To Firefighters: Thanks For Being There

With the ongoing destructive fire season underway in California, and we have at least one of our own likely out in the thick of it – maybe more than one – it seemed to be a good time to look a wildfires and how easy it is to go from a small controlled fire to a roaring dragon that engulfs and consumes everything in its path, with absolutely no mercy to anything or anyone in its way.

The long background of the SoCal fire season is described quite well in this article, a 1996 article about how the SoCal fires got their real start.  https://la.indymedia.org/news/2007/10/208946.php

There is more here about the current fire season in California, and how “climate”, not a bankrupt PG&E Co., is deemed by the current governor as responsible for the current disaster, which is consuming not just housing but farmlands and vineyards.   The denial of reality in California politicians is appalling:  https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/10/29/california-democrats-waste-billions-on-useless-climate-alarmist-schemes-while-the-state-burns-uncontrollably/

There is a list of “the 10 worst fires of all time”, but a shorter, more relevant group is here, starting with two wildfires that occurred on the same day, under different conditions:

The Chicago Fire  of 1871 – https://www.nationalgeographic.org/news/chicago-fire-1871-and-great-rebuilding/

While the fire itself did start somehow in the O’Learys’ barn, that poor cow of theirs has been eternally blamed for it, when she probably had little to do with it.

The Peshtigo Marsh fire of 1871 started Oct. 8, same day as the Chicago fire:   https://www.fireengineering.com/2007/10/08/247163/remembering-the-great-peshtigo-fire-of-1871/

Its source and fuel was the trash left behind by lumber company employees, trash such as piles of coarse sawdust and junk wood such as small branches which are unusable in the lumber industry, and also by small fires they had left behind without putting them out. The weather conditions for this disaster were perfect.  The Peshtigo Fire was so intense that it created its own wind, sending burning debris across Green Bay to the peninsula. There is more at this link:   https://medium.com/@chrisnelsonMET/the-1871-peshtigo-fire-how-my-great-great-great-grandparents-survived-the-deadliest-fire-in-u-s-e627efd17d13

The Big Burn of 1910, which led to developing methods to fight fire in forested areas, was in Montana.  https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a1961/4219853/

From the article: But the story that would come to define the Big Blowup of 1910 — becoming part of Western mythology and helping to cement federal firefighting policy for the following 90 years — was that of 40-year-old Edward Pulaski.

The forest ranger was leading 35 to 40 firefighters in a retreat from a wall of flames descending upon their position at Placer Creek, 10 miles southwest of Wallace. Unbeknownst to the crew, some townspeople had set a backfire — a last-ditch attempt to clear out fuel and save Wallace from the approaching blaze. As the two fires raced toward them, Pulaski ordered his men into an abandoned mining tunnel and told them all to lie facedown in the mud. As heat and flames lapped at the tunnel’s entrance, Pulaski covered it with blankets and fought the fire with his bare hands, until he blacked out from smoke inhalation like the rest of his crew. – article

The Pulaski tool bears his name:   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulaski_(tool)

The Pulaski is a special hand tool used in fighting wildfires[1] which combines an axe and an adze in one head. Similar to a cutter mattock, it has a rigid handle of wood, plastic, or fiberglass. The Pulaski is used for constructing firebreaks, able to both dig soil and chop wood. It is also well adapted for trail construction, and can be used for gardening and other outdoor work for general excavation and digging holes in root-bound or hard soil.

In my area, there is an abundance of woodlands and clear spaces, all sitting on top of very, very ancient dunes that form part of the scoop of the Great Lakes. That’s a  leftover from the creation, advances and retreats of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which began melting when the Wisconsin glacial period ended, sending an incredible volume of water down what is now the Mississippi Valley and eastward along what is now the St. Lawrence Seaway, partly forming the outflow of the St. Laurence and the Hudson River Valley.  http://greatriver.com/Ice_Age/glacier.htm

The Wisconsin ice sheet was large enough to connect the North American continent to Greenland, while in the west, near Alaska, a string of islands providing stepping stones across the ice from Siberia to North America.  Could anyone hunting for game have walked over here from Siberia? Absolutely. They were doing that as far back as 40,000 years ago, maybe longer.

With all the ongoing arguments about which way the planet is going to go, we’re in a solar minimum, have been since 2006 when it first startled NASA’s solar physicists by not coming out of that dormant period as energetically as it normally should. Few sunspots reappeared, and sometimes none. Sunspots denote solar activity; lots of them mean the Sun is busy, busy, busy. Sparse numbers and small size mean it is napping, and zero sunspots mean it’s gone to sleep. And right now the Sun is sleeping; the usual protection we get from its magnetic shield is weakening, and with the Earth’s magnetic field itself also weakening, leading to a switch of the magnetic poles, we’re in a quandary: will the Earth burn up, as AOC and Extinction Rebellion claim? Or are we facing another Maunder Minimum?

But in regard to wildfires in the west and the sources of those devastating events, the contrast between the boneheaded approach to what California does, and the way the Dept. of Natural Resources around here handles potential fire risks, like undergrowth and overgrown woodlands that are fuel sources, is the difference between brain-dead stupid, and the truly smart approach.

And the firefighters out there trying to control the fires in the West deserve our applause and thanks for being there, no matter what.

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Bravo Zulu