Update: A more recent article on the Park Fire can be found here.
A wildfire that started Wednesday afternoon on the edge of Chico grew in less than 12 hours to the largest fire of California’s season, and now is estimated at 164,000 acres.
The Park Fire was reported shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday in Upper Bidwell Park, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
In its first 12 hours, it grew to almost 50,000 acres; by early Friday it was 164,286 acres (256 square miles), CalFire said.
That’s more than four times the size of this year’s second-biggest fire, Lake, which burned 38,664 acres in Santa Barbara County.
CalFire investigators say the Park Fire started when a man pushed a burning car down an embankment. A suspect has been arrested.
The first evacuation order came before 6 p.m. Wednesday, and by the end of Thursday the evacuation zone covered more than 600 square miles in Butte and Tehama counties.
Coming under evacuation orders late Thursday afternoon were Butte County’s Doe Mill Ridge and more than 100 square miles in Tehama County north of the fire perimeter. Helltown, Centerville and part of Paradise came under warnings.
The map above shows the fire’s approximate perimeter as a black line and the evacuation area in red.
Highway 32 (Deer Creek Highway) was closed between the east edge of Chico and Highway 36, and campgrounds along the road were being evacuated.
For details of the evacuation zone, including warning areas, see the Butte County evacuation map or the Genasys Protect map (Tehama County only).
