California’s largest active fire has exploded in size, growing rapidly amid bone-dry fuel and threatening thousands of homes as firefighters scrambled to meet the danger.
The Park Fire’s intensity and dramatic spread led fire officials to make unwelcome comparisons to the monstrous Camp Fire, which burned out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and torching 11,000 homes.
More than 130 structures have been destroyed by this fire so far, and thousands more are threatened as evacuations were ordered in four counties
“There’s a tremendous amount of fuel out there and it’s going to continue with this rapid pace,” Cal Fire incident commander Billy See said.
He said the fire was advancing up to eight square miles an hour on Friday.
Officials at Lassen Volcanic National Park evacuated staff from Mineral, a community of about 120 people where the park headquarters are located, as the fire moved north toward Highway 36 and east toward the park.
It stood at 480 square miles on Friday and was moving quickly north and east after igniting on Wednesday when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico and then calmly blended in with others fleeing the scene.
One man was arrested early on Thursday in connection with the blaze and held without bail pending an arraignment, officials said.
Amanda Brown, who lives in the community where the man was arrested, said she was stunned that someone might set a fire in a region where the memories of the devastation in Paradise are still fresh.
“That anyone could deliberately put our community through that again is incredibly cruel. I don’t understand it,” said the 61-year-old.
Communities elsewhere in the US west and Canada were under siege on Friday, from a fast-moving blaze sparked by lightning, which sent people fleeing on fire-ringed roads in rural Idaho to a new blaze that was causing evacuations in eastern Washington.
In eastern Oregon, a pilot was found dead in a small air tanker plane that crashed while fighting one of the many wildfires spreading across several Western states.
More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles were burning in the US on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Centre.
Some were caused by the weather, with climate change increasing the frequency of lightning strikes as the region endures record heat and bone-dry conditions.
The most damage so far has been to the Canadian Rockies’ Jasper National Park, where a fast-moving wildfire forced 25,000 people to flee and devastated the park’s namesake town, a World Heritage site.
Oregon has the biggest active blaze in the United States, the Durkee Fire, which combined with the Cow Fire to burn nearly 630 square miles.
It remains unpredictable and was only 20% contained on Friday, according to the government website InciWeb.
The National Interagency Fire Centre said more than 27,000 fires have burned more than 5,800 square miles in the US this year, and in Canada, more than 8,000 square miles have burned in more than 3,700 fires so far, according to its National Wildland Fire Situation Report issued on Wednesday.
