Ryan Kendall’s crew of firefighters arrived too late to save the house on Dear Abby Road.
All that was left on Friday, amid the thick forests that surrounded it, was a jumble of smoking household appliances licked by hissing flames. The plastic from the home’s giant water storage tanks was fully ignited and dripping fire onto the forest floor.
“People love to build their homes in the forest,” said Mr. Kendall, the captain of a team of firefighters that drove up from Los Angeles to help battle the Park fire, by far the largest of the year in California in what is shaping up to be a treacherous fire season.
Dear Abby Road is in a neighborhood, Forest Ranch, that is hauntingly similar to the community that was decimated six years ago in the town of Paradise. As the crow flies, Forest Ranch is just 10 miles and a few gullies away, built into the evergreen forest on steep hillsides.
In Paradise, the fire came suddenly, whipped by a fierce wind, incinerating the town and killing 85 people, becoming a national symbol of the vulnerability of people living in wildland areas in the age of climate change.
The fire that blew through Forest Ranch came at a relentless pace. After igniting on Wednesday, the fire exploded to 120,000 acres in a single day, sending up a towering mountain of smoke, a pyrocumulus plume as firefighters call it, that hung like a nuclear cloud above the Sacramento Valley. By Friday morning, the fire had grown to 164,000 acres and was only 3 percent contained.
The authorities on Thursday ordered the urgent evacuation of people living in the hills above Chico, including those in Forest Ranch. In Butte County, 4,000 were told to flee, according to Sheriff Kory Honea.
By Thursday night, neighborhoods were empty of residents, although some pets were left behind. Just after midnight on Friday, a black-and-white cat scampered across a street in Forest Ranch, as the flashing lights of fire engines lit up tree trunks.
Cal Fire, the state’s main firefighting agency, said on Friday that the blaze had already destroyed 134 structures, three times what had burned in all of the thousands of other fires across the state since January.
Despite the very similar landscape to Paradise, the fire that marched through Forest Ranch on Thursday was different. It moved away from the city of Chico and toward less populated communities; Forest Ranch has about 1,300 residents, far fewer than the 26,000 who lived in Paradise several years ago.
And this time, the winds were not as strong. So far, everyone is believed to have escaped in time. Most homes have been saved.
As small spot fires spread through the woods in the early hours of Friday, dozens of fire crews blanketed the area, standing sentry in driveways and at the bottom of cul-de-sacs. They remained concerned Friday that the fire could intensify with the stronger gusts that were forecast and destroy more structures. They worked throughout the night to stamp out embers.
The house that burned to the ground on Dear Abby Road commanded a dream location, underscoring why people would want to live in the neighborhood despite the increasing risks of wildfire. Perched on the edge of a ridge, it had sweeping views of a vast valley. On Friday, the smoldering ruins of the place overlooked a blackened landscape flickering with embers.
In a measure of how California has been forced to mobilize firefighters far-and-wide to battle the Park fire, many of the crews guarding the forest-shrouded homes drove from hundreds of miles away. Their trucks are emblazoned with their home stations: Culver City, Orange County and Mr. Kendall’s, which is based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. “Down the street from Dodger Stadium,” he said.
When they arrived at Forest Ranch on Thursday evening, the crews were alarmed to discover that there were no fire hydrants in the area. “We are searching for anything — garden hoses — that we could use,” said Dave Simpson, an engineer on Mr. Kendall’s crew.
The landscape was unfamiliar to the Southern Californians, so thick with towering evergreens. “You wouldn’t want to be among these 60-foot trees when the fire is ripping,” said Zane Robinson, another engineer on the team from Los Angeles, as he peered up at a tree canopy mostly spared by fire.
The Park fire is believed to have started on Wednesday afternoon — the authorities put the ignition time at precisely 2:52 p.m. — when a man pushed a burning car into a gully. A suspect, Ronnie Dean Stout, a 42-year-old resident of the college town of Chico, was arrested after witnesses said they saw him shove the car and then calmly leave the area, apparently trying to disappear into a crowd of people fleeing the fire, according to the Butte County District Attorney’s Office.
For two years, firefighters in California have had something of a respite. Last year, 325,000 acres burned in the state, much less than the five-year average of over 2.3 million acres.
But that respite is now over. More than 340,000 acres have already burned in the state this year. And fire season is only getting started: the most punishing and deadly fires tend to be in the fall, spurred by the stronger winds of the changing seasons.
Ample vegetation from a wet winter combined with intense summer heat waves that desiccated the landscape has made California and other parts of the West primed to burn this year. In some parts of the Sacramento Valley it remained above 100 degrees after 7 p.m. on Thursday. Daytime temperatures have reached beyond 100 degrees, including some days above 110, for the past three weeks.
Residents of Forest Ranch were reminded of the risks of living in the woods every time they drove up and down Highway 32, which connects them to Chico. A prominent roadside sign, erected by Cal Fire, warns that, “WILDFIRE IS COMING.” It asks, “IS YOUR HOME READY?”
In the dark, predawn hours on Friday, the sign was lit up, but not by design. It was illuminated by the flames of a spot fire creeping toward the highway.
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