The sad wildfires in spain made me wonder this, especially as climate change means there’ll be more fires. I know groups like disabled people and their families are slower to get out, causing risk. But is it more that the fire is too fast, or that some people just don’t leave fast enough?
Just wondering what could be done to reduce deaths.
It can be both. Usually authorities try to evacuate people before the fire approaches too much, but sometimes wind comes up and spreads the fire faster. Some places are very difficult to access, with narrow curvy roads through flammable forest. Sometimes these roads don’t get closed down quickly enough and people get trapped. Mountainous terrain on fire gets chaotic easily.
May this be a fresh and moist summer, may the water stay around and keep us safe!
Edit: What can be done? What has been done here so far is the introduction of stricter rules about cleaning land (lots of brushcutting and mowing, great profits for the fossil fuel industry), and giving more money to fire fighting mechanisms (which introduces a certain tendency to commit arson to get more funds).
I believe we need to repair and shape water retention landscapes in the long term and respect water, soil, and non-human beings as conscious creatures to negotiate the building of these landscapes with. It would be a work of generations and few people are at the moment willing to think that far ahead, it’s always just reacting to the many manifestations of the polycrisis and desperately slapping more technology on top of everything.
Yep the fire service in the UK do a lot to prevent fires eg reducing litter in alleyways. Preventing is always better
One bit of difference between forests in the UK and those in the western US and parts of Australia is that the forests in the second group included fires as part of the lifecycle of the forest. The release of seeds occurs after a fire and some trees are able to resist fires of a certain temperature.
The problem is that white settlers saw the fires as bad, doing a really good job at preventing forest fires. The problem with doing that is that the forests now have a far higher energy density than they were evolved for, so modern fires are a lot worse.