A “wall of fire” rising to 328 feet in the Canadian Rockies has been reported to have destroyed up to half the buildings in a well-known tourist town, while more than 100 fires are currently raging throughout large areas of the western United States.
Thousands of homes are under threat from a large wildfire in California that is growing at an average speed of eight square miles per hour, forcing residents to evacuate.
The Park Fire, which broke out on Friday evening and reached 480 square miles (1,243 square kilometers), is currently the largest wildfires of the year in the state, having already burned more than 130 homes.
It began on Wednesday in Butte County and has rapidly moved east and north since then.
Firefighters have drawn analogies between the current fire and the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed 11,000 houses in the adjacent town of Paradise and claimed 85 lives, despite the fact that no deaths have yet been confirmed.
Billy See, the Cal Fire incident commander, stated: “There’s a tremendous amount of fuel out there and it’s going to continue with this rapid pace.”
According to accounts, a 42-year-old male was involved in the fire and fled the scene by pushing a blazing automobile into a Chico ditch.
In Chico, hundreds of people have given up on their homes, including Carli Parker.
The mother of five has previously had to flee her house twice due to flames.
She stated: “I think I felt like I was in danger because the police had come to our house because we had signed up for early evacuation warnings, and they were running to their vehicle after telling us that we need to self-evacuate and they wouldn’t come back.”
The National Interagency Fire Center reports that as of Friday, there were 110 active fires in the United States, encompassing an area of 2,800 square miles (7,250 square kilometers). A pilot was discovered dead in a small air tanker jet that crashed in eastern Oregon while battling one of the numerous fires that were raging throughout multiple western states.
The largest fire in the United States at the moment is the Durkee Fire in Oregon, which, when coupled with the Cow Fire, has burned nearly 630 square miles (1,630 square kilometers).
According to officials, it was just 20% contained on Friday and is still unpredictable.
Lightning caused a quickly spreading fire in rural Idaho on Friday that covered an area of 31 square miles (80 square kilometers). Homes were also damaged in eastern Washington.
It is believed that up to half of the town’s buildings—which draw over two million tourists annually—have been destroyed, and 25,000 residents have been forced to evacuate. Approximately 176 wildfires are raging in Alberta right now, 50 of which are out of control.
