Prescott Courier: 18 firefighters dead in Yarnell wildfire

[SheilaT]

26. Fires can move with incredibly rapidity,

that's how people get trapped.

Unfortunately, TV and movies tend to show fires as being sluggish, allowing dramatic rescues to take place. In reality, that doesn't usually happen, and returning to a burning building is generally a very bad idea.

There are any number of excellent books out there about specific fires. Recently I read Killer Show by John Barylick, about the Station Fire in West Warwick, RI, on February 20, 2003 killing 100 people. The nightclub went from being perfectly okay to unsurvivable in something like 90 seconds.

The Big Burn by Timothy Egan subtitled Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America is about a forest fire in 1910 that burned three million acres, totally destroyed five towns in Washington state, Idaho, and Montana. In two days it burned three million acres. An area roughly the size of Connecticut.

October 8, 1871 there was a big fire in Chicago. That very same day there was a fire in Wisconsin, called the Pestigo fire, that killed at least 1500 people, possibly 2500. And I bet you never heard about that one, because Chicago got all the press coverage. Firestorm at Peshtigo by Denise Gess and William Lutz is a riveting account of that fire.

One more terrible fire and a good book about it: Under a Flaming Sky by Daniel James Brown tells of a forest fire that consumed Hinckley, Minnesota, on September 1, 1894. Over 400 people died that day.

Fire is terrible and dangerous far beyond what most people realize.