Basically, TWC said the long hot and dry summer turned the area around Hinckley into one big tinderbox, and once a small fire got started it soon turned into a firestorm that destroyed the town and killed over 400 people.

I didn't take pictures in the museum, but here are some of the memorial: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13571352@N04/tags/hinkley/
The mass-grave trenches are still visible.

I first heard of this fire through a song that Juanita sings about one of the engineers you mention above. I'll have to ask her for the title on that one....

(Juanita collects books on disasters -- is this a new one? If so, I'll alert Bruce, it would probably make a good Christmas present for her.)

Thanks, Jim.

The same day, the same weather system, Brown points out, created other fires as far east as Pennsylvania. Other towns that were damaged or destroyed by fires included Park Falls and Fifield, Wisconsin, where my grandparents were living at the time, and where my mother would be born some ten years later.

Happened the same night as the Chicago fire, and much more massive, but because it happened in the backwoods of Wisconsin, it never got the same attention.

1.5 million acres burned, deathtoll uncertain but in the thousands -- Wikipedia* calls it most deaths by fire in US history until 9/11.

But what grabs you most is the personal accounts.

I remember writing a paper on the subject for which I went to the state archives to read the old papers and anniversary interviews with the last survivors.

Human stories. I concur.
Too bad K-12 history education seems to have lost site of that fact in favor of testable facts, because the human stories are what make history so fascinating. [So saith someone who discovered a love for the subject within the last decade and marvels how schools made it so boring.]

Many of the fires that blew up over a few day's period were controlled burns set by farmers or Native Americans, for a variety of reasons. The national-level reaction was to start a campaign against ANY wildfires, putting out even "good" fires as a matter of course and not doing nearly enough controlled burning.

The end result has not been exactly good for long-term fire surpression.

(I have family in Payson, AZ, with a remote cabin on a ridge at the end of a dirt road, and I very well know the fear of smelling woodsmoke on a hot, dry, windy summer day. Or of seeing the pumper truck go roaring up the road, followed by the growl of airplanes overhead. This book would probably give me nightmares -- when Jim talks about bug-out bags, my first association with bugging out is the possibility of bugging out with a wildire at my heels.)

-- Leva

Donner, party of 2,...
Donner, party of 1...

/ducks

"Hello, my name is Hastings. I'll be your maitre d' this trip."

Lis Riba @ 10: Did you know there was a book about the Peshtigo fire? I didn't, until I ran across it just now on Amazon--Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History, by Denise Getz and William Lutz. Apparently there was a circus involved in that fire, too, in some way . . .

Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History

Ghosts of the Fireground: Echoes of the Great Peshtigo Fire and the Calling of a Wildland Firefighter

Wildfire!: The 1871 Peshtigo Firestorm (X-Treme Disasters That Changed America)

[shatner]… must … resist … jocularity [/shatner]

Hmm, telegraph dispatchers as heroic archetype?

http://www.mnhs.org/exhibits/mn150/"

Presumably that should be "world's first artificial firestorm."

Here's an op/ed he wrote about the recent California wildfires (reprinted numerous places).

I learned about the Mann Gulch fire from Bill Gawne, when he sang "Cold Missouri Waters", and when I asked about it, he recommended the book.

Songs are often stories too. (Okay, that's preaching to the choir.) I learned about the men rowing from Athens to Lesbos to save 9,000 lives when Bill sang Zeke Hoskin's song "Mytilene's Reprieve", and Bill referred me to Herodotus.

If you like Herodotus, you might also check out a book called the White Goddess by Robert Graves. The two books supplemented one another in my sparse education of the ancient world. Everything I ever got, I learned out of books.

You don't think Graves was sober?

Just kidding. When I read the book I can see it, though, if that makes any sense, not as much as Herodotus or Plutarch, and it is all speculation on Graves' part.

page 46, "Asbestos and Fire: Technological Tradeoffs and the Body at Risk" by Rachel Maines

Teresa and I had pretty much the same experience: once we started it, we were unable to even think of reading anything else. Absolutely fascinating.

Another backdraft. (Looks like a training situation.)

Yet another backdraft.

A flashover. (Training situation.)

In other words, if we don't clean it up, they know the threads are undefended, and the next lot will be the bad stuff.

Even so, it took about 4 hours for him to be ready to go.

I think it's time to double-check the family go-bags.