Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Wildfires Work

Episode Date: March 9, 2019

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.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Good morning, everyone. It's July 26th, 2011. What? No, it's modern times, but this dates back to July 26th, 2011, and it is my select pick of the week.

How wildfires work. This one's important. That's why I picked this one, everybody. Wildfires are still happening all over the place every year, and it seems like they're getting worse and worse because they are. So this is a good podcast to educate yourself on wildfires and how to prevent them,

how to fight them, and how they get started in the first place. So enjoy how wildfires work right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.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? Yep. He was puffy and stuffed in a suit. He was 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 curiosity.

Oh, you're right. He was setting fires. He wanted work, right? Leonard Gregg. Leonard Gregg was his name. He set this fire and unbeknownst to him at the same time. I remember this now. You do?

Yeah. 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 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. Unbelievable. And it was a conflagration. Ultimately, 467,000 acres burned, including 491 houses, and it was the largest fire in Arizona's history. And this was 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, well, that never happens. You always see that like,

they're award so-and-so this and they just don't pay. It's just like a symbolic award, I guess. 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. And that's crazy.

Or that this guy set a fire because of a desire to get work to put the fire out. Yeah. But because they're not the only people who have done stupid stuff like this. Right. 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 gonna praise the firefighters. Not like we're saying a lot of these firefighters starting 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. So you all know that we all know that makes the fire burn hotter and bigger. 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. Something. 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. 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 stat that it 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. 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 US. It's a lot of wildfires. Isn't that crazy? And what's crazy is that four fifths of those are started by human activity. Yeah, a little more than four fifths. That's nuts. Like, I mean, there's a whole thing called lightning season.

Right? Yeah. That when combined with 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 apparently like a train wheel causing a spark off of the rail.

Into some tinder. 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 prescribing. Or not putting out their fire when they're camping. Yes, that's a big one too.

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- They're prescribed burns, right? No, no, no. That's like people setting- You mean acts of arson?

Yeah, but it's only a certain amount of those are wild. I think 63% are outdoor fires, vegetation fires. So the others are like trash fires, rubbish fires. Idiot fires. Yeah, exactly. All of them make smokey the bear weep. Yeah, true. So there's fire weather.

There's lightning season. Four fifths of fires are started by humans. More than four fifths, you said. We know about the fire triangle, right? So 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 combine to, I guess, give us an idea of what's going to happen

with this forest fire, right? Now, 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 fuel, the amount and the type of fuel, the type of weather 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 and the same. Well, they are today, at least. Forest fire just kind of rolls out the tongue a little more. Okay. For me, my thick tongue. Well, I said wildfire and I keep saying wildflower to Jerry.

She went, is it wildflower or wildfire? What, see, widefire. I think it's a forest fire. It could be a wildfire. That's true. Yeah. So fuel, you need a fuel obviously to get the wildfire burning.

And what they call the fuel load is the amount and it's a measured amount of fuel available per unit area. And it's usually tons per acre. So 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, is you would think that the fuel load, 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 the type of fuel is how much moisture it has in it. Yeah. And the density like 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 smaller. Yeah. And it dries out more quickly. Yeah. It's not like drying a tree or a log. It's got to take a long time to dry out. Right. And then the same goes for density

with like say tufts of pine straw, right? If it's very densely packed. Yeah. 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, 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 they wear like four fingered rings. Right. And on a chemical level, they, 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 campfire wood beside the fire. And you can hear it sizz, 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. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Oh, another thing, Josh, 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 a wildfire happens. By the time it gets there, it's already dry and ripe for the picking. Yeah, and it's just going to keep burning and keep burning.

There's nothing to stop it, basically. That's right. It feeds itself. Something else that feeds it. So that was fuel, right? Yeah. The second category or factor that really determines how a wildfire is going to go is weather.

Yeah, big time. And when you think of weather, you think, well, 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, Kevin went to a great. Was that Bonser?

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 that probably

has more of an effect than any is wind, actually. 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 Annas in California,

it's already hot and dry wind. Yes. So it might as well be fuel. Right. Or I guess it's sort of is fuel. Well, it. Not traditionally, but. It doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily fuel,

but it brings more oxygen to the fuel, too. Yeah, exactly. Right? So it pushes fire along. It's an oxygen delivery system, wind is. And it doesn't, 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, because 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. Those can be enormous. It's basically like the heat from the fire creates a vortex.

And the vortex is customarily horizontal. But if something gets under it, 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 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 treetops. And all of a sudden, dude, it's on this side of the mountain now. Right. It's scary stuff. And treetops specifically, by the way,

that's a type of fire unto itself. That's a crown fire, is what it's called. That's right. There's these fire worlds, right, the fire tornadoes. They don't necessarily have to follow 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. And apparently, these things, they get up to like 66 feet

wide, right? Yeah, they can shoot 300 plus feet at 100 miles an hour. It just, all of a sudden, like the fire just shot 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,

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, and just moving from both of these now. It's a living thing. Yeah. And they call that spotting. 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, obviously, that's an extra 60, 100 degrees that the sun doesn't have to heat something up to. Yeah.

Yeah, that's why they burn mostly, or most hot and wild during the day, during the afternoon. California, I had to get used to camping in California, because in Georgia, Georgia's like a rainforest, man. And 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 wanted to. You can't even strike a match outside right now. But I'm just used to camping with a great, big, awesome campfire. But once I headed west into Colorado and New Mexico and California, they have every state park and national park you go to and national forest has signs that say, fire risk, high, no fires at all.

Or you have to apply for a fire permit with the camp rangers, forest rangers. 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 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 didn't see any signs that said no fire or anything,

but 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, even though I was super careful, because accidents happen.

And I could have easily been that jerk that didn't see the ember get away that started a forest fire. So anyway, I want to say do not do that. 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. That was very good, Chuck. Way to see you, O.A.

Well, I didn't want to sound like I was bragging about it. Oh, I was super careful, so it was cool. It was not cool. There's this guy on. Yeah, I didn't take your bragging. OK. Did you ever watch Malcolm in the middle? Oh, yeah.

There was this one scene where the mom was telling the dad. 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 them with it was so cool. I enjoyed that show for a long time. That's a good one. But like all shows, when it's about kids,

when they got a little too old, all of a sudden, his voice is down. Well, no, he cached out right about that time. He was like, I'm Malcolm himself. He was 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, Frankie Meadies. I wonder if you listen. Cranston, though, I haven't seen Breaking Bad, but it's supposed to be amazing. 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. The ambient wind usually blows uphill. The steeper the slope, the better, because the smoke and the heat from the fire... No, not better, the worse.

Well, for the fire, as far as concern, it's like, give me a steep mountain. Because the fire would be standing almost upright then, and the smoke and the heat coming off the fire is really drying out the fuel load ahead. So most of the time they burn upward, up the mountain, and then they reach the crest, and they're like, 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. They can, besides burning all the vegetation, which can be really bad, it can lead to things like erosion and mudslides later on, because you mess with the ground like that,

and it's not stable like it once was. Yeah, I mean, one of the roles that a root system plays, is holding the ground in place, and if you burn the tree and the root system out, it's just soil, and nice, heavy rain comes, and... And that very thing happened, Josh, in 1994, in Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a 2,000-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, engulfing cars, sweeping them into the Colorado River, all because of the fire, months ago. And we've seen mudslides before. Remember Guatemala?

Oh, yeah, man. Remember, down the mountain, there was still that path, you could see where the path came from, and we were standing on this village, where they'd never unearthed the people, and the 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, 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, though. We should say that at times. Okay. Burning the underbrush of a forest

can prevent a larger fire later on, so they do have prescribed burns, like you were talking about. Yes, Chuck, I inadvertently started a book club by mentioning 1491 again recently. Oh, yeah? Have you noticed a lot of people have been writing and saying, like, thanks, man, I'm starting another book.

Yeah, and they're like, what about 1421? Yes, it's another book. That's a fake book, though. Oh, is it? Yeah, that's the one where the guy's like, the Chinese made it to South America or Mexico. So, that's not true. You wrote an article about it.

And I pilloried the guy. Oh, okay. Yeah, 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 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 is very beneficial. It burns away the underbrush. So, you have less potential for accidental fires, right?

Remember we talked about recessions are kind of like that. And it gets rid of disease, provides nutrients in the soil. That's right. Plant disease, that is. It's an awesome show after you've like, you know, hit the peace pipe,

just kick back and watch a forest fire go. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye, listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So let's talk about putting these things out, Joshers. They have a couple of categories of the, uh, these elite firefighters. They're called hotshots and smoke jumpers. The hotshots, what's so funny?

That's the names they give them. Yeah, that's pretty, I'd say that's pretty bad A now, be sure. All right, hotshots, they work in 20 person teams and they are trained, they're on the ground and they're trained to build, mainly to build fire breaks. And that is when they strip the land of fuel ahead of the fire or they will burn it ahead of the fire to stop it there. Have you ever seen that? That would be crazy too.

No. The dude, the main dude, I can't remember his name, he, um, there's a brush fire coming like a prairie fire, 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 and burns it and then basically creates a circle. It's like a backfire fire break and they're all standing in a circle where there's no

more fuel any longer, it's completely and utterly genius. Well it is and it's also, uh, 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, uh, That's kind of make you feel like 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, uh, 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. Then there's, uh, 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 U S, 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 the firestorm? I think he was a smoke jumper. I didn't see it. Not many people saw it actually, but, uh, I did copy the, the description from IMDB. I thought it was just about like a firefighter and like forest fires, but of course, because

it's Hollywood, they had some plot to it. Yeah. A 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, uh, ambulance drivers to get the dude out

of prison. That sounds awesome. I mean, the plot description sounds pretty awesome. You can tell you hear like how we long in 1998 and you're like, well, it's going to be awful. But like, I'm sure the writer of that was like, okay, that's, I'm on this. 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. So, uh, Chuck, oh, uh, you can find a fire using an air core, right? Oh, yeah. The drop fire retardant on the fire. You've seen 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, there was a forest fire somewhere, we'll say California, and they put it out and like six months later, whatever, some hiker is walking through this area and looks up and notices that there's a scuba diver stuck in a tree with the rebreather on and the, the, um, the mask on and the flippers and everything and, um, he's dead.

And the hiker can't figure out what's going on and, and, you know, leaves the forest and tell somebody about it. And they start doing some research and they figure out that, um, he was scooped up by one of these planes that goes out to the ocean and like a bunch of water and comes and dumps it on the... Totally not true, right? Wildfire now. Uh, the fire...

That's a good one though. 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 stings right now, but in about 45 seconds you're going to feel like a smarter person. Right.

That's true. So the fire retardant, uh, that is not just red stuff, it is, um, a, uh, chemical retardant containing phosphate fertilizer and it cools down the fire, slows it down. It's like, uh, it's main ingredient is water though. So it's like super, super water. Gotcha. As far as I understand. You know, I was thinking about when I was reading about smoke jumpers, um, the, uh, the

human cannonball thing that DARPA came up with would be perfect for that. You could just be like, chung, chung, chung, chung, just shoot a bunch of smoke jumpers into the, like over the fire and to where you want them. You don't need them. With what? Parachutes or something? Sure. Yeah.

I can imagine a smoke jumpers job, like landing in the middle of that stuff. Yeah. It's crazy stuff. Amazing. And, um, we also want to give a shout out to Always. Great movie starring Richard Dreyfus. It was a... No.

Always. Oh. I thought you said we always want to give a shout out to... No, no. You remember? Yeah. That was a good movie. John Goodman, Holly Hunter, Richard Dreyfus.

Uh-huh. Um... 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, uh, I think a guy named Joe or something. Uh-huh. And also, I believe Audrey Hepburn's final film. What was it? Mm-hmm. God, but 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, uh, beloved venerable website that we work for, howstuffworks.com, and type in wildfires, and we have it as one word. Right?

Yes. Uh, and if you type it in, it's going to bring up a very cool article with some really great photography, too. Um, I think the page one or page zero pick is just awesome looking. Um, 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'd 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 beats a pledge drive. Yeah.

Yes, it does, Chuck. You know? Do we ask that much from you guys, really? No. No. So, so. Great. Chuck, I'm glad we finally worked that out.

Yeah. That's a great action. Or how about some love for Jerry via email too? That'd 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 her life. We'll answer anything. Totally. We've just been waiting for everyone to ask. Uh-huh. Yeah. Um, you can ask those questions all sorts of ways.

Um, first, if you want to go give us a rating or review on iTunes, that's very nice of you. Thank you. Um, 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. Uh, Hudson Valley. Hudson Valley. Um, and, 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? Uh, sure. That I keep hearing like everybody in 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.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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