Death by Fire | Hacker News Reader

Death by Fire

longreads.com

78 pointsDiabloD316 comments

I live in Colorado and see the fires regularly. Just about two months ago I stepped outside on a weekend morning and smelled smoke, then saw a firebomber fly overhead towards the mountains. It's a strange thing to get used to, though I'm not near the forests, just close enough to get a tax-payer funded airshow once or twice a year.

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Beautifully written. While I see the horror, it read more like a romance. The author loves fire despite her ruthlessness

Yes reminds me a little of Cormack McCarthy.

Incredibly well-written and a window onto a life I prefer not to contemplate

Norman Maclean's "Young Men and Fire" tells the story of the Mann Gulch incident. Recommended.

Read quite a bit about it over the weekend. For anybody else who's interested in it:

- South Canyon Fire: https://youtu.be/ZzGTjfTHihU

- Yarnell Hill Fire: https://www.outsideonline.com/1926426/19-true-story-yarnell-...

The last paragraph reminded me of the end of "A River Runs Through It" by Norman Maclean.

Now that's an essay

Perhaps the idea of having forests near population centers should be reevaluated. Clearing a few km of city-bordering forest will create a gap in which fire will not spread, if there is nothing flammable on the ground. The aesthetics of having "natural trees" nearby is not worth the risk, and polluted air from forest fires definitely doesn't help the overall health.

Outdoor fires (which include wildfires) result in ~50 deaths annually in the U.S.[0] You want to ban trees for that? I'm curious about your thoughts on how we should deal with the actual problems we have. For example, cooking-related residential fires, which kill ~150 people annually in the U.S.[1] Clearly it's not worth the risk to cook our food.

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[0] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v9i2.pdf

[1] https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/res_bldg_...

The economic damage from ruined buildings, evacuations, burned property/vehicles/etc is another factor. Its like living in a cheap wooden house in tornado valley. I'm not for "banning trees", there should be just a safety zone which separate vulnerable urban/suburban housing and forest zones. That way fire will not become an emergency in principle. I'm just advocating for a system where firebreaks are several km wide and prevent winds from spreading fire material(which short firebreaks fails to do). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak (this is the general concept ) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensible_space_(fire_control...

Who pays for cleaning the gap? How do you guarantee that the city does not extend into it? Is pollution from fire offset by the cleaning effects of trees?

People are building in forests so that they can have trees by their houses.

I guess requiring huge setbacks would discourage that behavior.

Also, forest fires are more or less inevitable, at least, until you decide not to have forests. Overdoing fire suppression often leads to bigger fires (because fuel builds up). There might be room to make policy decisions that minimize the amount of pollution they produce, eliminating it isn't an achievable goal.

>forest fires are more or less inevitable

But with wide firebreaks they would become just air pollution nuisance, not an emergency.

>because fuel builds up

Its fixing the problem at the source, by removing fuel from future fires. A several km zone where nothing is flammable will stop almost all fires.

People will just keep building into these gaps. It's not like forests moved close to buildings but buildings moved closer to forests.

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