The Heat Is On

Fire Weather is a remarkable nonfiction book by award-winning author John Vaillant—part frightening description, part homage to those who fight wildfires, and part expression of frustration at lost opportunities. He centers the book around a wildfire that started near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, in May 2016. The town is populated by people who work in the oil extraction industry, which is a hellish kind of existence itself. He takes time to describe this environment, so that when the fire arrives, you understand what’s at stake. He calls Fire Weather “a true story from a hotter world.”

The middle section of the book details the battle against the wildfire relentlessly approaching Fort McMurray. Abetted by long-term drought, the fire has plenty of fuel. High temperatures prevent night-time cooling, which would aid the firefighters. The fire develops enough energy to start creating its own weather, propelled forward via hurricane-force winds . Vaillant’s descriptions of fire tornadoes is especially vivid. Using the one road out of town, families must evacuate through fire and smoke, and ordering evacuation is almost unthinkable. But, contrary to expectation and sooner than authorities believe, it has to be done.

Vaillant points out the vast qualitative differences between a structural fire, which we are accustomed to reading about (“Firefighters had the building fire under control in two hours” kind of thing) and a wildfire. Emphasis is on the wild. As people build their houses farther and farther into wooded suburban areas, wildfires engulf them easily. Firefighters on the front lines in Fort McMurray watched the fire move up a residential street, destroying one home after another. From the time the fire first reached a house until it was reduced to nothing but a pile of ash took three minutes. Three minutes in which the house was gone, aluminum framing melted, window glass reduced to puddles, and no plumbing fixtures. They were simply vaporized.

As I write this, the largest wildfire in Texas history rages in the Panhandle and into Oklahoma. Memories are fresh of the smoke from last year’s Canadian wildfires that traveled thousands of miles and created lingering eerie light in the middle and eastern United States. The conditions that enable the spread of these devastating fires continue. We have created the conditions for, as Vaillant puts it, “fire weather.”

The third part of the book details the failed politics of regulating the industries that contribute to the danger. It is, as you would expect, frustrating reading.

You’ll never be able to read about a wildfire in Europe, in Australia, in Chile—anywhere—in the same way. By the way, the Fort McMurray wildfire was not declared extinguished until August 2017—15 months after it began.

Photos: Fort McMurray evacuation by DarrenRD, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; NYC blanketed in smoke by Anthony Quintano, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

World Aflame

Last week I posted information from a Wired article by Daniel Duane about the changing nature of Western wildfires. The fear and heroism that emerge in the American West, in Australia, and in other fire-prone areas are ripe for fiction. A writer can always hope that a compelling depiction of the difficulties and terror of wildfires might serve the broader purpose of encouraging better fire management policies, greater support for fire fighters, and improved public safety.

Among the many fascinating “made-for-fiction” aspects of the problem of fire intensity is how very intense fires mirror the experience of Allied bombing campaigns during the Second World War. British and American flight commanders learned they could burn cities down more easily than they could blow them up. And they could burn cities more easily if they knocked down the buildings—especially in neighborhoods with highly flammable wooden structures–before attempting to light them on fire.

That strategy is what caused the catastrophic damage to the German city of Dresden, pictured, producing “a single giant plume of heat and smoke (that) took on a shape similar to a giant thunderstorm,” Duane says. The firestorm had hurricane-force winds that magnified the destruction. These effects are similar to the firestorm experienced after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and predicted if a nuclear weapon hit a national forest in a 1964 US Forest Service report.

The western forests’ accumulation of long-burning heavy fuels—logs and fallen trees that smolder for long periods before bursting into flame—creates conditions similar to those that produced the smoking ruins of European cities. The key ingredient, Duane says, is “simultaneous burning of many small fires in a combination of light and heavy fuels over a large area with light ambient wind.” Over time, the small fires join, the heat plume begins to rise, and the whole catastrophe unfolds.

Duane’s article, like other research writers do, provides the vocabulary—and in this case, a hit at the dynamics of fire—that lets us write about catastrophe persuasively. It doesn’t make us experts, but it gets us a good way there. It leads us to asking the right questions.

This whole article is well worth reading, and part one of my summary is here.

Photo of Dresden by Art Tower, Pixabay.

World in Flames

wildfire, fire

Daniel Duane’s riveting article in the November issue of Wired, “The Fires Next Time,” should give the people who live in the American West, all of us who have family or friends who live there, and everyone who loves the area’s beauty yet another serious problem to worry about. A distraction from covid, maybe?

You might think my posts about impending disasters—cyberthreats, climate change, and others—suggest I’m teetering on some mental edge. Not so. For me, these “ripped from the headlines” topics open dramatic possibilities outside the overworked crime fiction obsession with serial killers, duplicitous spouses, and missing “girls.”

The wildfires article is laden with enough drama and information about Western wildfires to create some compelling fiction. Martin J. Smith used an advancing wildfire to great effect, ramping up the tension in his 2016 police procedural, Combustion. It can be done.

Duane points out that, though their number seems to be increasing, wildfires were even more frequent hundreds of years ago—before housing developments, ranches, and towns erupted in fire-prone areas. Fires were a natural part of the landscape. The frequency of these long-ago fires meant they stayed close to the ground, burning surface fuels, and the forest ecology evolved to handle such ground-fires of that type.

Even now that fire managers recognize the benefits of periodic burns, which get rid of that ground-level fuel, it’s had to make that case to private property owners in the path of a blaze. Thus, CalFire’s mandate continues to be to extinguish every one of them as fast as possible, Duane says.

His article begins with a deconstruction of the 2018 Carr fire in the northern Sacramento Valley and explains how in recent years, western wildfires have become much more dangerous. The models that let officials predict wildfire behavior, and therefore, how to fight a particular fire and when to evacuate residents, have become obsolete.

There’s a growing incidence of plume-driven fires, in which wind and weather are redirected by the rising heat column to make the fire burn hotter and move faster. The result is a fire tornado. In the Carr file, it was “a whirling vortex of flame 17,000 feet tall and rotating 143 mph.” A fire tornado sucks up flaming debris (like the remains of people’s homes) and scatters it like firebombs, igniting new blazes.

Modern fires move fast. In some instances, Australia’s bushfires moved faster than people could flee them. The 2018 Camp Fire burned 70,000 acres in 24 hours. For a while, Duane says, it consumed “about a football field a second.” That was the fire that killed 85 people in Paradise, California, and sent Pacific Gas & Electric into bankruptcy. In court proceedings earlier this year, the company said, “No apology, no plea, no sentencing can undo [the fire’s] damage, and no passage of time can lessen the anguish we heard expressed in court.”

Next Week: How World War II Strategies Exposed Some Fire Secrets

Photo: Amissphotos for Pixabay