The wildfire raging in northern California spread on Wednesday as National Guard troops joined the search for its victims and lawyers filed a lawsuit blaming the blaze, the state’s deadliest, on poor maintenance by the area’s utility company. The death toll from the Camp Fire remained at 48 overnight but the fire grew 5,000 acres to 135,000 (55,000 hectares), even though diminished winds and rising humidity on Tuesday had allowed firefighting crews to set up containment lines around more than a third of the fire. A National Guard contingent of 100 military police trained to seek and identify human remains was going into the town of Paradise, a town of about 27,000 in the Sierra foothills that has been reduced to little more than embers and ash by the Camp Fire.
