Said Carl Otsuka, fire inspector for the Honolulu Fire Department, quoted in
"Why jumping into water to escape a wildfire should be a last resort/Seeking refuge in a pool or the ocean won’t always protect you from the heat or smoke, experts say" (WaPo).
Crystal Kolden, a professor of fire science at the University of California at Merced, said... if you seek refuge in the water, you may be stuck there for several hours “before the coast is clear,” Kolden said. “People don’t realize how long you’re going to be in the water... Hypothermia and risk of drowning due to not being able to swim or tread water for that long are very real possibilities.”
The flames may run out of fuel, but the smoke will linger. “You literally can’t see anything, so you don’t know if it’s safe to get out yet,” Kolden said.... “Those nice, green irrigated lawns, they don’t burn,” Kolden said. “If you get in the middle of that and you get down low on the ground where the coolest, cleanest air is, then you have a much higher likelihood of surviving.... You don’t want to get caught in your car. You don’t want to get caught in a forest,” Kolden said.
In Paradise, Calif., people survived one of the most destructive fires in the state’s history by huddling together in the middle of “this giant asphalt parking lot” outside of a grocery store, Kolden said. "So, I look for places like that....”
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Those are good tips. I would expect most people who jump in the water wouldn't do it if they had another choice and they can get out any time they want if it turns out to have been a mistake (and maybe you can't tread water for hours, but most people can do a crawl for a couple hundred yards to get around a particularly fiery patch). But I never would have thought of a green lawn as a protective barrier. I might not have thought of looking for a parking lot either, though it makes sense now that he's said it.
As opposed to burning alive.
I'll allow it.
Narr would probably say "I'm going to wait until my wife gets burned to see if it's a problem"
Putz
So there you are at the top of Niagra falls, and all that's available is a barrel.
Didn't Althouse blog about a elderly married couple who rode out a California fire in swimming poll?
I remember linking Elvis's "Burning Love."
On 9 March 1945, the USAAF carried out Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing attack in history. In terms of human life, the toll claimed by that single raid dwarfed both nuclear attacks. The following morning revealed the Sumida River virtually choked with floating corpses. Many were unturned with no visible injuries. This led some people to believe they had been poisoned by something dropped into the river by the B-29s, however, the official opinion was a combination of smoke inhalation and drowning due to hypothermia.
A similar effect happened during the great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Over 140 thousand people were killed in that cataclysm, some by collapsing buildings, some in the fires resulting from broken gas mains, but many were just found as floating corpses apparently uninsured. In the Great Fire Raid hypothermia was an obvious cause of death since the weather in central Japan was at or near freezing for weeks prior and floating ice was often seen in the rivers. However, the weather before the 1923 quake had been hotter than normal for weeks, which illustrates how even uncomfortably warm water can chill us to death.
"Didn't Althouse blog about a elderly married couple who rode out a California fire in swimming poll?"
Yes, here. And you're right about Elvis.
That incident is also discussed in the article linked in this post: "In 2017, one California couple survived by staying in a neighbor’s pool for hours as the nearby houses burned, but another woman perished in a pool, possibly overcome by smoke."
Explain to me how huddling low on a green lawn is any different from sitting in the shallow end of a pool?
I'd prefer the water and suffocation to burning alive.
That said - have you looked closely at the water in the Lahaina harbor? filled with oil and gas.
The last time I was in Hawaii, the public beaches were lined with tents and tarps and homeless people, with a lot of druggies among that population. Who exactly was it that didn't know a fire evacuation was going on, and ended up in the ocean?
People jumped a thousand feet to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center rather than be roasted alive and this joker is advising people to not run into the ocean -- where the fire cannot possibly reach them? Because they might get hypothermic?! Because the smoke will keep them from determining whether the fire has subsided or not?! (Here's an idea: Get out of the water when you think it's safe and if you feel really, really, really warm...jump back in.)
What idiocy!
Should we point out the boiling frog fallacy? Perhaps when all you have is a frying pan, it is better than the fire?
Norman Maclean's *other* book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Men_and_Fire) is more or less about the deaths of 13 firefighters in a 1940s Montana wildfire. The crew chief survived by lighting a fire in the dry grass ahead of the main fire--as expected, it burned out very quickly, so he was able to lie down in the ashes while the main fire skipped that patch. It wasn't a nice well-irrigated green lawn, but the same idea.
“[B]efore the coast is clear”.
Metaphor, or literal?
"In 2017, one California couple survived by staying in a neighbor’s pool for hours as the nearby houses burned, but another woman perished in a pool, possibly overcome by smoke."
What's unsaid is the key to why swimming pools are not comparable to rivers, lakes, or the ocean as a refuge from fire. How deep was the pool? Most pools today are pretty shallow end-to-end, about four feet. Thanks to some lucrative lawsuits, swimming pool contractors usually won't install a diving board on a backyard "cee-ment pond" because it's for swimming only. Diving into your pool voids all warranties and liabilities. Consequently, there's no compelling reason to build the pool deeper than four to four and a half feet. Adults can stand in a pool, whereas natural bodies of water may compel a person to swim or tread water. Being immersed in water below 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit up to one's chin lowers the core body temperature much more rapidly than being immersed in identically warm water up to one's waist. Furthermore, swimming or treading water depletes one's energy store more rapidly than standing. Once the available store of chemical energy is depleted, hypothermia begins to take its toll, which is why survival swimming techniques emphasize passive floating over treading water.
According to my sources, the fire was started by sharks with laser beams hoping to get people to run into the water.
The government's never going to tell us that though.
“Those nice, green irrigated lawns, they don’t burn,”
You mean the ones being outlawed?
Back in the 1940s Tokyo was interlaced with rivers and canals, which today are covered by concrete. I recall reading that during the B-29 fire bombing raids people jumped into the water to escape the flames, only to be boiled alive. Frightening g to think about it. Not clear that Hiroshima was worse.
A neighbor of my wife's parents stayed in his pool as his house burned down in the Bel Air fire of 1961. He saw cars on the street explode.
Ah yes. "Experts say" Heard a lot of that during COVID.
It is difficult to understand how so many died in a wildfire- some difficult questions are going to, or should, be asked of the local government officials. Someone fucked up really big time here.
Green lawn is a good idea. Hot shot forest fighting crews carry "space blankets" and if they get caught in a fire and can't get out, lie down on the ground and put the space blanket over them. It's a desperate play--but some survive.
The problem with these sort of warnings is they are usually far too late to be of any use. It is not going to help the people who already had to take a dip, for better or worse, and most likely anyone who could be affected in the near future is probably too busy trying to save life and property to be listening. There's also the matter that very rare events are not a priority for most people, so it is not like you can train them beforehand. They have lots of priorities and something that likely will never happen to them is not going to be remembered, assuming it was learned in the first place. That's why the successful campaigns usually involve fairly common events, like house fires, and are repeated all the time until it becomes second nature.
There's also the question whether the experts actually know what they are talking about. Experts have not been particularly accurate over the past couple of decades. As with any institution that can provide money, prestige, etc., it gets infested with people who want the benefits of the title without having to do the work. Along with the grifters and the amateurs who want to get a million followers, you get experts that fake studies, experts who make decisions on very flimsy studies, experts that opine on situations when they do not know the facts, experts who will repeat whatever their paymasters tell them, experts that refuse to change their opinions even when presented with evidence that they are wrong, etc.
But, yeah, if you get stuck in deep water for a long time, you may drown. Who knew? When the alternative was being burned to a cinder, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and, frankly, probably was a good idea.
"people survived one of the most destructive fires in the state’s history by huddling together in the middle of 'this giant asphalt parking lot' outside of a grocery store"
That's a poor assessment of what actually happened. They were placed in the open lot originally by firefighters and then moved into nearby empty buildings less likely to catch fire than other structures. They were positioned by the firefighters to avoid flames, heat, and possible explosions from a propane source, not smoke, which due to the wind conditions mostly rose away from the ground.
The safest place is going to be situational. Hopefully you'll have an experienced fireman to guide you as these people did.
I remember being told about holding wet towel over face while staying low/flat to ground
"Hypothermia and risk of drowning due to not being able to swim or tread water for that long are very real possibilities.”
Well, if being burnt to a crisp would otherwise be instantaneous, then those risks are well worth taking.
I wonder how the fires started. Here's something from Vox.
'Part of the problem is that climate change is making Hawaii drier, so it’s more likely to ignite when there’s an ignition event (most Hawaii wildfires are sparked by humans, though the source of the current blazes is unknown). The spread of highly flammable invasive grasses is also to blame. Native to the African savanna, guinea grass and fountain grass, for example, now cover a huge portion of Hawaii, and they provide fuel for wildfires, as Cynthia Wessendorf has written in Hawaii Business Magazine."
Blogger Big Mike said...
Not clear that Hiroshima was worse.
100,000 civilians died in the bombing of Tokyo on March 9 1945.
Wikipedia says 66-140,000 people died from the Hiroshima bomb including 20,000 soldiers and including those who died later up to december 1945.
If you look at pictures of the 2 cities, I doubt that 1 person out of 100 could tell which is which. Destruction was near total in both.
OTOH, had we invaded Japan, expected Japanese deaths were in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 range and a couple hundred thousand US casualties (including deaths)
My father was in the area and probably would have taken part in the invasion. Would I be here today absent the bomb?
I agree with William Manchester "Thank God for the atomic bomb"
And a belated happy Hiroshima and Nagasaki day to all who may be in the same boat.
John Henry
Fun fact. In the morning, the breeze at the beach tends to be from the ocean towards land, as the land warms first, warming the air and causing it to rise, being replaced by cooler denser air from over the ocean. If I was guessing, I would guess that widespread fire would cause a similar effect, making smoke inhalation less likely. Hypothermia is another issue, but I expect not a huge issue in Hawaii.
I've heard that 85% of "wildfires" are caused by people, power lines put up by people, careless people or arsonists. And that Hawaii has had an arson problem for several summers. This summer there's been a drought so the arson threat became quite serious. But still the Hawaiian government made no plans and gave no warnings. No one knows how this fire started but the over all situation was such that people should have been more prepared.
We know, thanks to Marjorie Taylor Greene, that the real culprit behind the Maui wildfires is a Jewish laser beam from space.
Greene alleges that the destruction of Lahaina using wildfires was the result of a space laser beam powered by Jewish financiers. Her source, as usual, is QAnon.
The initial reports of a brush fire came in after midnight Tuesday in Maui's Kula region and led to dozens of early-morning evacuations in that area. Then, another brush fire was reported after 6:30 a.m. in Lahaina, where the flames flared up and also prompted evacuations.
But the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency said it had no record of any warning sirens with Maui's Emergency Alert System being triggered on Tuesday, department spokesperson Adam Weintraub said.
"They didn't give us no warning. No nothing," Lisa Panis, a resident of the historic seaside community of Lahaina in western Maui, said in a phone interview. "No siren, no alarms, no nothing."
"They could have turned the tsunami sirens on so people knew to evacuate," Bryan Sizemore, a commercial sport fisherman and mechanic engineer who lives in Lahaina, said. "They're not handling this well at all. It's pathetic, heartbreaking really."
Maybe the Navy needs to rethink the Abandon Ship command. It probably hasn’t been told that seA water is particularly dangerous.
OTOH, had we invaded Japan, expected Japanese deaths were in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 range and a couple hundred thousand US casualties (including deaths)
When the US invaded Okinawa Japanese women threw their children off cliffs into the sea and jumped after them, lest they fall into American hands. Such is the power of propaganda. One million civilian casualties was almost certainly going to turn out to be conservative.
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