Search and rescue continues in Camp Fire aftermath

Search and rescue crews search a property that was destroyed by the Camp Fire for human remains on November 22, 2018 in Paradise, California.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

last updated 25 November 2018

Southern California's Woolsey Fire is 100 percent contained as of Saturday, and northern California's deadly Camp Fire is 98 percent contained as of Saturday night. While the great bulk of firefighting work is now complete, search and rescue operations are still underway.

At least 250 people remain missing in connection to the Camp Fire, down from a high of more than 1,000, and a team of 820 continued search operations over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Heavy rains that helped put out the fire have also complicated search efforts, though officials say it can make work easier for dogs searching for human remains. "One of the things that [rain] does do is it does concentrate the scent into a smaller compartment because of all the ash that was flying around," Craig Covey of the Orange County Fire Authority told a local television station. "It more compacts it, centralizes it, and the dogs can be very successful in that."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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