California's largest active fire exploded in size on Friday evening, growing rapidly amid bone-dry fuel and threatening thousands of homes as firefighters scrambled to meet the danger. The Park Fire's intensity and dramatic spread led fire officials to make unwelcome comparisons to the monstrous Camp Fire, which burned out of control in nearby Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people and torching 11,000 homes, per the AP. More than 130 structures have been destroyed by this fire so far, and thousands more are threatened as evacuations were ordered in four counties: Butte, Plumas, Tehama, and Shasta. It stood at 480 square miles as of Friday night and was moving quickly north and east after igniting Wednesday, when authorities said a man pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico and then calmly blended in with others fleeing the scene.
Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico, was arrested early Thursday in connection with the blaze and held without bail pending a Monday arraignment, officials said. "There's a tremendous amount of fuel out there, and it's going to continue with this rapid pace," Cal Fire incident commander Billy See said at a briefing. He said the fire was advancing up to 8 square miles an hour on Friday afternoon. Officials at Lassen Volcanic National Park evacuated staff from Mineral, a community of about 120 people where the park headquarters are located, as the fire moved north toward Highway 36 and east toward the park. Communities elsewhere in the US West and Canada were under siege Friday, from a fast-moving blaze sparked by lightning that sent people fleeing on fire-ringed roads in rural Idaho, to a new blaze causing evacuations in eastern Washington.
In eastern Oregon, a pilot was found dead in a small air-tanker plane that crashed while fighting one of the many wildfires spreading across several Western states. More than 110 active fires covering 2,800 square miles were burning in the US on Friday, per the National Interagency Fire Center. Some were caused by the weather, with climate change increasing the frequency of lightning strikes amid record heat and bone-dry conditions. The center said more than 27,000 fires have burned more than 5,800 square miles in the US this year; in Canada, more than 8,000 square miles have burned in more than 3,700 fires so far, per the "National Wildland Fire Situation Report" issued Wednesday. More here.
(More
Park Fire stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
