Firefighters raced to contain scores of blazes across the American West on Friday night as California’s largest wildfire of the year prompted a new wave of evacuations.
Federal officials say active fires have burned more than 1.8 million acres. With smoke darkening the skies, the authorities refined evacuation zones, warned of miserable air quality and urged people to be prepared to flee with little notice. Already this week, thousands of people have been told to evacuate, and haze from the fires has floated across the continent.
The sprawling fire in Northern California, known as the Park fire, has expanded rapidly to more than 307,000 acres in Butte, Tehama and Shasta Counties, near Chico, becoming the largest in the country, fire officials said. The fire’s growth triggered a new wave of evacuation orders and warnings on Friday, when it was zero percent contained, according to Cal Fire.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Friday declared a state of emergency for Butte and Tehama Counties, in addition to Plumas County, where the Gold Complex fire had burned nearly 3,000 acres.
The northern part of the Park fire grew dramatically on Friday, Jeremy Pierce, a Cal Fire operations section chief, said at a news conference. Fire officials said that the fire was expanding by as much as 5,000 acres an hour and that about 4,000 people were under evacuation orders.
Oregon was also contending with fires. The Durkee fire, which has unleashed havoc in a sparsely populated region close to the Idaho border since a lightning strike on July 17, was covering at least 288,000 acres. To the southwest, in the Malheur National Forest, the Falls fire has claimed more than 140,000 acres. And the Lone Rock fire has raced across more than 136,000 acres since it started on July 13 about 10 miles from Condon, Ore.
“The wildfires in eastern Oregon have scaled up quickly,” Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon said this week. “We are facing strong erratic winds over the region that could impact all fires. Rain is not getting through. Some communities do not have power. The situation is dynamic, and the teams on the ground are taking it day by day.”
In Oregon, the authorities said Friday that the pilot of a firefighting plane had been found dead after officials lost contact with the aircraft, a single-engine, single-seat tanker, on Thursday evening. The plane had been responding to a blaze blamed on a lightning strike near the Falls fire.
Lisa Clark, a spokeswoman for the Malheur National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that contracted the plane, said officials were investigating the cause of the crash. The authorities did not immediately release the pilot’s name.
More than 18,000 people in Oregon were covered by fire evacuations on Friday, state officials said.
Still, the authorities said they were encouraged in some areas. Officials reported Friday that the Lone Rock fire’s risks to structures had “reduced greatly,” and evacuations near some other blazes eased.
Enormous stretches of California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Nebraska spent Friday covered by “red flag” warnings, which the National Weather Service issues when conditions like strong winds and low humidity leave areas more vulnerable than usual to fires.
Although it is still somewhat early in fire season, and despite the relatively small size of many fires, this year is shaping up to be a damaging one. On Friday, the National Interagency Fire Center said there had been 27,187 fires this year, affecting about 3.7 million acres. By the same time last year, there had been more fires, but a quarter the number of acres had been affected. The federal government spent more than $3.1 billion on firefighting last year.
Most wildfires are classified as caused by humans, but the Park fire this week was notable for the circumstances the authorities described: A man pushed a burning vehicle into a gully in Butte County, causing it to tumble some 60 feet down an embankment. A suspect was arrested, held without bail and scheduled for arraignment next week.
The authorities have not publicly suggested a motive but said that the suspect — identified as Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico — had a criminal history, including a conviction for robbery with great bodily injury.
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