Authors: Bill Streever
For an example of a simple fire model depicting wildland fires over a long period, see http://schuelaw.whitman.edu/JavaApplets/ForestFireApplet. Cells in the model change color as they burn and again as they burn out. In the model, the ignition source of each fire is lightning. When the model starts, trees grow quickly, turning cells green. As trees mature, lightning strikes start fires. Burning cells are white. As a fire spreads, the burned-out cells behind it turn brown. Trees regrow in the burned-out cells, and they eventually reburn. Obviously models as simple as this one are not realistic as predictive tools but are intended to illustrate trends. Perhaps less obviously, more complex models are also unrealistic. Fires will burn as fires burn, and to date no one has come up with a model—or the data to populate the model in a manner that captures real-world variability—that reliably predicts actual fire behavior.
The quote by G. W. Craddock comes from his master’s thesis, “The Successional Influences of Fire on the Chaparral Type” (University of California, Berkeley, 1929). The thesis is quoted in Mark I. Borchert and Dennis C. Odion, “Fire Intensity and Vegetation Recovery in Chaparral: A Review,” in
Brushfires in California Wildlands: Ecology and Resource Management
,
ed. J. E. Keeley and T. Scott (Fairfield, Wash.: International Association of Wildland Fire, 1995). The paper also includes plots showing ground temperature at different points in a chaparral fire.
The firefighter who showed me the Spanish Ranch fire and other fire sites was Louis De La Rosa. Louis has also talked to other writers, including Joseph N. Valencia, author of
Area Ignition
(see next note), who quoted Louis’s remarks about his own training ride, or staff ride, at Spanish Ranch: “When I first came on this staff ride, I didn’t know the entire story. This fire happened in my backyard. I take it very seriously.”
The information about the Spanish Ranch Fire came from two sources: a
Staff Ride Students Guide
, printed by the CDF San Luis Ranger Unit as a training document, and Joseph Valencia’s book
Area Ignition: The True Story of the Spanish Ranch Fire
(Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse Press, 2009). The phrase “area ignition” is sometimes used to refer to areas where heated gases released by trees and brush suddenly ignite, making it appear as though the sky is on fire. The photograph of a charred Nomex shirt appears in the
Staff Ride Students Guide
. Ed Marty’s photograph, showing Marty in a Smokey Bear suit, appears in Valencia’s book.
Nomex was developed by DuPont in the 1950s. It is in some ways similar to nylon (which was also developed by DuPont, in the 1930s) but more rigid, durable, and extremely fire resistant. It is used by firefighters, race car drivers, military pilots, and oil field workers.
The discussion of Gifford Pinchot is for the most part based on Timothy Egan’s wonderful
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Egan’s book presents the early history of the National Forest Service and the fire itself, in part through descriptions of Pinchot’s role, but also through the roles of various firefighters. The firefighters included recent immigrants to the United States who had no experience in the wilderness.
The full title of Robert Burton’s 1621
The Anatomy of Melancholy
is
The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up
. Although the book is renowned as a unique work of literature and is sprinkled with passages of genius, most readers today would probably find the book even more tedious than its full title.
Edward Abbey’s remarks about Smokey Bear come from his book
The Journey Home
(New York: Penguin, 1991). In one passage, Abbey speaks out against the metric system. “The Park Service,” he writes, “no doubt at the instigation of the Commerce Department, is trying to jam the metric system down our throats, whether we want it or not. We can be sure this is merely the foot in the door, the bare beginning of a concerted effort by Big Business—Big Government (the two being largely the same these days) to force the metric system upon the American people. Why? Obviously for the convenience of world trade, technicians and technology, to impose on the entire planet a common system of order. All men must march to the beat of the same drum, like it or not.” The metric system has fallen by the wayside in the United States, but even without it the big business–big government partnership seems to have thrived since Abbey wrote
The Journey Home
.
There are many estimates of the degree to which fires are started by lightning as opposed to humans playing with matches or otherwise providing a source of ignition. Abbey stated that 90 percent of western forest fires were ignited by lightning, but I could not find his source for this statistic. Sources on this matter will vary from place to place and year to year, and while Abbey’s estimate may have been high, lightning strikes are important sources of ignition for wildfires in many areas, especially where dry lightning—lightning from storms that do not shower the ground with rain—is common. Most reports of fire ignition sources in the American West suggest that well over half of all fires are ignited by lightning.
For official information about Smokey Bear, see the government publication
Smokey Bear Guidelines
, dated March 2009. The guidelines explain how Smokey can and cannot be used. From page 3 of the guidelines: “Today, Smokey Bear is a highly recognized advertising symbol and is protected by Federal law. (PL 82-359, as amended by PL 92-318).” The guidelines are available online at www.smokeybear.com/downloads/Smokey_Bear_Guidelines.pdf.
There are many sources of information about fire injuries and deaths. The U.S. Fire Administration, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), publishes profiles of fires in the United States. At least thirteen editions are in circulation. The thirteenth edition was called
A Profile of Fire in the United States, 1992–2001
(published by FEMA and available online). Among other things, it includes statistics for firefighter deaths. In 2001, 449 firefighters died, with 344 dying in the World Trade Center and 102 in other situations. “As in all previous years,” the report says of the 102 who died in fires other than the World Trade Center, “the most frequent cause of deaths was stress or over exertion.” Heart attacks and strokes were the most common cause of death. Fourteen firefighters died during training exercises.
Wall’s theory, as it is called in some sources, is more appropriately called gate control theory. Many people have worked on gate control theory, but Patrick Wall and Ronald Melzack are generally credited as its originators. Their seminal article “Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory” was published in
Science
150, no. 3699 (1965): 971–79. The authors later acknowledged that many of their premises were incorrect, yet the general ideas behind gate control theory continue to influence pain research and treatment. Comments by Wall and Melzack shed an interesting light on the inner workings of science. From Melzack’s oral history: “So in the course of our talking I said to Pat, ‘You know, you and I think a lot alike about a lot of things. Why don’t we write a paper together?’ So we wrote a paper that was published in
Brain
in 1962. And we struggled with that paper, putting it all together, and it was certainly jointly done all the way through. I think three people read the paper. So we began to write [a second] paper and sending drafts back and forth—I’d bring them down, we would argue, and so on, and then at some stage, we began to organize the paper into components, and the main, the gate control theory got invented. Anyway, I suggested that we really aim for the top and try
Science
and see what the hell happens—the worst that will happen is to get rejected. It got accepted. We were astounded. Well, so, then you know the rest because some people loved it and most people hated it.” From Wall’s oral history: “At this time, with a completely different background, there was Ron Melzack, with whom I’ve really never worked in my life, we’d only got to talking. You ask about the gate control theory, which is 1965 as published, if you read what we’d published certainly three years before, it says exactly the same thing in it. And we tossed a coin, and published essentially exactly the same paper, only as Wall and Melzack (1962) rather than Melzack and Wall (1965), and it was utterly ignored. And then we put out the
Science
paper. And as you see, if you read this, we simply tried to bring together everything that we knew and what was in the literature at the time, knowing very well that we could be wrong, and certainly in the details.” Both oral histories are deposited with the UCLA biomedical library.
The realization that the brain is involved in the perception of pain seems intuitive today, but that has not always been the case. Not surprisingly, pain has been attributed to evil spirits or as punishment for some moral or spiritual shortcoming. Perhaps more surprisingly, the Greeks, under the sway of Hippocratic medicine, saw pain as an expression of an imbalance between the four humors of yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood, each of which had its own qualities and an association with seasons and the elements of fire, earth, water, and air, respectively. It was not until the seventeenth century that work by René Descartes attributed the sensation of pain to the brain. A famous sketch from Descartes’s work shows a naked boy with his foot next to a fire and a link between the brain and the foot running inside the boy’s body. Descartes saw this as a one-way flow of information. He described nerve impulses as “fast moving particles of fire” and wrote, “The disturbance passes along the nerve filament until it reaches the brain.” Today the sensation of pain is seen as something far more complex than this.
The firefighter’s remarks about morphine to relieve pain come from Steve Delsohn’s aforementioned
The Fire Inside
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), a compilation of first-person accounts of the lives of firefighters.
Silas Weir Mitchell’s
Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1872) was based on his experience as a Civil War surgeon. During that period, causalgia—pain triggered by the slightest stimulus, usually in a hand or foot that was not directly affected by an actual injury—was sometimes treated by amputation. Causalgia is now known as a type of “complex regional pain syndrome.” In his writings, Mitchell also explored the phenomenon of phantom limbs in amputees. Mitchell was both a technical writer and a literary writer, credited with poetry, historical novels, and at least one short story published in the
Atlantic Monthly
.
The article offering case studies of burn victims was I. H. Erb, Ethel M. Morgan, and A. W. Farmer, “The Pathology of Burns: The Pathologic Picture as Revealed at Autopsy in a Series of 61 Fatal Cases Treated at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada,”
Annals of Surgery
117, no. 2 (1943): 234–55.
For more on fire beetles, see Martin Müller, Maciej Olek, Michael Giersig, and Helmut Schmitz, “Micromechanical Properties of Consecutive Layers in Specialized Insect Cuticle: The Gula of
Pachnoda marginata
(Coleoptera, Scarabaeidae) and the Infrared Sensilla of
Melanophila acuminata
(Coleoptera, Buprestidae),”
Journal of Experimental Biology
211 (2008): 2576–83. For a more accessible summary of this article, see Kathryn Phillips, “Beetles ‘Hear’ Heat through Pressure Vessels,”
Journal of Experimental Biology
, August 8, 2008, i–ii. Louise Dalziel’s short article “Jewel Beetle Flies into the Inferno,”
BBC
, March 20, 2005, also offers a good summary, available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4362589.stm.
The government publication on the evolutionary insignificance of fire for wildlife came from Ronald D. Quinn, “Habitat Preference and Distribution of Mammals in California Chaparral, Research Paper PSW-RP-202” (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, Berkeley, Calif., 1990).
Charles E. Little’s article “Smokey’s Revenge,”
American Forests
99 (May–June 1993): 24–25, 58–60, offers a short but thoughtful discussion of Smokey’s role in the history of American wildfires, both pro and con. Another interesting short article is Jim Carrier’s “An Agency Icon at 50,”
High Country News
, October 3, 1994.
The Stephen J. Pyne quote about the Yellowstone fire came from his article “The Summer We Let Wild Fire Loose,”
Natural History
, August 1989, 45–49.
The photographer’s mother is Betsy Gallery. The fire mural that she created is on display at the Santa Barbara County fire headquarters, a very suitable home for such a work. While much of her work requires large spaces (such as public buildings) for display, she also creates smaller murals suitable for display in typical homes. Her website, www.elizabethgallery.com, correctly and succinctly says that her “studio resembles an archaeological dig as much as an artist’s workshop.” The website includes a photograph of the completed and quite amazing eight-by-four-foot Santa Barbara fires mural.