The Park Fire continues to grow near Chico, now becoming California's sixth-largest fire in state history.
The fire is now 368,000+ acres and 12% contained, across four different counties: Butte, Plumas, Shasta and Tehama.
CAL FIRE says nearly 110 buildings are now destroyed along with five others that are damaged.
The Park Fire had scorched an area greater than the city of Los Angeles as of Monday, darkening the sky with smoke and engaging thousands of firefighters.
Winds and temperatures were expected to increase slightly amid a drop in humidity, officials said in an update early Monday.
Air quality alerts were issued for Monday in the northwestern U.S. and western Canada.
The Park Fire started Wednesday, when authorities say a man pushed a burning car into a gully in Chico and then fled. A man accused of setting the fire was arrested Thursday and is due in court Monday.
The fire is one of more than 100 large active wildfires burning in the U.S. on Monday with evacuation orders in effect on 25 wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. More than 27,000 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to wildfires that have burned more than 3,200 square miles (8,288 square kilometers) nationwide, the center said.
Although cooler-than-average temperatures are expected through the middle of this week, that doesn’t mean existing fires will disappear, said Marc Chenard, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
The National Weather Service issued “red flag” warnings Monday for wide swaths of Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming, in addition to parts of California, meaning dry fuels and stronger winds were increasing the fire danger, the weather service said.
Fires burned across eastern Oregon and eastern Idaho, where officials were assessing damage from a group of blazes called the Gwen Fire, which was estimated at 43 square miles (111 square kilometers) as of Sunday.
In Oregon, the Grant County Sheriff’s Office identified a single engine air tanker pilot who died last week while fighting the Falls Fire as James Bailey Maxwell, 74. The U.S. Forest Service Malheur National Forest wrote in a Facebook post Sunday that Maxwell had 54 years of experience flying, logging roughly 24,000 hours of flight time during his career. His air tanker was contracted with the Bureau of Land Management when it disappeared late Thursday night while he was fighting the Falls Fire burning near the town of Seneca and the Malheur National Forest. Search and rescue crews found Maxwell and his plane the following morning in steep, forested terrain.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
