![]() They have introduced flammable grasses, overgrazed in the mountains and felled forests in ways that overturned the prior system of ecological checks and balances, suppressed good fires as well as bad, and erected towns in what might be regarded as the fire equivalent of flood plains. If people vanished, fires would still thrive, and they would here and there rush down the foothills like avalanches and storm to the sea. It’s a place that nature built to burn, often explosively. (We no longer dynamite or torch city blocks to deprive fire of fuel, as used to happen as late as 1906 when San Francisco burned.)Ĭalifornia is a special case. That’s one of many differences between wildland and urban fire. Big wildland fires are contained by burning out swathes of fuel in advance of the oncoming flames. If the fire is spreading by embers riding winds like the Santa Ana, the fire might burn until it reaches the Pacific Ocean. Depending on the flames, a fire line might be the width of a shovel or as wide as a football field. It’s what wildland firefighters do when they build fire lines-a sort of waterless moat around a fire-by removing a strip of vegetation. How Video Game Designers Peek Inside Their Players’ LivesĬontrolling fuel is fundamental to any strategy of fire management. What Real Meteorologists Wish You Knew About Your Weather App But Professors Are Grappling With Something Even More Challenging. ![]() ![]() ![]() The 2000s Video Game With an Unexpected Lesson for Today’s Transportation Debates ![]()
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