Science of Survival: The Sky is Burning

Outside Podcast

Sports, Wilderness

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 August 2018

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are between eight and ten thousand wildfires in the United States each year, but most quietly burn out, and we never hear about them. The Pagami Creek Wildfire in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area was supposed to be like that. It was tiny and stuck in a bog that was surrounded by lakes. It was the kind of fire you could ignore. Computer models predicted that it would just sit there. But those models didn’t account for a rare convergence of atmospheric events had prepped the forest for an unprecedented burn. And Greg and Julie Welch were camping right in its path. In the first of four episodes investigating American wildfires, we tell the Welch’s extraordinary story and look at the factors that lead to this unexpected blaze.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From Outside magazine and PRX, this is the science of survival.
0:15.0	The largest fire in U.S. history has a couple different names.
0:22.0	Some people call it The Great Fire of 1910 or the big blow-up.
0:27.1	It was also called the Devil's Broomfire and a forester at the time called it a veritable red demon from hell.
0:34.6	Mostly though, it's called the Big Burn.
0:38.4	The Big Burn torched more than 3 million acres of the Northern Rockies in Idaho, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming.
0:45.0	It killed 86 people.
0:47.0	It led Edward Pulaski to invent the Pulaski, which is like a pickaxe designed for scraping and cutting the forest floor,
0:55.2	and is still probably the most important firefighting tool ever made.
0:59.8	But more than anything else, the big burn changed the way we thought about forest fires as a country.
1:05.5	It was traumatic.
1:07.2	In the aftermath of the Big Burn, the Forest Service adopted a policy of extreme fire suppression,
1:12.1	including the 9 a.m. rule, which was that if a fire started, the Forest Service's goal would be to have it under control by 9 a.m. the next morning.
1:21.0	This worked great until World War II started, and all the young men who would normally fight these fires went over to Europe instead.
1:28.0	So the Forest Service began an education campaign.
1:32.0	In 1944, a poster appeared with a bear wearing a ranger hat.
1:37.0	With a ranger's hat and shovel and a pair of water on a campfire.
1:47.0	Above the caption,
1:49.0	Smoky says, Care will prevent nine out of ten forest fires.
1:53.0	Smoky the Bear, Smoky the Bear,
1:57.0	growling and a growling and a sniffing the air.
2:00.0	And before you write in to tell us that he's technically named Smoky Bear, not Smoky The Bear.
	...

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