Interesting facts I've learned about wildfires over the years
madole.xyz9 points by speckx 7 days ago
9 points by speckx 7 days ago
Awesome article. If anyone wants to learn more about wildfire firefighting from the boots-on-the-ground perspective, I can warmly recommend Matthew Desmond's On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters.
It taught me a lot that surprised me and is also mentioned in TFA, such as
- The main weapon against wildfires is dirt, not water. Wildfires burn so vigorously that trying to extingush with water is like pissing into a bonfire.
- Water is used to cool down firefighters, though. It is also used in places the fire hasn't yet reached to slow down its progress.
- Firefighters don't say "vegetation" or "trees" or "moss", they say "fuel".
- Controlled burns are an effective thing even though it meets political resistance.
- Firelines are like dirt roads except completely bare of fuel.
- Crown fires are terrifying.
- Looking for smoldering underground after a wildfire is important and extremely labour intensive.
- Fires travel faster downwind and uphill.
- The PPE a wildland firefighter carries may give them a few more minutes of oxygen if they end up surrounded by fire but it won't save their lives in most situations.
The stories I've heard over the years involving family and friends are horrifying.
Uncle (a CFA station chief) was on the missing list overnight during the Ash Wednesday fires, when he and his partner were trapped at Mt. Macedon. Witnessing the firestorm destroying nearby houses, they took refuge in a concrete public toilet block. He retired not long afterwards.
My father narrowly missed getting caught in the Black Saturday fires as he had been doing road inspections in the Strzelecki range. The Central Gippsland fire jumped the range in a matter of hours due to the 100kmh gales.
Close family friend was the pit manager at Loy Yang Power Station and had a very bad day that fortunately didn't become catastrophic, as Loy Yang A & B provides 50-60% of the base load for the whole state of Victoria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires#Centr...
I appreciate that each section of the article has supporting references. About zombie fires, coal seam fires can burn for 100+ years even sparking fires above ground [0]. This is a scientific discipline that appears to have a promising future due to a warming climate and more people living in the wildland/urban frontier. Probably not a bad career area to get into and may even be somewhat AI-disruption resistant career longevity-wise.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/22/fighting-a-decades-old-underg...
I'd like to add one more that this article doesn't touch on: wildfires are as much of a political phenomenon as an environmental one[0].
Thomas Sowell wrote a column[1] about this that is spot on, twenty years later.
0: I love these types of economic theories (x is a political problem, not an exogenous problem). Amartya Sen's theory of famines is another one.
1: https://www.ocregister.com/2007/10/31/thomas-sowell-preservi...
Thomas Sowell had three paragraphs and a short sentence using his "thoughts about wildfires" as a lever for a political point and a chance to bash his strawman "environmentalist" caracatures.
Useful commentary about wildfires looks very different and people actually concerned about the land are not as he paints them.
Yes, I suppose it is unfair to lump every economic agent (like NIMBYs, etc) into an "environ mentalist" straw man.
The general point is true, though. If you go past seeing wildfires as boogiemen and instead view them as allocation issues, they become more solvable.
His general point appears to be pave over wild areas:
No matter how much open space there is, it is never enough for environmental extremists, who will make political trouble if anyone is allowed to break up those miles and miles of solid vegetation with buildings, even though pavement and masonry don’t burn.
In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.
Not everybody wants to live on Trantor and the people local to the wildfires discussed in the article lived alongside and with them for 70,000 years sans parking lots.
On this matter Sowell appears to be unqualified, uninformed, and worse than an idiot.
I think it'd be productive to unhitch from the imperfect vessel that is Sowell.
Are you against controlled burns?
Nothing wrong at all with controlled burns / cool burns / fuel reduction / fire breaking / mosaicing / etc.
see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKdZpRbzMk
et al. - I've spent much of the past month and a half on tender watch during harvest in an Australian summer - we had one day with 14 spot fires from lightning strikes just a few weeks past.
Detaching from Sowell is an excellent idea.
Indigenous people had it right. And yep, this was a distraction. My bad.
Former wildland firefighter (used to work on a hotshot crew) turned wildfire researcher here. Feel free to reach out with questions.
Do you see the same or similar issues in US Forestry management with "Red Slurry" ammonium phosphate retardants as are outlined in the article or are those concerns unique to the Australian low phosphate soils and natives?