A Line of Fire South of Portland and a Yearslong Recovery Ahead

“We were very fortunate that the winds did not sustain another day like we had experienced” in the previous four days, said Doug Grafe, the chief of fire protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry.

As residents flee fire-ravaged communities, officials have struggled to manage a series of migrations reminiscent of a war zone, with distraught families showing up with little in hand beyond an overwhelming fear that their homes have been lost for good. Emergency responders have only begun to get a sense of how many victims they have and the grueling effort to rebuild that will lie ahead.

“The long-term recovery is going to last years,” said Mr. Phelps, the emergency management director.

Parking lots up and down the state were transformed into improvised campgrounds. A dozen campers and motor homes posted up outside a supermarket in Milwaukie, down the hill from the fires ravaging much of Clackamas County. Adriana Amaro said 25 members of her family had decided to leave before they were ordered out, concerned about how a frantic flight in the smoke would affect the children. They have been sleeping on air mattresses inside the back of a relative’s cargo truck and going to the bathroom at a gas station on the corner.

Hotel and motel rooms have become so scarce that officials who had been running a shelter at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem said they had to allow people to sleep on spaced-out cots indoors — a step they had been avoiding because of coronavirus fears.

“At this point it’s all we can do,” said Bethany Jones, a volunteer.

On Thursday night, about 2,300 people slept in emergency accommodations provided by the American Red Cross and its partners — 520 of them in traditional mass shelters. Tens of thousands more were crashing with friends or family members. Others were pitching tents in high school football fields or sleeping in shopping mall parking lots — many of them unsure whether they would be displaced for days, or weeks, or more.