California’s Park Fire blasts past 200,000 acres as evacuations expand into third county

The Park Fire, raging in Butte and Tehama counties, continued to chew through the Northern California wilderness Friday, crossing the 200,000-acre threshold that evening as more than 1,600 personnel battled flames amid tinder-dry and blistering conditions.

“The Park Fire continues to burn very actively, especially when aligned with slope and winds, resulting in spotting and quick fire movement,” Cal Fire, in unified command with the Butte County Fire Department and U.S. Forest Service, said in a Friday morning update. The fire was progressing through territory at a rate of 5,000 acres an hour.

Containment has declined from 3% to zero.

The focus for firefighters remains structure protection after the blaze, which started when a man allegedly pushed a flaming car down a gully Wednesday afternoon. The fire has burned over hamlets, including Cohasset and Richardson Springs, and is racing through the region’s brushy, wooded vegetation.

Northeast of Chico, it has destroyed at least 134 homes, according to initial estimates by Cal Fire. Assessing homes in the sparsely populated foothills will take time, authorities said in a Thursday evening briefing.

“We have numerous structures that have been destroyed, and we’re working to get an accurate number to share with you,” Cal Fire Butte Unit spokesman Capt. Dan Collins said. “To the citizens of Cohasset and Forest Ranch, we realize being evacuated is difficult, stressful and challenging for you. We are working our hardest to protect your communities and appreciate your support and patience.”

Cal Fire in a Friday evening update reported the Park Fire at 239,152 (374 square miles), nearly twice the size of Lake Tahoe (192 square miles). The agency in its Friday morning update reported the fire at 164,286 acres and just after 12:30 p.m. mapped it at 178,090 acres.

With the latest measurement, the Park Fire became California’s 13th-largest wildfire in modern history, which dates back to 1932, Cal Fire records show.

With the addition, 15 of California’s 20 biggest modern fires have now come since 2012, and 19 of 20 have come since 2003.

Evacuations expand into Shasta County

The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office just before 6:30 p.m. Friday placed several zones in the Manton area under mandatory evacuation orders: MAN-5000, MAN-5010, MAN-5020, MAN-5030, MAN-5040, MAN-5050, MAN-5060 and SHI-5070-A.

More than 4,000 residents in Butte and Tehama counties remain under evacuation orders as the fire burns north into the Ishi Wilderness in Tehama while crews work to protect parts of Forest Ranch, a community of about 1,200 people that sits along Highway 32 and has been threatened by the fast-moving, wind-whipped fire since Wednesday evening.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office by 4 p.m. Friday had upgraded evacuation warnings to orders for communities of Butte Meadows, Inskip and part of Jonesville. The additions put more than 300 additional structures under mandatory evacuation.

Tehama County sheriff’s officials ordered the Sky Ranch and Paynes Creek areas, near Highway 36, to evacuate.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office ordered residents of Forest Ranch to evacuate Friday morning in zones 260 to 273. Voluntary evacuation warnings have also gone up in Magalia and Paradise, two areas hit hard by the Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and left 153,336 acres in cinders over two weeks. The Camp Fire is the state’s deadliest and most destructive ever.

On the northern flank, firefighters Friday morning said they were concerned the fire could move into two more counties: Shasta and Lassen.

Plumas County also placed one zone, PLU-040, under an evacuation warning.

Growth on the fire’s north arm was outpacing work by air resources and running through retardant lines, operations section chief Jeremy Pierce said in a 3 p.m. news briefing.

Helicopters were having difficult accessing the blaze due to thick smoke columns from the “enormous amount of energy this fire is putting out,” Pierce said Friday afternoon.

“Currently we’re having extreme growth to the north and through Tehama County,” Incident commander Billy See said in the 3 p.m. news briefing. “At this time we are looking at areas of opportunity on what we can do to prevent the fire from crossing Highway 36. It has not reached that point at this time.”

Highway 36 connects Red Bluff to Susanville.

A red flag warning remains in effect for the burn area and most of the upper Sacramento Valley until 11 p.m. Friday. See said crews expect “dramatic” weather improvements this weekend after red flag conditions end.

An initial contingent of 200 or so firefighters, augmented by fixed-wing air tankers and helicopters , has been reinforced with a total of 1,633 personnel battling the fire across an area of 256 square miles, two and a half times the size of Sacramento. The fire quickly became the state’s largest of the year and is now four times the size of 2024’s second-largest blaze, the Lake Fire in Santa Barbara County.

The flames, visible from space, have created smoke plumes that southerly winds have pushed into Great Basin states.

“As the fire grew, additional resources were ordered,” said Cal Fire spokesman Capt. Dan Collins, who added that despite the influx of manpower, “the fire quickly began to outpace our resources because of the dry fuels, the hot weather the low humidities and the wind.”

Authorities said at least two firefighters on the front line have been treated for minor injuries.

While the head of the fire was charging “aggressively” into the Ishi Wilderness, a sprawling but desolate part of the Lassen National Forest and well south of Mount Lassen, fire officials remained concerned about new growth on the fire’s southeastern flank. Those flames, fire officials said, could easily race unabated toward more populated areas, including over areas decimated by the 2018 Camp Fire.

Cal Fire lists the official cause of the Park Fire as arson.

‘I’ll just ride it out’

Hope Messatzzia said Friday that she’s the last woman staying in her mobile home community in Forest Ranch as the Park Fire threatens the town and her residence.

The town of roughly 1,700 people was under evacuation orders Friday morning. Messatzzia chose to stay at her place despite the flames and scorched hot spots just across Highway 32. She said she is currently sick with COVID-19 and had little fuel left in her car.

“If I had gas, I probably would have left last night,” she said.

She moved to her mobile home community, Forest Village on Fitzgerald Road, from Nevada just a few months ago in April. She called her new home “magical.”

“I love this place, right here, I do,” she said. “It is nice, it’s calm, it’s quiet, it’s cooler.”

The first night evacuation warnings were put in place, she felt too sick to leave and had few places to go. She has since lost electricity. Her neighbors and sons have reached out to try and help her, but she felt passionate about staying in her mobile home.

“I’ll just ride it out,” she said. “This is just what I did everything for.”

Thursday morning, two sheriff’s deputies checked in on her after hearing from firefighters that she was ignoring evacuation orders.

“Tell them I’m not refusing, I just refuse,” Messatzzia said. “I am and I am not.”

On the other side of Highway 32, not more than a mile from her home, pink retardant and blackened trees lined the road as PG&E employees worked on repairing downed power lines.

Bryan Morey, a Forest Ranch resident of 32 years, was cycling down Highway 32 while evacuation orders were underway Thursday.

He decided to stay because he thought his house remained safe and he had a generator running with “food in the fridge and freezer.” Morey said he would run if the fire worsens near his property, citing falling embers as his tipping point for evacuation.

“I’m all hitched up with stuff and ready to go and I know several evacuation corridors,” he said.

He lives in the area with his wife, who is currently on vacation, and has stayed for more than three decades due to the nature that surrounds Forest Ranch, he said.

“The trees and the brush and everything that burns. It is beautiful,” he said.

His house has survived both the Dixie Fire and the Camp Fire in previous years. Morey called past evacuations “inconvenient” for him and his family. In the years since, he has tried to minimize wildfire risk to his property by cutting down trees and brush around his home.

Morey planned to keep track of the fire’s path at his home, but said he felt less worried Friday. On Thursday, he witnessed ominous, dark clouds of smoke rising up the canyon across Highway 32. He had not smelled smoke outside of his property by midday Friday.

“It was scary yesterday but I feel better about it today depending on what the wind does,” Morey said.

Law enforcement leaders, meanwhile, are urging those under mandatory evacuation orders to leave. The Butte County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and again Friday morning “re-issued” some evacuation orders — not meaning they had been lifted and implemented again, but reinforcing the order as an extra reminder of the extreme fire danger.

At a news conference Thursday, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea expressed frustration that many residents were not complying with the instruction to leave. He referred to the death toll of the 2018 Camp Fire, and said, “I don’t know how to keep saying this over and over again. People have got to know their zones. … In addition to that, you have to be prepared to go.”

Honea said that, in the evacuation zone in the community of Cohasset on Wednesday night, he encountered “numerous people who were not prepared to go,” including three whose cars were out of gas. On Thursday, the fire swept through Cohasset.

Devastation in Cohasset

On Thursday, the Park Fire tore through Cohasset, a small town near Chico.

By Friday, much of the southern side of town was destroyed, with homes, cars, businesses and vegetation on both sides of Cohasset Road reduced to smoldering ash covered in pink retardant.

Kristi Lopez stayed in her home while flames engulfed her neighborhood and jumped over her house’s roof.

She said she felt a need to help the people who were evacuating, so she opened her home to her fleeing neighbors. Lopez said she didn’t even know how many people came through her house, there were “so many,” she said.

“People were just so scared,” she said. “There’s a lot of destruction.”

Lopez’s home was one of only a handful still standing Friday, as hundreds of firefighters continued to work the blaze.

“I don’t even know what today is,” said Capt. Robert Klemek of the Monterey Fire Department, who was deployed to the Park Fire around 1 a.m. Thursday and has been on the fire line since then.

Klemek was working Friday afternoon on Vilas Road, which forks off of Cohasset Road.

“The fact that we keep getting these (structure) saves is very motivational,” Klemek said.

Klemek emphasized the importance of defensible space .

Though Lopez said she was grateful to still have her house, relatively unscathed, she said she also felt bad for her neighbors and other community members who were not as fortunate.

“Everybody has a home up here,” she said. “It’s not fair.”

Lopez moved to Cohasset from Chico six years ago and has enjoyed the “quietness” of the town tucked into the mountains.

She said she had experienced other wildfires in the past, but the Park Fire “was something else.”

“It was just all around,” she said. “It was just out of control…It was jumping everywhere.”

Lopez said she was constantly worried about needing to evacuate, but the road out of Cohasset was blocked.

Still, she said she supports her neighbors deciding whether they should remain or evacuate during the fire.

“If you can go, or if you need to stay and defend your property, I’m for both,” she said. “Everybody has a choice.”