Opinion | The Age of the Urban Inferno Is Here
Opinion | The Age of the Urban Inferno Is Here
Excerpt from this Op-Ed by David Wallace-Wells, published in the New York Times:
It wasn’t even really a wildfire. By the time the flames passed through Lahaina, Hawaii — burning a beloved 150-year-old banyan tree and throwing embers so far that when residents jumped into the ocean for relief, they saw the hulls of boats floating among them on fire, too — it had long since left the wild land behind. Instead it had become another instance of what the climate scientist Daniel Swain memorably called the return of the “urban firestorm.”
The string of examples is growing: the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa, Calif., in 2017; the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., the following year; and the Marshall fire in Boulder County, Colo., in 2021, which after burning through a lot of nearby vegetation made a jump to a shopping center with a Costco and a Chuck E. Cheese and ultimately destroyed more than 1,000 homes. You might think of these events as having two ignitions: the first when the natural landscape begins to burn, from a lightning strike or a dropped match or a downed power line, and the second when that fire, often supercharged by climate conditions, makes the jump to buildings and cars and other forms of modern infrastructure and keeps burning.
In general, we’ve long believed the built environment offered formidable firebreaks and worried over what might be lost when fires passed near homes as a form of tragic collateral damage. But increasingly, fires emerging hotter and more intense from the natural landscape are burning human structures not as collateral but as fuel, jumping from home to home as earlier fires would jump from tree crown to tree crown, with vegetation, Swain told me when I interviewed him in the wake of the Marshall fire for New York magazine, acting only as a wick. These firestorms may seem like a harbinger, he said, but they are also a throwback, to a time a century or more ago when towns and cities, in a time of wood-frame buildings and premodern firefighting, regularly stared down the threat of incineration by flame.