Fire Tornadoes Make Forest Fires Even More Deadly

Photo credit: Josh Lane

Forest fires are already frightening and deadly enough on their own, but when the conditions are right, something hellish happens: fire whirls. Fires sometimes spawn their own winds as the flames consume oxygen, creating tornadoes filed with fire and noxious gases.

From Discover Magazine:

All these wonders start with the plume that is formed as the heated air rises from the fire in a column. Usually a strong prevailing wind quashes such a plume before it can grow. But when the fire is especially hot and the wind is weak, the plume can prevail. “Wind is the most critical weather component for fires,” says Margaret Gross, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Riverside, California. “It determines more than anything else how fast a fire will spread. But when the power of the fire is greater than the wind, these large plumes can rise high into the atmosphere. Those are the fires that usually generate weather.”

Photo credit: Boston.com

Fire whirls develop in a similar manner to dust devils, growing from a heat source close to the ground. When there’s a little instability in the atmosphere, with warm, rising currents, the whirl’shitting a cliff or some other obstacle.

Fire whirls can reach 300 to 400 feet in height, and 20 to 50 feet in width. As they blow over the surface at five to seven miles per hour, they can ignite new fires in unburned areas.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

In 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake in Japan spawned a massive fire whirl that killed 38,000 people in just fifteen minutes. Three years later, numerous fire whirls developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California, killing two and producing significant structural damage.

Link [Wikipedia] + [Discover Magazine]

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