An enormous wildfire in Northern California destroyed buildings, left at least two people injured and placed thousands of people under evacuation orders as it raged across the region on Friday morning, with over 164,000 acres burned in what has become the state’s largest fire so far this year.
The blaze, known as the Park fire, was burning near Chico, north of Sacramento. It was believed to have been sparked by a man accused of pushing a burning car into a gully on Wednesday afternoon, sending it 60 feet down an embankment.
A witness “saw him get into the vehicle, do something in the vehicle, get out of the vehicle and then push the flaming vehicle down in the embankment,” Michael Ramsey, Butte County’s district attorney, said in a news conference.
The man, who was identified as Ronnie Dean Stout, a Chico resident, was then seen leaving the area, apparently trying to blend into a crowd of people fleeing the flames, the Butte County District Attorney’s Office said.
Mr. Stout, 42, was being held in a local jail without bail on suspicion of intentional arson. He was scheduled to be arraigned on Monday. The district attorney said any charges would hinge on whether anyone is injured or killed in the fire.
As of early Friday, the Park fire was just 3 percent contained and had prompted evacuation orders in parts of Butte and Tehama Counties. It was one of scores of blazes burning in the West, creating smoky skies that reached all the way to the East Coast. In the Canadian province of Alberta, a wildfire destroyed as much as half of the town of Jasper this week, forcing tens of thousands of tourists and residents to evacuate.
The evacuation orders in Butte County covered about 4,000 residents, including 400 in Chico, Sheriff Kory Honea said in a news conference, adding that at least two people had suffered minor injuries from the fire. The town of Paradise, the site of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, was under an evacuation warning.
Sheriff Honea urged residents to know their evacuation zones and be prepared to move, saying he and his staff had encountered people whose vehicles were completely out of gas. “You have to be ready to go,” he said.
Dan Collins, a fire captain and spokesman for the Cal Fire unit in Butte County, said hundreds of firefighters were battling the blaze, with many more driving in from around the state. Aircraft were also being used to fight the fire. State fire officials said on Thursday that firefighters were focused on evacuations and protecting structures, and using bulldozers and fire crews to build lines to contain the fire.
There were also 43 active wildfires in Oregon and Washington, covering more than one million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Many fires are exhibiting “extreme fire behavior,” the center said.
The Durkee fire in Oregon, near the border with Idaho, grew amid thunderstorms on Wednesday and is now the largest wildfire in the United States, covering more than 284,000 acres as of Thursday night, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
More than 3,200 people in Oregon were under evacuation orders as of Friday morning, according to the Oregon Department of Emergency Management. Air quality warnings were issued in parts of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, with health officials cautioning that the wildfires and strong winds could combine to raise pollutants to unhealthy levels.
Fire investigators have said some among a series of fires in Oregon that began in the early morning hours of July 11 are human-caused and “suspicious,” and have asked for the public’s help to investigate.
Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said in a statement on Wednesday that fires in the eastern part of the state had “scaled up quickly.”
In California, officials did not offer a motive in the Park fire arson case, though they said at a news conference on Thursday that it was a car belonging to Mr. Stout’s mother that started the fire.
Mr. Stout had previous criminal convictions that required him to register as a sex offender and for robbery with great bodily injury, according to the district attorney’s office. He was sentenced to state prison for 20 years in the robbery case, but was out by 2020, when he was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence, authorities said.
State inmate records showed that Mr. Stout was in custody at Butte County Jail after being booked just before 5 a.m. on Thursday.
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