A friend of the Tracker’s, whom I shall call Lynne, is voraciously interested in anything about Mount Wilson, having grown up in its morning shadow (as did I). She worried terribly when the big Station Fire threatened the observatory and the forest of broadcast towers on its peak. At stake were research, history, and mass communication: topics rather central to science journalists’ souls.  Two days ago she tipped me to a catch-up story on the fire’s aftermath – which is that we are not quite to the after part at all. It covers a topic that I bet few of us knew or thought about: when is a wildfire really out? I’ve been neglectful in not putting up a post right off, but here it finally goes.

It turns out, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Baxter Holmes, that conflagrations in high, heavily vegetated terrain have been known apparently to go out – sometimes with the help of firefighters – in fall or early winter, then in the following year after the snows have melted, to return.  And why such things happen is his topic with Mount Wilson and its surroundings an example . Contained, in fireman’s lingo, is not controlled, cold,  or dead. It’s not a long story, but is an illuminating one.

Pic – San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

- Charlie Petit

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