Los Angeles County firefighters attack flames approaching the Salvation Army camps in Malibu Creek State Park during the Woolsey Fire on November 10, 2018 near Malibu, California. The Woolsey fire has burned over 70,000 acres and has reached the Pacific Coast at Malibu as it continues grow.

With hearses standing by, crews stepped up the search for bodies in the smoking ruins of Paradise, and relatives desperately looked for more than 100 missing loved ones, as wind-whipped wildfires raged Sunday on both ends of the state.

The statewide death toll stood at 25 and appeared certain to rise.

At least five search teams were working in Paradise — a town of 27,000 that was largely incinerated on Thursday — and surrounding Northern California communities. Authorities called in a mobile DNA lab and anthropologists to help identify victims of the most destructive wildfire in California history. By early afternoon, one of the two black hearses stationed in Paradise had picked up another set of remains.

The search also went on for the missing.

"I still haven't heard anything," said Laurie Teague, who was looking for her 80-year-old stepfather, Herb Alderman. She and her brother called shelters, hospitals, the sheriff's department and the coroner's office.

"He has friends in that area," Teague said. "I'm hoping one of them grabbed him and took him to shelter."

Officials and relatives held out hope that many of those unaccounted for were safe and simply had no cellphones or other ways to contact loved ones.

Sol Bechtold drove from shelter to shelter looking for his mother, Joanne Caddy, a 75-year-old widow whose house burned down along with the rest of her neighborhood in Magalia, just north of Paradise. She lived alone and did not drive.

Bechtold posted a flyer on social media, pinned it to bulletin boards at shelters and showed her picture around to evacuees, asking if anyone recognized her. He ran across a few of Caddy's neighbors, but they hadn't seen her.

As he drove through the smoke and haze to yet another shelter, he said, "I'm also under a dark emotional cloud. Your mother's somewhere and you don't know where she's at. You don't know if she's safe."

He added: "I've got to stay positive. She's a strong, smart woman."