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Should the US Air Force Bomb Forest Fires? (popularmechanics.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Earlier this summer, the Swedish Air Force dropped a laser-guided bomb on a forest fire to help suppress the flames. Now there's a proposal for the United States to do the same, using the might of the U.S. Air Force to fight America's raging forest fires via bombs and sonic booms. F-15 Strike Eagle Weapon System Officer Mike Benitez, writing in War on the Rocks, proposes using B-1 bombers stuffed to the gills with bombs to battle wildfires on the American homefront. The idea here is to snuff out fires the way you'd blow out birthday candles at the base. In Sweden, the shockwave from a single bomb snuffed out flames within a 100-yard radius of the impact point. So, Benitez reasons, why not load up a heavy strategic bomber with up to 84 bombs and do some serious firefighting?
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
Benitez chose the B-1 for his hypothetical scenario not only because of its bomb-carrying capability, but for the same reason the heavy bomber became a close air support platform of choice in Afghanistan: its long range translated into persistence over the battlefield, enabling the big bomber to hang around above friendly forces and bomb the Taliban for hours. The B-1 could do donuts in the skies over a wildfire as firefighters on the ground work out the best way to tackle it. The B-1 wouldn't carry just any bomb, either, but ordinance that was designed for firefighting. Most bombs use a steel casing that fragments into deadly shrapnel, but this would be unnecessary (and dangerous) when fighting fires. A firefighting bomb would use a combustible casing that would disintegrate on impact. Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
Ideally the bomb would use a thermobaric warhead, one that kills via overpressure, as it generates even more powerful blast waves than traditional high-explosive bombs.
A lot of these fires are near habitation. You can't just go dropping bombs anywhere. The Swedes were able to bomb their fire because it was on a bombing range.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm sorry, but there is no significant historical record to accurately reflect any particular reason for a particular set of fires. While you may wish for the reason to be "abnormal climate" there is simply no way to know at the moment.
I.E. Please notice the "Post-2000" heading in this particular Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Have a great day!
Caution: Contents under pressure
Also 30 meters is great but it is basically pissing in the wind for fires this size. The fire front from the Mendocino complex is over 45 km. The Carr fire, that I was evacuated for is currently about 24 km. (And this is after its ~50% contained)
Those are huge walls of fire. We’d need an order of magnitude more than is suggested to really make a strategic difference.
Look at the MODIS 1km FRP footprints back from a few days ago and see how many Megawatts per Sq KM these things were emitting. It was insane.
I was under the impression that forest fires are natural in a healthy forest, ...
Is this a California thing?
It depends which forest. In places where lightning is frequent, or humans have been burning the forest for long enough e.g. Australia or California, the forest has become dominated by fire-tolerant trees, and ones which germinate after a fire to take advantage of the sunlight reaching the ground.
But in many coniferous forests, such as in Sweden and Canada, fires are rare and can completely obliterate a forest when they happen.
So you can do frequent controlled burns to limit the build-up of flammable material, but you are going to have a very different kind of forest.
That's rather unlikely. This sort of thing is done on the outer edges of forest fires, not the interior. The way they fight forest fires is by containing them and allowing them to burn whatever is within the containment region. It's just not feasible at this time to do any more.
As far as animals go, that's pretty much a non-issue. The ones that can get out, get out and the ones that don't don't. Having animals hanging out there just at the edge of the fire would be highly unusual.
That's not to say that this is a particularly good idea. A better idea would be to get better imaging technology involved and catch the fires when they're still small enough that a few dozen bucket loads of fire retardant are sufficient to do the job.
They do set management fires, called controlled burns. They are typically done in the spring before everything dries out, so that they donâ(TM)t get out of control. They bulldoze firebreaks before setting the fire so the spread can be limited. https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail...
management fires *are* set to remove fuels but only under special circumstances.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Doesn't work if the material is too hot. Once the oxygen comes back, if the fuel source is still hot enough it just bursts back into flames. It's not like an oil/gas rig when the material is coming out in an unignited stream, and then hitting the burning part to ignite. In those cases the explosion breaks the stream and when it succeeds there's nothing left hot enough to reignite it. Part of the reason why have to remove some of the parts before they attempt it or the hot metal will just start the fire back up.
Now trees don't move into the fire, rather the fire moves to them. Those glowing hot pieces of wood/charcoal are still glowing hot even after the explosion, so they are both a source of fuel and heat, all it needs is oxygen.
There might be situations where it can potentially help, but a widespread fire has the nasty habit of just going back and reigniting fuel if conditions allow. (Uphill, downwind, etc.) So you are going to want to get a damn near perfect spread so there's not spots left that can reignite the whole mess again. Of course carpet bombing can provide quantity, but accuracy isn't part of that equation, for that you need smart bombs, either Laser or TV guided.
Now here's the other part of this mess. Using real munitions is VERY expensive. If you add smart bombs to the mix, you've multiplied the price by many times! Sure the warhead is expensive, but the guidance unit is so much more expensive! As in you can buy a new Tesla for the price of one of those guidance units.
Then there's all that talk about a combustible case for the warhead. Hey, great idea! Except there aren't any, and that would be an expensive thing to build. Did you know that STEEL case of a warhead serves the purpose of confining the explosive so it can build up a higher pressure so it's a high order explosion instead of a low order explosion? So unless you want to increase the number of bombs you have to use since you've very dramatically decreased the power of your explosive, that combustible casing has to be able to withstand the same kind of forces the steel one does. If you didn't know, that's not sheet metal those things are made out of. A blacksmith could cut sword blanks out of those things if they had some empties to play with. Not an oversized and insane anime or video game sword, just a regular historical sized one. (I'm not sure if the weight of an empty warhead casing is public info or not, so I'm not going to bring up specifics like that)
So again, some situations may be able to use explosives, but most of the time it's a champagne in solid gold goblets kind of price tag to go with it.
The special non-steel cases don't exist and somebody would have to develop them. There's a ton of issues with that idea.
I see Saloomy brought up bulldozing. Yes, they do a lot of that to try and make firebreaks, but you again can't build those everywhere. It takes time, there are only so much equipment even available, and they have time limits to make it, and that's assuming the fire doesn't shift direction. Even then, there's always the problem that fires can and do jump firebreaks at times. Those burning bits get carried on the wind and can ignite a multitude of other fires on the otherside of the break. When some idiots from the OSI ignored multiple rules and did something really stupid, they burned down a lot of the forest that was on base. That area was used for wargames and training. The road between the bomb dump and the burning woods was acting like a firebreak, and for about an hour before they pulled us out my crew was driving around in our truck with all the fire extinguishers we could get our hands on chasing down the burning embers floating across on the light breeze.
With a big fire, there's always a breeze, they are big enough affect the weather and create their own thermal updraft column.
Anyway, not dissing the posters here, just spreading some knowledge.
That's not to say that this is a particularly good idea. A better idea would be to get better imaging technology involved and catch the fires when they're still small enough that a few dozen bucket loads of fire retardant are sufficient to do the job.
I like your suggestion!
On the other hand:
As far as animals go, that's pretty much a non-issue. The ones that can get out, get out and the ones that don't don't. Having animals hanging out there just at the edge of the fire would be highly unusual.
Don't take for granted that animals necessarily take the same approach as humans in case of a fire. Some take refuge in the very fire area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Then it's *still* irrelevant, because fire-fighting is not law-enforcement. What are they going to do, arrest the fire and send it to jail?
I would expect this to actually work less effectively the larger the bomb is. The reason is that the force of the bomb is distributed through a spherical volume proportional to its yield, but the fire is spread over a two-dimensional surface. So area of a given level of destruction goes up as the 2/3 power of yield.
This is why gigantic bombs are largely impractical. In most cases they're less effective than a equivalent weight of smaller bombs. MOAB weighs as much as 43 Mark 82 500 pound bombs; it has as much H6 as 97 Mark 82s, but destroys an area equivalent to 21 Mark 82s.
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The person calling someone an idiot is a shameless outright liar with a political agenda, big surprise. (No, California doesn't have a shortage of firefighting water like you read on twitter either.)
I see the controlled burn notices and the plumes of smoke every spring, and they've been increasing in frequency in recent years as the fire danger has grown. Here's a source from 9 months ago noting that California's controlled burns have doubled in the past 3 years and is now 31 square miles of controlled burns a year: https://weather.com/en-CA/cana...
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Detonation vs deflagration. Meerling is simply wrong. A strong case hasn't been required since deflagrating black powder was replaced by real detonating explosives. For nitroglycerin, TNT, PETN, HMX, RDX and so on - a baggie will do. Yes, I've worked with high explosives. Numerous examples exist of a simple block of C4 or other explosive being used with just a blasting cap. Plenty of brisance to involve the whole mess before it breaks up when you use HE with detonation rates of a few km/second.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!