A2 · Elementary
9 min
climatewildfiresenvironmental sciencepublic safety
Three Firefighters Didn't Make It Home
Cien cabañas en cenizas
This week, Utah's Cottonwood Fire destroyed more than a hundred buildings and became the most destructive in state history, while the Snyder Fire killed three firefighters near the Colorado border. Fletcher and Octavio dig into the science of western megafires and why fire behavior has fundamentally changed.
Esta semana, el incendio Cottonwood en Utah destruyó más de cien edificios y se convirtió en el más destructivo de la historia del estado. Fletcher y Octavio exploran la ciencia detrás de los megaincendios del oeste americano y por qué el fuego ya no se comporta como antes.
5 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| incendio | fire (large, destructive) | El incendio es muy grande. |
| quemar | to burn (general use) | El sol quema mi piel. |
| seco | dry | El bosque está muy seco en verano. |
| bombero | firefighter | Los bomberos trabajan mucho en verano. |
| peligroso | dangerous | El fuego es muy peligroso. |
Three firefighters died in Utah this week.
That sentence stopped me cold when I read it, and then I kept reading, and it got worse.
Sí.
Yes.
Hay dos incendios grandes en Utah ahora.
There are two big fires in Utah right now.
Right.
The Cottonwood Fire and the Snyder Fire.
The Cottonwood is being called the most destructive in Utah's history, property-wise.
Over a hundred condos and cabins gone.
And the Snyder crossed into Colorado and killed those three men.
El fuego es muy grande y muy rápido.
The fire is very large and very fast.
And that speed is actually the thing I want to pull on, because it's not just a dramatic detail.
It points to something that's changed about how fires move in the American West, and that change has a very specific scientific explanation.
El clima es diferente.
The climate is different.
La tierra está muy seca.
The land is very dry.
That's where it starts, yes.
But let's back up a little.
Octavio, when you hear about wildfires in the American West, what's the picture in your head?
Because I'm curious whether Europeans have a mental image of what this actually looks like on the ground.
Pienso en muchos árboles y mucho humo.
I think of many trees and a lot of smoke.
En España también hay incendios.
In Spain there are fires too.
Spain absolutely does.
Galicia, Valencia.
You've covered those, haven't you?
Sí.
Yes.
Los incendios en España son muy serios también.
The fires in Spain are very serious too.
So here's the piece of science that I think reframes everything.
What's happening in Utah right now isn't just a big fire.
It's what researchers call a megafire, which is a specific category defined by behavior, not just size.
And the behavior has changed because three things have converged at once.
¿Tres cosas?
Three things?
¿Qué cosas?
What things?
First, drought.
The western United States has been in what climatologists call a megadrought since roughly 2000.
That's not a dramatic term, it's a technical one.
Twenty-plus years of below-average precipitation across an enormous region.
Sin lluvia, los árboles están secos.
Without rain, the trees are dry.
El fuego va muy rápido.
The fire goes very fast.
Exactly.
Dry fuel burns faster and hotter.
Second thing: temperature.
The mountain West is warming at roughly twice the global average.
That means the snowpack melts earlier in spring, the ground dries out longer in summer, and the fire season runs from roughly May to November now instead of July to September.
La temporada es más larga.
The season is longer.
Eso es muy malo.
That is very bad.
And the third thing is the one people talk about least, which is fuel accumulation.
For most of the twentieth century, American land management policy was to suppress every fire as fast as possible.
Which sounds sensible, but forests are systems that evolved with fire.
When you stop the small fires for a hundred years, the dead wood and underbrush just pile up.
El bosque tiene mucho material para quemar.
The forest has a lot of material to burn.
Right, it's like not cleaning your house for a century and then being surprised when things get out of hand.
The technical term is fuel load.
In some parts of the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, the fuel load is ten times what it was before European settlers arrived.
Ten times.
Diez veces más.
Ten times more.
Eso es increíble.
That is incredible.
And when those three things collide, drought plus heat plus a century of accumulated fuel, you don't get a normal fire anymore.
You get a fire with its own weather system.
That's not a metaphor.
Large fires generate their own winds, their own updrafts, sometimes their own lightning.
Fire scientists call it a pyroconvective event.
El fuego hace su propio viento.
The fire makes its own wind.
Eso es muy peligroso.
That is very dangerous.
Extremely dangerous.
And this is almost certainly what killed those three firefighters on the Snyder Fire.
When a fire generates its own wind, the direction can shift in seconds.
Firefighters are trained for a lot of scenarios, but a fire that becomes its own weather system is something no amount of training fully prepares you for.
Los bomberos son muy valientes.
Firefighters are very brave.
Es un trabajo muy difícil.
It is a very difficult job.
They are.
And the thing that strikes me, having spent time reporting from conflict zones, is that wildland firefighting has a mortality rate that rivals some of the more dangerous professions I've covered.
But it doesn't get the same public attention, maybe because the enemy is weather instead of people.
En España, los bomberos forestales trabajan mucho en verano.
In Spain, forest firefighters work a lot in summer.
Let's talk about the geography for a second, because Elk Mountain in Utah is a specific kind of place.
These aren't remote wilderness areas.
They're the wildland-urban interface, which scientists abbreviate as WUI.
Places where houses and vacation properties sit right at the edge of forest.
And that's where the property loss really concentrates.
Las casas están muy cerca del bosque.
The houses are very close to the forest.
El fuego llega rápido.
The fire arrives quickly.
And here's the uncomfortable part.
The WUI has expanded dramatically over the last forty years because people want to live near nature, real estate is cheaper there, and nobody thought the fire risk would get this bad this fast.
Now there are roughly five million structures in high-risk fire zones across the western US.
Five million.
Cinco millones.
Five million.
Es un número muy grande.
That is a very large number.
It's staggering.
And insurance companies know it, which is why they've been pulling out of California and are starting to pull out of Utah, Colorado, Oregon.
When private capital stops pricing the risk, that's usually a signal that something has moved outside the range of what markets can handle.
Sin seguro, la gente pierde todo.
Without insurance, people lose everything.
Es terrible.
It is terrible.
And it connects to something scientists have been tracking carefully, which is the relationship between fire and the broader carbon cycle.
Here's a detail that I find genuinely unsettling: when a large western fire burns, it can emit more carbon dioxide in a week than an entire region's worth of vehicles emit in a year.
El fuego produce mucho CO2.
The fire produces a lot of CO2.
Y más CO2 hace más calor.
And more CO2 makes more heat.
That's exactly right, and this is where it becomes a feedback loop, which is one of the darker concepts in climate science.
More heat creates drought.
Drought creates fire conditions.
Fire releases carbon.
Carbon warms the atmosphere.
Which creates more drought.
You can see where this goes.
Es un círculo.
It is a circle.
El problema no para.
The problem does not stop.
A vicious circle, yes.
Now, there are scientists working on solutions.
Prescribed burning, which is controlled fire used to intentionally reduce fuel loads.
Better satellite monitoring so fires get detected faster.
New firefighting aircraft.
Some interesting research into fire-resistant building materials.
None of it is nothing.
En España usamos fuego controlado también.
In Spain we use controlled fire too.
Funciona, pero es difícil.
It works, but it is difficult.
It's politically difficult too, because prescribed burns sometimes escape containment and become wildfires themselves, and then whoever authorized the burn gets blamed.
There was a terrible example in New Mexico in 2022, the Hermits Peak Fire, which started as a prescribed burn and became the largest in New Mexico history.
That kind of disaster makes politicians very cautious about approving more of them.
El problema político es real.
The political problem is real.
Nadie quiere ser responsable.
Nobody wants to be responsible.
And that's where the science and the politics come apart.
The science says: burn more deliberately now, or burn catastrophically later.
The politics says: don't be the person who started a fire.
It's a collective action problem of the highest order, and the Cottonwood Fire is what happens when the problem doesn't get solved.
Es el mismo problema con el clima.
It is the same problem as with the climate.
Todos esperan.
Everyone waits.
Nadie actúa primero.
Nobody acts first.
That's a sharper summary than anything I could write.
The collective action problem is the same whether it's carbon emissions or forest management.
Everyone benefits from the solution, but everyone waits for someone else to absorb the cost.
Y mientras esperamos, el fuego quema más casas.
And while we wait, the fire burns more houses.
And more firefighters die.
Right.
I don't want to lose that.
Before we close, I want to come back to something you said earlier, because you used a word I want to ask about.
You said 'quemar' for burn, which I've heard before.
But I've also heard 'incendiar.' Are those the same thing?
No, son diferentes.
No, they are different.
'Quemar' es más general.
'Quemar' is more general.
El sol quema.
The sun burns.
La comida quema.
The food burns.
So 'quemar' is burn in the everyday sense.
Toast burns, skin burns in the sun.
Sí.
Yes.
Pero 'incendiar' es solo para el fuego grande.
But 'incendiar' is only for the big fire.
El bosque se incendia.
The forest catches fire.
So 'incendiar' carries the weight.
It's not that the toast incendió.
It's that the forest incendió.
The scale is built into the word itself.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y 'incendio' es el nombre.
And 'incendio' is the noun.
Un incendio forestal.
A forest fire.
Which means if I'm ever trying to describe this in Spanish and I say 'la tostada se incendió,' you're going to look at me like I've lost my mind.
Sí.
Yes.
Como el día que dijiste 'estoy muy embarazado.'
Like the day you said 'I am very pregnant.'
And we're done.
Thanks, Octavio.