#CarrFire in Northern California so big it is making it’s own weather

Classic Homer Simpson Doh! moments.

Amass a large enough amount of flammable material that when ignited, it appears to create it’s own weather effects.
A) The fire draws in greater and greater amounts of air for sustaining the fire with oxygen.
B) Fires cause convection of an accelerated schedule.
C) Incoming winds, convection draw and coriolis influence cause rising columns of hot air to rotate.

Without supercell air circulation and jet stream influences, firenados are simple dire devils.

There are many times in recorded history when man caused or experienced blazes that initiated local weather effects.

* 1) Dresden firebombing in 1945
* 2) Chinese capital of Chongqing firebombed in 1939
* 3) Firebombing British cities during the blitz, e.g. Coventry firebombing in 1940
* 4) Tokyo firebombing in 1945

Most of these firebombings were planned to utilize local weather to maximize the fires.

Other major fires in urban centers had the misfortune of fire ignition occurring during weather that aids the blaze:
* 1) The Great London fire in 1666
* 2) The Chicago fire in 1871
* 3) The San Francisco fire caused by the 1906 Earthquake

Other fires throughout civilizations history occurred and in many places convinced local populations to build with stone or brick. Only, many of those locations no longer require building with nonflammable masonry.

Forests are natural firetraps. As fallen debris pile up, it is advantageous and supports many of a forests smaller creatures. When the fallen decris builds too large a cache, that debris can sustain a large hot fire that sterilizes Earth’s surface layers and cooks the cambium layers in trees whose naturally fire resistant bark normally protects them.

While it is easiest to point out places where man’s interaction with forests resulted in disastrous fires; one must understand that nature if perfectly capable of igniting forests without man’s aid.

* Example 1) “Naturalist Henry David Thoreau, though known as the Sage of Walden, accidentally, but carelessly, sparked a life-threatening fire that blighted 300 acres in 1844, while he was cooking fish in the Concord, MA woods.”

* Example 2) “The Miramichi Fire – 1825; cause unknown.

* Example 3) “During the late summer of 1910, a searing drought combined with high-velocity August windstorms to create a fiery holocaust in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The fires also laid a major challenge at the feet of the newly established U.S. Forest Service, which was charged with fighting the fires.”
…
“In mid-August, a lightning storm ignited the largest and longest-burning of Oregon’s 1910 fires on the Crater National Forest (now Rogue River-Siskiyou). More than fifteen large fires (over 1,000 acres) burned both east and south of Medford. The rapidly spreading Brushy Hill Fire in the Siskiyou Mountains a few miles from Ashland caused merchants to close their businesses, and all able-bodied men “assembled on the fireline to save the city.” While leading an inexperienced crew of townsmen, Ranger Claude Dubois, whose hands were badly burned, reportedly went without sleep for fifty-five hours.

In the Cascade Range, a fire burned much of the South Fork of the Rogue River Canyon near Prospect, and another torched several thousand acres of dense forest west of Union Creek. Careless berry-pickers caused a large fire on Huckleberry Mountain, just west of Crater Lake National Park, and arsonists set blazes close to the town of Butte Falls.

The Cat Hill fire east of Butte Falls was the biggest conflagration in the Crater National Forest. Burning at least 30,000 acres, the fire swept from the slopes of Mount McLoughlin northward along the spine of the Cascades. The Oregonian described the situation at Cat Hill as “almost like a tremendous explosion, scattering sheets of flame in all directions.” Forest Supervisor Martin Erickson and his crew of Greek railroad laborers took refuge in the shallow Twin Ponds “to keep from being roasted.” Arriving at the Medford depot in the smoke-filled Rogue Valley on August 20, companies E and M of the 1st Infantry headed to join firefighters at Cat Hill and elsewhere.

In many cases, firefighting efforts simply helped deflect the flame fronts from ranches, towns, and valuable stands of timber. The fires were not successfully suppressed until the fall rains provided relief.”

Example 3’s fires initiated America’s aggressive fire detection and suppression program that allowed fallen debris in forests to build into very dangerous amounts; leaving a legacy of recent fires that remind man that fallen forest debris needs to me maintained at safe levels.

* Example 4) “Silverton Fire in 1868, Oregon; Worst recorded fire in state’s history”

* Example 5) Canada Forest fires: “Based on data in the National Forestry Database, over 8000 fires occur each year, and burn an average of over 2.1 million hectares. Also, lightning causes about 50% of all fires but accounts for about 85% of the annual area burned.”