Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Sunday, July 28. I’m your host, Andrew J. Campa. Here’s what you need to know to start your weekend:
California’s largest fire roars with no relief in sight
A hillside burns as the Park Fire tears though the Cohasset community in Butte County, Calif., on Thursday, July 25, 2024.
(Noah Berger / Associated Press)
The catalyst behind this year’s largest fire is a burning car that authorities said a Chico man pushed down a 60-foot embankment into a gully last week.
The vehicle — engulfed in flames — ended up in Chico’s Bidwell Park. The fire then quickly spread.
Authorities arrested the suspect, Ronnie Dean Stout II, the next day, Thursday.
Cal Fire reports that the blaze had scorched more than 350,000 acres across Northern California’s Butte and Tehama counties. It’s 10% contained.
The perfect storm of fires
Experts say the fire’s explosive growth is due to a perfect storm of hot, dry conditions, combustible vegetation and a landscape that hasn’t burned in decades. Combine those elements with the fire’s remote terrain, which has made it challenging for crews to gain access to the blaze’s swelling perimeter, and the firefight could be long and arduous.
“This is really the first fire in the past several years in California that I would call extraordinary — and that’s not a good thing,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA, said in a briefing.
On Thursday, footage captured by AlertCalifornia wildfire cameras appeared to show the blaze spewing tornado-like vortices, sometimes referred to as fire whirls or firenados.
“At this point the fire is kind of creating its own weather, and that can be pretty unpredictable,” said Courtney Carpenter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “Really big, explosive wildfires can create thunderstorms; they can make whirling fire plumes that can mimic tornadoes.”
Swain said it is almost certain to become several times larger than it currently is, and will probably be a several-hundred-thousand-acre fire before it is contained.
Path of destruction
The fire’s rapid rate of spread has so far marched it north and east — stretching across northern Butte County and a growing portion of Tehama County — into a relatively remote mixture of grass, brush and timber and away from the threatened communities of Cohasset and Forest Ranch.
The fire, however, has already carved a path of destruction. Chief Garrett Sjolund, of Cal Fire’s Butte County unit, said “numerous structures” have been burned, including 134 buildings destroyed and 4,000 under threat.
Officials are worried about the community of Cohasset, where they initially feared a repeat of the 2018 Camp fire, which razed the nearby community of Paradise and killed 85 people — the deadliest wildfire on record in California. During that blaze, dozens of people were trapped on the area’s limited roadways while trying to escape.
About 4,000 residents have been evacuated from Cohasset, Forest Ranch and parts of northeast Chico, along with several rural areas in southern Tehama County.
The area was under a red flag warning, signaling dangerous weather that supports rapid fire grow, both Thursday and Friday.
That pattern has pushed flames into wilderness that has been untouched by fire for decades, if not longer — making it ripe with thicker vegetation and dead and dying brush, which ignites easily and fast.
Residents from the Chico area are watching the Park fire’s movements with anxiety.
“It’s been a pretty restless time for us,” said Don Hankins, a professor of geography and planning at Chico State, who is also on the Butte County Fire Safe Council.
What’s the outlook?
The days and weeks ahead are likely to see more acreage added to the fire as crews contend with rugged, volcanic topography and persistent hot and dry conditions.
“The outlook is that it’s not going to be easily contained,” Hankins said. “We’ve got a long season ahead of us before the rainy season comes, and that’s really going to be the ultimate thing to curtail any of these fires that are happening across the West right now.”
For more on the fire, please check out the reporting of journalists Hayley Smith and Grace Toohey.