Massive Park fire in Northern California sparked by man pushing burning truck into a gully, officials say

LOS ANGELES — A man has been arrested on suspicion of arson after officials say he pushed a burning car down a gully in Chico and created what quickly became California’s largest wildfire of the year.

The man, who was only identified Thursday as a 42-year-old Chico man, was seen around 3 p.m. Wednesday pushing the car about 60 feet down an embankment in Chico’s Bidwell Park, where it became engulfed in flames that rapidly spread, according to the Butte County district attorney’s office.

He was seen “calmly leaving the area by blending in with the other citizens who were in the area and fleeing the rapidly evolving fire,” the district attorney’s office said in a news release.

The fire continued to explode over the next few hours, driven by winds and heat, forcing thousands to evacuate in the dark of night as the blaze grew by seven times in seven hours to more than 45,000 acres.

By around 9 p.m. Wednesday, the Butte County Sheriff’s Office began ordering evacuations for residents northeast of Chico, and continually added evacuation zones to the list of neighborhoods required to leave through at least 2 a.m. Thursday. More than 4,000 people had been evacuated by Thursday morning, according to Megan McMann, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office.

The Park fire grew exponentially as it raced north parallel to Highway 99 and into Tehama County.

The man arrested on suspicion of arson was booked into the Butte County Jail on Thursday morning, where he’s being held without bail, the district attorney’s office said.

Following the “dynamic fire activity overnight,” crews went into Thursday expecting to battle the flames while negotiating persistent winds and temperatures that could reach 110 degrees during the day and remain in the 80s at night — factors that promote rapid fire growth, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s latest update.

“The forecast is for more hot, dry weather with a steady breeze from the south again,” the agency said Thursday morning.

The National Weather Service also issued a red flag warning for the northern Sacramento Valley, including where this fire is burning. Forecasters warned there could be wind gusts up to 30 mph pushing the fire north combined with low humidity through Friday evening that “can cause new fire starts and ongoing wildfires to ... grow rapidly and dangerously in size and intensity.”

Firefighters remained focused on assisting evacuations and protecting structures until additional crews arrived, though no buildings had been confirmed damaged as of Thursday morning, said Dan Collins, a spokesperson for the Butte Unit of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The other major factor in this fire, he said, is its location, burning north into the Ishi Wilderness and Lassen foothills, which experts say hasn’t seen fire activity in decades, if not a century.

“Once it got into that area, it had a lot of fuel to consume,” Collins said.

“A lot of us who work in fire have kind of been waiting for this fire to happen for the last 25 years,” said Zeke Lunder, a Chico-based fire specialist and geographer. He said the lack of recent fires has made the area a jackpot for flames.

The fire initially began chewing through new grasses that sprang up in the wake of two back-to-back wet winters, Lunder said, but it really accelerated once it reached heavier vegetation, such as live oak and grapevines that spit out red-hot embers as they burn and that can be carried in the wind and start new fires.

The area also includes a lot of steep, inaccessible terrain, which has hindered firefighters’ response.

“Some of the challenges were just getting resources into the edge of the fire,” Collins said. There’s been some better progress on the fire where it’s burning closer to developed areas, but it’s still far from under control, he said.

“The southwesterly portion of the fire, the crews were able to get in there last night … and establish some control lines,” Collins said. But he said more containment is needed to protect nearby communities, and further evacuation orders could be issued.

Cal Fire listed the fire at 45,549 acres Thursday morning with 3% containment. Residents in northeast Chico, Forest Ranch and some smaller mountain areas, including the hamlet of Cohasset, have been ordered to evacuate, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

The fire’s massive expansion was particularly unusual to see overnight, Lunder said. The fire made a huge run after dusk on Wednesday — throwing up a massive column of smoke and flames — as it began to align with faults and ridges in the Lassen foothills, he said.

“Even though it was going across the canyons, there’s all these little side canyons, and so it was kind of a perfect setup,” Lunder said.

He said the blaze is likely to continue growing in the hours and days ahead, noting that it’s not unusual for fires of this size to double in acreage every day.

“It’s a big one,” Lunder said. “Unless you can get people out there on the ground to put in fire lines, aircraft alone aren’t necessarily going to put this fire out — and the area where it’s burning into is extremely rough.”

And while the fire is primarily burning in low-country grass and brush, there’s potential for it to burn up in the Cohasset Ridge and become “a lower elevation version of the Dixie fire,” Lunder said, referring to the 2021 blaze that burned about 963,000 acres— the second-largest wildfire in California history.

The fire also has echoes of the Camp fire, Lunder said, which devastated the nearby town of Paradise in 2018 and killed 85 people. Fortunately, the Park fire’s explosion has — so far — occurred away from heavily populated areas.

“If we had a city of 30,000 people in the [Lassen] foothills, it would have had a Paradise-type experience yesterday,” Lunder said. “This fire so far has threaded the needle through this area with pretty low-density development. The 45,000-acre footprint is exceptional in the lack of structures.”

But that could change in an instant, as many Californians know all too well. There is potential for the blaze to grow into the more developed area of Cohasset on Thursday, which would be a “worst case scenario” that could lead to major structure loss, Lunder said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state has secured a fire management assistance grant from the federal government, which provides significant financial support for firefighting and communities affected by wildfires, resources that can be quickly put to use.