The winds kicked up several hours before dawn and pushed flames into the hills on the edge of Sonoma, a town of 11,000.

The death toll, revised upward by eight on Thursday, marked the greatest loss of life from a single California wildfire event in recorded state history.

Even establishing a decent estimate of the unaccounted-for has proved too difficult, with authorities citing wildly disparate figures within a single day Wednesday, though all were in the hundreds.