How wildfire works.

Natural disasters are everywhere. They determine how we live, where we live, how we go about our daily lives, how we protect ourselves, and a multitude of other things. But wildfire is the only natural disaster that we, as a species, still try to fight.

So we have to be prepared to discuss how wildfire works in order to fight it most effectively, and that’s exactly what this article is about!

Let’s breakdown what fire actually is first. Fire is a mixture of three things: heat, oxygen, and fuel. This is also known as the fire triangle. Without even one of those three things, fire cannot occur. Now, during the summer, we have the heat portion covered. Oxygen is all around us so that’s also not too hard to come by. All that leaves us with is fuel, which is something we can absolutely control.

Photo by Anasmeister on Unsplash

When a flame ignites in a forest, it can be from a ton of different sources. It could be as simple as someone flicking a cigarette outside of their window or someone starting heavy machinery with sparks flying off of it. It could just be that it’s so hot that something small enough catches in the right environment and causes a massive wildfire.

Either way, a huge portion of it is contingent on the fact that there is fuel for the fire to move around in. If there’s no fuel, the fire can’t stay alive for very long.

That’s one of the things we tackle with defensible space. If you’re new, defensible space is a method of wildfire prevention that residents use to secure structures in case of a fire near the home. It requires them to remove fuel from 5-100 feet from the home in order to protect them from a fire burning their property. This can be in the form of vegetation management, home hardening, flame retardant, or a combination. 

Now, back to the wildfire itself. Fire travels along the fuel that surrounds it. If you have a campfire and you throw sticks in the campfire, the fire won’t leave the campfire because there isn’t any fuel outside of it.

And once it starts to spread, with high winds and an especially hot fire season, wildfires can spread at more than a football field a minute, making them extremely hard to contain. 

Now another interesting thing about fire is that it creates it’s own weather. All of the heat and wind and gas contained within a megafire quite frequently makes the area surrounding it highly unpredictable. That’s why we require all citizens in times of emergency to evacuate.

We can never fully predict how a fire will react but we know approximately what the path is and who is in danger. By creating defensible space around the home and removing fuel, you provide the fire with less mobility, which is exactly what we want.