Follow KQED's ongoing wildfire coverage.
Updated: Wednesday, 6:28 p.m.
Authorities searching through the blackened aftermath of the Camp Fire — California's deadliest wildfire in history — have released the names of about 100 people who are still missing, including many in their 80s and 90s. Dozens more could still be unaccounted for.
As the names were made public late Tuesday, additional crews joined the search. So far, 56 people are confirmed to have been killed by the Camp Fire.
"We want to be able to cover as much ground as quickly as we possibly can," Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. "This is a very difficult task."
A sheriff's department spokeswoman, Megan McMann, acknowledged that the list was incomplete. She said detectives are concerned they will be overwhelmed by calls from relatives if the entire list is released.
"We can't release them all at once," McMann said. "So they are releasing the names in batches." She said the list would be updated.
Authorities have not updated the total number of missing since Sunday, when 228 people were unaccounted for.
Meanwhile, friends and relatives of the missing grew increasingly desperate. A message board at a shelter was filled with photos of the missing and pleas for any information.
"I hope you are okay," read one hand-written note on the board filled with sheets of notebook paper. Another had a picture of a missing man: "If seen, please have him call."
Some of the missing are not on the list, said Sol Bechtold, who is searching for his 75-year-old mother, Joanne Caddy, whose house burned down along with the rest of her neighborhood in Magalia, just north of Paradise, the town of 27,000 that was consumed by flames last week.
Bechtold said he spoke with the sheriff's office Wednesday morning, and they confirmed they have an active missing person's case on Caddy. But Caddy, a widow who lived alone and did not drive, was not on the list.
"The list they published is missing a lot of names," Bechtold said. Community members have compiled their own list.
Greg Gibson was one of the people searching the message board Tuesday, hoping to find information about his neighbors. They've been reported missing, but he does not know if they tried to escape or hesitated a few minutes too long before fleeing Paradise, where about 7,700 homes were destroyed.
"It happened so fast. It would have been such an easy decision to stay, but it was the wrong choice," Gibson said from the Neighborhood Church in Chico, which was serving as a shelter for some of the more than 1,000 evacuees.
Inside the church, evacuee Harold Taylor chatted with newfound friends. The 72-year-old Vietnam veteran, who walks with a cane, said he received a call Thursday morning to evacuate immediately. He saw the flames leaping up behind his house, left with the clothes on his back and barely made it out alive.
Along the way, he tried to convince his neighbor to get in his car and evacuate with him, but the neighbor declined. He doesn't know what happened to his friend.
"We didn't have 10 minutes to get out of there," he said. "It was already in flames downtown, all the local restaurants and stuff," he said.
The search for the dead was drawing on portable devices that can identify someone's genetic material in a couple of hours, rather than days or weeks.
"In many circumstances, without rapid DNA technology, it's just such a lengthy process," said Frank DePaolo, a deputy commissioner of the New York City medical examiners' office, which has been at the forefront of the science of identifying human remains since 9/11.