Firefighters Race to Contain Wildfires in California and Oregon

Firefighters raced to contain scores of blazes across the American West on Friday night as California’s largest wildfire of the year prompted a new wave of evacuations.

Federal officials say active fires have burned more than 1.8 million acres. With smoke darkening the skies, the authorities refined evacuation zones, warned of miserable air quality and urged people to be prepared to flee with little notice. Already this week, thousands of people have been told to evacuate, and haze from the fires has floated across the continent.

The sprawling fire in Northern California, known as the Park fire, has expanded rapidly to more than 307,000 acres in Butte, Tehama and Shasta Counties, near Chico, becoming the largest in the country, fire officials said. The fire’s growth triggered a new wave of evacuation orders and warnings on Friday, when it was zero percent contained, according to Cal Fire.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Friday declared a state of emergency for Butte and Tehama Counties, in addition to Plumas County, where the Gold Complex fire had burned nearly 3,000 acres.

The northern part of the Park fire grew dramatically on Friday, Jeremy Pierce, a Cal Fire operations section chief, said at a news conference. Fire officials said that the fire was expanding by as much as 5,000 acres an hour and that about 4,000 people were under evacuation orders.

Oregon was also contending with fires. The Durkee fire, which has unleashed havoc in a sparsely populated region close to the Idaho border since a lightning strike on July 17, was covering at least 288,000 acres. To the southwest, in the Malheur National Forest, the Falls fire has claimed more than 140,000 acres. And the Lone Rock fire has raced across more than 136,000 acres since it started on July 13 about 10 miles from Condon, Ore.