Ive seen one forest fire, the one above Taos NM about 12 years back. Amazing, as it burned its way up the mountain you could watch the trees explode like lighting matches. Nothing like this thing though.
Firenado
- Thread starter Maggot
- Start date
When I worked on the UU Bar in Cimarron the USFS would pay us to fight forest fires. One afternoon we were sent to work on a fire started in dark timber by lighting. We had been up since 4:00 AM working cattle and it was a bitch hauling buckets, toe sacks, pulaski's and shovels up that steep terrain. We started working the perimeter of the fire when one of the Ponderosa's a 100 yards or so away crowned. It was like a 60 foot match getting lit. The heat blast was incredible and it sounded like a jet taking off. Drove into Durango at night when the Missionary Ridge fire was raging in 2002 and it was like something out of the apocalypse. A great read is Norman MacLean's "Young Men and Fire" which is a historical account of the Mann Gulch Fire that killed 13 Smoke Jumpers. His son wrote a book about the South Canyon Fire that took the live of 14 fire fighters. Have the greatest respect for wildfire crews and it is damn hard and dangerous work.
The same phenomenon had been witnessed during the firebombing of Tokyo in 1944. At one point, survivor accounts recalled how vicious winds swept inward towards the firestorm, strong enough to blow people who were fleeing the flames back towards the conflagration. Those who managed to withstand the updrafts' sheer power did not fare well either, as the suction of the updrafts left a zone of zero oxygen all around the fire, effectively suffocating those caught in that zone. When rescue parties were sent out to survey the rubble after the flames had died down, they discovered heaps of bodies well outside the actual zone of the burning. These bodies had no indications of burn wounds on them. They had simply suffocated to death.
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