How Fighting Wildfires Makes Them Worse
Today's wildfires burn, on average, twice the amount of land they did in 1970. The reason? We've been working too hard to put them out. Thanks to our Patreon patrons: - Today I Found Out...
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Survivors of the 1871 fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin – which vaporized 1.5 million acres of forestand killed 1500 people – reported a wall of flame five miles wide that traveled at90 miles per hour and tossed trains into the air. Four decades later, an even larger infernoroared through the Rocky Mountains, scorching an area the size of Connecticut. These epicwildfires, and similar ones in between, helped spawn the U.S. Forest Service, and forgedits aggressive policy to not only prevent wildfires, but to smother any that did startby no later than 10 AM the next day. For a time, this policy seemed to work – theannual number of fires and area burned plummeted between 1920 and 1970. But fewer fires ledto denser, more flammable forests, packed with the combustible needles of...
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Survivors of the 1871 fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin – which vaporized 1.5 million acres of forestand killed 1500 people – reported a wall of flame five miles wide that traveled at90 miles per hour and tossed trains into the air. Four decades later, an even larger infernoroared through the Rocky Mountains, scorching an area the size of Connecticut. These epicwildfires, and similar ones in between, helped spawn the U.S. Forest Service, and forgedits aggressive policy to not only prevent wildfires, but to smother any that did startby no later than 10 AM the next day. For a time, this policy seemed to work – theannual number of fires and area burned plummeted between 1920 and 1970. But fewer fires ledto denser, more flammable forests, packed with the combustible needles of...
