The Chainsaw and the Drip-torch
How to fight a megafire
The anatomy of a megafire is greater than just the flames. It includes the plume of black smoke, which can be seen from space, which can collapse on itself like a detonated skyscraper and send firebrands in all directions. It includes cumulonimbus clouds so far away that they cannot be seen due to the curvature of the earth. It includes cold fronts and battering winds.
At the fringes of a megafire, firefighters are punier than ants at the feet of Godzilla. When a small fire metamorphoses into a megafire, the fighters must pull back from the blaze — sometimes more than a mile — and fortify a defensible position.
This is almost always a gravel road bifurcating the forest. Like the trenches of twentieth-century warfare, the gravel road is paltry protection, and the enemy (the megafire) is obscured by complex topography. As the fighters scurry with preparations, the megafire amasses strength. The fighters must devise a way to reach out and touch the megafire without being touched in return.
The region between the megafire and the fighters on the road becomes a no-man’s land. No-man’s land is also called the black; it will be sacrificed to the megafire and transformed to ashes. The land being defended is called the green, and it will be protected at all costs, save life and limb.
Sacrificing no-man’s land to the megafire must be executed with precise choreography. The fighters create and foster their own fire called a backfire. Before they light it, however, they groom the landscape in preparation. To neglect the preparation is to invite catastrophe.
The backfire is too likely to overpower them and cross over the road to the green. Combustible fuel from the forest must be removed from the landscape to inhibit the backfire’s initial growth.
The proximate section of no-man’s land — that which lies alongside the road — is partitioned into three imaginary lanes, as if three racers are to run along the road all the way to the horizon, shoulder to shoulder but never touching. Each lane, actually fifteen feet wide, is the sole domain of a chainsaw team.
A chainsaw team consists of a sawyer, who operates the chainsaw, and a swamper, who organizes the chaos of the forest into this cut, the next cut, the next cut, and removes felled brush from the sawyer’s way. A sawyer’s job is to never cease cutting. As a rule, the sawyer produces more work than his swamper can manage, swamping him.
The three saw teams march forward, cutting every bush, vine, limb, and small tree to the ground. Hands belonging to the other fifteen firefighters on the crew lift, drag, and toss every piece of downed fuel to the green. An enormous mass of combustible fuel is thus transported across the road, from no-man’s land to the green. When the fighters finish, the lanes look like a manicured arboretum stretching for thousands of feet along the road. Tensions are high.
With sufficient combustible fuel removed from no-man’s land, the fighters add their own fire. They use a tool called a drip-torch. It is a glorified gas can with a long, thin straw that, once lit, sports an eternal flame at the tip. A curlicue in the neck of the straw prevents the flame from traveling to the reservoir and exploding the can. When it is inverted, a gasoline mixture pours through the eternal flame and onto the ground, carrying fire with it. In this way, a precise line of tiny flames can be created.
The sawyers and swampers rest in the green but keep watch for new smoke. Periodically, the megafire flares quietly in the distance like Godzilla spewing vaporized lava from her mouth.
The drip-torch carriers take their places in the cleared swath of no-man’s land along the road. They are going to travel the same pathway just cleared by the saw teams, in the same lanes, but this time using drip-torches to make a backfire.
The small flames dripped from the drip-torch stay small as they gnaw through the manicured swath. The manicured swath is long but not wide. The flames magnify a thousand-fold as soon as they travel past it — as soon as they are in the rough forest of no-man’s land.
Once it is among the available fuel of no-man’s land, the backfire awakens like a Kraken. It blooms into a monstrosity. It feeds itself; it feeds upon itself. The proximity of the backfire is dangerous to the fighters. If the atmosphere is too dry, the backfire will morph into a dreaded crown fire — traveling through the crowns of trees — and spew embers over their heads into the green. If the wind is wrong, the backfire will spill across the road into the green right beneath their feet.
But, if the fighters have acted in accordance with the amenability of the wind and atmosphere, the backfire will roll toward the interior of no-man’s land like a cloud of chlorine gas.
An hour later, or perhaps a week later, the two mutants — Godzilla and the Kraken — will clash. The farther away from the green, the better, because the conflagration is immense. The backfire has left only scorched earth in its wake, depriving the megafire of fuel for growth. And yet, for a few moments before death, the two fires mate, each enhancing the other’s power.
As they die, they launch a billion embers into the sky like swarms of bees. If a single ember crosses no-man’s land to catch fire in the green, a spot fire is born. The megafire calves new fires ahead of itself in this way.
Thank you for reading.
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