As Massive Park Fire Rages, Crews Fight to Save Rural Communities Near Chico

Updated 12:30 a.m. Saturday

Nearly 2,500 firefighters battled California’s largest wildfire of the year in dangerous conditions on Friday as they tried to protect rural woodland communities north of Chico from the rapidly spreading blaze.

The Park Fire has already destroyed at least 134 structures, pushed some 4,000 people from their homes and charred more than 307,000 acres since it ignited Wednesday afternoon. It grew Friday amid hot, dry conditions and gusty winds, becoming the state’s eighth-largest fire on record, according to Cal Fire.

During the day Friday, the fire more than doubled in size, tearing through grass, brush, timber and dead vegetation in difficult terrain for firefighters.

“It’s burning in inaccessible areas, in areas with little to no fire history, and into the Ishi Wilderness,” Cal Fire Capt. Dan Collins, a public information officer on the Park Fire, said Friday. “So couple that with heavy fuel loads, both dead and live … that’s why the fire grew exponentially overnight.”

The rural communities of Cohasset and Forest Ranch along Highway 32, which have been ordered to evacuate, are under threat. Immediate evacuations were ordered in Forest Ranch on Friday “due to the extreme danger of being overtaken by the fire,” the Butte County Sheriff’s Office said on social media.

The fire was burning above Forest Ranch as numerous spot fires broke out along Highway 32, forcing Cal Fire to roll out a significant deployment in an effort to protect the community.

By Friday evening, it had made a major run to the north and crossed Highway 36, the route between Red Bluff and the Mount Lassen area, according to Cal Fire units in the area.

Weather conditions were expected to improve over the weekend, but not before getting worse Friday night, according to Cal Fire’s fire behavior unit. Strong southeasterly winds of up to 30 mph could sweep across the area between 10 p.m. Friday and 3 a.m. Saturday; although that could help keep the fire out of Forest Ranch, it could also aid the blaze’s strong push into more remote, sparsely populated terrain to the north.

Firefighters were focused Friday on trying to prevent the blaze from sweeping into Cohasset, where several hundred homes are dispersed along a ridge about 10 miles northeast of Chico.

Cohasset Road, the only paved road in or out of the woodland community, was overrun by the fire on Wednesday evening, but evacuees were guided to safety by firefighters and Sierra Pacific lumber workers who drove over remote logging roads to get them to Highway 32.

George Sikorski, 81, was one of those evacuees. He has lived in Cohasset for more than 30 years.

“There have been a number of fires in this particular area. Most of them have been relatively small, and they got on them really quickly,” he said. “This one, they got on quickly, but it was just too much.”

He said he’s been on edge all summer amid high fire danger conditions as vegetation that flourished during excessive rain this past winter dries out.

“Everything is drier this year, and the fire spread rapidly,” he said.

David Eleazer, 63, lives in the tree line above where the fire started to spread Wednesday evening.

“The power went out. Cell phone went out. Everything went out. I was up there all night with no information. So I just started packing,” he said.

When he left Thursday morning, he couldn’t find his Rottweilers.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “They got confused and took off.”

Julie Phillips, 55, said the fire moved quickly on Cohasset.

“It was real. It was very, very fast. We had no chance really to get anything, so we got our dogs, which meant everything to us,” she said Friday at an evacuation center set up at Neighborhood Church of Chico.

As she was evacuating, she said, her car ran out of gas, forcing her to roll down the mountain road until she got to a flat, where a friend passed by.

“He literally turned around and chained us up and brought us to Eaton Avenue gas station so that we would make it, you know, so people come together during things like this,” Phillips said. “I’m just thankful to be here and have a place to go because I have nowhere now.”

The fire is burning just a few miles from the town of Paradise, which is under evacuation warnings. Much of the town was destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in California history.

Two people with minor injuries have been treated and released by firefighters, authorities said in a press conference on Thursday night.

Crews faced difficult conditions as they battled the fire on Friday. The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning through Friday night, as temperatures were expected to exceed 100 degrees in some areas, and relative humidity was quite low.

As heat built throughout the day, the fire’s smoke column grew due to the lifting of the inversion layer, or a band of warm air that keeps cooler air trapped underneath, said Collins, the Cal Fire captain.

“That column and header is a clear indicator of what the fire is doing. So if you see a very angry smoke column that’s growing and then also perhaps swirling, that’s a big indicator of extreme fire behavior on the ground,” Collins said. “We expect a very active day and a challenging firefight for our air and ground resources.”

The conditions raised the likelihood of “rapid spread of any fires,” NWS Sacramento meteorologist Sara Purdue said.

Conditions are expected to improve into the weekend, Purdue said.

Arson investigators believe the blaze was started by a man who pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico’s upper Bidwell Park.

Ronnie Dean Stout II, 42, of Chico, was arrested Thursday morning on suspicion of arson and is being held without bail in Butte County Jail. He has two prior felony convictions for child molestation in 2001 and robbery with great bodily injury in 2002, Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said.

KQED’s Ezra David Romero and Beth LaBerge contributed to this report.