LOS ANGELES, July 30 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Throngs of firefighters were mobilized in California to battle the state’s largest blaze of the year, which has prompted thousands of evacuations and already burned an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.
The Park Fire outside of Chico in the state’s north has been raging since last Wednesday in a rural region about three hours’ drive northeast of San Francisco.
It has now ravaged more than 149,700 hectares according to the Cal Fire agency, making it one of the largest fires in state history.
No casualties have been reported so far, and firefighters benefitted from a slight drop in temperatures over the weekend that allowed them to make some progress, with the fire now 12 percent contained.
Nearly 4,900 firefighters have been mobilized, with 33 helicopters, 400 fire trucks and numerous planes battling the conflagration.
More than 26,000 residents were under evacuation orders Monday afternoon, with authorities calling for extreme caution due to a high risk of fire escalation.
“This fire is extremely unstable and unpredictable,” Tehama County Sheriff Dave Kain told a press conference Monday.
“We’ve seen many places that we thought were going to be safe to move back into erupt in flames again,” he added.
The fire progressed during the first 48 hours at the speed of a person walking and has spawned fire tornadoes and generated smoke shaped like mushroom clouds.
The fire was able to spread quickly following multiple heat waves that have struck California and the western United States since the beginning of June.
While the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains burn regularly, the particular canyons where the Park Fire is located have not seen fires in decades, meaning there is plenty of fuel for the flames.
The enormous 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.
The United States is presently battling about 100 large fires according to the National Interagency Fire Center, mainly in the west of the country and in particular Oregon, where an airplane pilot fighting the fires died last week. — NNN-AGENCIES
