The Park Fire off Upper Park Road in Upper Bidwell Park east of Chico is at 3 percent containment this evening, according to CAL FIRE, and is being run by CAL FIRE IMT 3 in unified command with the Lassen National Forest. Though the cause was earlier reported as under investigation, the Chico ER reported later today that investigators had arrested a Chico man suspected of igniting the fire.
07/26 FRI a.m. Park Fire burns to 164,286 acres, over 4,000 evacuated
The burned-out car that CAL FIRE investigators traced to the start of the Park Fire in Chico. The suspect is in the Butte County Jail. ~ Butte County District Attorney’s Office photo.
The 42-year-old suspect is facing arson charges. Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said Thursday that investigators apprehended Ronnie Dean Stout, a twice-convicted felon and registered sex offender.
Investigators followed up on local reports of a man pushing “a car on fire” into a gully and down a 60-foot drop near Alligator Hole in upper Bidwell Park midafternoon on Wednesday. Ramsey said the guy was seen calmly leaving the area as the fire took off.
The fire spread from the car, which Ramsey said was Stout’s mother’s car, and grew 45,000 acres overnight; it was estimated Thursday afternoon at 75,000 acres.
It’s at 125,000 acres tonight burning in both Butte and Tehama counties; numerous firefighting airtankers from throughout the state are flying as conditions allow, along with over 1,100 personnel assigned, 6 helicopters, 41 dozers and 10 watertenders, 40 crews, and 153 engines.
A fire whirl was spotted at the Park Fire in the early evening hours of July 25, 2024. ~ AlertCalifornia Platte Mountain camera in Butte County Click photo to watch video
A fire tornado ore fire vortex developed from the intensity of the fire on July 25. The time-lapse was captured by the ALERTCalifornia Platte Mtn 1 camera. The camera sensors can see 60-70 miles on a clear day and more than 120 miles on a clear night. Watch ALERTCalifornia’s more than 1,080 (as of July 2024) monitoring cameras live at cameras.alertcalifornia.org
The Park Fire was started at 3:00 p.m. yesterday and by 8:00 p.m. the IC had requested 30 strike teams of any type engines. (Holy immediate need Batman, 150 engines!)
PARK FIRE: View from Hamilton City about 7 p.m. July 25
CAL FIRE said the fire displayed dynamic fire activity overnight. Winds are definitely a factor and the temperatures are in the 80s. Three helicopters were available for night ops, and they spent the night finding hotspots to drop water on. CAL FIRE has a dandy photo collection on flickr, including timelapse images of the smoke at the fire’s origin.
Richardson Springs camera yesterday at 8 p.m.
~ Gracias and a big tip o’the hardhat to Pat for this …
The British Columbia Wildfire Service recently welcomed a group of 60 IMT members and specialized personnel from Australia and New Zealand to assist throughout the province. Another 30 went to Alberta.
The firefighters arrived in Canada as part of a years-long partnership through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
“The relationship between the B.C. Wildfire Service and Australia is longstanding, extending more than 15 years of mutual aid, support, and knowledge transfer,” they said. “The first instances of support started during the 2007 wildfire season in Australia, when B.C. assisted by sending more than 60 personnel to support fire suppression efforts.”
Staff from Australia and New Zealand in B.C. before traveling to their initial Canadian assignments. ~BC Wildfire Service
CIFFC is a not-for-profit group operated by Canadian wildland fire management partners and shares resources and mutual aid throughout the nation and internationally using the Canadian Interagency Mutual Aid Resource Sharing (MARS) Agreement — and the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council during wildfire seasons. CIFFC has a similar agreement with the U.S.
During the catastrophic 2021 season in British Columbia, the B.C. Wildfire Service was able to rely on these arrangements to request support from other Canadian provinces, the federal government, Mexico and Australia. CIFFC supports this coordination of resources.
Fire officials attribute the strong relationship between the nations to a shared understanding of how to approach emergency management.
“The agencies operate similarly in terms of warning systems, collaboration, and information sharing. We share a lot in common when it comes to fire behavior as well. Large bushfires and wildfires that can cause significant impact to close-by communities and property, hot dry and windy conditions, and fires with ability to grow quickly are not uncommon for the two nations.”
Nine of the 90 total firefighters came from the South Australian Country Fire Service (CFS), according to the South Australian government; the deployment could last up to 40 days.
“I feel humbled and honored to have this opportunity to travel to Canada to support their firefighters in a time of need and to deploy the skills I have learned over the years and to learn some new ones,” CFS Divisional Commander Phil Tapscott said. “These opportunities always reaffirm that what we do here in the CFS is of a very high quality.”
Around 883 wildfires have burned in British Columbia since the beginning of the year, according to the BC Wildfire Service list. Of those, 349 are still burning and 211 are considered out of control; 16 evacuation orders in 2024 have been issued.
Alberta has recorded 927 wildfires this year, 161 of which are labeled “active” and 53 of which are “out of control,” according to the province’s wildfire status dashboard.
Briefing on working in B.C., topics from radio communications to safety around wildlife. ~BC Wildfire Service
Wildfires in Arizona are burning near the town of Kearny, about 90 miles southeast of Phoenix.
The Romero Fire is estimated at 3,500 acres, spreading west and north through grass and brush. It’s 13 miles southwest of Kearny and 22 miles northwest of Mammoth, according to the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management. There is as of Saturday afternoon zero containment.
Romero Fire, Arizona, east of Casa Grande
azcentral.com reported that another fire, the Circle Fire, has burned about 200 acres at the base of Antelope Peak southeast of Kearny. The fires are just north of the Freeman Fire, which burned 32,568 acres.
The Southwest Coordination Center (SWCC) reports that scattered to numerous wetting thunderstorms are predicted for the Mogollon Rim and parts of eastern Arizona. The region reported 17 new fires on July 19, with 1,517 recorded so far for 192,579 acres thus far in 2024.
Multiple wildfires across Russia have caused officials to issue multiple states of emergency and evacuate thousands, while government officials are accused of largely ignoring the problem.
The latest state of emergency was issued by Novorossiysk Mayor Andrei Kravchenko on July 14, according to the Kyiv Independent. The city in southern Russia was forced to evacuate around 500 people from the fire that burned at least 153 acres as of July 15. More than 300 people, including workers from the Emergency Situations Ministry, were fighting the fire.
Two other regions declared wildfire-driven states of emergency at the beginning of July, a Reuters article reported. The Republic of Sakha, also known as Yakutia, declared a federal state of emergency for wildfires on July 1. The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reported more than 107 registered wildfires burned more than 331,000 hectares (~818,000 acres) in the region.
The governor of the remote Siberian region of Tuva made the declaration on the same day as Sakha after a wildfire burned around 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) driven by intense heat, strong winds, and dry thunderstorms.
“At the moment, 23 forest fires have been registered on the territory of the republic,” said Vladislav Khovalyg, head of the Tuva region. “Most of them are in inaccessible mountainous areas. July as a whole promises to be the most difficult month in terms of the fire situation, and we have to fight for every hectare of forest.”
Experts warned that the nation was unprepared for an alarming wildfire season. The Moscow Times reported that limited state capacity for fire prevention and control, along with ongoing dry grass burning practices, worried experts of the potential for the season to turn into an annual crisis.
The “official indifference” was seen in real-time during the Siberia wildfires, which have burned an area the size of Normandy since the beginning of the year, French newspaper Le Monde reported. While the Russian government is preoccupied with its incursion into Ukraine, officials are neglecting necessary resources to fight wildfires burning throughout the nation.
“The problem is not just in the forest and its poor management,” an Irkutsk resident told Le Monde. “It’s largely in the heads of the people and the authorities, who don’t want to see it or fight it.”
The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations reported more than 107 registered wildfires burned more than 331,000 hectares (~818,000 acres) in the region.
Russia’s wildfire problem is exacerbated by Earth’s changing climate. Recent research has shown wildfires will worsen in the coming years, even in areas where wildfires are currently rare, such as Russia’s alpine regions. Smoke from the worsening wildfires, e.g. in Siberia, is projected to cause thousands of deaths and billions in costs for East Asia.
The colors on the Russian Hydrometeorological Center’s map below represent the number of days of predicted “high” and “extreme” fire danger in April, according to the Moscow Times. The purple indicates less than one day, the yellow between one and three days, pink between four and six days, red between seven and nine days, and dark red over ten days.
The peatland ecosystems of Central Kalimantan are transitioning from wildfire resistant to wildfire prone; with the potential huge release of carbon from burning peat stocks, it’s time for local and global actions to better protect these lands and communities.
As someone who has visited and observed wildfires in Indonesia for more than 20 years, I’ve witnessed the increasing loss of forest ecosystems and I recognize the potential for constructive international assistance.
Sebangau National Park firefighters moving fire equipment on the fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park
In the Indonesian language, Kalimantan refers to the whole island of Borneo (the third largest in the world), while in English it describes just the 73 percent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 percent of the island’s population.
Kalimantan covers 554,150 kilometers divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei, and East Malaysia.
The meaning of the name Kalimantan — originally Kalamanthana — is burning weather island, referring to the very hot and humid climate.
Kalimantan is home to many cultures; the Dayak, or people of the interior, are Indigenous and have long used landscape fire in their agricultural practices to clean up land for slash-and-burn farming.
The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured during times of wildfires as air pollution.
A volunteer firefighter with firefighting patrol boats on a fire in the Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. District level volunteer firefighting brigades in Central Kalimantan are locally known as Masyarakat Peduli Api, or MPA firefighters.
This system of using fire to clear farming plots in the rotating system of land use allows for conservation; preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they’re allowed to go back to nature to recover fertility, while another field is cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until its fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared, and the small scale of slash-and-burn continues as the land recovers after farming.
This system of rotating agriculture and wildfires to clear land has been culturally important. The Dayak use of fire for cleaning and clearing was extremely controlled historically, with organized groups using pre-constructed fire breaks and advance planning to consider predicted winds and fuel conditions.
The Dayak have been masters of using fire as their tool to clear their forest lands. However, cultural, modernizing, and competitive economic forces have brought changes which, during a severe dry season, can quickly transform some areas of the Indonesian part of this island into a thick smoke-filled hazard, lasting months and impacting the surrounding islands and even the cities of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Recent changes in vegetation and culture have swung the Dayaks’ historic mastery of fire in Kalimantan out of balance. The Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan, where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Also, within Dayak culture, changes are taking place as the people join the wave of progress brought by globalism sweeping the world which, as a byproduct, disconnects us from the natural world and our hands-on, sustainable practices. The landscape is being modified and fire use has fallen outside of its traditional Dayak checks and balances.
While most of the fires in Kalimantan are human-caused, the fire origins are complex. Many past fires arose from the fact that land ownership claims in Kalimantan historically have been legally proven with the use of applying fire to land for clearing, thus establishing legal usage. Other blazes are ignited by accident — or by fishermen to attract more fish or drive away mosquitos — or fires are lit by hunters to attract wildlife, and myriad other reasons.
Sebangau National Park firefighter moving hose across fire ground. Photos courtesy of Sebangau National Park
But in recent years, during extra hot and dry seasons, when fires do get started in what may now be often lighter fuels, they can spread quicker and carry flames into forest areas, or even into the swamp peat forests. And once the peat layer below ground is lit, it will burn underground down to the water table and then move laterally beneath the surface, consuming important thick layers of organic decaying peat matter.
These burns can become huge subsurface peat fires with their flames not visible until they occasionally climb up to the surface to consume vegetation. But the heavy smoke from these peat fires, referred to locally as smog/haze, will have local, regional, and global impacts. The Dayak historically did not apply fire to the forest where there were peat layers beneath it, as they were burning for their agricultural fields and they knew their crops would not grow in the peat region.
Peat swamp fires on Borneo are unique for wildfires because the peat itself, created from countless generations of falling and then decaying organic forest matter, has been built up into massive locked-up carbon stores — and these peat stores burn underground as a slow smolder, releasing heat and smoke to the surface. The thick carbon stockpiles begin to release their carbon when the peat swamplands they are part of are dried by drainage canals created to open lands for timber harvest, home building, and other uses. If this dried peat is then consumed by fires, the huge pool of stored carbon that had been safely locked away will be released into the atmosphere, causing global concerns for air pollution and climate change.
The smoke produced by burning peat is particularly hazardous. Besides its climate-warming carbon content, peat smoke contains toxins and other particulate matter, and in Indonesia, it is now being measured as air pollution during times of wildfires.
Kalimantan fires became an international concern in 1997 when a massive man-made ecological disaster burned in the peat forests, and since then, because of that disaster’s compounding effects, additional new dryseason peat fires have created an accelerating cycle of fires, peat loss, and flooding.
Peat’s organic matter, lying below the surface in a swamp forest, has long functioned as a natural sponge; the small percent of its decaying matter is able to soak up as much as nine times its volume in water. This layer of peat acts as an absorber to dampen the effects of seasonal flooding river systems. However, now with large areas of peat lost to wildfire seasons in 1997, 2015 and 2019, the summer dry seasons are followed by rainy seasons and large flows of water are draining from the burned peat lands into Borneo’s river systems and to the sea, leading to much human property loss and misery along the way.
Protecting the remaining peat beneath the swamp forests has become a priority in Central Kalimantan for those understanding the issue, and over the last 20 years, people have been adapting to the situation. Groups of people in Central Kalimantan have been organizing into both volunteer fire militia and paid fire forces, ready during dry seasons to fight fire. With the help of Japanese, Indonesian, and English scientists, new tactics and techniques are explored, and in 2015, there arose an international effort to assist in fighting wildfires. Indonesian law enforcement has also been activated to target illegal burners with stiff penalties of up to 15 years in prison and 15 million Indonesian Rupiah (about $930 USD) in fines.
Internationally, an agreement among Southeast Asian nations has been developed to assist during times of high fire activity, though there are still very real needs for which international assistance would be greatly appreciated and valued globally — by reducing the peat fires and their massive carbon releases.
Indonesia is still adapting to the emerging wildfire issues in Kalimantan, and as such, has so far developed only limited capabilities, with a particular need for shared technology in fire detection and wildfire response equipment. Many other fire-prone areas of the world have developed and routinely share these types of technologies, and Indonesia should be added to this group. Indonesia has unique firefighting technology advances to share, such as locally developed fire response systems and cloud seeding.
Aircraft dropping water on vegetation has been found to have limited effectiveness on peat fires, and therefore the fires are fought from beneath the ground. The priority is to find a water source on a peat bed nearby; this water source must be safely away from the fire to prevent its burning, and it’s usually found by drilling down as if through the ice on a frozen lake.
Using an augur to bore beneath the peat to find the water table, crews will tap into the water with a firefighting water pump and install a series of pipes and hose to carry water to firefighters, who spray it where needed to cool the flames. These firefighting pumps and their draft drill holes are strategically laid out and are manned with crews across the path of wildfire or in its wake, depending on the responding agency to act as anchor points, working outward with the cooling water while supporting each other. This is hard work, Kalimantan style, but necessary.
Indonesians are also experimenting with Japanese-developed soap agents that can be injected underground into the peat to extinguish flames, and the Air Force is using weather modification by cloud seeding to create rain. It is truly a fascinating time of change and adaptation for wildfires in Kalimantan.
While these changes are internal, the funding and support for Indonesia’s efforts can come from beyond the region’s borders. Indonesia’s emerging wildfire issues are global issues, considering the potential climate impacts of the massive carbon releases from the peat.
Better protection of the peat reserves could be accomplished by a change of local land ownership laws to allow for proof of ownership to be legally established in new ways, thereby supporting long-term management, conservation, and restoration. Instead of the historic local use of fire to clean property, incentives could be created toward fire prevention. Tree planting instead of clearing could be transformed into legal proof of land ownership. Indonesia has huge stockpiles of reforestation funds at the government level, and some of these funds could be invested into bank loans to assist in these efforts and for program development (and local hiring and training for landowners).
Water-canal damming is undertaken to allow the saturation of dried-out peat soils; these efforts could be greatly assisted by the international community, and as an essential byproduct of healing these soils could begin to return more of Kalimantan’s fire-resistant blanket of forest with the added benefit of assisting in the fire protection of its peat lands.
The damage to the peat lands over the past 20-some years is immense; however, to protect the remaining peat lands and their carbon sinks would require only strategic forest replanting above the damaged areas, such as along waterways after the area’s water levels are again raised from canal damming.
Kalimantan’s El Niño dry season fires, especially in the peat swamp areas, have the potential to affect the world’s climate with their associated huge carbon releases. For this reason alone, Kalimantan and Indonesia should be offered more support internationally in their efforts to help to protect the remaining peat swamp forests.
Kalimantan may be an island that seems isolated and far away, yet when the peat fires burn they impact us all with carbon releases, whether we can see the smog or not.
Learn more about Kalimantan’s wildfires, nature, and the Dayak culture on Michael Hill’s YouTube channel, Talking Wildfires with Michael Hill.
Michael Hill
Michael Hill began this journey in the 1980s as an American wildland firefighter, and across his career worked as a hotshot and smokejumper. For many years Hill has been, and still is, deeply interested in Indonesia’s and Australia’s wildfires. He serves as an associate editor for WIldfire magazine.
A fire east of Québec in Newfoundland and Labrador has burned more than 24,000 acres and forced thousands to evacuate Labrador City. CNN reported that the “extremely aggressive inferno” was considered contained earlier this week, but weather changes on Friday blew the fire back to life and it spread rapidly. Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador Andrew Furey said Saturday the fire had grown to 22,000 acres and had spread 13 miles in about four hours.
In a news conference on Sunday, Furey said weather conditions are favourable for firefighting. “We have some good news today. There is no significant growth in the size of the fire that is just northwest of Lab City,” he told reporters. The fire has burned through about 14,000 hectares (about 35,000 acres) to within four kilometres of the community — the same as Saturday.
Newfoundland and Labrador fires, ESRI map
Light rain, lower temperature and humidity, and northeast winds has kept the fire away from the town and burning onto itself.
Four water bombers are fighting on the eastern front of the fire. Six to eight are fighting on the western side from Quebec.
Around 9,500 people were evacuated from Labrador City, said Jeremy Reynolds with the provincial government. “A contingent of essential personnel have remained behind to oversee the emergency response,” he said.
The remoted town of Labrador City, in the northwestern part of the province, is about 900 miles north of Canada’s capital city of Ottawa.
A province-wide outdoor fire ban prohibiting setting of fires on forest land or within 300 metres of forest land is now in effect in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Significant firefighting resources are currently dedicated to wildfire suppression near the communities of Labrador West.
Updates on the location, status, and size of active fires can be viewed online at the NL Active Wildfire Dashboard.
Labrador City fires
Residents were told to evacuate to the Town of Happy Valley-Goose Bay – a six-hour drive away.
