'The fact that a fire can essentially become self-sustaining outside the wildland, in an urban environment — it’s a reemergence of an old problem,' Weather_West tells dwallacewells
An aerial view of one of the Boulder County neighborhoods which burned to the ground on Thursday.
There are lots of people calling this a Colorado forest fire. It was absolutely not a forest fire, by any stretch of the imagination. It arguably started as a wildfire, mainly as a brush and grass fire, with some woodland near the point of origin. But it was a wildfire that became an urban conflagration pretty quickly — just a matter of hours into the event.
I think the next thing it hit was the shopping center, where there is a Costco and a Target and a bunch of other cookie cutter suburban kind of stories. Superior is not one of those towns in the woodlands, in the WUI. It’s a sprawly suburb, with a lot of tract homes. Shopping plazas with grotesque, large parking lots. The fire burned a lot of the structures in this context, which was kind shocking.
And there is this sea of ash and embers, literally a sea flying around. And there’s other videos of just the landscaping in the parking lot: the brown grass, the trees they planted in the medians, they’re all just igniting from this ember storm. Or thinking back to the Oakland Hills fire in the 1990s — that was only like a 2,500 acre fire, but it was massively devastating because it burned mainly through neighborhoods. There were some pockets of parkland, but it burned thousands of structures and killed dozens of people. I don’t think this is quite on that magnitude in terms of structures, at least. And I don’t think we know anything about casualties yet. But in other ways it was kind of similar.
Fire consumes a home in a suburban neighborhood in Superior, Colorado on December 30. Photo: Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images But some of these conditions make those lessons harder, don’t they? When wind is 80 or 90 or 100 miles-per-hour, there’s not much firefighting you can do — which is something I think most Americans still don’t appreciate about these fires.
Yeah. I mean, it’s still miles on a side, over the course of a couple hours. But even a really small fire — imagine trying to put out a campfire sized fire if the winds are 90 miles an hour and there’s flammable stuff around, I mean, that’s not an easy task. If the winds are 90 miles an hour, the fire can be a mile away in minutes.
There’s the geographic and ecological context — this fire was initially brush and grass fire, not a forest fire. And then there was this big urban component to it as well. But then there’s the weather and climate context. The weather context is pretty obvious. The winds were insane Thursday.
What about the winds? You hear people talking about climate intensifying wind patterns but there doesn’t seem to be much research yet to back that up. But instead of them coming during “fall” conditions, they’re effectively coming during “summer” conditions. But I think this probably did come genuinely as a surprise to a lot of the people who lived in the places that burned Thursday, in the sense that they were not living in that wildland landscape and yet these whole neighborhoods burned anyway.
And it’s interesting that this happened right at the boundary, this fire literally started precisely at that geographic and cultural boundary, right at the base of the foothills and spread into this other world. This was a small fire that spanned a pretty wide and pretty unusual cross section of geography — physical and cultural and otherwise. But it’s also so recent. It’s still less than 24 hours ago that this started, so I think a lot of us haven’t processed it yet.I mean, I’m doing all right.
The obvious line is that climate change is a global problem. But a more specific bit is that we keep getting surprised. I mean, I honestly don’t think any climate scientist would have honestly predicted that in 2021, the glacial valleys of British Columbia would see Death Valley-like temperatures. I mean, I’m still completely blown away by the fact that it was 120 degrees in British Columbia this summer. That’s just one example.
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