The Spark of Something New
Fire historian Stephen Pyne has the story of the Big Blowup, a massive wildfire that raged across the West in 1910, and started the practice of fire suppression.
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ED: Welcome to the show. I’m Ed Ayers, here with Brian Balogh.
BRIAN: Hey there, Ed.
ED: And Peter Onuf.
PETER: Hey, Ed.
ED: We’re going to start off in August, 1910 with an event known as the big blowout.
MALE SPEAKER: It was quite a sight. If we had a movie out of that, oh boy, we would have something.
FEMALE SPEAKER: And the hot ashes were falling. You know, those things make an awful impression on a child. Something like that, you’ll remember.
PETER: These are oral histories of Idaho residents recounting the Big Blow-up, one single wildfire that spanned three states and more than three million acres. One report likned the sound alone to 1,000 trains rushing over 1,000 steel trestles.
MALE SPEAKER: The roar of it, when you went by, you couldn’t talk. You had to shout, get right up and shout in a man’s ear in order to make him hear.
FEMALE SPEAKER: You know, if you’ve never heard the roar of a terrible forest fire, it’s worse than any thunder, I think.
PETER: The inferno forced residents from their homes, leaving their positions to the oncoming flames. As it stretched across the northern Rockies, the blaze became so large that according to some reports, smoke could be seen as far away as northern New York.
ED: The federal government had responsibility to extinguish the flames. Wildfire historian Stephen Pine says a new federal agency, the US Forest Service, had been formed just years earlier.
PETER: Before there’d been large fires, hundreds of people killed, whole communities wiped out. Just extraordinary catastrophes. And in this case, the Forest Service was on board. And now this would be taken as the test.
ED: The agency didn’t exactly pass that test. Even before the big blow up, the meager number of fire rangers had to be padded with men from work gangs, employment centers, and the US Army. By the time rain and early September snows extinguished the flames, 78 firefighters had died, several towns have been leveled, and the Forest Service was $1 million over budget.
BRIAN: Pine says the leaders of the young Forest Service took away one lesson from the traumatizing event. It could have been stopped. And in the following years, the agency poured resources into a policy of absolute fire prevention.
STEPHEN PINE: That every fire will be controlled by 10 o’clock the morning following its report. And that’s whether the fire is a mile away from the ranger station, or 100 miles away. There is one universal unblinking standard, and the idea was that we could, once and for all, beat the fire menace by just throwing massive amounts of effort at it.
BRIAN: But Pine says this policy had long term consequences. They cut down on the number of smaller forest fires that had been productively blazing in years past.
STEPHEN PINE: So one of the consequences of 1910 and the effort to exclude fire, shut fire out from the landscape, is that stuff keeps growing. And fire is not pruning, and cleaning out, and shaping in all the ways it traditionally did, and recycling. And so what happens is that made the fire scene far worse than what it would have been.
PETER: In other words, as more temper built up, more fuel has been available to feed wildfires. Wildfires at the center of news reports, like this one on ABC earlier this summer.
FEMALE SPEAKER: And in California, the scorching heat and persistent drought fueling the worst fire season conditions ever.
PETER: Indeed, 2015 is shaping out to be one of the worst years on record for US wildfires. Around 6.5 million acres have burned so far, well above the average for this time of year. And that, says Pine, is why 1910 should be remembered. It wasn’t the biggest fire in US history, or the most destructive. But while factors like historic droughts bear some blame for the current crisis, Pine reminds us that our history also plays a part.
STEPHEN PINE: Big fires can come and go without much impact. But what matters is how that fire interacts with society. And over and over again, we’re living with the consequences of the great fires.
ED: So today on the show, we’re blazing a trail through history with stories about America’s fraught relationship with fire. we’ll hear why so many arson convictions are now in doubt, and how San Francisco’s thriving Chinatown rose from some controversial ashes. And we’ll find out if modern firefighting companies are actually descendants of gang warfare.