Sublime

There is a non-linear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fires. Fifty-year-old trees burn fifty times more intensely than twenty-year-old trees. However, because of the power of influential residents living in the Malibu region, since 1919 the local policy has been one of ‘total fire suppression’. This means t

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Fire suppression without provisions for the inevitability of California’s fire cycles is, simply put, the pursuit of uniformity with the result of catastrophe. What if we saw fire not as a crisis to be managed, but as an epistemological break – a regular call to rethink our relationship to prediction, adaptation, and climate governance? What if we ... See more

Why do homes survive a firestorm? For us forensic experts who have lived a few decades through many fire storms, patterns emerge.

It is not global warming, it is not due to carbon, or even drought. Multimillion dollar homes burned down surrounded by lush landscaping fit for a tropical environment. Here’s the facts:

High wind moves burning brands int... See more

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

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As a former California resident, I watched Santa Anna winds (aka Sundowner winds) sweep down from the desert and blow out to sea. 100 km per hour winds, 5% humidity, 35 degree C temperatures (the temperature goes UP after sundown via compression), and all it takes is a spark on the mountain ridge road. In Santa Barbara, I watched electrical transfo... See more

At the fire's peak, it destroyed one house every 11 seconds. By the first hour, the fire had destroyed nearly 790structures.

The underground fire is still burning, and in 2006 it was reported that it is expected to do so for another 250 years.[20]

The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer of the landfill,[16] but fell behind schedule, leaving the barrier incomplete. This allowed the hot coals to penetrate the coal seam underneath the pit and start the subsequent subterranean fire.[17][18]

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geo... See more