Why the Park Fire Happened So Quickly

“This region is no stranger to fast-moving, high-intensity fires,” Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Nevada, Reno, said in an email. “This fire is one of the fastest-growing fires in recorded history.”

Several wildfire experts and historians, including Zeke Lunder, a veteran wildfire and fuels management expert who lives in Chico, California, near where the Park Fire started, said they can’t recall another wildfire that burned 350,000 acres in 72 hours. In 2020, the Bear Fire, part of the North Complex Fire that devastated the town of Berry Creek, came close, he said. The wind-driven Cedar Fire in Santa Ana in 2003 burned 280,000 acres around the San Diego area during that time.

While every fire is unique, climate and fire scientists have a general idea of ​​when a fire will be bad and why. The Park Fire, however, is exhibiting extreme behavior and “moving in ways that we’re not used to seeing,” Lunder said.

An explosive mix of ingredients made this particular fire one of the most extreme the state has ever seen. Here’s why it grew so big so quickly.

Heat waves have been plaguing California since early May, after the last major rainstorm hit the state. But this month’s heat is unprecedented.

Much of California is on track to experience its warmest July on record. That includes Red Bluff, a city just west of where the fire is burning, which also just experienced its warmest 21-day stretch on record, from July 3 to 23, according to the National Weather Service in Sacramento.

“The record high heat in early July in the West set the stage for the explosion of fires we are seeing now,” Lareau said.

The heat quickly dried out grass, shrubs and trees, greatly increasing the risk of fire.

“Climate change just adds more energy to the system and amplifies the energy that’s in there,” said Stephen Pyne, a professor emeritus and fire historian at Arizona State University.

Butte County, where the Park Fire originated, is at the epicenter of the state’s wildfire crisis, amid increasingly hot fire seasons as global temperatures rise. Many of California’s most devastating recent blazes have torn through the area: 2018’s deadly Camp Fire, 2020’s North Complex Fire that wiped out a town and killed 15, and 2021’s million-acre Dixie Fire.

But this fire is “near the top of the list in terms of the extraordinary, record-breaking, paradigm-changing fire characteristics that we saw,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, said at a briefing on Friday.

After starting in Chico’s lush Bidwell Park on a 90-degree afternoon last week, the fire has spread across Butte County and, with the help of strong winds, has quickly spread northward through all that fuel. Given the highly flammable conditions, any wind would be a problem.

“The wind has not been extreme, but ‘just right’ to cause high intensity,” Lareau said.

At a press conference Saturday morning, Cal Fire officials discussed the extreme conditions they were seeing and explained that this fire is a “plume dominated fire.” That means the fire’s force is stronger than the wind and it is creating its own convection columns filled with gases, smoke, ash and other fire particles.

Firefighters were dealing with multiple large, intensifying plumes, and as those columns rise, “you get a strong wind inflow,” officials said. When those come together, they can create erratic, gusty winds that can throw embers far out in the air, creating new hot spots that can also rise.

“Individually, a plume-dominated fire is very dangerous. In this case, we have multiple plumes working together,” Scott Weese, a fire behavior analyst with Cal Fire, said Saturday.

During briefings throughout the week, fire officials explained how these conditions allowed the fire to spread quickly.

“It’s been growing at 5,000 acres an hour since it started,” said Billy See, incident commander for Cal Fire. “To put that in perspective, we’re looking at almost 8 square miles an hour that this thing is taking out.”

The fire is burning so hot because there is so much dry vegetation to consume, with high fuel loads and abundant grasses in the region. And many of the places where the fire is burning have never burned in modern history, experts said, meaning the fire is tearing through very dense fuels that have built up.

“There are areas where there has been no fire, with a lot of ‘dead and decayed’ terrain and a lot of wood waste,” Weese said.

Pyne wasn’t surprised to see such a fire in this area, given all the grass growth from two wet winters and then a serious heat dome to dry it all out. California has gone from the lush green of the wet season to serious wildfires in a few short months.

“The cadence (of the fire season) is there, it’s just compressed and exaggerated,” Pyne said. “So, things are shifting, but further than they would have in the past.”