On Thursday, dozens of intense, wind-driven fires burned through forests and towns on the US West Coast, killing at least 16 people, forcing half a million to evacuate in Oregon alone, and destroying hundreds of homes, officials said.

A spokeswoman for the Oregon Emergency Management Office reported late in the evening that it had been ordered to leave their homes to some 500,000 people, around an eighth of the total population of the State. In the neighboring states of Washington and California thousands more were displaced north and south.

The region's confirmed death toll for this year is now at least 16, including eight fire deaths in California last month.

Among those killed in the past day was a one-year-old boy who died while his parents attempted to drive out of an inferno 130 miles (209.2 kilometres) east of Seattle. They are both in a critical condition in hospital. 

"This child's family and community will never be the same," said Washington Governor Jay Inslee, in a statement on the state's first fire death of 2020.

"And neither will countless others who are reeling from the utter devastation these wildfires are leaving in their wake."

Oregon has borne the brunt of some 100 major wildfires raging across the western US this week. Around 3,000 firefighters have been battling nearly three dozen blazes in Oregon, but fire officials say about twice as many are necessary to bring the fires under control.

Governor Kate Brown warned the death toll would rise as rescue teams reached devastated areas.

"We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state," she told a press conference.

"We know that there are fire-related fatalities. And as soon as we are able to provide confirmed information, we will do so."

Police have opened an arson investigation into at least one of the Oregon blazes, the Almeda fire, which started in Ashland near the border with California, according to local police chief Tighe O'Meara.

"We have good reason to believe that there was a human element to it, so we're going to pursue it as a criminal investigation until we have reason to believe that it was otherwise," O'Meara told Reuters news agency.

O'Meara said he expected the death toll from the Almeda fire, initially blamed for two of Oregon's fatalities, to rise as search teams combed through the ruins of homes that burned amid a chaotic evacuation.

The Oregon blazes tore through at least five communities in the Cascade mountain range as well as areas of coastal rainforest normally spared from wildfires. In eastern Washington state a fire destroyed most of the tiny farming town of Malden.

In central Oregon, search and rescue teams entered devastated communities like Detroit, where firefighters led residents on a dramatic mountain escape after military helicopters were unable to evacuate the town.

A 12-year-old boy was found dead with his dog inside a burned-out car and his grandmother was believed to have succumbed after flames engulfed an area near Lyons, about 50 miles (80 km) south of Portland, the Marion County Sheriff's Office said.

SOURCE: News agencies