So a fire during a temperature inversion is basically a giant vacuum bomb. It starves itself of oxygen and slows itself down. The bad part of that is the smoke is so heavy that you can't bring in air support.
But let's say your vacuum bomb works, or maybe a massive nitrogen bomb that pulls all the O2 out of the air. You have to realize that the fire area is still chock full of animals and sometimes people.
People see the dramatic images and they really misunderstand what is happening. There are two things to know about these images.
1. They are cherry-picking the absolute hottest parts of the fire.
2. Look closely. Many of these are taken in relatively low light. It makes it look like the fires of Hell, but these are relatively long exposures.
It is true that fires will sometimes make long, hot runs. But if you hike through a burn area shortly after a fire, what you'll see is
- large areas where all the big timber is still standing
- relatively small areas of total devastation, which are always the ones that show up in the news pictures.
The giant fire that almost took out our house in 2018 had frightening photo after frightening photo in the news, but about 90% of the burn area was low-intensity.
Then there's the more germane problem. We do want to protect lives, property and infrastructure, but we do NOT want to put these fires out quickly. The simple fact is that even this year California will not burn enough to even reach historical burn averages that were typical for thousands of years before the era of fire suppression.
Why do we want these to burn?
Selfish reason: low-intensity burns often are better than high-intensity burns rarely. Low-intensity burns do almost no damage to life, property or infrastructure. You can outwalk them if you have to. Easily. They might take a month to grow to 10,000 acres.
Eco reasons
- many species in the Western US depend on fires. Locally, that would be giant sequoias, knobcone pine, golden eardrops, congdon's sedge and many, many more. Without fire, these species literally would go extinct.
- fires create open areas that allow other species to thrive. After our fires, where the forests opened up, we had huge blankets of hyacinth (unbelievably beautiful), star tulip, pretty face and others.
- these blooms create all kinds of seed crops for songbirds and small critters who then support the larger predators.
- the "fire followers" are essential for supporting other animal populations.
Studies in Montana have shown that, "on winter ranges where fires have not burned for more than 20 years, an acre of winter range will typically yield from 30 to 120 pounds of forage [for elk]. On winter ranges that burned in the last year or two, however, the production typically jumps to 200 to 3000 pounds of forage per acre—over a 20-fold increase in forage production."
We actually need MORE fire in California and the Western US, not less. But we need more of the fire that helps protect us. As an index, we typically burn about 1-2 million acres per year in California. This year has broken the record and it goes down with 2003 as the only year in recorded history when we will burn 2 million acres. This year we could hit three million by the time we see the first rains.
But for perspective, before 1800, and AVERAGE year, not a record, was 4.5 million acres. So double our *record* year. But, and here's a critical piece, roughly 50% of that was intentional burning by Indians (and yes, our local tribal council asks that we use their tribal name or call them Indians, not Native American, First Nations or whatever). The Indians, of course, did not have aircraft and fire engines, so they protected their homes in the obvious way. They burned around their homes every year. This they did not just for safety, but because it encourages the growth of oak trees (their major food source, over half their calories), dogbane (necessary for making thread/rope they usef to make baskets which, in turn, were necessary for collecting, storing and cooking food), and just in general promoted meadows, which support populations of game animals and, as we might say today, are the repositories of diversity in the eco-system.
So in short, not only do we not have the magical technology tool for putting out fires, we don't even WANT it. What we want and need is
- much more fire in California. Fire ecologists estimate we have to burn at least 20,000,000 acres in the next few years to get on top of our problem
- more human-started, low-intensity fire in general
- and maybe some great new tech that would make protecting infrastructure and property easier.
I have mixed feelings about the last one. If we get too good at that, it just convinces more fools like me to build in high-fire areas. I was so ill-educated on fire when I moved here over 17 years ago. Totally clueless.