Man arrested over California fire sparked by burning car pushed into gully

A wildfire that has tripled in size in a day was started by a burning car, authorities said as they arrested a man who was seen pushing the vehicle into a gully.

The man was spotted in Bidwell Park in northern California’s Butte County, and it burned completely, spreading flames that caused the Park Fire, county prosecutor Mike Ramsey said in a news release.

The blaze had burned more than 257 square miles by early Friday near Chico, a city of about 100,000.

The man calmly left the area, in one of the nation’s largest urban parks, by blending in with other people and fleeing the “rapidly evolving fire”, officials said.

Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico, California, was arrested early on Thursday and held without bail pending a Monday arraignment, officials said.

Evacuations were ordered in Butte and Tehama counties, with the blaze only 3% contained by Friday morning.

About 4,000 residents in unincorporated areas of Butte County and 400 residents of Chico were ordered to evacuate, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said at a news conference late on Thursday.

An unspecified number of structures have been destroyed and two minor injuries were reported, Butte County Fire Chief Garrett Sjolund said.

“The fire quickly began to outpace our resources because of the dry fuels, the hot weather, the low humidities and the wind,” he said.

Near the Nevada border, about 1,000 people remained displaced from their homes after evacuations were ordered on Monday night when lightning sparked the Gold Complex fires that have burned more than four square miles of brush and timber in the Plumas National Forest about 50 miles north west of Reno, Forest Service spokeswoman Adrienne Freeman said.

There have been no reports of structural damage, deaths or serious injuries at the Gold Complex of fires south west of Portola near the Nevada border.

“We’ve made some really good progress on the fires,” Forest Service operations section chief Tom Browning said on Thursday afternoon. “But it’s hot, it’s dry and it’s very windy. With the wind and the heat, we don’t have great containment on all these lines.”

Tim Fike, Forest Service incident commander at the Gold Complex, said gusty winds were plaguing crews at the Park Fire as well, causing new spot fires up to a mile beyond the main fire lines.

“That’s been a big, big problem on the Park Fire right now,” he said.

A tanker plane that disappeared in Oregon while fighting one of the many wildfires spreading the state has been found, and the pilot on board is dead, authorities said on Friday.

A Grant County Search and Rescue team located the aircraft Friday morning and confirmed the death, said Lisa Clark, a Bureau of Land Management information officer for the Falls Fire.

The single-engine tanker, a small and nimble plane that looks like a crop duster, was located in steep, forested terrain on Friday morning after the search was suspended at nightfall the day before, Ms Clark said.

The plane contracted by the US Bureau of Land Management went missing on Thursday. The pilot was the only person on board.

As evacuations continued in California, some Oregon residents were cleared to return home after a thunderstorm dropped welcome rain but also potentially dangerous lightning on the biggest active blaze in the US.

More than two dozen new fires started in Montana on Wednesday and early on Thursday, and another fast-moving blaze forced thousands to abandon a town in Canada.

In eastern Oregon, evacuation orders were lifted for the city of Huntington after a severe thunderstorm late on Wednesday brought some rain and cooler temperatures to the nearly 630 square miles burned by the Durkee Fire — the nation’s biggest — and another nearby blaze.

President Joe Biden called Oregon governor Tina Kotek on Thursday night and offered his support to ensure the state has everything it needs to fight the fires, the White House said.

Baker County Sheriff Travis Ash called the rain a “godsend”, and the Oregon State Fire Marshal said firefighters were set to “seize the opportunity” of better conditions to push back the fire on the Idaho border.

It remained unpredictable and was just 20% contained, according to the government website InciWeb.

Lightning strikes started 15 new fires overnight in Idaho, the US Forest Service told Boise’s KBOI-TV, but several had already been extinguished by Thursday afternoon.

More than 2,800 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes were detected across south-east Oregon and Idaho on Wednesday, the National Weather Service in Boise said.

Overall, nearly 1,562 square miles have burned so far this summer in the Pacific Northwest. Oregon alone has 34 large fires, almost all of them in the central or eastern part of the state.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of wildfires sparked by lightning across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada as the region endures recording-breaking heat, with many triple-digit days and bone-dry conditions.

Idaho Power has for the first time instituted a pre-emptive power outage, shutting off electricity to thousands of customers to prevent new fires and other power grid issues from wires downed by the high winds, the utility said.

In northern California, fire personnel were focusing on evacuations and defending structures while using bulldozers to build containment lines ahead of the Park Fire. No deaths or damage to structures had been reported, Cal Fire/Butte County Fire Department said.

A fire in southern California was much smaller, but moving fast and threatening homes.

Evacuation orders were in effect on Wednesday night in San Diego County after a wildfire began to spread fast near the border with Riverside County.

Fire officials said the Grove Fire was heading south east through steep and challenging terrain. The fire grew to 1.4 square miles overnight and was 10% contained by Thursday afternoon.

In Montana, a fire warning was in effect in the central part of the state because of high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds.

An extreme heat warning east of the storm front meant temperatures could soar up to 42C. After hurricane-force winds toppled trees, downed power lines and damaged gas lines in the Missoula area, authorities urged people to stay out of rivers because they might be electrified.

In the Canadian Rockies’ Jasper National Park, a fast-moving wildfire this week hit the park’s namesake town, forcing thousands to flee and causing significant damage in the World Heritage Site.

That blaze, like those in the western US, led to some air quality alerts and advisories as skies filled with smoke and haze.