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With deaths from the wildfires rising, Portland, Seattle and San Francisco among the worst cities for air quality anywhere in the world.

The fires have scorched more than double Oregon's yearly average amount of acres in the past week, with over 10% of the state living in evacuation zones. A top state official said in a press conference Friday that Oregon was preparing for a \"mass casualty incident.\"

\"We have thousands of people who have lost their homes. I could never have envisioned this -- the east winds came over the top of the mountain, proceeded to turn the fires into blow torches that went down and just incinerated a series of small towns,\" Merkley said. \"You have community after community with fairgrounds full of people, of refugees from the fires.\"

\"PHOTO:
Ted S. Warren/AP
PHOTO: Washington Gov. Jay Inslee talks to reporters, Sept. 9, 2020, following a tour to survey wildfire damage in Bonney Lake, Wash., south of Seattle.
>

In Washington, wildfires have burned on both sides of the Cascade mountains, consuming more than 675,000 acres of land as of Sunday morning, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.

Inslee warned that the entire country should view the blazes as a warning of what could come if climate change is not addressed.

\"If this is not a signal to the United States, I don't know what it will take. Because, as (California) Gov. (Gavin) Newsom suggested, it may not be fires in the Midwest. It's floods in Hamburg, which washed away Hamburg, Iowa. It's the rising seas that are drowning Miami Beach. It's the hurricanes on the East Coast,\" the governor told Stephanopoulos.

\"We need to act, and we need to act now. And these people whose homes were destroyed, that I've seen, with their tears, in the last few days, they deserve action against climate change,\" he added.

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