The Truth About Wildfires
1 It may seem as if wildfires have multiplied in recent years, but that’s not the case. Since 2000, there have been on average 72,400 fires annually, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Last year saw 49,786 fires. In 2018, there were 55,911.
2 The real problem is the intensity of the blazes. In 2015, for the first time, fires burned more than ten million acres nationwide. It happened again in 2017. In California, eight of the state’s 20 worst wildfires have occurred in the past ten years. The 2018 Camp Fire, which claimed 85 lives in Northern California, was the deadliest in a century.
3 Combating large-scale fires could prove more challenging than ever this year. To help teams of firefighters access a blaze quickly, they often live together in “fire camps.” But health officials fear that if the COVID-19 virus persists, that kind of communal living will be dangerous.
4 Preventing forest fires (which, like bushfires, are a subset of wildfires) first became a largescale concern after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as people worried that our World
War II enemies would target the mainland. The Forest Service enlisted an ingenious not-so-secret agent: Smokey Bear. The Smokey Bear Wildfire Prevention campaign is still on the job; in fact, it’s the longest-running public service advertising campaign in American history.
5 The worst wildfire in terms of lives lost was the 1871 Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin, in which at least 1,200 people died. Never heard of it? Perhaps that’s because it was overshadowed by another terrible blaze that happened the same night: the Great Chicago Fire.
6 Humans still cause more than four out of five wildfires, through carelessly tossed cigarettes, poorly extinguished campfires, and arson. Another major sparker of wildfires is lightning. According to the Natural History Museum of Utah, lightning strikes the earth more than 100,000 times a day. Anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of those strikes cause fires.
7 One of the most bizarre humansourced wildfires occurred in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest, in 2017. It wasn’t a camping bonfire that got out of control; it was a gender-reveal party, CNN reported. A man shot a rifle at a target laced with an explosive substance called Tannerite. The explosion was rigged to produce the appropriately colored cloud of smoke: pink or blue. Instead, it touched off a fire that ultimately burned 47,000 acres of the forest.
8 One of the many challenges of dealing with wildfires is that they can overtake even a very fast human. According to National Geographic, the fires can travel up to 14 miles per hour, or about one mile every four minutes.
9 Unlike people, wildfires move uphill much more quickly than downhill. Fire needs air to burn, and a steep hill allows more air to come from below the blaze than from above it, which in turn encourages the fire to climb.
10 It’s no wonder, then, that to join a “hotshot” crew— a specially trained team that travels to the most dangerous fires— firefighters have to meet certain physical requirements. These include running 1.5 miles in 10.6 minutes or less and completing 40 situps in a minute.
11 Wildfires also burn money. In 1991, the Forest Service spent 13 percent of its budget on “wildfire suppression.” By 2025, fires will eat up two thirds of the agency’s money, at an estimated cost of $1.8 billion.
12 If a wildfire gets large enough, it can actually affect the local weather. Researchers who studied the July 2014 El Portal Fire in Yosemite National
Park learned that the wildfire created updrafts and eddies that changed the wind patterns more than a mile away. The blaze also caused the formation of dense clouds called pyrocumulus clouds.
13 Beetles of the genus Melanophila are actually attracted to fires—they’re sometimes called fire chasers. They prefer to lay their eggs in freshly burned (or still-smoldering) wood, according to the American Museum of Natural History. It turns out their eggs are safer from predators in a justburned landscape.