Residents flee as carr fire threatens Northern California City

Images posted on social media showed orange and red flames glowing against the night sky. Long lines of vehicles backed up as people tried to flee parts of Redding, a city of 92,000 people about 100 miles south of the Oregon border.

One person was killed, a privately hired bulldozer operator who was fighting the fire, authorities said.

“This fire is extremely dangerous and moving with no regard for what’s in its path,” said Bret Gouvea, incident commander for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

Some firefighters and civilians were injured, but the exact number was not yet known, Gouvea said.

At 10:30 p.m., a news anchor at KRCR-TV, an ABC-affiliated television station in Redding, abruptly announced that the station was under evacuation orders.

“Right now we are being evacuated and that’s why we are kind of closing out right now,” said the anchor, Allison Woods. “We are going to leave the station because it is now unsafe to be here.”

The fire was started Monday by “mechanical failure of a vehicle” in the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area, Cal Fire said in a report, without elaborating.

By late Wednesday the fire, known as the Carr Fire, had engulfed 6,700 acres. It expanded to 20,000 acres by Thursday morning and to more than 28,000 acres by Thursday evening, with just 6 percent of it contained.

Hot, dry weather fueled the fire. The temperature peaked at 113 degrees in Redding on Thursday and hovered around 90 late Thursday.

“Tonight it blew up and blew into the city limits of the city of Redding,” said Scott McLean, a spokesman for Cal Fire.

Multiple structures were on fire on the west side of the city, and the speed of the blaze’s expansion recalled the deadly wildfires north of San Francisco last year.

“This fire is just extremely dynamic,” McLean said. “We really haven’t seen anything like this except for last year on the Tubbs.”

The Tubbs fire, wind-driven blazes that ravaged Sonoma and Napa counties, killed 22 people and destroyed more than 5,500 structures, making it the most destructive wildfire in California history.

That disaster raised questions about emergency alert and evacuation systems for fast-moving fires. Sonoma, Napa and other counties used alert systems that send text messages to mobile phones. But those warnings generally go only to the people who have signed up to receive them, and the fires knocked out cellular service in many areas.

Authorities then described a chaotic scramble to evacuate residents. Similar situations were reported on social media Thursday night in the Redding area.

The weather conditions that fostered the surging flames in Redding — blistering temperatures, low humidity and a steady wind — are expected to continue Friday.

In addition to the Carr fire, large wildfires are burning in Central and Southern California. The Ferguson fire caused the largest closing of Yosemite National Park in 30 years, and the Cranston fire is only 5 percent contained in the San Jacinto Mountains in Southern California.

A man suspected of starting the Cranston fire was arrested Wednesday night and charged with five counts of arson to wildland.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.