THE GREAT FIRE IN 1910 & YELLOWSTONE FIRES IN 1988

Memorial to lives lost in the Great Fire of 1910

Today, The Grandma is travelling from Cadaqués to Vielha e Mijaran, the capital of Aran. She is going to visit Víctor, her friend who is spending his holidays in this beautiful Occitan valley.

The trip is a fantastic way to discover and contemplate the wonderful landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees and it has been impossible to think in the fires that are destroying Amazonias in Brazil and Gran Canaria one of the islands of the Canary Islands, a natural disaster that can affect two amazing natural sites, Tamadaba and Inagua.

The Grandma remembers when she was visiting these wonderful islands with her closer friends some months ago and she has also remembered two important fires that affected British Columbia in Canada and Yellowstone National Park in the USA just on a day like today, August 20, on 1910 and 1988.

Protecting nature is a hard and necessary work that must be done. Environmental policies must take care of our natural treasures because they are essential to our planet development. We must think that we are a part of the planet not the owners, not its destroyers.

Before remembering these fires, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 13. Images, diagrams and titles (II) (Spanish Version)

The Great Fire of 1910, also commonly referred to as the Big Blowup, the Big Burn, or the Devil's Broom fire, was a wildfire in the western United States that burned 12,100 km2 in North Idaho and Western Montana, with extensions into Eastern Washington and Southeast British Columbia, in the summer of 1910. 

The area burned included large parts of the Bitterroot, Cabinet, Clearwater, Coeur d'Alene, Flathead, Kaniksu, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark, Lolo, and St. Joe National Forests.

More information: Forest History Society

A great number of problems contributed to the destruction caused by the Great Fire of 1910. The wildfire season started early that year because the winter of 1909-1910 and the spring and summer of 1910 were extremely dry, and the summer sufficiently hot to have been described as like no others.

The drought resulted in forests that were teeming with dry fuel, which had previously grown up on abundant autumn and winter moisture.

The 1910 Fires

Hundreds of fires were ignited by hot cinders flung from locomotives, sparks, lightning, and backfiring crews. By mid-August, there were 1,000 to 3,000 fires burning in Idaho, Montana, and Washington.

August 20 (Saturday) brought hurricane-force winds to the interior Northwest, whipping the hundreds of small fires into one or two much larger blazing infernos. Such a conflagration was impossible to fight; there were too few men and supplies. The United States Forest Service, then called the National Forest Service, was only five years old at the time and unprepared for the possibilities of the dry summer or a fire of this magnitude, though all summer it had been urgently recruiting as many men as possible to fight the hundreds of fires already burning, many with little forestry or firefighting experience.

More information: Spokesman

Smoke from the fire was said to have been seen as far east as Watertown, New York, and as far south as Denver, Colorado. It was reported that at night, five hundred miles (800 km) out into the Pacific Ocean, ships could not navigate by the stars because the sky was cloudy with smoke.

The extreme scorching heat of the sudden blowup can be attributed to the expansive Western white pine forests that covered much of northern Idaho at the time. Hydrocarbons in the trees' resinous sap boiled out and created a cloud of highly flammable gas that blanketed hundreds of square miles, which then spontaneously detonated dozens of times, each time sending tongues of flame thousands of feet into the sky and creating a rolling wave of fire that destroyed anything and everything in its path.

The fire burned over two days on the weekend of August 20–21, after strong winds caused numerous smaller fires to combine into a firestorm of unprecedented size.

More information: Popular Mechanics

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 collectively formed the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Starting as many smaller individual fires, the flames quickly spread out of control due to drought conditions and increasing winds, combining into one large conflagration which burned for several months.

The fires almost destroyed two major visitor destinations and, on September 8, 1988, the entire park closed to all non-emergency personnel for the first time in its history. Only the arrival of cool and moist weather in the late autumn brought the fires to an end. A total of 3,213 km2, or 36 percent of the park was affected by the wildfires.

Thousands of firefighters fought the fires, assisted by dozens of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft which were used for water and fire retardant drops. At the peak of the effort, more than 9,000 firefighters were assigned to the park.

Yellowstone National Park Fire, 1988

Before the late 1960s, fires were generally believed to be detrimental for parks and forests, and management policies were aimed at suppressing fires as quickly as possible.

However, as the beneficial ecological role of fire became better understood in the decades before 1988, a policy was adopted of allowing natural fires to burn under controlled conditions, which proved highly successful in reducing the area lost annually to wildfires.

In contrast, in 1988, Yellowstone was overdue for a large fire, and, in the exceptionally dry summer, the many smaller controlled fires combined. The fires burned discontinuously, leaping from one patch to another, leaving intervening areas untouched. Intense fires swept through some regions, burning everything in their paths.

Tens of millions of trees and countless plants were killed by the wildfires, and some regions were left looking blackened and dead. However, more than half of the affected areas were burned by ground fires, which did less damage to hardier tree species. Not long after the fires ended, plant and tree species quickly reestablished themselves, and natural plant regeneration has been highly successful.

More information: National Park Service

The Yellowstone fires of 1988 were unprecedented in the history of the National Park Service, and many questioned existing fire management policies.

Almost 250 different fires started in Yellowstone and the surrounding National Forests between June and August. Seven of them were responsible for 95% of the total burned area.

On August 20, the single worst day of the fires and later dubbed Black Saturday, more than 610 km2 were consumed during one of many intense fires.

The Red fire started near Lewis Lake on July 1, and like the Shoshone fire, advanced little for several weeks. The fire then moved northeast on July 19, and combined with the Shoshone fire in August. As these two fires advanced towards the Grant Village area, evacuations were ordered so fire fighting crews could concentrate on structure protection. In the midst of a large lodgepole pine forest, the Grant Village complex was the first major tourist area impacted that season. A number of small structures and some of the campground complex were destroyed. After the Red and Shoshone fires combined, they were referred to as the Shoshone fire, since it was much larger.

The third largest fire was the Huck fire, which started after a tree fell on a power line on August 20 near Flagg Ranch. This fire burned primarily in the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway, crossing Yellowstone's southern border on August 30.

More information: My Yellowstone

Yellowstone wildlife is treasured. We understand that.

We'll manage them in a way that addresses that sensitivity.

Steve Bullock