Firefighters battled fiercely to hold on the progress made in past days against California’s largest wildfire, before temperatures are set to warm later this week.
Authorities said the Park fire is continuing to rage at intense speeds in rugged terrain outside the university town of Chico, and is threatening to spread to two other counties.
Fire crews managed to reach 18% containment in recent days, and evacuation orders in some communities have been lifted.
Cooler weather has helped firefighters stop the blaze’s path near some communities such as Forest Ranch, where some people began returning to unscathed homes on Tuesday.
Christopher and Anita Angeloni have lived in the community of 1,600 for 23 years and have had to evacuate several times due to wildfires, they said, including during the 2018 Camp fire that killed 85 people and decimated the town of Paradise, about 8 miles (13km) south.
Christopher Angeloni said he constantly worked on creating defensible space around his home and was happy to return home nearly a week after evacuating to see his hard work had paid off.
“We were prepared to possibly lose everything,” he said.
Anita Angeloni said it had been a stressful week.
“We have not been sleeping enough, very tense, praying all the time, teary eyes,” she said. “But we’re here. We’ll see for how long.”
The fire, now the fifth largest in the state’s recorded history, had scorched 386,764 acres by late Tuesday evening, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency. More than 270 structures have been destroyed, and about 8,200 remain threatened.
The fire started last Wednesday after authorities say a man pushed a burning car down a ravine in Chico. The suspect, Ronnie Dean Stout II, was charged with arson on Monday. His public defender, Nicole Diamond, said in an email she had no comment.
Quick Guide
US wildfire terms, explained
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Acres burned
US wildfires are measured in terms of acres. While the size of a wildfire doesn’t necessarily correlate to its destructive impact, acreage provides a way to understand a fire’s footprint and how quickly it has grown.
There are 2.47 acres in a hectare, and 640 acres in a square mile, but this can be hard to visualise. Here are some easy comparisons: one acre equates to roughly the size of an American football field. London’s Heathrow airport is about 3,000 acres. Manhattan covers roughly 14,600 acres, while Chicago is roughly 150,000 acres, and Los Angeles is roughly 320,000 acres.
Megafire
A megafire is defined by the National Interagency Fire Center as a wildfire that has burned more than 100,000 acres (40,000 hectares). That’s an area about the size of Rhode Island.
Containment level
A wildfire’s containment level indicates how much progress firefighters have made in controlling the fire. Containment is achieved by creating perimeters the fire can’t move across. This is done through methods such as putting fire retardants on the ground, digging trenches, or removing brush and other flammable fuels.
Containment is measured in terms of the percentage of the fire that has been surrounded by these control lines. A wildfire with a low containment level, such as 0% or 5%, is essentially burning out of control. A fire with a high level of containment, such as 90%, isn’t necessarily extinguished but rather has a large protective perimeter and a rate of growth that is under control.
Evacuation orders and warnings
Evacuation warnings and orders are issued by officials when a wildfire is causing imminent danger to people’s life and property. According to the California office of emergency services, an evacuation warning means that it’s a good idea to leave an area or get ready to leave soon. An evacuation order means that you should leave the area immediately.
Red flag warning
A red flag warning is a type of forecast issued by the National Weather Service that indicates when weather conditions are likely to spark or spread wildfires. These conditions typically include dryness, low humidity, high winds and heat.
Prescribed burn
A prescribed burn, or a controlled burn, is a fire that is intentionally set under carefully managed conditions in order to improve the health of a landscape. Prescribed burns are carried out by trained experts such as members of the US forest service and indigenous fire practitioners. Prescribed burns help remove flammable vegetation and reduce the risk of larger, more catastrophic blazes, among other benefits.
Prescribed burning was once a common tool among Native American tribes who used “good fire” to improve the land, but was limited for much of the last century by a US government approach based on fire suppression. In recent years, US land managers have returned to embracing the benefits of prescribed burns, and now conduct thousands across the country every year.
Meanwhile in southern California, people in Kern and Tulare counties were ordered to evacuate because of a fire sweeping through the Sequoia national forest. That fire, which has been dubbed the Borel fire, scorched through almost the entirety of the historic mining town of Havilah, officials said.
The fires burning throughout California have overwhelmed the state’s firefighting capacity and outside help has started to arrive, officials said. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, thanked his Texas counterpart, Gregg Abbott, on Tuesday for sending more than two dozen fire engines to help combat the Park fire this week.
It has been a brutal wildfire season in the US west this year, with more than 100 large active wildfires burning across the country. Typically, the most intense period in the US wildfire season comes in late August.
In Oregon, wildfires have burnt more than 1m acres in recent weeks. The largest of them, the Durkee fire, has scorched nearly 285,000 acres. Firefighters there said cooler weather had allowed them to make significant progress in battling the conflagrations.
In Colorado, a wildfire near the city of Loveland in Colorado’s Rocky mountains grew to more than 5,000 acres by Tuesday evening as more homes were placed under mandatory evacuation orders and a looming column of smoke could be seen for miles around.
Some of the worst fires have sent smoke billowing for hundreds of miles around them, blanketing cities like Boise, Idaho, and Calgary, Canada, with poor-quality air. Wildfire smoke is known to have strong adverse health effects. Smoky skies have been linked to spikes in hospital admissions and ambulance calls for conditions such as asthma. For people who have cardiovascular problems, the risk of cardiac arrest rises 70% during days with heavy smoke. A recent study in California attributed more than 50,000 premature deaths to wildfire smoke exposure.
Western states have spent weeks in the grip of back-to-back heatwaves, some with record-breaking triple-digit temperatures, compounding the risk of new ignitions as a parched landscape is primed to burn.
Fire crews are bracing for warm temperatures set to return to California later this week. “Above average” temperatures in many areas, in combination with possible lightning outbreaks and occasionally breezy winds, may spell trouble for firefighters, said the climate scientist Daniel Swain on X.
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