Starting on Wednesday, July 24, in the north of the state, the Park Fire – of criminal origin – has already joined the list of the largest fires in California's history. After 60 hours of burning, it ranked tenth in terms of devastated area. After 72 hours, it had moved up to seventh, a progression that testifies to its extraordinary speed of spread in a region of dense vegetation dried out by the heatwave.
Climatologist Daniel Swain, an expert in extreme weather events, even predicted on Saturday that the fire, which had already destroyed 350,000 acres (141,000 hectares), would probably be one of the top three. At the top of this list, established in 1932, is the August 2020 mega fire (August Complex), caused by thousands of bolts of dry lightning that ignited dozens of fires. It plunged San Francisco into darkness in the middle of the day.
This is followed by the Dixie Fire of July 2021, also in Northern California. Both burned around one million acres (405,000 hectares). The fire that reduced the town of Paradise to ashes in November 2018 was the deadliest (85 dead), due to the difficulty of evacuating via the only road, but was not among the 20 most extensive fires. Caused by an incident on power lines, it destroyed "only" 153,000 acres (62,000 hectares).
Most of these large fires were the result of several fires merging, hence the name 'complex'," pointed out Swain. The Park Fire is unusual in its rapid expansion, even though it originated from a single ignition. "The questions that often come up (...) are why they just don't put out the fire, why don't you just spray water on it," the climatologist explained on Saturday in his almost daily YouTube talk. "It's difficult for some folks to conceive of a fire that moves 50 miles in two days burning at a forward speed of 1 to 4 miles per hour, (...) irrespective of the terrain as the crow flies."
The Park Fire began in the same area of Chico, a three-hour drive north of San Francisco. Residents who moved back to Paradise after the 2018 disaster have once again been asked to evacuate – without, at this point, being forced to do so. The fire caused phenomena of frightening scale, including pyrocumulonimbus and masses of smoke sculpted like atomic mushrooms. The firefighters filmed a clip that has done the rounds of fire-modeling experts. It shows "an actual tornado strength fire vortex," explained Swain. "A swirling cloud that appears to have a rotational velocity consistent with a weak tornado."
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