July 30 (Reuters) – The largest wildfire in the U.S. swelled to nearly 600 square miles on Tuesday morning, bigger than the city of Los Angeles, fire officials in California said, as thousands of firefighters battled the blaze in a wilderness area north of Sacramento.
More than 5,000 firefighters from across California and other states were working around the clock to douse the Park Fire, burning in the state’s Central Valley, about 90 miles (145 km) north of Sacramento, the capital. The fire grew to 383,600 acres (155,237 hectares), becoming the fifth largest wildfire in Californian history, officials said.
The Park Fire on Tuesday surpassed the size of the 2020 Creek Fire in Fresno County, which burned almost 380,000 acres, fire officials said. But it is still smaller than the state’s largest fire on record, the August Complex fire of 2020, which burned more than 1 million acres in seven counties in northern California.
The Park Fire – fueled by dry grass, brush and timber – is fast-moving, said Fire Capt. Dan Collins of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection or Cal Fire.
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