Megafires are remaking U.S. forests
By Laura Parker, National Geographic
TWISP, Wash. — The largest fire in state history swept through the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range with explosive force last summer. The Carlton Complex Fire burned more than 250,000 acres, devouring everything in its path at the hypersonic pace of 3.8 acres per second.
Until then, the top slot in the state’s fire rankings belonged to the Tripod Fire, which burned up 175,000 beetle-infested acres in two months on the same slopes in 2006.
Carlton and Tripod are “megafires,” part of a wave of extreme fires that are transforming the great forests of the American West. By the end of the century, scientists say, megafires—conflagrations that chew up at least 100,000 acres of land—will become the norm. Which makes them of critical interest to researchers.
These infernos, once rare, are growing to sizes that U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell describes as “unimaginable” two decades ago. Five alone have consumed more than 5 million acres in central Alaska since June. Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado also experienced their worst wildfires in the past seven years.
So far in the Lower 48, none of the thousands of fires that have burned across the 11 Western states have grown into megafire size. But the most perilous weeks of fire season are still ahead.
3.8 X 60 X 60 X 24 = 328,320. So at a pace of 3.8 acres a second, this 250,000 acre fire went from cradle to grave in less than a day. ha. More media hype.
He fails to mention that the environmentalist have dictated forest policy for the last 40 years and these policies don’t work. These mega fires are a direct result of failed practices by the last big eco scare and that the health of our forest is the result of listening to people who really didn’t know what they were talking about. It was their big classroom experiment. Everything cannot be blamed on “climate change”.
No, Walter, the failed policy is the one that clearcut the heck out of the forests and replacing mature forests with trees that are all the same age, size and species(when they did anything at all). Forty years huh? Drop in the bucket for a forest, unless it’s been cut down. You sound like the one who really doesn’t know what they are talking about. Your comment is ridiculous.