In just 2½ days, the Park Fire near Chico exploded into the 8th-biggest wildfire in recorded California history.
Cal Fire on Friday afternoon tallied the size of the fire — the state’s largest this year — at 178,090 acres, making it the 20th-largest in California’s known history, overtaking the Marble Cone Fire in Monterey County that blackened 177,866 acres in July 1977. By Saturday morning, the blaze had blown up to 307,369 acres, becoming the 8th-largest. Reliable records go back to 1932, according to Cal Fire.
The fire remained at zero containment Saturday morning, Cal Fire reported. Flames had crossed Route 36 and the fire was less than 20 miles from Shingletown, with a population of around 2,400, east of Redding.
“Extreme fire behavior has occurred due to the slope and winds aligning, causing significant growth,” Cal Fire said in a Saturday-morning update.
Believed to have started when a man, now in custody, pushed a burning car into a ravine Wednesday afternoon, the Park Fire spread rapidly amid gusty winds, and flames found abundant dried vegetation uphill — the direction fire travels most easily, Cal Fire battalion chief David Acuna said.
Temperatures nearing triple digits Friday toughened the battle for the 1,600 firefighters attacking the fire ravaging forest and brush, along with isolated communities, in severe terrain including steep canyons in Butte and Tehama counties, Cal Fire Capt. Dan Collins said.
More than 130 structures had burned, according to Cal Fire, including homes, but it was unclear Friday afternoon how many houses were lost. More than 4,000 buildings were under threat.
As of Friday afternoon, areas north and northeast of Chico were under evacuation orders, including in the hamlets of Cohasset and Forest Ranch, where homes burned. Evacuation warnings extended into western portions of Paradise, where the 153,336-acre Camp Fire killed 85 people in 2018.
No deaths or injuries from the Park Fire were reported as of Friday at 3:30 p.m.
The fire was zero-percent contained, and humidity was low, adding to conditions, such as the plentiful dry grasses and brush that fuel flames, contributing to rapid fire spread.
“The challenges are going to be the fuels, weather and topography and getting resources into the edge of the fire in some of the areas — it’s challenging for the ground resources to get in there because of the long travel times and the inaccessibility of parts of the fire,” Collins said.
Many more firefighters, engines, bulldozers and water tankers are heading to the Park Fire from all over the state, Collins said.
Across California, wildfires have scorched 467,136 acres this year, almost four times the average by this date over the past five years.
Wetter winters and springs for the past two years helped vegetation grow and kept fires relatively minimal.
“However, with climate change, including the large amount of heat we experienced in June and multiple seasons of brush and grass growing with two relatively light fire years, that’s just left a lot of fuel on the ground,” Acuna said.
Underlying conditions creating mega-fires in California were laid by more than a century of fire suppression that has filled landscapes with three to four times as much flammable material as existed before the 1900s, said Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley professor who studies the effects of wildfires on ecosystems. Smaller, lower-intensity fires used to burn every eight to 15 years and every few years in areas where indigenous people used controlled fire to manage their environments, Stephens said.
“We set ourselves up,” Stephens said. “When we have an ignition on a bad day, we get a Park Fire.”
Where fires formerly killed fewer than one in 20 trees, the giant, hot fires today can wipe out half, Stephens said. In areas of maximal destruction, dead trees litter the ground, and shrubs grow freely in new-found space and sunlight, creating conditions ripe for another big fire, Stephens said.
The Park Fire has put in jeopardy a threatened type of Chinook salmon that summers in deep pools in the Deer and Mill creeks within the fire area, before spawning in the creeks come fall. In past decades, tens of thousands of “spring-run” Chinooks teemed in California waterways, but the last two years have seen the population — largely found in Deer and Mill creek “strongholds” — plummet to 50 or 100 adult fish, said Andrew Rypel, director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences.
Ash can kill fish during a fire or damage spawning beds when fall rains carry it into streams, Rypel said.
“We were already looking at emergency scenarios,” Rypel said. “My fear is that we’re watching an extinction happen in real time.”
Addressing California’s wildfire problem requires more controlled burns by agencies and tribes, said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University. And some fires, particularly in the early season when spread is slower, should not be extinguished, Wara said. “We show up as soon as we spot a fire on the fire camera, and we put it out,” Wara said. “You can let those fires burn.”
Winds at the Park Fire were expected to pick up Friday night.
“It’s not good,” said Brent Wachter, a fire meteorologist for the U.S. Forest Service. “The nice thing about that is it does bring humidity, too, but there is this transition period — that higher humidity doesn’t do much when the winds are blowing pretty good.”
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However, humidity — moisture in air that affects both fire behavior and the flammability of vegetation and debris on the ground — is expected to rise this weekend while temperatures drop slightly and winds abate into typical summer breezes, Wachter said.
“It could be a bump up in wind on Monday, we just don’t know how much,” Wachter said, adding that the area may see a heatwave starting Wednesday.
Heat and wind forecast for August in northern California, combined with the copious dried vegetation, suggest fire risk will be higher than normal, with elevated danger continuing into September, Wachter said.
A little rain may fall in September or October, he said, “but there are some mixed signals there.”
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