Sonoma County authorities assist with missing persons operation in Camp fire

As the Camp fire tore a destructive path through Butte County this month, local authorities quickly turned to their Sonoma County counterparts for help with the daunting task of resolving the thousands of missing persons reports.

“We knew that Sonoma County (Sheriff’s Office) had a specific skill set developed in the course of your tragic fires,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said.

“We’ve had their staff members in our call centers and helping staff track down leads.”

As of Wednesday, the Sheriff’s Office had resolved more than 2,600 reports of people missing since the fire started Nov. 8, with 158 people still on the missing list.

The blaze did its most severe damage in rural communities east of Chico, including the town of Paradise. Cal Fire declared the fire fully contained on Sunday.

The remains of at least 88 people have been found in the wake of the wildfire, the deadliest and most destructive in California history.

It scorched 153,300 acres and destroyed upward of ?18,800 structures, most of them homes.

“We’ve done a lot of work and we’ve made good progress, but we have a lot of work to go,” Honea said.

His agency opened a missing persons call center on Nov. 11. A team of four Sonoma County detectives and a lieutenant were dispatched there two days later at the request of California’s Office of Emergency Services to help Butte County’s unaccounted persons operation, Sonoma County spokesman Sgt. Spencer Crum said.

The group drew from their experiences from October 2017, when local authorities faced a similarly daunting task after a series of deadly blazes across Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office fielded close to 2,270 missing persons reports in the days that followed, some of which were duplicates. Sheriff’s personnel spent two months working through the list, Crum said.

“We were quickly getting inundated with people from out of the area saying they couldn’t get in touch with loved ones,” Crum said. “We started realizing that this was going to be bigger than what we had foreseen.”

In all, 40 people died in the North Bay fires, including 24 deaths in Sonoma County, nine in Mendocino and seven in Napa.

A majority of the reports of missing people during the Camp fire and those in 2017 came from people who lived outside of the region or state, and who had no easy way to reach people in the fires’ path, sheriff’s officials said.

While some reports were from close family members who were in regular contact with loved ones before the blazes erupted, many others came from people with loose ties to burn-zone residents - they attended the same high school years ago, for example.

In Butte County, deputies still are checking local shelters to see if anyone who was reported as missing has checked in with volunteers, Honea said.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office opted not to publish the names of those reported missing following the 2017 fires fearing doing so would cause confusion or undue panic.

Honea said the Butte County Sheriff’s Office chose to release those names as soon as possible, a move he credited with helping the office reach community members, who in some cases saw the missing persons list and then called to report themselves, or others, as being safe.

“We opted for progress over perfection, which means the data that we put out was very raw,” Honea said. “We would rather start that way and whittle it down.”

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter?@nashellytweets.