California wildfire death toll rises to 56, troops search for missing 130

U.S. National Guard troops scoured the ruins of the town of Paradise on Thursday for any sign of 130 people still missing in California's deadliest wildfire on record as authorities said the death toll had risen to 56.

The "Camp Fire" blaze obliterated the Sierra foothills town of Paradise, once home to 27,000 people, last Thursday. Most of those still missing in and around town, which lies about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco, are above the age of 65.

The surface area of the fire had grown to 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) by of Wednesday evening, even as diminished winds and rising humidity helped firefighters shore up containment lines around more than a third of the perimeter.

Still, the ghostly expanse of empty lots covered in ash and strewn with twisted wreckage and debris made a strong impression on Governor Jerry Brown, U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and other officials who toured the devastation on Wednesday.

"This is one of the worst disasters I've seen in my career, hands down," Brock Long, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters in Chico.

"It looks like a war zone. It is a war zone," Brown said.

Butte County Sheriff's spokeswoman Megan McMann said the list of 130 missing would fluctuate from day to day as more names are added and others are removed, either because they turn up safe or end up identified among the dead.

Sheriff Honea invited relatives of the missing to provide DNA samples to compare against samples taken from newly recovered remains in hopes of speeding up identification of the dead. He said it was possible some of the missing might never be found.

Authorities attributed the magnitude of casualties to the staggering speed with which the fire struck Paradise. Wind-driven flames roared through town so swiftly that residents were forced to flee for their lives. Some victims were found in or around the burned-out wreckage of their vehicles.