The Forbestown Fire was discovered at 1:34 p.m. Saturday on private land near Forbestown in eastern Butte County, according to an early Sacramento Bee report citing the National Interagency Fire Center. At the time of that report, published at 2:09 p.m., officials had not established a containment figure or determined the cause. Those early details do not establish the fire’s current status.
Forbestown is a small, unincorporated foothill community. The county’s evacuation-planning resources include a Forbestown-Clipper Mills evacuation map; its listing is a preparedness resource and does not indicate whether any evacuation order is in effect for this fire.
Local planning and a separate past fire
Butte County says its Board of Supervisors approved a Community Wildfire Protection Plan in April 2025. The county describes the plan as identifying strategic sites and methods for fuel-reduction work across the landscape. The plan provides countywide risk-reduction context, but the county’s description does not identify a project specific to Forbestown or establish anything about the cause of Saturday’s fire.
A separate fire with the same name was reported near Forbestown Road and Hurleton Swedes Flat Road in 2019. A CAL FIRE update quoted by the Chico Enterprise-Record said that earlier incident had reached 58 acres and was 50% contained on September 6, after forward spread stopped. Those figures refer only to the 2019 fire; they do not describe the current incident or show a trend in local wildfire activity.
