John Valliant writes:

Water bombers, the air cavalry of wildfire fighting, buzz the treetops like air show stunt pilots as they save the day with surgical drops of water or orange retardant.

But what happens when those drops have no effect? When, as a pilot working the massive Gironde Fire just west of Bordeaux, France, described it, “The environment above the fire is so hot that my payload of 10,000 liters of water evaporates in the air.”? Mathieu Jomain, a commander and 26-year veteran in Gironde’s fire service, compared the fire’s intensity to “a meteorological nuclear bomb.”

This is the new reality of wildfires in the 21st Century: they hit different. And, too often now, the water doesn’t hit at all.

From America to Algeria, dangerous blazes are occurring around the world, giving us a glimpse into an age ablaze. We should all be asking the question: What will this age entail?

In Spain, where several massive fires recently began burning with comparable ferocity, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska declared, “We are facing the most significant and aggressive fire in Spain’s history.” Spain is more than 500 years old.

Across France and Spain alone, approximately a third of a million people have been displaced, the largest evacuations since World War II, but that is just the one among many examples. This summer, evacuations are ongoing across Europe, from Portugal to Turkey. Earlier this summer in Germany, evacuations were ordered in record-breaking heat after a wildfire triggered explosions in a nature reserve strewn with leftover ordnance from World War II. [Continue reading…]