Park wildfire spreading rapidly, now California’s largest this year

An enormous wildfire in Northern California has destroyed buildings, left at least two people injured and prompted evacuation orders for thousands of people as it raged in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As of early Friday, the fire had burned more than 164,000 acres, making it the state’s largest fire this year.

The blaze, known as the Park fire, was burning near Chico, north of Sacramento. It was only 3% contained by firefighters as of Friday morning, and conditions were ripe for it to continue to spread, with gusty southwesterly winds and very low humidity. Its path of growth so far has mainly been to the north, away from Chico.

“Red flag” warnings of high fire danger are in effect through the day for a wide region around the Park fire, according to the National Weather Service. Evacuation orders were issued for parts of Butte and Tehama counties.

The fire was believed to have been started when a burning car was pushed into a gully Wednesday afternoon, rolling 60 feet down an embankment.

A witness said he saw a man “get into the vehicle, do something in the vehicle, get out of the vehicle and then push the flaming vehicle down in the embankment,” Michael Ramsey, Butte County’s district attorney, said in a news conference Thursday. The man was then seen leaving the area, apparently trying to blend into a crowd of people who were fleeing the flames, Ramsey’s office said.

The man accused of starting the fire was identified as Ronnie Dean Stout, a Chico resident.

Stout, 42, was being held in a local jail without bail on suspicion of intentional arson and is scheduled to be arraigned Monday. The district attorney said specific charges would hinge on whether someone is injured or killed in the fire.

The Park fire was one of scores of blazes burning in the West, creating smoky skies that reached all the way to the East Coast. In the Canadian province of Alberta, a wildfire destroyed as much as half of the town of Jasper this week, forcing tens of thousands of tourists and residents to evacuate.

The evacuation orders in Butte County covered about 4,000 residents, including 400 in Chico, Sheriff Kory Honea said at a news conference Thursday, adding that at least two people had suffered minor injuries from the fire. The town of Paradise, the site of the 2018 wildfire that was the deadliest and most destructive in the state’s history, is not far from the current fire and was under an evacuation warning.

Honea urged residents to know their evacuation zones and be prepared to move, saying he and his staff had encountered people whose vehicles were completely out of gas. “You have to be ready to go,” he said.

Dan Collins, a fire captain and spokesperson for the Cal Fire unit in Butte County, said hundreds of firefighters were battling the Park fire, with many more driving in from around the state. Aircraft were also being used to fight the fire. State fire officials said Thursday that firefighters were focused on evacuations and protecting structures, and were using bulldozers and fire crews to build lines to contain the fire.

Beyond California, there were 43 active wildfires in Oregon and Washington, covering more than 1 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Many of the fires are exhibiting “extreme fire behavior,” the center said.

The Durkee fire in Oregon, near the border with Idaho, grew amid thunderstorms Wednesday and is now the largest wildfire in the United States, covering more than 288,000 acres as of Friday morning, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Authorities were searching Friday for a plane that they lost contact with Thursday evening as it responded to an Oregon fire caused by a lightning strike. Thomas Kyle-Milward, a spokesperson for Northwest Incident Management Team 8, said in an interview Friday that officials had looked for the single-seat, single-engine tanker into the night but had not found it.

The search resumed Friday as officials continued to fight the Falls fire, close to Seneca, Oregon.

More than 7,400 people in Oregon were under evacuation orders as of Friday morning, according to the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. Air quality warnings were issued in parts of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with health officials cautioning that the wildfires and strong winds could combine to raise pollutants to unhealthy levels.

Fire investigators have said that some fires in Oregon that began in the early hours of July 11 were human-caused and “suspicious,” and have asked for the public’s help to investigate.

Officials in California have not publicly offered a motive in the Park fire arson case. They said at a news conference Thursday that the car that was believed to have started the fire belonged to Stout’s mother.

Stout has previous convictions for crimes that required him to register as a sex offender and for robbery with great bodily injury, according to the district attorney’s office. He was sentenced to 20 years in state prison in the robbery case but was free again in 2020, when he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, authorities said.

State inmate records showed that Stout was booked just before 5 a.m. Thursday and was in custody at Butte County Jail.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.