Wildfires In Washington State

     According to Science Daily, the summer of 2012 is known as the summer of devastating western fires.  Lately, Washington has been hit the hardests with such fires.  The biggest fire that is currently happening in Washington is the Wenatchee Complex fire that started by a lightening stricke on September 9th and as of September 21, it has destroyed more than 39,000 acres and was only 22 percent contained.  This fire has multiple different fires burning as well which makes it very hard to contain all of them especially whe the terrain in some areas makes menuevering very difficult. 
     One thing that I caught onto while reading the post about the fire was the overal knowledge that they had about wildfires in general.  I feel like this area has a pretty good understanding of fires because they have had so many; and it is always a good ting to be informed about potential disasters that could happen.  They were talking about how a fires strength and uncontrollable behavior can happen in whats called an inversion; which is when smoke and warm gasses ris untill the temperature equals that of the surrounding air, than the smoke will eventually flatten out horizontally which in turn causes surface winds and eratic fire behavior.  I feel like this is good information to have because the more you know about a fire the better off you are in combating it. 
     Wildfires can be classified as a Biological Natural Disaster under the Natural Hazards events; but I wanted to look at relating the fires happening in Washington State to te common characteristics of environmental hazards that we talked about in class.  The origins of all of the fires currently happening are very clear because for a majority of them they started with a lightening strike.  The warning time was obviously very limited because they started just like that.  The direct losses are very clear to see because you can see all the wildlife and acres being destroyed right in front of your eyes.  Also, human exposure is involuntary because they were living in the area but did not expect all those fires to be happening, and this disaster, such as in any wildfire will justify an immediate response to try and control the fire. It is good that we have a knowledge base about fires but my hopes are that in the near future we can come up with better ways to combat them before they destory so many acres of land.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120921142832.htm