Forest fires: Firefighter pilot dies in tanker plane crash in Oregon

Communities in the western United States and Canada were hit by raging wildfires on Friday: A fast-spreading fire sparked by lightning sent people fleeing across flame-ringed roads in rural Idaho, and a man-made inferno in Northern California forced hundreds of homes to be evacuated.

A pilot was found dead in a crashed tanker plane that disappeared in eastern Oregon while crashing into one of the many Wildfires are spreading in several western states.

A Grant County search and rescue team located the plane Friday morning and confirmed the fatality, said Lisa Clark, a Bureau of Land Management public information officer for the Falls Fire. The single-engine tanker, a small and maneuverable aircraft that looks like an agricultural plane, was located in steep, wooded terrain after the search was called off at nightfall the previous day, Clark said.

The plane, commissioned by the US Bureau of Land Management, disappeared on Thursday. The pilot was the only person on board. The Falls Fire near the town of Seneca on the edge of the Malheur National Forest has spread to 567 square kilometers and is 55 percent contained, according to the government website InciWeb.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of lightning strikes as the region suffers record-breaking heat and bone-dry conditions. More than 110 active fires were burning across 2,700 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) in the U.S. on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

In California, more than 130 buildings have been destroyed and thousands more are threatened by the state’s largest active wildfire. The Park Fire began Wednesday when a man pushed a burning car into a ravine in Chico and then calmly mingled with others fleeing the scene, authorities said.

Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico was arrested early Thursday and held without bail pending arraignment Monday, officials said. There was no immediate response to an email to the district attorney asking if the suspect had legal representation or someone who could comment on his behalf.

By Friday afternoon, the fire was completely out of control, having burned over 720 square kilometers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada above the city of 100,000 inhabitants. Unless the forecast is revised downwards, it is expected to reach Cal Fire Statistics.

About 4,000 residents in unincorporated areas of Butte County and 400 residents of Chico were ordered to evacuate, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said late Thursday. Two minor injuries were reported, 134 structures were destroyed and about 4,200 were threatened.

“Due to dry fuels, hot weather, low humidity and wind, the fire soon outgrew our resources,” said Butte County Fire Chief Garrett Sjolund.

The Park Fire burned northwest of Paradise, the Butte County community where the infamous Camp Fire killed 85 people and incinerated thousands of homes in 2018. It became California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire. Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said he wanted to “express his regret and frustration that we are here again.”

In an interview, Carli Parker talked about her escape from the Forest Ranch northeast of Chico.

When the flames began to encircle her community this week, Parker said she and her family decided to leave. With fires across the street and having been displaced from their homes by fires twice before, she had little hope that her family home would be safe.

“I think I felt in danger because the police had come to our house because we had signed up for early evacuation alerts. They ran to their vehicle after telling us that we had to evacuate ourselves and they were not coming back,” said Parker, a mother of five.

The greatest damage so far has been caused in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where a rapidly spreading forest fire forced 25,000 people to flee and devastated the park’s eponymous citya world heritage site.

Oregon still has the largest active fire in the U.S., the Durkee Fire, which along with the Cow Fire has burned nearly 630 square miles. The fire remains unpredictable and was only 20 percent contained as of Friday, according to government website InciWeb.

In Idaho, lightning strikes sparked rapidly spreading wildfires that forced the evacuation of many communities. In one of those communities, a man drove past a building with trees ablaze and a tunnel of smoke rising above the road.

A man can be seen on social media saying he heard explosions as he fled Juliaetta, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) southeast of the University of Idaho campus in Moscow. The town of just over 600 residents was evacuated Thursday shortly before the fires broke out, as were several other communities near the Clearwater River and the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery Complex, which raises salmon.

“This series of fires is a difficult one,” said Robbie Johnson, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Lands. “We’re using everything we have — if there are more fires in an area, you have to say, ‘You need planes over here and over there,’ and you have to make those difficult decisions about attack. There are really smart people working on that.”

There are no estimates yet of the number of buildings burned in Idaho and no information on the damage in urban areas, Johnson said Friday morning.

Elsewhere in California, about 1,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes Thursday as the lightning-sparked Gold Complex fires burned nearly 4.5 square miles (12 square kilometers) of brush and forest in California’s Plumas National Forest, near the Nevada border and about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Reno. Some evacuations were lifted Friday when the fire was 11% contained.

And in inland Southern California, firefighters battled a small blaze that broke out Thursday afternoon in hills above the Riverside County town of Lake Elsinore. The Macy Fire was 15% contained early Friday, with one unspecified building destroyed. In rural northern San Diego County, containment of the three-day-old Grove Fire rose to 25% after a day of minimal spread.

The National Interagency Fire Center said more than 27,000 fires in the United States have burned a total of more than 15,000 square kilometers this year, and in Canada more than 3,700 fires have burned more than 22,800 square kilometers so far, according to the National Wildland Fire Situation Report released Wednesday.

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Associated Press writers Holly Ramer, Sarah Brumfield, Claire Rush, Terry Chea, Scott Sonner, Martha Bellisle and Amy Hanson contributed to this report.