A state of emergency was declared last night in two California counties threatened by the massive fire that started last Wednesday, in order to speed up the authorities’ response.
The blaze, dubbed the Park Fire, had burned more than 270 square miles (720 square kilometers) of forest and 134 buildings as of yesterday despite the intervention of 1,700 firefighters, according to the California Forestry and Fire Protection Service CalFire.
The fire forced about 4,000 people to flee their homes in the villages of Cohasset and Forest Ranges after it broke out in the small town of Chico.
This massive wildfire is bringing back bad memories: part of the city of Paradise, where 85 people died in 2018 in the deadliest wildfire in California history, is on alert and residents must be prepared for any eventuality.
“You need to be ready to go,” Bute County Sheriff Cory Honia said Thursday. “If the fire spreads, I can’t promise or guarantee that we’ll be able to save your life.”
Residents who escaped the flames described to local media their frantic escape down the only accessible forest road in the area, with their car headlights unable to illuminate the road due to the thick smoke.
“It was very sobering to know that this was the only way to escape,” Nico Shelton told the Sacramento Bee.
“I feel like I’m paralyzed,” Julia Yarbough, whose home was burned by the flames, told CBS.
This fire was caused by arson, according to authorities. A 42-year-old man was taken into custody Thursday morning after he was seen pushing a “car that caught fire down a ravine,” according to the local prosecutor’s office.
The suspect was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003. His criminal record includes sexual assault of a minor and armed robbery.
“It’s really the first fire in years in California that I would say is behaving out of the ordinary, and that’s not good,” said Daniel Swain, an extreme events expert at UCLA.
Swain compared this massive fire to those that burned California in the 2010s, which were among the worst in the western US state’s history.
After two rainy winters, the western US has experienced several heat waves since June, which dry out new vegetation due to rain and encourage the spread of forest fires.
“We broke temperature records and this happened in a very large area, stretching from northwestern Mexico to western Canada,” the expert noted. Hundreds of forest fires are still raging in this area, especially in Oregon, the US and Canada.