Park Fire quickly becomes one of the biggest wildfires in California history

A fire that allegedly started when a man pushed a flaming car into a gully in a Northern California park on Wednesday has quickly ballooned into the West’s largest fire burning right now and one of the largest in state history.

The southern edge of the Park Fire is about 90 miles north of Sacramento, and the fire has now burned nearly 350,000 acres as of Saturday afternoon, according to Cal Fire. It’s now the seventh-largest fire in California history and is even producing its own clouds and fire whirls.

The blaze has more than doubled in size since Friday morning, when it engulfed an area the size of Chicago.

Prosecutors allege the fire started when Ronnie Stout sent his mother’s car ablaze 60 feet down an embankment near Alligator Hole in Chico’s Upper Bidwell Park. That gave the fire its match to spread northward across the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Triple-digit temperatures, low humidity and gusty winds contributed to the Park Fire’s rapid growth, officials say. The Park Fire on Saturday has burned an area larger than the size of the city of Los Angeles. So far, the Park Fire has damaged 134 structures, according to Cal Fire on Saturday afternoon.

The area's terrain is steep and rocky, with few roads for firefighters to enter to try to put out fires, Kirsten Larson, a spokesperson for Cal Fire's response, told USA TODAY on Saturday.

Saturday had cooler temperatures, with highs in the upper 80s, and more humidity, according to the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office. Cooler conditions are expected to continue in the coming days before hot weather returns next week.

Officials hoped these conditions would give some 2,500 firefighters the needed respite to reduce the fire's spread from Butte County into Tehama County, where the majority of the fire is now occurring, as it burns grass, brush, timber and dead vegetation.

Evacuation orders have been issued across eastern Tehama County up to the Shasta County line, nearly 50 miles from the fire’s start. This includes smaller communities approaching Lassen Volcanic National Park.

In Butte County, evacuation orders and warnings continued through Friday night, the county Sheriff’s Office announced. This included warnings for Magalia in the foothills east of Chico, located just next to Paradise, the California town burned by the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed 14,000 homes and killed 85 people. The Camp Fire, caused by faulty Pacific Gas & Electric power lines, maxed out at 153,336 acres.

In total, officials have told nearly 8,700 people to evacuate their homes with the Park Fire, Larson said. The Butte County Fairgrounds, churches and rodeo grounds have been converted to evacuation centers and animal shelters.

Fire's extreme behavior, climate change

The Park Fire has scorched a relatively remote area that hasn’t had a recent fire history, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. The fire has spread across from grasslands in the west, toward the Central Valley, to dense forest, including logging, east into the Sierras.

At the same time, this month has been the region's hottest on record, Swain said. It hasn't been a particularly dry year, nor has severe drought affected the area. But the heat quickly dried foliage to help fuel the fire in under three days, he said.

“The fire has, continuously since it started, moved incredibly quickly and exhibited continuously extreme behavior,” he said. He pointed to the Park Fire producing its own thunderstorm-like clouds, as well as one or two fire vortices captured on video.

Warmer temperatures and dry conditions caused by climate change are helping fuel massive wildfires. More than that, Swain said, fires are burning more readily through the night, along with fires creating their own weather patterns with winds that can reinforce flames. This allows events like the Park Fire to move much more quickly.

There are over 100 large wildfires that have burned over 2 million acres across 10 western states and Alaska, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

Contributing: Christopher Cann and Dinah Pulver of USA TODAY

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Park Fire now one of the largest wildfires in California history