Stuff You Should Know - How Wildfires Work

Episode Date: July 26, 2011

Wildfires consume an annual average of 5 million acres in the US. But what causes wildfires? How do they become so powerful? More importantly, how do we fight them? Join Josh and Chuck as they take you to the frontlines of the fight against wildfires. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HouseStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Right over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That was my shatner. I told you I worked with him, I think, on a podcast, right? Yeah. He was puffy and

stuffed in a suit. He's nice though, right? He was super nice. And heck, every time I'm wearing a suit, I'm puffy and stuffed in a suit. So I'm poured into my suits. Poured in. Liquid. That's great. So and that's absolutely not true, by the way. Okay. Chuck. Yes. I have a couple of stories for you. I have a specific story for you. But you have this too, right? Did I give you this? Yes, I do. Okay. So in 2002, right? There is a guy who worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and he was a firefighter for them, right? He went on to the Arizona Apache Reservation and he started a wildfire intentionally. Okay. So he's an arsonist? Yes. He's not an arsonist for fun or because he's crazy. Or what was it? He was curious, highly curious.

Remember? That was a trade. That was trait curiosity. Oh, he was setting fires. He wanted work, right? Leonard Gregg. Leonard Gregg was his name. He said this fire and unbeknownst to him, same time. There is a woman who had run out of gas not too far away, right? And she saw that there was a news helicopter covering the fire that Leonard Gregg had just set. She didn't know about either. But she didn't feel like walking or she felt like she couldn't walk. So she set a fire to try to get the attention of the news helicopter so that it would come rescue her so she didn't have to walk to go get gas. That's pretty amazingly awful. So I guess her last name was Chedisky. Yeah. Because the rodeo fire, which is what they called the fire that Leonard Gregg started,

collided with the Chedisky fire. And it was a conflagration. Ultimately, 467,000 acres burned, including 491 houses. It was the largest fire in Arizona's history. And this is 2002. So Gregg, I don't know what happened to the woman, but Gregg was found guilty of arson since the 10 years in order to pay $28 million, which as an occasional firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, I would imagine he didn't have. Yeah. And that never happens. You always see that like they're awarded so-and-so this and they just don't pay. It's just like a symbolic award, I guess. Right. You'll never make more than 50% of your wages again kind of thing. Yeah. But what's crazy is not just that this lady set this fire because she wanted to get the

attention of a news copter or that this guy set a fire because of a desire to get work to put the fire out, but because they're not the only people who have done stupid stuff like this. They follow in a long grand tradition of people who have set wildfires for all sorts of different reasons and a lot of them to get work. Yeah. You have a list here and of course we're not, we're going to praise the firefighters now that we're saying a lot of these firefighters aren't fires, but it does happen more than you would think. Yeah. I imagine we'll probably throw some more out later on. But first, Chuckers, right? Let's get to wildfires, how they work, what affects them, the fire triangle. Yeah. We should probably start with the fire triangle

because it relates to not just forest fires or wildfires, but all fires. All fire, Josh, requires three things. Fuel, obviously, to burn. Yeah. Air, to get oxygen to the fire, because we all know that makes the fire burn hotter and bigger. Yeah. And then the heat source to bring the fuel to the ignition temperature to begin with. Right. And they call that the fire triangle. And the goal of a wild firefighter and I guess probably more so a wild firefighter is to remove one of those three components from the scene and that'll give them a better chance of extinguishing the fire. Yeah. If you can bring the temperature down or starve the fire of oxygen or get rid of the fuel. Right. Yeah. All three of those things have

to exist. And the reason why, like, if you look at wood as a fuel, wood as it pertains to fire is just a solid store of hydrocarbons that are released when the wood is heated. To the flashpoint. To the flashpoint. And those hydrocarbons at the flashpoint, bind with oxygen in the air and it combusts thanks to the spark. Yeah. Thanks to the heat. Yeah. And the flashpoint, everything has a flashpoint. Apparently everything will burst into flames at some point. Like Fahrenheit 451 is supposed to be the flashpoint of books. Yes. Right. Yes. Which is a very cool title. Wood's flashpoint is 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes. 300 if you're into Celsius.

If you're into that kind of thing. And that's when wood will burst into flames. Yes. I've got a couple of just quick stats here. About 5 million acres of woodland burn every year in the United States. And I got a different set that was 1.2 million, but then I looked. I saw that stat too. Yeah. I looked at the past decade. 5.9 million, 5.2, 9.3, 9.8, 8.6, 8, 4, 7, 3, and 7. So that's about five. Yeah. So I trust that one. And that is, dude, in 2009, I'm sorry, let's go to 2006. There were 96,385 fires, wildfires in the U.S. It's a lot of wildfires. Isn't that crazy? And what's crazy is that four fits of those are started by human activity. Yeah. A little more than four fits. That's nuts. Like, I mean, there's a whole thing called

lightning season, right? Yeah. That when combined with this, um, this type of weather called fire weather, which is very, very dry, maybe drought-like conditions during warm summer months when it's very hot out. And all it takes is like, apparently like a train wheel causing a spark off of the rail. And it's some tender. And then bam, you've got a wildfire. But even all those don't account for more than a fifth of wildfires. The rest are like people throwing cigarettes out or looking for work as firefighters or putting out their fire when they're camping. Yes. That's a big one, too. Um, I have another couple of stats from FEMA. There are total, there are 176,000 intentionally set outdoor fires every year in the United States. And a lot of those, I think, uh, they're prescribed

burns, right? No, no, no. That's like people. You mean acts of arson? Yeah. But it's, uh, only, you know, a certain amount of those are wild. I think 63% are outdoor fires, vegetation fires. Yeah. So the others are like, uh, trash fires, rubbish fires. Idiot fires. Yeah, exactly. All of them make smokey the bear weep. Yeah. True. So, um, there's fire weather. There's lightning season. Four fifths of fires are started by humans. More than four fifths, you said. And we know about the fire triangle, right? So, uh, once combustion is started from whatever the source is, there's a lot of factors. Well, no, not necessarily. There's three large factors that, uh, combine to, I guess, give us an idea of what's going to happen with this forest fire,

right? Now, are these, are these the fuel characteristics or like how fast it'll spread? No, it's fuel, weather and topography. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the big three and then each of those kind of has a few subcategories. Yes. But the, but the fuel, the amount and the type of fuel, the, um, the type of weather that, that's going on, like, is it fire weather? Is it not? And then topography, the lay of the land, like if it's a lake, that's not good topography for a forest fire. Right. And I'm going to use forest fire and wildfire interchangeably. I didn't see anything that said that they're not one in the same. Well, they are today, at least. Forest fire just kind of rolls off the tongue a little more. Okay. For me, yeah, my thick tongue. Well, I said wildfire

and I keep saying wildflower to Jerry. Is it wildflower or wildfire? What, see? Wide fire. Wide fire. I think it's a forest fire. It could be a wide fire. That's true. So fuel, uh, you need a fuel, obviously, to, uh, get the wildfire burning in what they call the, the, the, they call it a fuel load is the amount and it's a measured amount of fuel available per unit area. And it's usually, uh, tons per acre. Right. So they, they can actually, they're good enough to guesstimate that. Yeah. Like the biomass of like all this dry grass. Yeah. Like they know, like, man, this is going to be a bad one because we've got a, you know, I don't have any numbers, but a whatever fuel load in this area of the Colorado

National Forest. And what's interesting is, um, you would think that the fuel load, if, if you do it in weight, cause it's tons per acre, right? That depending on the type of fuel, like if it's grass, if it's lighter, that it's going to burn more quickly because it has less water. Yeah. Right. True. Cause that's a characteristic of, of the type of fuel is how, um, how much moisture it has in it. Yeah. And the density, like, uh, twigs obviously will burn faster for two reasons. One is because there's, it's not as densely packed cause which will give it more oxygen. Yeah. There's less surface area. Yeah. And the second is it's a smaller

and it dries out more quickly. Yeah. It's not like drawing a tree or a log. It's got to take a long time to dry out. Right. And then the same goes for, uh, density with like, say, tufts of, um, pine straw, right? If it's very densely packed, yeah. Um, it's going to retain moisture in the middle, which makes it harder to burn anytime you've ever set pine straw on fire, you know, as a kid, it smokes a lot. If you'd throw a big mess on your fire. Right. But if it's kind of spread out, it's, uh, it dries more easily and it lets more oxygen in between it, which is another need for fuel. Yeah. And the small fuel material, they call flashy fuels.

Yeah. And, uh, they wear like four finger rings. Right. And on a chemical level, they, um, it varies on how long it takes these things to ignite as well beyond the fact that it's just like more dense or bigger or more spread out. Right. Like when I go camping, I will dry out, uh, campfire wood beside the fire and you can hear it says, you can see it. You can see the moisture sizzling from the log and then you just inch it closer and it'll just boom flash point. Yeah. That's how it happens. Yeah. Oh, another thing, Josh, um, as the fire pushes forward, it's what it's going to be doing because there's so much heat associated with it and smoke, it's going to dry out the stuff, the fuel in front of it. Yeah. So by the time it gets there,

potentially, I mean that's why wildfire happens. By the time it gets there, it's already dry and ripe for the picking. Yep. And it's just going to keep burning and keep burning. There's nothing to stop it basically. That's right. It feeds itself. Um, something else that feeds it. So that was fuel, right? Yeah. The second category of, or factor that really determines how a wildfire is going to go is, um, uh, weather. Yeah. Big time. And you know, when you think of weather, you think I will, you know, rain or snow, if it's raining, then of course the wildfire is going to go out. They point that out in here too. But yeah. I thought, um, Kevin went to a great, he was a bonzer. Yeah. He definitely, he dotted his eye on that one. He did. Because yes, obviously,

if it's pouring down rain, it's going to keep everything moist or if it's been raining for a while. Yeah. Humidity helps. Yeah. Big time. But the aspect of weather, um, that probably has more of an effect than any is wind. Big time. Oh yeah. So you've got wind outside of the fire, which is going to push it along, push it in one direction or another. Well, it's very unpredictable. That's one of the things. The winds, especially the dry Santa Ana's in California, it's already hot and dry wind. Yes. So it's might as well be fuel. Right. Or I guess it sort of is fuel. Well, traditionally, but it doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily fuel, but it brings more oxygen to the fuel too. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Um, so it pushes fire along.

It's an oxygen delivery system. Wind is, um, and it doesn't, it, uh, there's a guy who's interviewed in this article, his name is Dr. Terry Clark at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And he's created this model called coupled fire atmospheric dynamics. Pretty cool. And basically what he's doing is figuring out how fire interacts with the surrounding atmosphere and vice versa. Cause apparently they feed off of each other. Yeah. Fire can create its own weather system and weather pattern. Yes. And you've seen it before, like in a really hot fire, these little tornadoes come up. It's a fire world. Right. Um, those can be enormous. It's basically like, uh, the heat from the fire creates a vortex and the vortex is

customarily horizontal, right? But if something gets under it, uh, it can stand upright and it becomes a fire tornado that can throw whole logs. Yeah. It can throw a burning tree like a mile. It's a, it's a, it's a monster and it can throw it a mile into where there previously was no fire. And that's why forest fires are so hard to fight. One reason why they are, because all of a sudden you're fighting it on one front and you've seen them too leap from the tree tops and all of a sudden dude, it's on this side of the mountain now. Right. It's scary stuff. And tree top specifically, by the way, that's a, that's a type of fire onto itself. That's, that's a crown fire is what it's called. That's right. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's

public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer. Be sure to listen to the war on

drugs on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Marcel Swiley, that dude and host of more to it, a new I heart original podcast that takes a deep dive into the biggest topics in sports, entertainment and culture. The journey begins with headline news, which leads to deeper discussions about life lessons that are presented in every story. Each week we tackle subjects and issues beyond the public's perception and narrative to learn more about the stories and about ourselves, hosted by someone who defied the odds to go from Compton to the Ivy League and then played 10 years as an all pro defense event. This is not your typical sports show with topics ranging from the social ills that surround us all to the character

growth that occurs from overcoming adversity. You'll get inspired hearing stories that highlight the growing pains that fuels anyone on a successful journey. You'll leave every episode with a greater understanding that no matter the story, the person or outcome, there is always more to it. Found on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. Um, there's a these fire worlds, right? The fire tornadoes. They don't necessarily have to follow that, that process of starting out horizontally and standing up and then moving like a tornado. There's another thing called a hairpin fire world. Is this the forward burst? Yeah, this is amazing. Basically, it's like the fire develops so much, I guess, heat,

it's vortexes do it's vortices do that it shoots forward like a flamethrower. Yeah, and apparently these things are they get up to like 66 feet wide, right? Yeah, they can shoot 300 plus feet. Yes, at 100 miles an hour. It just all of a sudden like the fire just shot. Yeah, 100 feet forward at 100 miles an hour. And then in an instant, all of a sudden, your fire is going in a different direction, an additional direction, right? Because tracking these things, predicting these things, it's, we figured out or Dr. Terry Clark has figured out that it's not just the atmospheric conditions. It's the fire creating its own stuff, its own wind. Yeah. And just moving from both of these names. It's a living thing. Yeah. And they call that

spotting. If they if it tosses embers to another spot, they call that spotting. And if it starts a fire, obviously, right? And then temperature also is another factor. If it's warm out hot, yeah, um, you know, obviously that's an extra 60 hundred degrees that the temp that the sun doesn't have to heat something up to, you know, yeah, you never, that's why they burn mostly or most hot and wild during the day, during the afternoon. California, like I had to get used to camping in California, because in Georgia, Georgia is like a rainforest man. It's like, there's never any fire threat. No, plus it's so muggy. Yeah, it is so muggy all the time. There's no way you couldn't start a fire if you want to. You can't even strike a match outside right now.

But, uh, well, I'm just used to camping with a great, big, awesome campfire. But once I headed west into like Colorado and New Mexico and California, they have, you know, every state park and national park you go to a national forest says have signs that say, you know, fire risk, high, no fires at all. Or you have to apply for a fire permit with the camp camp rangers, camp rangers, forest rangers. Sure. And I had to get used to either sneaking my fire, which is not right and risking fine or not having one at all, which stinks. Why don't you just go apply for a permit? Well, sometimes it was the fire risk was so high you're not supposed to have one at all. Oh, gotcha. And I would still have one. And I probably shouldn't be saying that, but

I'm super, super careful. When I was living in the van for a little while, I camped on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon and I started a fire, but I don't, I didn't see any signs that said no fire or anything, but I wasn't, I could have totally missed it. Probably no one said anything though. Yeah. And you know what? I was completely irresponsible for doing that. Just let me go on record and say that it was not the right thing to do. Right. Even though I was super careful because accidents happen and I could have easily been that jerk that like didn't see the ember get away that started forest fires. That's true. I want to say, I mean, if a spark from a train's wheel can start a forest fire, then yes, very easily, a fire that you started

could start a forest fire. Right. That was very good. Chuck, wait a sec. Well, I didn't want to sound like I was bragging about it. Like, oh, I was super careful. So it was cool. It was not cool. There's this guy on, yeah, I didn't take your break. Okay. Did you ever watch Malcolm in the middle? Oh yeah. There was this one scene where the mom was telling the dad, he was, he was saying that she was giving him grief about the stories that he was telling his kids. And he's like, they're cautionary tales. And she goes, cautionary tales doing him with, it was so cool. I enjoyed that show for a long time. It's a good one. But like all shows, when it's about kids, when they got a little too old, that, you know, all of a sudden his voice is down. Well,

no, he, he cashed out like right about that time. He's like, I'm out Malcolm himself. He's like, I've got 15 Porsches and I'm very happy I'm done. Well, yeah, he went on to his big movie career. Yeah, that's right. Sorry. Thank you. I wonder if he listened. Cranston though, he's, uh, I haven't seen Breaking Bad, but that's supposed to be amazing. Yeah. All right. The last thing Josh is topography. That's what we talked about, a steep slope. It's going to spread faster, usually spreads uphill, even though leave it to Australia to do something weird. Dr. Terry Clark says he has a case study in Australia where the fire actually burned down a sloped mountain, which is pretty unusual. Yes. Normally it burns up for a

couple of reasons. Uh, the ambient wind, um, usually blows uphill. Um, the steeper the slope, the better because the fire, uh, the smoke and the heat from the fire, better, the worse. Well, for the fire, as far as concern, it's like, give me a steep mountain. Yeah. Um, because the fire would be standing almost upright then and the smoke and the heat coming off the fire is, um, really drying out the fuel load ahead. Yeah. So most of the time they burn upward, up a mountain, then they reach the crest and they're like, oh, I should have thought this through because now I have to go down and I can't. Yeah, which is good for fighting the fire. Not good for the fire. No. Um, they can, besides burning all the vegetation, which is can be really

bad, uh, it can lead to things like erosion and mudslides later on because you mess with the, with the ground like that and it's not stable like it once was. Yeah. I mean, like the, one of the roles that roots, a root system plays is holding the ground in place. Yeah. And if you've burned the tree and the root system out, it's just soil and the nice heavy rain comes in. And that very thing happened, Josh, in 1994 in a storm king mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, uh, 2000 acre forest burned and the underbrush burned on the steep slopes. And two months later, they got a lot of heavy rain and it literally poured tons of mud and rock onto a stretch of interstate 70, like engulfing cars, sweeping them into the Colorado River. Yeah. All because the

fire months, months ago. And we've seen mudslides before. Remember Guatemala? Oh, yeah. Remember like down the mountain, there was still that path. You could see the, where the path where the trees standing on this village where they'd never unearthed the people. Yeah. It was like people's kids were running around. Yeah. It was so sad where we were standing was like six feet higher than it once was, right? Yeah. At six, at least I would say that's awful. So Chuck, if you want to put out a fire, well, first of all, they're beneficial that we should say that at times. Okay. Burning the underbrush of a forest can prevent a larger fire later on. So they do have like prescribed burns like you were talking about. Yes. Chuck, I inadvertently started a

book club by mentioning 1491 again recently. I have, you know, it's a lot of people have been writing and saying like, thanks man. I'm starting. Yeah. And they're like, what about 1421? Yes, it's another book. That's a fake book though. Oh, is it? It's, yeah. That's the one where the guys like the Chinese made it to South America or Mexico. So there's not true. You wrote an article about it. And I pilloried the guy. Okay. Yeah. It's, he has very shaky, shaky evidence that's fascinating stuff. But have we not podcasted on that? No. Oh, let's do it. All right. I've read that today and I was like, why haven't we done this yet? Oh, we can totally do it. Okay. I think it took a little while for me for the bitterness to like leave my mouth like after I wrote that one

because the guy was getting tons of press at the time. Oh, really? But anyway, anyone who's read 1491 knows that North America was basically a managed forest. And one of the ways that it was managed prior to Columbus was through prescribed burns. Yeah. Like it, it is very beneficial. It burns away the underbrush. So you have less potential for accidental fires. Yes. Right. Remember we talked about recessions are kind of like that. And the, it gets rid of disease. Yep. Provides nutrients in the soil. That's right. Plant disease. That is an awesome show after you've like, you know, hit the peace pipe, just kick back and watch a forest fire go. So let's talk about putting these things out, Joshers. They have a couple of categories of the, these

elite firefighters. They're called hot shots and smoke jumpers. The hot shots. What's so funny? Just the names they give them. Yeah. That's pretty, I'd say that's pretty bad A. No, be sure. All right. Hot shots. They work in 20 person teams. Yeah. And they are trained. They're on the ground and they're trained to build mainly to build fire breaks. Right. And that is when they strip the land of fuel ahead of the fire or they will burn it ahead of the fire. Yeah. To stop it there. Have you ever seen that God's must be crazy too? No. The dude, the main dude, I can't remember his name. He, there's a brush fire coming like a prairie fire in Savannah fire coming at the main characters. And they're about to be engulfed in it. And the, the main Bushman runs and grabs

like a piece of grass or whatever and sets fire to the grass behind them that they are running into. Right. And burns it and then basically creates a circle. It's a backfire fire break. And they're all standing in a circle where there's no more fuel any longer. It's completely an early genius. Well, it is. And it's also, you have to be, you have to really know what you're doing. You know, you have to put it in the exact right spot. I know that sometimes they'll do the fire break and the fire will leap over that. And then that's kind of make you feel like yeah, there's nothing we can do. Well, in a lot of cases, I mean, it's like, I remember was it two years ago was, or maybe it was three years ago when they had all those wildfires. And I remember

thinking like what we can do medically and like, we can, you know, put a man on the moon, but we can't stop a fire. And it's that out of control because it's so huge and overwhelming. Very deep Chuck. Thank you. Not deep at all. Actually, there's a, there's smoke jumpers, which are hot shots that jump out of airplanes, right? Yeah. And there's only a couple of hundred of them in the US, which I can imagine that's a really specialized job. And you have to be a tough mug to do that. That would be how we long. Is that what he did in that in Firestorm? I think he was a smoke jumper. I didn't see it. Not many people saw it actually, but I did copy the description from IMDB. I thought it was just about like a firefighter in like forest fires. But of course, because it's

Hollywood, they added some plot to it. Yeah. Firefighter Jesse Graves has to save ornithologist Jennifer and other people in a forest fire. Like I thought that was it. But no, it was set up by the lawyer of a convicted killer, Earl Shea, who escaped from prison with several of his inmates, posing as firefighters to recover 37 million in stash loot. So they were acting, they started the fire on purpose. It was sort of like the guys who posed as ambulance drivers to get the dude out of prison. That sounds awesome, actually. I mean, the plot description sounds pretty awesome. You can tell you hear like how we long 1998. It's going to be awful. But like, I'm sure the writer of that was like, okay, that's I'm honest. Yeah. And then he hears it's going to be Firestorm.

Yeah. Starting how he long and he's like, I'm sure that the writer Alan Smithy was pretty psyched about his project for a little while. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take to America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops.

Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Marcel Swiley, that dude and host of More To It, a new iHeart original podcast that takes a deep dive into the biggest topics in sports, entertainment and culture. The journey begins with headline news, which leads to deeper discussions about life lessons that are presented in every story. Each week we tackle subjects and issues beyond the public's perception and narrative to learn more about the stories and about ourselves. Hosted by someone who defied the odds to go from

Compton to the Ivy League and then played 10 years as an all pro defense event. This is not your typical sports show with topics ranging from the social ills that surround us all to the character growth that occurs from overcoming adversity. You'll get inspired hearing stories that highlight the growing pains that fuels anyone on a successful journey. You'll leave every episode with a greater understanding that no matter the story, the person or outcome, there is always more to it. Found on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. So Chuck, oh, you can find a fire using an air core, right? Oh yeah, the drop fire retardant on the fire. You've seen of the news footage, the red stuff. Yes, or they can drop tons of water. And have you

ever heard that urban legend? Oh, yeah, but what is it? So there is a forest fire somewhere, we'll say California, and they put it out and like six months later or whatever, some hiker is walking through this area and looks up and notices that there's a scuba diver stuck in a tree. That's right. With the rebreather on and the mask on and the flippers and everything, and he's dead. And the hiker can't figure out what's going on and leaves the forest and tells somebody about it, and they start doing some research and they figure out that he was scooped up by one of these planes that goes out to the ocean and like spooks up a bunch of water and comes and dumps it on the totally not true, right? Wildfire now. That's a good one. Yeah, it is a good one. I hate it when

you burst urban legends though, because it bursts so many bubbles. Like there's people out there right now going, oh man. It's so beneficial. Like yes, I know it's things right now, but in about 45 seconds you're going to feel like a smarter person. Right, that's true. We mentioned the fire retardant. That is not just red stuff. It is a chemical retardant containing phosphate fertilizer and it cools down the fire, slows it down. It's main ingredient is water though, so it's like super, super water. As far as I understand. You know I was thinking about when I was reading about smoke jumpers. The human cannonball thing that DARPA came up with would be perfect for that. You could just shoot a bunch of smoke jumpers over the fire

into where you want them. With parachutes or something? Sure. Yeah, I can't imagine a smoke jumpers job like landing in the middle of that stuff. Yeah, it's crazy stuff. Amazing. And we also want to give a shout out to Always. Great movie starring Richard Dreyfus. No, Always. Oh, I thought you said we always want to give a shout out. No, always. Remember? Yeah, that was a good movie. John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfus. And that handsome dude. Who? I don't know. Oh, yeah, that's right. The guy that played the handsome guy. Yes. And it was a remake of I think a guy named Joe or something. And also I believe Audrey Hepburn's final film. Was it? She was darling in it. She was. She was pretty till the very end. Is that it? That is it. Okay. If you want to know

more about forest fires, you should go into the beloved venerable website that we work for howstuffworks.com and type in wildfires. We have it as one word, right? Yes. And if you type in it, it's going to bring up a very cool article. It's some really great photography, too. I think the page one or page zero pick is just awesome looking. And since I said handy search bar, that means it's time for a listener mail. No, it's not. Oh, yeah, that's right. I don't have a listener mail for this one, Josh. And I was trying to think of what we could do instead. What did you come up with? Well, I thought about a call to action saying, you know, that'd be great if you could go to iTunes and leave us a rating and a review. Good or bad. Some people hate it when we

do that. You know, like we're just begging for it or whatever. It's pizza pledge drive. Yeah. Yes, it does. Chuck, you know, did we ask that much from you guys? Really? No, no. So, so great. I'm glad we finally worked that out. Call to action or how about some love for Jerry via email to be great. Oh, that's nice. Some Jerry questions or both. We'll tell you all about Jerry. Yeah, ask us really personal questions about our life. We've just been waiting for everyone to ask. You can ask those questions all sorts of ways. First, if you want to go give us a rating or review on iTunes. That's very nice of you. Thank you. But if you want to ask us a question about Jerry, you can tweet to us. We have our own Twitter feed up to 15,000 followers.

Did you know that? Really? Yes. S-Y-S-K podcast. One word. And then, of course, we have our great Facebook page. That's facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can send us a regular old email. And you can listen to us on WFMU if you're in New York or New Jersey. 91.1 Fridays between 7 and 8 p.m. Yes, the stuff you should know radio public radio version. Yeah, or 90.1 in the Hudson Valley. Hudson Valley. And it's not New York. New York's not in the Hudson Valley. Where's the Hudson Valley? New York State. So that's upstate. Yeah. Is that where Albany is? I keep hearing like everybody on Law and Order talk about when they mention the governor. I get so. Or you can send us a regular old email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com.

Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuff Works staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Langston Kermit. Sometimes I'm on TV. I'm David Borey, and I'm probably on TV right now. David and I are going to take a deep dive every week into the most exciting ground breaking and sometimes problematic black conspiracy theories. We've had amazing past notable guests like Brandon Kyle Goodman, Sam J. Quinta Brunson, and so many more. New episodes around every Tuesday, many episodes out on Thursdays where we answer you, the listeners conspiracy theories. Listen to my mama told me on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.