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Wildfires raced through more than a dozen Western states Thursday, incinerating homes, forcing hundreds of thousands of evacuations, and burning a swath of land almost the size of New Jersey. At least 23 people have died and hundreds of homes have been destroyed by more than 100 major fires that have consumed nearly 7,000 square miles. Authorities in Oregon say more than 500,000 people statewide have been forced to evacuate because of wildfires - over 10% of the state’s 4.2 million population. (Bacon, Hughes and Ortiz, 9/10)

A Northern California wildfire that destroyed a foothill hamlet has become the state’s deadliest blaze of the year with 10 people confirmed dead — and the toll could climb as searchers look for 16 missing people. The North Complex fire that exploded in wind-driven flames earlier in the week was advancing more slowly Friday after the winds eased and smoke from the blaze shaded the area and lowered the temperature, allowing firefighters to make progress, authorities said. (Beam and Melley, 9/11)

Deadly wildfires in heavily populated northwest Oregon were growing, with hundreds of thousands of people told to flee encroaching flames while residents to the south tearfully assessed their losses. People evacuated statewide because of fires had climbed to an estimated 500,000 — more than 10 percent of the 4.2 million people in the state, the Oregon Office of Emergency Management reported late Thursday. (Flaccus and Selsky, 9/11)

Smoke from wildfires burning throughout California and Oregon is expected to linger in the Bay Area through the end of the week, leading to unhealthy air in certain parts of the region that can be especially harmful to people with underlying health conditions. Unfortunately, Bay Area residents will probably have to cope with varying degrees of unhealthy air as the 2020 fire season continues through November. That means that residents should prepare to stay indoors as much as possible on smoky days, keep their windows closed, consider investing in ozone-free air purifiers and even arrange to leave the area until the bad air clears. (Ross, 9/10)

What exactly is in a wildfire’s smoke depends on a few key things: what’s burning—grass, brush or trees; the temperature—is it flaming or just smoldering; and the distance between the person breathing the smoke and the fire producing it. (Montrose, 9/10)

The health effects of wildfire smoke are not fully understood, and the particles differ in some ways from other air pollution, which has been shown to cause disease. But wildfire smoke, which can include toxic substances from burned buildings, has been linked to serious health problems. (Perlroth and Schwartz, 9/11)

Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face. The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other. (Fuller and Flavelle, 9/10)