SAN FRANCISCO | The search for people still missing after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in at least a century is winding down in Northern California, with just 11 names remaining on a fluctuating list that once approached 1,300 and prompted fears that hundreds had died in the flames.
The declining number issued late Monday came as welcomed relief in the Paradise area as it recovers from the wildfire that killed at least 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes.
Families, friends and even long-ago acquaintances have littered social media with pleas for help finding people. Sometimes they had no more than a first name to work with.
Authorities now say they have located more than 3,100 people who had been reported as unreachable at some point during the catastrophe.
“I think that’s a pretty remarkable number at this point,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said.
He also has updated the death toll down to 85 from 88, saying medical examiners determined several bags of human remains were duplicates.
The Associated Press has been scouring the list of people unaccounted for and found duplicate names, misspellings and people who just don’t appear to exist.
People who were previously identified as dead or alive by family or friends have at times reappeared on the list.
The list of names released each day frustrated those searching for people and confused residents whose names appeared even though they weren’t missing.
Honea has repeatedly said he released the list — no matter how long at times — to reach those who may not know people were looking for them.
He said the intention was never to be a definitive account of people who were missing or possibly dead.
The AP located several people, including a couple who had decamped from the fire zone area for a previously planned vacation in Hawaii.
Patrick Holden and Nancy Barnes fled their Paradise home at the same time as most of their neighbors. They spent five terrifying hours on Nov. 8 making the normally 30-minute drive to nearby Chico.
The next day, they identified themselves as safe through Facebook, alerted their friends and then, realizing that their home was burned to the ground, headed to Hawaii for their vacation.
Holden was stunned to see his name pop up on the list two weeks after the disaster. The couple appeared on a list released Sunday as “Patrick and Nancy Holton” of Paradise.
“Everybody in the car club, the bridge club and the Paradise Newcomers Club knew we were OK,” Holden said Monday from his timeshare in Maui. “I don’t know how we got on the list now.”
His daughter, Amanda Lunsford, said a former co-worker of her father may have added him. Holden said he hasn’t called the Butte County Sheriff’s Office to let them know about the error, because they’re busy.
