A California man was arrested on Thursday and accused of starting the state’s largest wildlife of the year by pushing a burning car into a gully.
The flames have since exploded into what is now the Park fire, which has burned more than 71,000 acres (28,733 hectares) near the city of Chico. Evacuations were ordered in Butte and Tehama counties, with the blaze only 3% contained early on Thursday.
California authorities did not immediately name the man they arrested.
On Thursday, flames were visible from Chico as they burned through the foothills. Massive smoke plumes hung over the the north-eastern edge of town as the sound of helicopters and airplanes fighting the fire whirred overhead.
The Park fire began in Chico’s Upper Bidwell Park, an area beloved for hiking and swimming. As the fire broke out on Wednesday, people lined the edge of town to watch the flames rise.
Fire officials are concerned that hot, windy conditions in the area could cause the fire, which was bearing down on rural communities, to grow rapidly overnight.
The blaze has stirred up a sense of trauma for residents, who have lived through several destructive and deadly fire seasons in recent years. The 2018 Camp fire that destroyed the nearby town of Paradise remains one of the most deadly in US history.
The arrest comes as firefighters across North America are working intensively to contain wildfires across the region, including in areas of California, Washington, Oregon and other states, as well as parts of Canada, as heatwaves reaching record-breaking temperatures continue.
In California, near the Nevada border, about 1,000 people remained displaced from their homes on Thursday after evacuations were ordered earlier this week when lightning sparked the Gold Complex fires, which have burned more than 3,000 acres in the Plumas national forest, about 50 miles (80km) north-west of Reno.
In eastern Oregon, evacuation orders were lifted on Thursday for the city of Huntington, population 500, after a severe thunderstorm late on Wednesday brought some rain and cooler temperatures to firefighting efforts against the Durkee fire, currently the largest in the US. The fire had grown so big that it was creating its own weather.
Officials remain concerned that lightning from the storm – which brought wind gusts of up to 75mph – could spark new blazes. More than 2,800 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes were detected across south-east Oregon and Idaho on Wednesday alone, the National Weather Service in Boise said on Thursday.
The US National Interagency Fire Center said in a report on Wednesday that 84 uncontained large fires were burning across the country. In a statement, the center said that many of the wildfires in the north-west were exhibiting “extreme fire behavior”, and that evacuation orders were in effect as of Wednesday on 15 fires including in parts of California, the Northern Rockies and the Great Basin, the center said, with more than 21,000 wildland firefighters across the country working on managing the flames.
In northern California, fire personnel were focusing on evacuations and defending structures while using bulldozers to build containment lines ahead of the Park fire. No deaths or damage to structures had been reported, Cal Fire and the Butte county fire department said in a late Wednesday update.
A fire in southern California was much smaller, but moving fast and threatening homes.
In San Diego county, evacuation orders were in effect on Wednesday night after a wildfire began to spread fast near the San Diego and Riverside county line. And in many of the areas of the country affected by the wildfires, including parts of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, air quality alerts and advisories were in effect due to wildfire smoke.
Areas of Utah and Nebraska were under fire weather watches on Thursday morning from the US National Weather Service, and areas of western South Dakota are under extreme fire danger warnings due to extremely dry conditions.
Red Flag warnings, which means that critical fire conditions are occurring or will shortly, according to the National Weather Service, were in effect in areas of North Dakota, Nevada, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Idaho, Nebraska, Washington and Oregon with low humidity and strong winds expected.
The Pacific north-west has already seen a particularly aggressive fire season this year, with millions of acres of national forest lands continuing to see record-breaking dry timber conditions, exacerbated by a lack of rainfall, according to the news release.
The lengthy heatwave across the region has increased the wildfire threat in recent weeks, with dried out land and record-setting temperatures heightening the risk of ignitions.
In Canada, wildfires continued to burn in areas near the Canadian town of Jasper on Wednesday night, officials said. The town suffered “significant loss” due to the fires, Jasper National Park Service said in a statement on X.
The Associated Press contributed
