Park Fire nears Paradise, California, town that was incinerated in 2018 in state’s deadliest fire

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

California’s Park Fire, now the sixth largest in state history, is now close enough to trigger evacuation warnings in Paradise, an idyllic town in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was almost entirely destroyed in the 2018 Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest on record.

“I don’t want anyone else to experience this. It’s the most traumatizing, terrifying, and saddening thing to have a whole community go up in flames, and to lose all your personal items … so to see my parents go through this is just really hard,” Ava Elsner, who lived through the Camp Fire, told CNN. “I want to stay strong for them and comfort them the way that they did for me. And it’s just, it’s just difficult.”

The Park Fire, which began on Wednesday, and is centered on an area 180 miles northeast of San Francisco, has destroyed more than 100 structures and grown to a size of roughly 368,000 acres, an area larger than Los Angeles.

The blaze has prompted evacuation warnings and orders in the Northern California counties of Tehama, Plumas, Shasta, and Butte, home to Paradise, where 85 people died and 11,000 homes were burnt to the ground during the 2018 fire.

The sights and smells of smoke on the horizon once again can be triggering to some residents, Paradise mayor Ron Lassonde told KCRA last week.

"It was very impactful, every once in a while we smell smoke or see smoke like that, it does trigger us. It triggers the people here in Paradise. When you go through trauma, that’s what happens," he said.

As of Monday, the Park Fire was 12 percent contained.

An estimated 3,400 firefighters, drawn from crews across the state, are fighting the fire, along with scores of helicopters and air tankers.

Officials have accused Ronnie Dean Stout II, 42, of starting the fire by pushing a burning car into a gully.

As The Independent has reported, the climate crisis is fueling extreme heat and drought in the Golden State, conditions that drastically increase the risk of wildfire.