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, and 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, a combined total of about 720,000 acres burned, a number this year is likely to exceed. And while the number of people since 2022 who directly died either fighting or not escaping wildfires was not as high as previous years, 13 people lost their lives, including four last year who crashed in a helicopter accident and one person this year in the Mina Fire in Mendocino County.