Megafire forces thousands of evacuations in California

(Chico) About 4,000 people were forced to evacuate in California, faced with a violent mega-fire that continued to grow dangerously Friday, despite the intervention of 1,700 firefighters and causing concern among the authorities.

Since breaking out Wednesday afternoon in the northern Golden State, the Park Fire has ravaged more than 450 miles.² of wildfire and 134 buildings Friday and was “0% contained,” according to CalFire.

The fire is moving at the speed of a man walking, in a rural area located three hours drive northeast of San Francisco.

The huge column of black smoke it generates is so vast that it resembles the clouds typical of ultra-violent storms in the American West, an AFP photojournalist noted.

On Friday evening, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency in two counties threatened by the flames, in order to speed up the action of the authorities.

Flames forced 4,000 people to evacuate in the villages of Cohasset and Forest Ranch after the fire broke out in the small town of Chico.

This huge forest fire brings back bad memories: part of the town of Paradise, where 85 people died in 2018 in the deadliest fire in California history, is now on alert and its residents must prepare for any eventuality.

“You have to be ready to go,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said Thursday night. “If this fire spreads, I can’t promise or guarantee that we’ll be able to save your life.”

“It’s surreal”

“This is a changing situation,” he insisted Friday during a new press briefing, recalling that the fire “crossed” the village of Cohasset during the night.

Some residents who escaped the flames described to local media their stressful escape, on the only accessible logging road in the area, where their headlights struggled to cut through the black smoke.

“It was definitely scary knowing that this was the only way out,” Shelton told the daily. Sacramento Bee.

“I feel like I’m paralyzed. It’s surreal,” Julia Yarbough, whose home was destroyed by the fire, told CBS.

The fire was caused by arson, according to authorities. A 42-year-old man was remanded in custody Thursday morning after he was seen pushing a “burning car into a ravine,” according to local prosecutors.

On the ground, reinforcements from multiple locations in California have been dispatched. A red alert has been issued by the weather service for Friday, due to strong winds that risk promoting the spread of the fire.

“We’re seeing extreme growth to the north” of the fire, Billy See, a fire commander, said Friday.

For want of anything better, the firefighters are concentrating most of their resources on protecting inhabited areas.

“We hope that the weather conditions will improve considerably from this weekend, with cooler temperatures and an increase in relative humidity, which will allow us to access the perimeter itself more easily, instead of remaining on the defensive,” he detailed.

Temperature “records”

“This is really the first fire in recent years in California that I would describe as extraordinary in its behavior, and that’s not a good thing,” Daniel Swain, an extreme events specialist at UCLA, said Thursday evening.

This expert compares this mega-fire to those which ravaged California in the 2010s, among the worst in the history of this western American state.

“The only good news is that there are no major cities in the immediate path of the fire,” he added, estimating that the fire could last “for weeks, if not months.”

After two rainy winters, the American West has suffered several heat waves since June, which is drying out the vegetation that has regrown and favoring the spread of flames.

“We broke records [de température] and this in a very large area, going from the northwest of Mexico to the west of Canada,” he insisted.

Hundreds of fires are currently burning across the region, including in Oregon and Canada.

Repeated heat waves are a marker of global warming linked to climate change caused by humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels, scientists say.