The office said four other structures sustained minor damage from the fire, with damage assessment more than 50 percent complete. The Klamath River community remains under an evacuation order, it said. CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam said weather conditions are unlikely to help extinguish the fire over the weekend. “Conditions have remained sunny and warm around the McKinney fire over the past 24 hours due to dry conditions near the event. High temperatures have neared triple digits on the valley floors, with extreme heat continuing into Monday before slightly cooler temperatures,” he said. “The combination of heat, low humidity, dry conditions and downslope winds means that further spread of the fire can be expected over the weekend and into early next week. While a thunderstorm cannot be ruled out over the fire area today, won Likely to contain substantial precipitation.’ The Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office said it is working to allow residents to return to their properties, but that many dangers remain in the evacuation zone. Four bodies were recovered from the burn area, he said earlier in the week. Search and rescue teams from California and southern Oregon contributed more than 1,000 volunteer hours to the operation, the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post. “At least 150 SAR members staff the Law Enforcement Headquarters, planning and organizing day-to-day operations, going out on the river to help search structures and homes and anything else that goes into a major incident. We also had 10 K9 search and rescue teams, starting early in the morning every day,” he said.
Houses were burnt to the ground
Among the homes burned was that of Kayla Dailey, who fled the fire with her family on the due date of her third child. “I could see nothing but smoke and fire coming down the mountain,” Daley told CNN earlier this week. Dailey, her two young sons, husband Levi and family roommate Dalton Shute left in their small car with few possessions. Dailey later learned that the fire had started just 3 miles from their home, which they had moved to from Indiana just four months earlier. When she spoke to CNN, Dailey was worried that the evacuation of the nearest hospital meant she faced a 2-hour trek through the mountains to give birth at a hospital in Medford, Oregon. On Friday, she shared news that the local hospital began accepting patients on a limited basis after Daley went into labor, and her daughter was delivered safely via emergency C-section on Thursday. Her brother-in-law set up a GoFundMe page to help the family, who lost everything in the fire. Shute, Dailey’s friend and roommate, told CNN he lost his mother in a house fire when he was 6 years old. “I feel that emptiness that I felt when I was a kid,” he said. But he was optimistic that he and his friends would recover. “We’re definitely not going to let that hold us back,” Shute said. Valerie Linfoot and her husband, both retired forest firefighters, lost their home of more than three decades. “We’ve fought fires and we’ve seen houses burn and we’ve been in a place where we’re the firefighters out there doing this job, but to have it happen to yourself, it’s just unimaginable,” Linfoot told CNN earlier in the week. “I am still shocked that we are victims of this horrible, horrible convergence of weather and fire, that so many times we have seen other people suffer.” For Linfoot, the hardest part is thinking about the irreplaceable items left behind when her house burned down, like her wedding rings, her mother and grandmother’s ashes and her children’s baby photos. The Linfoots have set up a GoFundMe page to help them with recovery and rebuilding. “It’s a small community and this is absolutely devastating for the Klamath River,” he said. “I don’t know how they’re going to recover. None of us are rich. We’re all hardworking and resilient people, but most of the people who were down there are middle class, regular workers or retirees.”
