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Rescuers continue to search for survivors in Lahaina, Hawaii, following the catastrophic wildfire that devastated the town last week on the island of Maui . It is one of the deadliest fires in the United States in recent times. With 99 confirmed deaths, it exceeds the 85 who perished in the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. And crews have only been able to search a quarter of Lahaina, so the death toll is expected to rise even further. At least 2,200 structures have been destroyed.
It's like going back to polio
In the 19th century, it made perfect sense that fires like the Chicago fire of 1871 would burn swaths of a city almost unchecked. There were no fire or building codes. There were also no firefighting forces or a solid hydr Phone Number List aulic infrastructure. By the beginning of the 20th century, all that had been improved. Cities were safer for a time. But now sprawling urban fires have returned , and they do so with surprising frequency and intensity.
" We thought that urban fires had disappeared , that the one in San Francisco in 1906 had been the last. It's like seeing polio again. We had fixed it . But we must maintain hygiene, we must continue vaccinating."
Fire where we didn't expect it
And the fire in Lahaina shows that it can burn in places where no one expects a catastrophic wildfire : a modern city on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, whose ecosystems saw wildfires only rarely in prehistory.
It is not the only recent example of fires devastating surprising places. In 2021, a rare wildfire broke out in late December, outside of fire season, in Boulder, Colorado, burning more than 1,000 buildings. In 2016, the Tubbs Fire devastated Santa Rosa, California, and surrounding communities, destroying 5,600 structures and killing 22 people. "These are not burned areas, but suburbs ," clarifies Thomas Cova, who studies wildfire evacuations at the University of Utah. They are modern streets, modern sidewalks, manicured lawns. "In this changing climate, it is much more difficult to determine where fires will occur, at what time of year and with what intensity."
On Maui, as with wildfires around the world, there is no single factor contributing to the flames. Overall, climate change is making wildfires worse. A warmer atmosphere can absorb more moisture from the landscape. Climate change is also making droughts more frequent, longer and more severe, so there is less moisture to wet the landscape.
Add to this the strong winds – gusts of up to 130 kilometers per hour that carried the flames at a speed of 1.5 kilometers per minute through Lahaina – and a single spark was enough to cause a rapidly spreading fire. "Once a structure catches fire, if the wind blows like that, it becomes a blowtorch against the neighboring house."
How do invasive species affect us?
These winds on Maui were also dry, which helped absorb remaining moisture from vegetation to convert it into fuel. That fuel appears to have been invasive grasses that European settlers brought with them when they established plantations. When the rains are abundant, these plants grow very much, and then they easily dry out as soon as it stops raining.
"Those fire-prone invasive species fill in any gaps everywhere else: roadsides, between communities, between people's homes, everywhere," Elizabeth Pickett, co-executive director of the Management Organization , told WIRED last week. of Hawaii Wildfires. "Right now, 26% of our state is covered by these fire-prone grasses."
Not only has much of Maui been in drought, but it is in the middle of the dry season, so these plants have become tinder. "Wild landscapes fuel fires," says Pyne. "Hot, dry and windy, with lots of fuel, is the formula for big fires. And that's what you have here."
In Hawaii, like elsewhere on the West Coast, more and more people have been moving into the danger zone: the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. This is where nature collides with human settlements or even intermingles with them. That's why Paradise burned so quickly and deeply, destroying 19,000 structures, as the fire spread through pine needles and other dead leaves piled around the city. On Maui, invasive grass acts as an accelerant. “Virtually all communities in Hawaii are at a wildland-urban interface,” Pickett continues. "So we are like a WUI state, because we have housing estates that are all adjacent to or surrounded by forest areas.
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發表於 2024-3-12 14:59:36