Sheriff: Residents can't return to Butte co. evacuation areas yet

The Butte County Sheriff says many residents still can not return home after the Bear Fire for safety reasons.

Sheriff Honea also talks about how evacuations are communicated to the public and how evacuation warnings and orders are decided.

Thousands of bear fire evacuees remain blocked from returning to their homes and the frustration is growing.

Butte county sheriff kory honea says his department feels the pressure.

But he says many don't understand the many hazards and other safety concerns that remain.

"in the case of the bear fire, what we are dealing with now, we're trying to go through, one, we still have active fire.

So we're trying to get the all clear from cal fire in some of these areas.

In addition to that, there's substantial damage to powerlines, to other infrastructure.

So we're working with pg&e, comcast, to go in there.

To clean that stuff out and make it minimally safe for people to go in.

There's damaged infrastructure.

They have to look at guardrails and bridges and culverts to things of that nature.

And then unfortunately in the bear fire, and as was the case in the camp fire, there are people who didn't make it out.

And so there is this effort to go through and search for human remains, then that requires us to send searchers in to search on properties to look for them."

Sheriff honey stated last friday a hope that most the evacuation orders could be lifted within a couple of weeks.

Butte county library