A man has been arrested on suspicion of sparking California’s largest wildfire of the year by pushing a burning car down a steep embankment.
Ronnie Dean Stout II, 42, was seen shoving the smouldering vehicle down a 60-foot gully in the Alligator Hole area of Bidwell Park in Chico, California, at around 3pm local time on Wednesday afternoon, according to the Butte County District Attorney’s Office.
Stout was then seen “calmly leaving the area by blending in with the other citizens who were in the area and fleeing the rapidly evolving fire,” authorities said.
The flames from the car in question quickly burned out of control and spread across the dry surrounding landscape, driven on by persistent winds, and causing the huge Park Fire.
An estimated 164,000 hectares had burned by Friday morning, according to The Los Angeles Times, an area four times larger than any other California fire so far in 2024. Just 3 per cent of the blaze had been contained as of early morning.
More than 4,000 people from northeastern Chico, Forest Range and Cohasset have meanwhile been evacuated from the danger zone, according to sheriff’s office spokesperson Megan McMann, with several rural areas in nearby Tehama County also under evacuation orders.
Crews numbering 1,100 firefighters, 150 engines and several air tankers have been battling the blaze but are said to be struggling with sweltering temperatures, steep terrain and high winds whipping the flames towards the Ishi Wilderness and Lassen foothills – which have reportedly not been troubled with fires for many decades, making them more vulnerable.
“Once it got into that area, it had a lot of fuel to consume,” Cal Fire spokesperson Dan Collins said, explaining that the fire had burned through fresh grass as well as the area’s denser vegetation.
“A lot of us who work in fire have kind of been waiting for this fire to happen for the last 25 years,” Zeke Lunder, a Chico-based fire specialist and geographer, told the Times.
“Even though it was going across the canyons, there’s all these little side canyons, and so it was kind of a perfect setup.
“It’s a big one. Unless you can get people out there on the ground to put in fire lines, aircraft alone aren’t necessarily going to put this fire out — and the area where it’s burning into is extremely rough.”
Lunder added that that fire has so far “threaded the needle through this area with pretty low-density development”.
He warned that any town in its path would likely have been devastated like the town of Paradise, which was destroyed in apocalyptic scenes in the horrific Camp Fire of 2018.
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the state has been granted a fire management assistance grant from the federal government, providing financial support for communities hit by wildfires.
Stout is expected to be charged with arson offences over the fire.
He is being held in Butte County Jail without bail ahead of a court hearing on Monday, according to District Attorney Michael Ramsey.
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