Around 4,000 people were forced to evacuate in California as a violent megafire continued to grow dangerously on Friday, despite the intervention of 1,700 firefighters and causing concern among authorities.
Since breaking out Wednesday afternoon in the northern part of the Golden State, the Park Fire has ravaged more than 720 km2 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 typical clouds of ultra-violent storms in the American West, noted a photojournalist from Agence France-Presse.
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.
The massive wildfire is bringing back bad memories: Part of the town of Paradise, where 85 people died in 2018 in the deadliest wildfire 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 the fire spreads, I can’t promise or guarantee that we can save your lives.”
Criminal origin
“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 was the only way out,” Nikko Shelton told the newspaper 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 being seen pushing a “burning car into a ravine,” according to local prosecutors. The suspect was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2003. His criminal record includes sexual assault of a minor and armed robbery.
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.
“Extraordinary behavior”
“This is really the first fire in recent years in California that I would describe as being out of this world, and that’s not a good thing,” Daniel Swain, an extreme events expert at UCLA, said Thursday night.
The expert compares the megafire to those that ravaged California in the 2010s, among the worst in the history of this western 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.