BUTTE COUNTY, Calif. — The Park Fire just pushed California’s wildfire season into overdrive.
It has grown rapidly since it started near Chico on July 24. Within two days, the blaze had consumed some 178,000 acres, then it doubled the next day. By Sunday, the fire had devoured more acres than all of this year’s other fires to date combined. Even more striking: The Park Fire had claimed close to 500% of the previous five-year average of acres burned by this point in the summer.
To get a sense of how large this fire is, we built a tool, which you can explore below, that allows you to enter an address and see the most current perimeter for the Park Fire drawn around that location. You can also overlay several other fires from the past, including the Camp Fire, which in 2018 destroyed Paradise, not far from where the Park Fire is raging now.
Up until the Park Fire started, the past two years have been milder than usual as wetter winters took the state out of a drought. For example, in 2022 and 2023, about 720,000 acres burned, which is likely to be exceeded this year. And while the number of people since 2022 who died from wildfires has not been as high as in previous years, 13 people lost their lives, including four last year who crashed in a helicopter accident, and one person who died this year in the Mina Fire in Mendocino County.
This article was originally published by CalMatters.
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