whether they should mourn.

Outside a shelter at East Avenue Church in Chico, Kenny Burton sat down in a barber’s chair for a haircut. There were tears in his eyes, as he spoke of his two missing brothers.

Burton, 64, fled Magalia, a town of nearly 12,000 residents just north of Paradise, with nothing. He imagined his younger brother, Donald Wilt, 62, of Paradise, and elder brother, Paul Howard Burton of Magalia, “three or four years older,” had fled, too. But he had no clue.

“I have no way to know,” he said, tears flowing from his light blue eyes as Hector Santos, a volunteer from Danny’s Barber Shop, clipped his sideburns. It was the best day for breathing since the fire. The sky bore hints of blue and the sooty smoke that had filled the air for 200 miles lifted. People were ditching their paper masks.

Burton could think only of his brothers. “I don’t know if my brothers are camping out somewhere,” he said, “and they’re wondering about me.”

Kristin Aquino and her family were initially unable to account for her father and her uncle, whose Paradise homes were destroyed by the fire.

She was grateful to find her father at a hospital after more than 24 hours of anxious waiting. Her father, Donald Anderson, 72, who uses a wheelchair, struggled to flee Paradise as he witnessed homes erupting in flames around him. He was picked up by a police officer as he rushed down the street. He checked into two different evacuation centers before he was registered online by the Red Cross at the Orchard Hospital in Gridley. He could not call his family because he does not have a cellphone and had no phone numbers memorized.

“People are spread out everywhere with no way to contact each other. The wait and worry is excruciating,” said Aquino, 49, of San Diego. “He’d likely still be missing if not for the Red Cross site.”

But her uncle, Russell Anderson, 70, has yet to be found. As search crews continue inspecting burned ruins, more and more families are receiving the news that their loved ones did not outpace the fires.

In the case of Sheila Santos, whose family was urging her to call her children, the authorities discovered remains that might be hers, her daughter, Tammie Konicki, said on Tuesday.

Donna Ware’s family waited in agony for a week before eventually learning Friday that her remains were found at her home in Paradise. Her son, Steve Ware, had been unable to reach her on the day of the fire because of the speed with which it overtook the town, and he and his family were forced to flee the blaze without her.

The following days of unanswered prayers were a horror, according to the family, as they tried to find Ware, who suffered from dementia. They placed countless phone calls: to the sheriff’s office, to the fire department, to the missing person hotline. Like many other families, they took to social media to ask if others had seen her, hoping she might turn up in a shelter.

The pictures the family posted on Facebook showed a doting great-grandmother smiling with two small children, a boy and a girl, three sets of matching blue eyes.

“It’s living in the unknown,” said Chris Carlson, of Grant Pass, Oregon, who is married to Donna Ware’s grandson. “It’s just been very surreal. There’s no church or mortuary to call when the whole town is gone.”