{"id":8695,"date":"2020-12-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8695"},"modified":"2021-02-16T08:22:03","modified_gmt":"2021-02-16T13:22:03","slug":"world-aflame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8695","title":{"rendered":"World Aflame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Last week I posted information from a Wired<\/em> article by Daniel Duane<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the many fascinating \u201cmade-for-fiction\u201d 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\u2014especially in neighborhoods with highly flammable wooden structures–before attempting to light them on fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That strategy is what caused the catastrophic damage to the German city of Dresden, pictured, producing \u201ca single giant plume of heat and smoke (that) took on a shape similar to a giant thunderstorm,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The western forests\u2019 accumulation of long-burning heavy fuels\u2014logs and fallen trees that smolder for long periods before bursting into flame\u2014creates conditions similar to those that produced the smoking ruins of European cities. The key ingredient, Duane says, is \u201csimultaneous burning of many small fires in a combination of light and heavy fuels over a large area with light ambient wind.\u201d Over time, the small fires join, the heat plume begins to rise, and the whole catastrophe unfolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Duane\u2019s article, like other research writers do, provides the vocabulary\u2014and in this case, a hit at the dynamics of fire\u2014that lets us write about catastrophe persuasively. It doesn\u2019t make us experts, but it gets us a good way there. It leads us to asking the right questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This whole article is well worth reading, and part one of my summary is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo of Dresden by Art Tower, Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"World Aflame - Burning cities in World War II were a foretaste of the nearly uncontrollable wildfires today.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[366,266,35,104],"tags":[1778],"class_list":["post-8695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama","category-history","category-real-life","category-the-morgue","tag-wildfire"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2gf","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8696,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8695\/revisions\/8696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}