But fires can be capricious. Maybe he still had his home?

He arrived, and stared. A house that has succumbed to a wildfire is rarely just a little bit destroyed. The damage almost always looks as if the structure had not merely been burned, but also bombed. A water pipe spurted halfheartedly over the ruins.

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“On the one hand . . . it’s stuff,” McClenahan said, struggling to maintain his composure. “But it’s a lot of history. Everything, our whole lives were in here.”

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“Oh, you get to start over,” he said. Then he crumbled to his knees and sobbed.

The wildfires scorching California in the past few days have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities across large swaths of the state, including this one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.

The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the most destructive individual wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday, it already had destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise and has been blamed for 23 of the 25 overall deaths, though more could come.

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“This event was the worst-case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.”

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Honea said Saturday night that 14 additional bodies were found, bringing the death toll in the Northern California fire to 23, the Associated Press reported. The victims have not been identified. He said there are reports of about 110 people missing.

The smoke, like orange fog, that enveloped Chico and surrounding towns Friday gave way to a low-lying haze that spread all the way up to Redding on Saturday, thanks to a shift in winds overnight.

Surgical nurse Nichole Jolly, who turned 34 on Friday, spent her birthday helping evacuate the patients from Paradise’s only hospital. She didn’t know whether her home survived. After the hospital had been cleared, she tried to leave the area but was trapped by smoke and flames. Her car caught fire. A call from her husband, in a place where cellphone service is notoriously spotty, came through, and “he told me to get out and run.”

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“I told him I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out,” she said. “I told him I loved him and told him to give the kids a kiss. He told me to get out of the car and run, that if you’re going to die, die fighting.”

A bulldozer operator picked her up and took her back to the Feather River Hospital, where staffers, trapped in place, started a triage area outside because “the whole place smelled like burned plastic.”

Staff members, patients and anyone who could hold a fire extinguisher watched for spot fires. She said about 10 nurses, two doctors and a respiratory therapist spent the next five or six hours treating anyone who reached the hospital.

“People were making sure no one was left behind,” she said. “Strangers helping strangers. We might be a divided country, but it didn’t matter that day. Black, white, Democrat, Republican; none of that mattered. People just helped one another, and it was amazing to see.”

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Here in Southern California, authorities said two bodies were found, both burned, in Malibu in a vehicle that had been in the path of the wildfire, though homicide investigators are still working that case and have not officially declared a cause of death. Winds eased Saturday, but they are expected to increase again Sunday. The weather — dry air, high winds and no rain — is conducive to fires and is forecast to continue until late Tuesday.

About 200,000 people were displaced by the Woolsey Fire, which began midafternoon Thursday near Simi Valley, even as fire departments were responding to a second wildfire, called the Hill Fire, just west of Thousand Oaks. The Woolsey Fire proved to be explosive, expanding within 24 hours to some 35,000 acres. It raced from the Conejo Valley to the Pacific Ocean, across Highway 101 and the Santa Monica mountains, at speeds that impressed veteran fire officials.

“It’s spreading quicker than it used to,” said Mark Lorenzen, chief of the Ventura County Fire Department.

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They weren’t surprised. They knew the wind was coming, and when there is strong wind here, there is fire, reliably. But David Richardson, deputy chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said everyone had expected a lull in the wind Friday afternoon, and it didn’t materialize. The gusts stayed dangerous.

“This fire is very bad and monumental. It’s a historic fire,” Richardson said. “These fires come along every 30 years or so.”

This was an unpredictable fire, burning some houses to their foundations while leaving next-door structures untouched. That was the case in Oak Park, which abuts the rugged hills separating Conejo Valley from Simi Valley. Residents were still gradually returning to their neighborhoods Saturday, and what they found was a largely intact community pocked with destroyed houses.

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“It’s just nature. Nature makes its choices,” said a man walking his dog, too busy on his cellphone to provide his name or any other information.

Californians have a relationship with fire. They read smoke signals. They will study a fire’s glow on a ridgeline and forecast their immediate future according to what they smell. They know what to pack. They know to turn their cars around in their driveways for a quick getaway.

They are required by law to have “defensible space” around their homes, free of brush, a firebreak built into the building codes. They know how fire spreads. “We get this ember wash. It looks like a billion fireflies,” Lorenzen said.

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The embers were largely gone Saturday, but the smoke remained — inescapable, pooling in low-lying areas. Spot fires remained, and the ground smoldered. Among the property consumed by flames was Paramount Ranch, a fake Western town used for HBO’s “Westworld” and other shows dating back more than a half-century.

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Here is what wildfires and the devastation in Northern and Southern California looks like share Share View Photos View Photos Next Image Brenda Wilson sits with her dog Scooby at an evacuee encampment outside a Walmart parking lot in Chico, Calif. (Josh Edelson/For The Washington Post)

Sharon Woods, 48, who owns a winery, lives just a few yards from McClenahan in Malibu Lake, and she was horrified by the hellscape around her. Her two-story wooden house somehow was spared, with a trail of fire skirting it along the property line. The only things she lost were a couple of garbage cans. She’d won the fire lottery.

“I’m still completely dazed,” she said. “I’ve been crying for 20 hours.” She surveyed the remnants of the neighborhood with Jeremy Sugarman, 39, a landscape architect whose home also survived.

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“I’m very familiar with fire. This one, however, was exceptionally scary,” Sugarman said. He recounted driving to Malibu to check on his mother’s house. “We were seeing smoke tornadoes.”

In Malibu, Pepperdine University’s 3,600 undergraduates were ordered to shelter in place as the fire approached. That decision by university officials proved controversial, especially with parents, after the flames reached hillsides near campus. Overnight, debate had raged about whether the students were in the safest possible spot — or trapped and in danger.

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It seems counterintuitive, said Connie Horton, vice president for student affairs, but the Los Angeles County Fire Department supports the shelter-in-place plan as the safest course. “We have lived it a number of times over the years, practiced it, rehearsed it, trained on it,” she said.

The flames had been extinguished near campus by early Saturday morning.

On Saturday, President Trump made his first comments on the wildfires, alleging mismanagement of the forests.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”

A spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown (D) said that more federal forest land has burned than state land, adding that the state has expanded its forestry budget while the Trump administration has cut its budget for forest services.

Later Saturday, the president posted a tweet expressing concern for those affected.

“More than 4,000 are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California that have burned over 170,000 acres,” he wrote. “Our hearts are with those fighting the fires, the 52,000 who have evacuated, and the families of the 11 who have died. The destruction is catastrophic. God Bless them all.”

Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, also responded to Trump’s earlier tweet.

“The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines,” Rice said in a statement.

Rice added: “The president’s assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong . . . nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.”

Back in Oak Park, Richard Gwynn, 75, and his wife, Lynda Gwynn, 70, surveyed the burned landscape. She became emotional, looking at a canyon where her children had once played, now blackened by fire.

“Winds are coming back tonight, and they’re going to blow all day Monday,” Richard Gwynn said. “But there’s nothing left to burn.”

Nearby, a rabbit hopped over charred ground.

“There’s one alive?” he said.

“We can’t get rid of them, no matter what,” Lynda Gwynn said.

Achenbach reported from Thousand Oaks, Calif. Williams in Paradise, Calif., Tony Biasotti, Katie Mettler and Katie Zezima in Thousand Oaks, and Jason Samenow in Washington contributed to this report.