Fire disaster in Spokane
On candles, explosive demolition, and the need for innovations to deal with the awful new reality of wildland-to-urban fire outbreaks
Devastating wildfires have encroached into Spokane, Washington, forcing thousands of people to evacuate and probably destroying dozens of structures. The evacuation orders at one point were expanding multiple times an hour, indicating just how quickly the fires were spreading.
■ American cities often suffered huge conflagrations in the 1800s, sparked by human activities taking place in the middle of highly combustible cities. Candles, broken gas pipes, and other human-related causes were common, but innovations like fire hydrants (patented in 1869) and automatic indoor sprinklers (patented in 1879), along with social practices (like insurance policies that rewarded fire prevention) had substantially curbed that type of fire by about the 1920s.
■ When big fires happen in cities today, it’s almost always because a wildfire crosses into an urban area from the outside. It’s still early in this disaster, but that looks like what happened in Spokane.
■ The evidence is pretty strong that at least some measure of climate warming is here to stay -- irreversible in the short to medium term, no matter what we do to reduce carbon emissions. And even a slight increase in average temperatures is likely to increase the frequency of drought in large parts of the world, which in turn makes it probable that wildfires will grow larger on average than they used to be. It’s a pretty dire situation when half a state is covered by an “extreme” fire weather outlook, as happened in Washington at the outbreak of the Spokane fires.
■ Some technological and policy innovations are needed, preferably soon. It just isn’t possible to deploy enough firefighting labor, equipment, or water to put down fires that expand to hundreds or thousands of acres that incorporate urban areas. People aren’t going to want a return to the old days, when preemptive explosive demolitions were used to create firebreaks. If the macro-scale climate conditions cannot be reversed, then community-scale efforts to deal with the resulting high-risk reality will need to follow.