Timothy Egan: In Fire Country
[Timothy Egan worked for The Times for 18 years – as Pacific Northwest correspondent and a national enterprise reporter. In 2001, he was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team that wrote the series “How Race Is Lived in America.” He is the author of several books, including “The Worst Hard Time,” a history of the Dust Bowl, for which he won the National Book Award, and most recently, “The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America.”]
...It’s early in the fire season, and the West has been lucky so far. It was exactly 100 years ago this month that the granddaddy of all wildfires — the Big Burn of 1910 — came through. Those founding forest rangers called it, “The night the mountains roared.” Over 36 hours, 3 million acres burned in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana, nearly 100 people died, and five towns fell to flame.
How big is 3 million acres? The size of Connecticut. This year to date there have about 38,000 wildfires tallied by the National Interagency Fire Center, burning a total of 2 million acres. That’s wildfires for all of 2010. The Big Burn was a single fire, a million acres larger than the total for this year.
In 1910, people who lived near ground that could combust and kill were petrified. Fire was an unknowable force. When that fire blew up, riding hurricane force winds of 65 miles an hour, there was nothing an army of 10,000 could do except run into mine shafts or duck into shallow streams or hide and pray.
We now know so much more about wildfire. Or do we?...
Read entire article at NYT
...It’s early in the fire season, and the West has been lucky so far. It was exactly 100 years ago this month that the granddaddy of all wildfires — the Big Burn of 1910 — came through. Those founding forest rangers called it, “The night the mountains roared.” Over 36 hours, 3 million acres burned in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho and Montana, nearly 100 people died, and five towns fell to flame.
How big is 3 million acres? The size of Connecticut. This year to date there have about 38,000 wildfires tallied by the National Interagency Fire Center, burning a total of 2 million acres. That’s wildfires for all of 2010. The Big Burn was a single fire, a million acres larger than the total for this year.
In 1910, people who lived near ground that could combust and kill were petrified. Fire was an unknowable force. When that fire blew up, riding hurricane force winds of 65 miles an hour, there was nothing an army of 10,000 could do except run into mine shafts or duck into shallow streams or hide and pray.
We now know so much more about wildfire. Or do we?...