![]() ![]() If they land on gravel or a wet surface, they’ll eventually burn out. ![]() When thousands of embers cluster together, it’s called an ember attack. And all bets are off when the wind is blowing, and it’s taking those embers two miles away from you. But then as that heat goes away, or they’re heavier than the convection, they come down. They go up in the air with the convection, with the heat. “Embers are tricky,” says O’Meara, who was recently deployed to fight the still-burning Sequoia Complex Fire in Sequoia National Park. Dry, hot conditions, lightning strikes, and violent winds-like those blowing through the tinder-dry West right now-exacerbate the risk. They can also linger behind a fire, smoldering in place for hours like lit cigarettes or incense sticks before reigniting and laying waste to buildings and forests that fire crews had saved.Īccording to the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS), up to 90 percent of homes and buildings ignited in a wildfire are lit by embers. Windborne embers can float miles ahead of a fire front, sparking spot fires wherever they land and posing a major risk to structures built near wilderness. Also known as firebrands, these seeds of combustion are the tiny, smoldering pieces of wood, vegetation, and debris sent aloft by wildfires, which this year have immolated 5.6 million acres- an area roughly the size of New Jersey-in the western United States. If we hadn’t found it, it would have burned the house right to the ground.”Įmbers may remind you of a campfire’s cozy glow, but they’re often the most dangerous part of a wildfire. “We started clearing everything out, and then we saw it-a glowing ember, sitting right there, smoldering by itself. “My captain said, Looks like there’s a bunch of stuff under there, let’s pull it all out,” says O’Meara, a 21-year veteran of the department and now a captain there himself. It seemed to be-till they happened to peek beneath a wooden deck in a backyard. An engine company from the Fresno Fire Department had just put out a neighborhood fire, and O’Meara’s team was assigned to make sure everything was extinguished. ![]()
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