Did A Comet Trigger The Great Chicago Fire?

Alien54 writes "Perhaps it was not Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern that sparked the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which destroyed the downtown area and claimed 300 lives. New research lends credence to an alternative explanation: The fire, along with less-publicized and even more deadly blazes the same night in upstate Wisconsin and Michigan, was the result of a comet fragment crashing into Earth's atmosphere."

Comments

Re:Don't rule out the cow!

[Jerf]

Uh, moderators, consider the source, OK? Said site also claims to have photographic proof of a Cardinals baseball cap in NASA Mars pictures, a story about how perfume are secret biological and chemical weapons tests, and a story about the power outage covering a Martian invasion.

I'm 90% sure it's a deliberate humor site; I'd be more certain if they didn't seem to pull so many of their stories straight out of the paranoid schizophrenic playbook.

Sounds like legend there - evidence?

[Tau Zero]

Even the firestorms in Germany created by incendiary bombs and the atomic bomb in Japan left charred remains.

Yes they did... to some degree. To what degree can that be true and still be consistent with the (possibly overblown) description of the fire marshal?

So, while there are definately, some things that can be explained by radiation, it is by no means the whole story.... Something different is going on here.

You've just asserted a positive. You're implying that, of all the known phenomena (direct contact by flame, radiation, embers, flashover from combustible gases - were there underground tunnel networks in pre-fire Chicago?) nothing accounts for the fire "burning everything" and igniting buildings to the windward in a gale.

1. Is there any physical evidence remaining to qualify or quantify the elements of the fire marshal's account? If not, you're drawing conclusions from zero data.
2. Radiation does indeed account for rubbish being burned (radiant heat would ignite it) and for a fire burning upwind (radiation is not affected by the wind, and the leeward side of a windowed building could be ignited just as easily by radiation as the windward side). Once ignited, the building could flash over inside and begin radiating heat on its own windward side, continuing the process. This might be easier after the winds from a firestorm have had some time to dry out buildings.
3. Radiation isn't the whole story. Embers falling out of the smoke cloud have their own chance to do their thing.
4. Brick and stone buildings are usually supported by internal timbers and have plenty of combustibles inside. Once those ignite (especially all at once, and supported by radiant heat from the environs) they could weaken quickly and bring the whole structure down. Buckling of masonry from radiant heat could account for more of this; typical fires do not involve whole blocks and wouldn't exhibit this phenomenon enough to be familiar.
5. You get interesting colors in fires when you add metallic salts. Copper salts in particular burn green, and copper roofs used to be much more common than they are now.

I think that one would need to account as completely as possible for known phenomena before asserting that unknown phenomena were at work in the Chicago fire.

Occam's Razor

[cybermace5]

I think this is an overly-complicated explanation for a tragic event. The fires were surrounded by wild-eyed accounts from people who were in mortal panic. Sensational journalism often "enhanced" the facts, and there really wasn't any way to check up on the factual basis of the stories.

There was a very long, bone-dry period before the fires. The whole area was a tinderbox, heavily wooded at the time, with lots of underbrush; houses weren't built to fire codes, communication was slow so people didn't have the chance to evacuate. The physics of forest fires have to be seen to be believed; the fire will follow the fuel, not the wind. The fire creates its own wind and becomes a temporary blast furnace. The sheer heat from such rapid burning will easily cause objects to burst into flame when not in contact with the fire. The oxygen is also rapidly consumed, and suffocating gases produced, without the need for chunks of methane.

There is also no real way to prove that many fires started simultaneously. Communication, again, was patchy and slow at best. The fire could spread along dozens of unpopulated paths and appear to pop up everywhere at once.

Accidentally starting a fire is easy, and it's not so absurd to think that fires might have broken out in a few separate locations, given the tinder-dry conditions at the time. The times could have been separated by hours and still appear simultaneous. Things like lightning, static electricity, spontaneous combustion...they're all possible, but that's looking for an over-glamorous cause to a massive tragedy.

The odds are very good that the fires were started accidentally by very mundane means. Someone's cooking fire might have wafted a spark into some dry grass, or someone might have dropped their pipe and not noticed until it was too late. The conditions were just so dry, the whole place was a firebomb on a hair trigger.

Sometimes people want to take a tragic accidental event and attach some absurd, freak cause to it. It helps distance the event from them; if it can't happen normally, they don't have to worry about the risk, right? Many people prefer the "Navy missile" theory of TWA 800, instead of the "frayed wire" theory. It makes the tragedy the stuff of legends, and it doesn't hit quite so close to home anymore.