California’s largest active wildfire erupted Friday night, rapidly spreading through dry fuel and threatening thousands of homes as firefighters scrambled to battle the danger.
The intensity and dramatic spread of the Park fire have led firefighters to draw unwelcome comparisons to the monstrous Camp fire, which raged out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and burning 11,000 homes.
More than 130 structures have been destroyed so far by the fire, and thousands more are threatened as evacuations have been ordered in four counties: Butte, Plumas, Tehama and Shasta. It spanned 480 square miles (1,243 square kilometers) Friday evening and was moving rapidly north and east after erupting Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a ravine in Chico and then calmly mingled with others fleeing the scene.
“There's a tremendous amount of fuel out there and it's going to continue at this rapid pace,” Cal Fire Incident Commander Billy See said at a briefing. He said the fire was advancing up to 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) an hour Friday afternoon.
Lassen Volcanic National Park officials evacuated staff from Mineral, a community of about 120 people where the park headquarters is located, as the fire moved north toward Highway 36 and east toward the park.
Communities across the western United States and Canada were under siege on Friday, as a fast-spreading wildfire sparked by lightning sent people fleeing onto flame-filled roads in rural Idaho, and a new blaze prompted evacuations in eastern Washington state.
In eastern Oregon, a pilot was found dead in a small tanker plane that crashed while battling one of several wildfires spreading across several Western states.
More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) were burning across the United States on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Some were weather-driven, with climate change increasing the frequency of lightning strikes as the region endures record heat and extreme drought.
A wildfire in eastern Washington has destroyed three homes and five outbuildings near the community of Tyler, which was evacuated Friday afternoon, said Ryan Rodruck, a spokesman for the Washington Department of Natural Resources. Firefighters have managed to contain the Columbia Basin Fire in Spokane County to about a half-mile (1.3 square kilometers), he said.
In Chico, California, Carli Parker is one of hundreds of people who fled their homes as the Park Fire approached. Parker decided to leave her Forest Ranch residence with her family when the fire began burning across the street. She had previously been forced to leave two homes because of the fire and said she had little hope that her residence would survive.
“I think I felt unsafe because the police came to our house because we had signed up for an early evacuation notice and they ran to their car and told us we had to evacuate ourselves and that they were never coming back,” said Parker, a mother of five.
Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico, was arrested Thursday morning in connection with the fire and was being held without bail pending a preliminary hearing Monday, officials said. There was no response to an email to the district attorney asking if the suspect had legal representation or someone who could comment on his behalf.
Fire crews were making progress on another complex of fires burning in the Plumas National Forest near the California-Nevada border, Forest Service spokeswoman Adrienne Freeman said. Most of the 1,000 residents evacuated from the lightning-started Gold Complex fires were returning home Friday. Some crews were detaching to help fight the Park Fire.
“As the (Park) fire out west shows, some of these fires are just exploding and burning at rates of spread that are hard to even imagine,” Tim Hike, Forest Service incident commander of the Gold Complex fire about 50 miles (80 km) northwest of Reno, said Friday. “The fire doesn’t look that bad until it gets bad. And then it might be too late.”
Sherry Alpers, a Forest Ranch evacuee, fled with her 12 dogs and decided to stay in her car outside a Red Cross shelter in Chico after learning the animals would not be allowed inside. She ruled out going to another shelter after learning the dogs would be caged, since her own dogs have always roamed free in her home.
Alpers said she doesn't know whether or not the fire spared her home, but added that as long as her dogs are safe, she doesn't care about material possessions.
“I'm a little worried, but not that much,” she said. “If it's gone, it's gone.”
Brian Bowles was also in a car outside the shelter with his dog Diamon. He said he doesn't know if his mobile home is still standing.
Bowles said he only has a $100 gift card from United Way, which he distributed to evacuees.
“Now the question is: Do I get a nice motel room for a night? Or do I put gas in the car and sleep here?” he said. “Tough choice.”
In Oregon, a Grant County search and rescue team located a small, single-engine tanker plane that went missing Friday morning while battling the 219-square-mile (567-square-kilometer) Falls Fire burning near the town of Seneca and Malheur National Forest. The pilot died, said Lisa Clark, an information officer for the Bureau of Land Management. No one else was aboard the plane hired by the bureau when it went down in steep, wooded terrain.
The worst damage so far has been reported in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies, where a fast-moving fire has displaced 25,000 people and devastated the park’s eponymous World Heritage town.
In Idaho, lightning has ignited rapidly burning wildfires and forced the evacuation of several communities. As of Friday afternoon, the fires had burned about 30 square miles.
Videos posted on social media include a man who said he heard explosions as he fled from Juliaetta, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) southeast of the University of Idaho’s Moscow campus. The town of just over 600 residents was evacuated Thursday shortly before the fires, as were several other communities near the Clearwater River and the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery Complex, which raises salmon.
There is no estimate yet of the number of buildings burned in Idaho, nor is there any information on damage to urban communities, officials said Friday morning.
Oregon still has the largest active wildfire in the United States, the Durkee Fire, which together with the Cow Fire has burned nearly 600 square miles. It remains unpredictable and was only 20 percent contained as of Friday, according to the government website InciWeb.
More than 27,000 fires have burned across more than 15,000 square kilometers in the United States this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, which released its National Wildland Fire Status Report on Wednesday, while in Canada, more than 22,800 square kilometers have burned in more than 3,700 fires so far.
