Wildfires and the Conditions That Cause Them
Wildfires can burn across many acres of land, consuming everything in their path. Uncontrolled blazes fueled by weather, wind and dry underbrush can destroy miles of wilderness in minutes. Sometimes caused humans, other times by nature, wildfires can cause massive damage and cause very dangerous situations for people and wildlife.
On average, more than 100,000 forest fires clear 4 to 5 million acres of land in the United States every year. In the past few years, wildfires have burned over 9 million acres of land across the US. Wildland fires can move across land at speeds up to 14 miles per hour, consuming brush, trees, homes and even humans in its path.
There are three conditions that need to be present in order for wildfires to flourish. Firefighters refer to this as the ‘fire triangle.” These three items are fuel, oxygen and a heat source. Fuel can be any flammable material surrounding a fire, including trees, grasses, brush and even homes. The greater the area’s fuel load, the more intense and dangerous the fire can become. Air supplies the oxygen, while a heat source sparks the fire by bringing the fuel source to temperature hot enough to ignite.
Four out of five forest fires are started by humans. However, nature is almost always a catalyst in contributing to the fires. Drought can convert green vegetation into bone dry flammable fuel. Strong winds central cryogenics can spread wildfires in a matter of seconds. Warm temperatures encourage combustion. When all these factors combine, it creates a condition extremely favorable for destructive wildland fires to wreak havoc.
Firefighters, using special fire safety equipment battle wildfires by depriving them of one or more of the fire triangle fundamentals. Traditional methods include water bulldozer types dousing and spraying fire retardants to extinguish existing fires. Clearing vegetation to create firebreaks starves a fire of fuel and can help slow down or contain it.
Firefighters also fight wildfires by deliberately starting fires in a process called controlled burning. These prescribed fires remove undergrowth, brush, and ground litter from a forest, depriving a wildfire of fuel.
Although destructive to humans, wildfires play an important role in the natural balance and life cycle. Fires return nutrients to the soil while clearing dead vegetation, providing a fertile ground for new vegetation and wildlife to flourish. By burning through thick canopies and brushy undergrowth, wildfires allow sunlight to reach the forest floor, enabling a new generation of seedlings to grow.…
My granddaughter is the reason I got hooked on. There was one particular camping trip Gord and I took years ago that had adventurously funny details she always loved hearing about. It would set her into giggling fits. Of course, the better I became at telling the story, the more she enjoyed it. And after she started to experience show and tell sessions at school, she wanted me to show her this memory as well.
There is no cure-all when it comes to lighting solutions for your house. Each room is used for a different purpose, each room has its own array of complementary (or not) furniture, and each room has a mood. Walking through a house can be like walking through different moods, and nothing accentuates that better than using the right lighting. If a good electrician wired the lighting, then your home may be perfectly moody. Of course, there can be no hard-and-fast rules with lighting, especially when the lighting from one room spills over to the next, but here is a guide, room-by-room, to lighting up your house’s moods.
As I look at the scar on my left index finger, I am reminded of how fast a machine tool can cause an injury. I was a teenager working in my grandfather’s machine shop when it happened. I was using the large drill press to counter bore holes in the cutting edge of a bulldozer blade.
Do you enjoy racing? There are few people who do not. But once you finished a race you may have discovered that few essential parts of you racing car has been spoilt. Speeding on a dirt track may make you feel great but the dirt is going to jam those valves and oil pipes in your engine.
Workplace fatalities by workers in the UK declined in 2009 to about .06 per 100,000 according to Health and Safety Executive statistics. This is just slightly below the rate of .08 reported in 2008. Part of the decline could be attributed to the increase in enforcement notices issued by both HSE and local authorities; however, this decline is still only modest at best indicating that additional safety measures need to be put into place by employers and more self regulation must take place.
As we all know, power tools and industrial supplies are not exactly the cheapest part of building your home workshop or any business incorporating power tools for that matter.