Background
Forest fires can burn millions of acres of land at shockingly fast rates, consuming everything in their path and leaving ashes in its wake. As stated by National Geographic, these rolling flames travel up to 14 miles an hour, which converts to about a four-minute-mile pace, and can overtake the average human in minutes. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic has derailed mitigation efforts—such as homeowner assistance programs and controlled burns—due to concerns over social distancing, respiratory dangers, and other priorities. By the end of June, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection had responded to nearly double the number of fires than it had in the entirety of 2019.
Causes
Humans
Nearly 85 percent of wildland fires in the United States are caused by humans. Human-caused fires result from campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, equipment use and malfunctions, negligently discarded cigarettes, and intentional acts of arson which could very well ignite huge fires.
Lightning
Lightning is described as having two components—leaders and strokes. The leader is the probing feeler sent from the cloud. The return streaks of light are a series of strokes that produce the actual lightning bolt or flash that is seen in the sky. There are two types of lightning—cold lightning and hot lightning. Cold lightning is a return stroke with intense electrical current but of relatively short duration. Hot lightning has currents with less voltage, but these occur for a longer period. Fires usually begin by unusually long-lasting hot lightning bolts.
Fuel
Fuel is any flammable material surrounding a fire, including trees, grasses, brush, even homes, and other objects. The greater an area's fuel load, the more intense the fire is likely to be, and the faster it will multiply. The most forest fire-prone state is California, which lost 259,148 acres of land to 8,194 forest fires in 2019.
Air
Air supplies the oxygen a fire needs to continue burning. California forests are often made worse by the hot, dry Santa Ana winds, which can carry a spark for miles, allowing for a faster spread of fires.
Impacts
Benefits
For most people, a forest fire is synonymous with destruction and disaster. But there are some kinds of forest fires that benefit the environment. Well-thought-out and well-managed burns can be incredibly beneficial for forest management. They can stop an out-of-control wildfire from worsening. The technique is called backburning, and it involves setting a controlled fire in the path of the approaching wildfire. All the flammable material is burnt up and extinguished. When the wildfire approaches, there’s no more fuel left and so it extinguishes.
Harms
Slash and burn fires are set every day to destroy large sections of forests, harming habitats and living creatures. Of course, these forest fires don’t just remove trees; they kill and displace wildlife, alter water cycles and soil fertility, and endanger the lives and livelihoods of local communities. They also can rage out of control and further destroy the environment. In 1997, fires set intentionally to clear forests in Indonesia escalated into one of the largest wildfires in recorded history. Hundreds of people died; millions of acres burned; already at-risk species like orangutans perished by the hundreds; and a smoke and ash haze hung over Southeast Asia for months, reducing visibility and causing acute health conditions that impacted communities around the place.
The destruction caused by forest fires in the United States has significantly increased in the last two decades. An average of 72,400 forest fires cleared an average of 7 million acres of U.S. land each year since 2000, double the number of acres scorched by wildfires in the 1990s. In 2015, the largest forest fire season recorded in U.S. history burned more than 10 million acres of forests.
Most Costly Forest Fires in History
Portugal Wildfires, Portugal, 2017
Indonesia Forest Fires, Indonesia, 2015
Siberia Wildfires, Russia, 2019
Daxing'anling Fire, China, 1987
Indonesia Wildfires, Indonesia, 1997
Fort McMurray Wildfire, Alberta, Canada, 2016
New South Wales Bushfires, Australia, 2019
Black Friday Bushfires, Australia, 1939
Black Friday Bushfires, Australia, 1939
Attica Wildfires, Greece, 2018
Camp Fire, California, USA, 2018
Tubbs Fire, California, USA, 2017
Great Fire of 1910, Idaho and Montana, USA, 1910
Amazon Rainforest Fires, Brazil and others, 2019
Sources
Written by Althea Ocomen from Manila City, Phillippines
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