Wildfire, Inside the Inferno


Book Description

Wildfires rip through forests, choke the air with smoke, and destroy homes. Some wildfires are sparked by nature. Others are started by humans. All come with devastating results. Readers will find out the science behind wildfires, learn about recent wildfires around the world, and discover what's being done to prevent them. Dynamic photography and clear, engaging text will captivate the reader's attention.




Inside the Inferno


Book Description

"On May 1, one of the worst natural disasters in Canada's history struck Fort McMurray. What began as a small, remote forest quickly became a nightmare for the 90,000 residents of the city. A perfect combination of weather, geography, and circumstance had created a wildfire that was more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. As winds drove the flames towards Fort McMurray, the entire city population was ordered to evacuate. When the fire leapt across the river and started to devour everything in its path, the only people left to face it were the firefighters and support crew tasked with protecting the city. Born and raised in Fort McMurray, Damian Asher was a fifteen year veteran of the city's fire department. When the order went out for all firefighters to report for duty, Damian stopped work on his family's house-which he was building by hand-sent his wife and children out of town, and answered the call. For thirteen straight days, Damian and his crew were on the frontlines of the fire, battling the blaze wherever it encroached upon the city. As homes burned and embers rained down around them, Damian and the rest of the Brotherhood barely slept, rushing from hotspot to hotspot as they struggled to contain the fire. Aid poured in from around the world and the country watched in hope and fear, wondering what was happening on the streets of Fort McMurray. Finally, after weeks of fighting a wildfire that appeared insatiable, the Brotherhood managed to regain control of the city. But the fire had more than left its mark - billions of dollars of damage, exhausted emergency workers, and a scattered citizenry were left in its wake. When Damian's family returned to their home, they found that it and all of their possessions had been burned to the ground. It seemed as though things would never be the same. And yet, as the smoke dissipated and the city reunited, there was hope that life would resume in Fort McMurray."--




Into the Inferno


Book Description

In the tradition of Young Men and Fire and Fire on the Mountain, Stuart Palley’s memoir Into the Inferno documents eight years of devastating wildfire in California, showing how fire can transform a landscape as well as a soul ... For nearly a decade, Palley has been on the frontline of fire. He has witnessed homeowners on the worst day of their lives. He’s seen puddles of aluminum where cars were once parked. He’s watched as 150-foot walls of flame cascaded down mountainsides and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. And he’s captured, time and again, the tireless commitment of firefighters as they work to save lives and homes, in terrain where fire always seems to have the upper hand. In this memoir, Palley recalls how he went from learning to be safe on the fireline to a fire-savvy documentarian of wildfire and climate change. He covers some of California’s largest, most destructive, and deadliest fires between 2012 and 2020, lugging his gear from the Wine Country Fire Siege to the Thomas Fire and ultimately to the Woolsey Fire in Malibu. And he shows how, in a relatively short span of time, fire season in California has grown into a perpetual crisis, requiring billions of dollars and thousands of firefighters each year. Ultimately, the experiences, the voices, the science shared in the memoir form an urgent call for climate action. Into the Inferno stands alongside Palley’s photography to show just what kind of environmental tragedy we can expect if we do nothing.




Rippling Wildfire


Book Description

Rippling Wildfire: A Poetry Inferno Poetry Uncovers Life Volume 1 By: Will Lynch Finding one’s own voice can be difficult to uncover, and an outlet to view as a method of understanding can give peace to a lonely soul. The first in a series, Rippling Wildfire: A Poetry Inferno is about deep, visceral emotion and the impact it has on our perspective of the world. While there are so many different feelings that can’t be expressed or categorized, with each verse, Will Lynch verbalizes things that others may feel but cannot express.




Inferno by Committee


Book Description

“Tom Ribe's clear, scrupulous and thorough account of the Los Alamos/Bandelier fire of 2000 is a white-knuckle narrative, yet meticulously accurate.” —Roger G. Kennedy, Former Director, U.S. National Park Service; Director Emeritus, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution and author of Wildfire and Americans Inferno by Committee tells the story of America’s worst prescribed fire disaster, the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000 which burned 250 homes in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The fire started with a National Park Service prescribed fire that went out of control and ended up burning 42,000 acres of the Santa Fe National Forest. A thorough review of the investigations of the fire and the policy changes that resulted from this seminal event in American fire history are also an integral part of this examination. Prescribing fire on the landscape involves risk. Sometimes, as with the Cerro Grande Fire, the risk taken results in disaster. For land managers, there really is no option but to prescribe fire and take risk—to restore fire to a landscape where fire is native and necessary for the survival of biological systems. Cerro Grande showed us both the consequences of taking a risk with fire and more dramatically, the consequences of avoiding that risk.




Wild Inferno


Book Description

In the sequel to Wild Indigo, Bureau of Land Management agent Jamaica Wild is sent in to assist at a wildfire on the Southern Ute reservation, where she encounters a burning man whose final plea sends her on a quest to unravel a mystery more dangerous than mere murder.




Monster Fire at Minong


Book Description

Ignited by a single match on April 30, 1977, the Five Mile Tower Fire raged out of control for 17 hours. It would be one of the largest wildland fires in Wisconsin history, ultimately destroying more than 13,000 acres of land and 63 buildings. As a column of black pine smoke reached high in the sky, citizens from Minong, Chicog, Webster, Gordon, Wascott, Hayward, Spooner, Solon Springs, and other communities began showing up to help. The grassy field designated as fire headquarters quickly became a hub of activity, jammed with trucks, school buses, dozers on trailers, dump trucks, tanker trucks, fuel trucks, and hundreds of people waiting to sign in. More than 900 came in the first four hours, clogging the road with traffic in both directions. Headquarters personnel worked valiantly to coordinate citizens and DNR workers in a buildup of people and equipment unprecedented in the history of Wisconsin firefighting. Based on his own experiences during the long battle, plus dozens of interviews and other eyewitness accounts, Bill Matthias presents an in-depth look at the Five Mile Tower Fire, the brave citizens who helped fight it, and the important changes made to firefighting laws and procedures in its aftermath.




Wildland Fire Behaviour


Book Description

Wildland fires have an irreplaceable role in sustaining many of our forests, shrublands and grasslands. They can be used as controlled burns or occur as free-burning wildfires, and can sometimes be dangerous and destructive to fauna, human communities and natural resources. Through scientific understanding of their behaviour, we can develop the tools to reliably use and manage fires across landscapes in ways that are compatible with the constraints of modern society while benefiting the ecosystems. The science of wildland fire is incomplete, however. Even the simplest fire behaviours – how fast they spread, how long they burn and how large they get – arise from a dynamical system of physical processes interacting in unexplored ways with heterogeneous biological, ecological and meteorological factors across many scales of time and space. The physics of heat transfer, combustion and ignition, for example, operate in all fires at millimetre and millisecond scales but wildfires can become conflagrations that burn for months and exceed millions of hectares. Wildland Fire Behaviour: Dynamics, Principles and Processes examines what is known and unknown about wildfire behaviours. The authors introduce fire as a dynamical system along with traditional steady-state concepts. They then break down the system into its primary physical components, describe how they depend upon environmental factors, and explore system dynamics by constructing and exercising a nonlinear model. The limits of modelling and knowledge are discussed throughout but emphasised by review of large fire behaviours. Advancing knowledge of fire behaviours will require a multidisciplinary approach and rely on quality measurements from experimental research, as covered in the final chapters.




Young Men and Fire


Book Description

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: “The terrifying story of the worst disaster in the history of the US Forest Service’s elite Smokejumpers.” —Kirkus Reviews A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in this extraordinary book. Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write—includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul. “A moving account of humanity, nature, and the perseverance of the human spirit.” —Library Journal “Haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal “Engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly




Paradise


Book Description

"The definitive firsthand account of California's Camp Fire-the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century-and a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the climate crisis unfolds ... A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again"--




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