Fire Weather

The Carr Fire, as it came to be known, ignited on July 23 near the hamlet of Whiskeytown, fifteen miles west of Redding, due to sparks thrown by a trailer wheel with a flat tire. Three days later, the fire roared into the city. The temperature that day was similar to Black Saturday, 2009: 113°F (tying a local record that was 13°F above the average

If all of Alberta’s pipelines were lined up end to end, they would span the gap between Fort McMurray and the moon, with enough leftover to wrap the equator. Some of these pipelines are four feet in diameter, and much of the petroleum flowing through them is extracted using unconventional methods like fracking, steam-assisted gravity drainage, and

Our experience of fire occurs in the realm of the visible, but it is made possible by the invisible, and there is a world of energy in those vaporous, unseen realms. It is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit. This is what the heat is for: to liberate the flammable gases from their solid or liquid prisons by transformin

Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equiv

Forensic analysis of the scene on Buenaventura concluded that the tornado’s wind speed was somewhere between 140 and 165 miles per hour, and that “peak gas temperatures likely exceeded 2,700°F”—the melting point of steel.

a fire service pilot estimated head fire heights at a hundred yards, and a number of victims perished in their cars, overtaken by flames even as they fled at highway speed. But there was another killing energy released by those fires that moved even faster—at the speed of light. So otherworldly were the fire conditions on Black Saturday that animal

while floods generally follow rivers, and hurricanes follow weather patterns in specific parts of the ocean, fire can occur anywhere there’s fuel, and fire’s menu is astonishingly broad, including virtually everything under the sun save dirt, rock, metal, and water. Furthermore, the paths fire takes are determined almost exclusively by the wind, wh

Rising forty thousand feet into the stratosphere, the plume’s colossal umbra lowered average temperatures by several degrees, caused birds to roost at midday, and created weird visual effects as it circled the Northern Hemisphere, including widespread reports of lavender suns and blue moons.

Reckoning with the negative aspects of oil and gas is a responsibility that duplicitous marketing, short-term governance, superb engineering, and a certain amount of willful blindness have enabled us to keep at bay for a century. In addition to being extraordinarily flammable, petroleum is lethally toxic, both in its liquid and vapor forms. In ligh