this Missoula Montana Fire lab is the only one of its
kind in the U.S. They work every day to answer
seemingly simple questions like how does fire spread.
That's one they thought they already knew. We started
to realize that a lot of the basics that we thought
were the foundation of fire behavior science. Where in
fact quite wrong, not just a little wrong but exactly
not just wrong. Counterintuitiv I would say the theme
for most of our research here is that we initially use
intuition about fire and to start experiments to design
them. But often what we find is results that are
exactly the opposite of what we thought we were going
to find. Mark Phineas team disproved the entire theor
about how fire spreads. About a decade ago scientists
thought flames spread through radiation the same energy
transfer that allows you to feel warmth from the sun.
Instead they found it was convection basically flame
contact convection is a very very efficient process of
heating fuel particles, especially if they're very
small. Here's why that matters. Many of the fuel
particles and wild land fires are small. Think pine
needles, twigs, grasses, there' a little trough right
here. The revelation led to an even simpler question,
why is fire shaped the way it is with peaks and troughs.
No one had ever figured out what those were, whether
they were functionally meaningf for wildland fire or
there's just some so something that was, you know,
superfluous in the whole process. Well it turns out
that those are the reason that fire spreads these
simulated fuels allow Phineas team to burn the same
fire over and over and take high speed video. That's
when they notice that pattern in the structure, but
it's the cold air coming down counterintuitively
replace the rising gas is going up. That is actually
pushing flames down into the bed and touching, making
those flames touch the fuel particles out ahead of the
fire. The more fuel in the forest, the larger the
flames. And it's one part of why firefighters are
seeing such a dramatic change on the lines. All that
stuff is sitting there waiting to be burned and it has
to be removed and it will be one way or another, I
would categorize the difference is radical. If you took
1995 firefighter Shawn Morgan to drop that same
firefighter just overnight into today's environment
would be a head spin, right Because things move way
more way more quickly, there are way more hazards on
the landscape. So how is fire behavior changing Well,
that's why we came to this lab to find out. But as we
learned ourselves, we were asking the wrong questions,
even though people are seeing fire behavior that
surprises them. The physics of fire behavior hasn't
changed. It's never changed basically. Fire is doing
what it's expected to what is different. The conditio
climate change combined with overgrown dense fuels, a
recipe for disaster. The percentage of fires that are
getting away and going from that initial attack mode
too extended attack, large fire scenario that is
happening faster and with a higher frequency than we
ever had. This little flame is the same temperature is
the biggest crown fire you've ever seen. Vinny says the
solution is again counterintuitive more fire. The
science shows us pretty clearly what we need to do. And
often that is disappointing to people because they
don't want to see that fire is the solution. They just
inherently don't understand it and it scares them. And
if if you say we need more fire on the landscape well
they say, well that means more smoke and that means
more impact to me. But it's not like we have a smoke
free environment and right now we would just have
ownership of that smoke and we take responsibility for
it as part of our, our necessary management a
that's been termed and widely discussed in the, in the
science community as the fire paradox. Okay. This thing
that can threaten us yet if we don't allow it to exist,
it threatens us more. That's why you'll see more plant
fire in the forest service's new wildfire crisis
strategy. In many cases it will take thinning the trees
before burning to prevent a disaster. The plan includes
treating more than 50 million acres across the us and
it will take maintenance. We have to mow our grass Well,
no, it once and then 20 years later do it again. I mean
it's constant maintenance. After decades of research,
there are two messages Finney wishes he could get
through to people. First fire is our ally seconds. We
don't have a choice about fire every year. We prove we
do not have the power to choose not to have it. The
only power we have is when to have it and what kind to
have. And that's it. And when you realize that those
are your only real choices, why wouldn't you choose to
have beneficial kinds of fires that sustained rather