LOS ANGELES: Crowds of firefighters were mobilized in California on Monday to battle the state’s biggest wildfire of the year, which has prompted thousands of evacuations and already burned.
The upstate Chico Park Fire has been raging since Wednesday in a rural area about a three-hour drive northeast of San Francisco.
It has now ravaged more than 370,000 acres (149,700 hectares), making it one of the largest wildfires in state history, according to Cal Fire.
Almost 4,900 firefighters were mobilized, 33 helicopters, 400 fire engines and numerous planes fought the fire.
More than 26,000 residents were ordered to evacuate Monday afternoon, with authorities urging extreme caution due to the high risk of the fire escalating.
“This fire is extremely volatile and unpredictable,” Tehama County Sheriff Dave Kain said at a news conference Monday.
“We saw a lot of places that we thought would be safe to go back into the flames,” he added.
The fire progressed at walking speed during the first 48 hours and spawned fire tornadoes and mushroom cloud-shaped smoke.
The fire was able to spread quickly after several heat waves that have hit California and the western United States since early June.
Vegetation “is still super, super dry,” said Daniel Swain, an extreme weather specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, adding that this was due to “a month of record heat and evaporative demand.”
While the Sierra Nevada foothills burn regularly, the particular canyons where the Park Fire is located haven’t seen fires in decades, meaning there’s plenty of fuel for the flames.
Despite the massive resources deployed by California, which has special firefighting expertise, “it’s still beyond the technology to deal with a fire of this magnitude,” Swain said.
The huge park fire brings back bad memories: the town of Paradise, where 85 people died in 2018 in the deadliest fire in state history, is only about 20 kilometers from the flames. Its residents have already been put on alert.
Some evacuees decided to stay until the last minute, like Justin Freese, who is waiting with a fire hose and 10,000 gallons of water ready.
“I’m ready, but I’m not stupid,” he told the New York Times. “If there’s a thirty-meter wall of flames approaching, I’m not going to stand still and melt my skin.
The fire in the park was caused by arson, according to authorities. A 42-year-old man was taken into custody Thursday morning after he was seen pushing a burning car into a ravine, according to local prosecutors.
The United States is currently battling about 100 large wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, mainly in the West and especially in Oregon, where a pilot of a plane fighting the fires died last week.
Smoke from the fires prompted the weather service to issue air quality warnings in many places.
According to scientists, repeated heat waves and extreme weather fluctuations are being accelerated by climate change, which is related to humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels.
