Northern California Wildfire Has Burned 350,000 Acres

Reuters reports:

A northern California wildfire is now the country’s largest, after doubling in size in 24 hours. The Park Fire had burned more than 350,000 acres about 90 miles north of the state capital city of Sacramento as of Saturday afternoon, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

Evacuation orders and warnings were issued for multiple communities in several counties, including a warning for Paradise, the town that was devastated by the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in the state’s history. A man was arrested on Thursday on suspicion that he started the Park Fire by pushing a flaming car into a bone-dry gully.

SF Gate reports:

“It’s been growing 5,000 acres an hour since the inception or the ignition of this incident started,” Cal Fire Incident Commander Billy See said at a Saturday briefing. “OK, just to put that into perspective, we’re looking at almost 8 square miles an hour this thing is taking out.”

“This fire is going to burn for another couple weeks for sure,” Cal Fire spokesperson Robert Foxworthy told SFGATE on Saturday afternoon. “Even if the fire stopped tomorrow, there would still be weeks of work to do. This is a long-duration fire.”

CNN reports:

The Park Fire, which began Wednesday in the Chico area, has forced thousands of people to evacuate in Butte County, where the state’s deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire, killed more than 85 people and destroyed thousands of homes in 2018.

Triple-digit temperatures and high wind gusts have fueled the explosive growth of the Park Fire amid an active fire season in California. An estimated 626,600 acres have burned across the state so far in 2024, compared to 25,254 acres burned by this time last year, according to Cal Fire.