UPDATE:
PARADISE, Calif. — The death toll in the wildfire that tore through a Northern California community has risen to 23. Two people have also died in a fire in Southern California.
The Butte County sheriff says investigators discovered 14 additional bodies Saturday, three days after the fire broke out. He says some of the victims were found in cars and in houses.
The fire has become the third-deadliest in California history.
EARLIER:
MALIBU, Calif. — Two people were found dead and scores of houses, from the celebrity mansions of Malibu to the mobile homes of seniors in the suburbs, burned in a pair of wildfires that stretched across more than 100 square miles of Southern California, authorities said Saturday.
The two bodies were found in a sparsely populated stretch of Mulholland Highway in Malibu, but Los Angeles County sheriff's Chief John Benedict offered no further details. It brings to 11 the number of people killed in the state's wildfires in the past few days, with nine found dead in a Northern California wildfire.
Firefighters have saved thousands of homes despite working in "extreme, tough fire conditions that they said they have never seen in their life," Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.
Those vicious conditions on Friday night gave way to calm Saturday, with winds reduced to breezes.
Firefighters used the lull to try to rein in the powerful blaze that had grown to 109 square miles and get a grasp of how much damage it did in its first two days.
Osby said losses to homes were "significant" but did not say how many had burned. Officials said earlier that 150 houses had been destroyed and the number would rise. Some 250,000 homes are under evacuation orders across the region.
Fire burned in famously ritzy coastal spots like Malibu , where Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian West, Guillermo del Toro and Martin Sheen were among those forced out of their homes amid a citywide evacuation order.
But the flames also burned inland through hills and canyons dotted with modest homes, reached into the corner of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, and stretched into suburbs like Thousand Oaks, a city of 130,000 people that just a few days ago saw 12 people killed in a mass shooting at a country music bar.
In Northern California, the blaze that started Thursday outside the hilly town of Paradise has grown to 156 square miles and destroyed more than 6,700 buildings, almost all of them homes, making it California's most destructive wildfire since record-keeping began. But crews have made gains and the fire is partially contained, officials said Saturday.
The dead in that fire were found inside their cars and outside vehicles or homes after a desperate evacuation that Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea called "the worst-case scenario." Their identities were not yet known.
"It is what we feared for a long time," Honea said, noting that there was no time to go door to door.
President Donald Trump issued an emergency declaration providing federal funding for Butte, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. He later threatened to withhold federal payments to California, claiming its forest management is "so poor."
President Donald Trump issued an emergency declaration providing federal funding for Butte, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. He later threatened to withhold federal payments to California, claiming its forest management is "so poor."
Trump tweeted Saturday that "there is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly fires in California." Trump said "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!"
California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom responded on Twitter that this was "not a time for partisanship."
"This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those in need up," he said.
Trump took a more empathetic tone later in the day, tweeting sympathies for firefighters, people who have fled their homes and the families of those killed by the flames.