A burning car that authorities say was pushed into a gully less than a week ago has now sparked one of the largest wildfires in California history. As of Sunday, officials say the Park Fire has grown to more than 360,000 acres – marking the biggest wildfire since 2020 and the seventh-largest to ever burn across the state.
In CalFire’s latest update on Sunday night, officials said the Park Fire had grown to 360,141 acres and was at 12% containment. That size – about 563 square miles – is about half the size of Rhode Island and is almost 12 times bigger than San Francisco County and slightly larger than the city of Los Angeles.
That size also makes it the seventh-largest fire in California history. According to Reuters, the Park Fire is now nestled in ranking between the LNU Lightning Complex Fire of 2020 that burned 363,220 acres, and the North Complex Fire of the same year that burned 318,935 acres. The August Complex Fire that also took place in 2020 remains the largest in state history at more than 1 million acres.
Four counties – Butte, Plumas, Shasta and Tehama – have been impacted by the ongoing blaze, with at least 100 structures destroyed so far, officials said on Sunday. More than 4,000 other structures remain threatened by the fire, which has not caused any known injuries or fatalities to civilians or firefighters so far, according to officials.
After days of what CalFire says was “rapid growth,” Sunday brought cooler temperatures that helped reduce some of the fire’s extreme behavior and allowed responders to “actively combat the fire outside of the National Forest lands.” However, there was also less smoke on Sunday, causing a “warmer climate around the fire which has led to increased fire activity,” officials said.
Even without a loss of human life, the Park Fire has been disastrous. The fire has sparked fire tornadoes and has infiltrated Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is now closed. The park said on Facebook on Saturday that the fire was approaching its western edge “three years after the Dixie Fire consumed much of the eastern portion.”
“Staff are scrambling to save historic artifacts stored in the 1927 Loomis Museum,” the park said.
Christopher Apel and his brother-in-law Bruce Hey told CBS Sacramento that their family has lived in the Cohasset area for decades and that they had people staying on their adjacent properties who had survived the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 84 people in the same region where the Park Fire is burning.
“Everything is burning,” Apel said.
“I tried to outrun it,” Hey added, saying he burned his left arm while evacuating. “…I wouldn’t have gotten burned if I hadn’t rolled down the window to look in the rearview mirror.” I was right in the middle of it and I was trying to put it in reverse.”
Julie Yarbough, a former news anchor and reporter for CBS Los Angeles, watched her home burn down in real-time through home security camera footage.
“Our house is gone, their house is OK,” she says of the aftermath in her neighborhood. “The house next to it you can see it’s gone.”
She said that she doesn’t think she will be hit with the full blow of the loss until later.
“It really is almost a numbness,” she told CBS News Sacramento. “It’s surreal.”
