For several years when I was a child, one of my chores was removing ashes from the fireplace in our family room. Our fireplace had a metal insert and there was a metal chamber beneath the fire chamber. When there was no fire in the fireplace, a door could be opened between the two chambers and the ash could be swept into the lower chamber. This chamber had a door on the outside of the chimney. My chore was to remove cold ashes from the lower chamber. We lived in windy country and the biggest problem with the chore was that the wind could blow ash into your face. The job could be quite messy. I learned that putting of the job made it worse. It was easiest to deal with the ashes when there were only one or two buckets of ash rather than waiting until the chamber filled and a mandate was issued because no more ash could be added from above. If the ashes got packed in the chamber, it was a real chore to get them out with a fireplace poker and a shovel.

I also had the chore of bringing firewood from the backyard piles into the house and keeping the wood box filled. I quickly noted the difference in volume and weight between the firewood carried in and the ashes carried out. Sometimes I would sit and watch the fire in the fireplace and note how much the wood was reduced as it was transformed into ash. Of course I knew that part of the volume of the wood was going up the chimney as smoke, but smoke seemed even less substantial than ash.

Later, when I was older, I spent quite a bit of time around smoke jumpers and others who fought wildfires. I listened as they described fire behavior. Part of effective firefighting is learning to anticipate which directions the fire is spreading and understanding where natural phenomena such as the slope of the ground or the fuel load affect the ability to fight the fire. I learned that because heat causes air to rise, fires burn more intensely when going uphill than when spreading down. I learned that wildfires in grass can burn like a moving wall, but in heavily forested areas they become dozens and dozens of individual and sometimes isolated fires as embers blow ahead of the fire and ignite areas ahead of the fire. Sometimes the spot fires ahead of the main fire can consume fuel and slow the pace of the main fire.

Fire behavior is a complex science and what I know from casual observation and talking with firefighters is enough to convince me that there is a lot that I don’t understand. There is one additional thing about wildfire that I learned from watching the 1988 and 1989 Yellowstone Park fires. I found myself glued to the television during the late summer and early fall watching images of crown fires burning through the forest canopy. I looked for places that I recognized and since I knew the park fairly well and knew the places near the roads from having driven them a lot, I could often identify features. Most striking for me were pictures of trees burning around Old Faithful Lodge. The iconic log cabin hotel is a landmark in the area. What I didn’t realize at the time is that because there was significant danger, news photographers were kept at a significant distance from the fires. In order to get dramatic pictures they used long lenses which tend to collapse images making it seem like the burning trees were much closer to the building than was the case. When I visited in person the year after the fires, I had trouble reconciling what I was seeing on the ground with the pictures I had watched on the television because the distances seems so much bigger in person. Yes, I saw lots of burned out trees, but I also saw survivor trees and I saw areas that were unburned.

Most importantly, I learned that what I saw on the media of the day was not the whole story. It is a lesson that it seems a lot of people still need to learn. Just because you saw a video clip on a social media site does not mean that you understand what has occurred. People posting their conspiracy theories on social media are not experts in fire behavior and their theories lead others away from the truth. Yes, there are places in the areas devastated by the Los Angeles wildfires where trees survived next to houses that were destroyed. This doesn’t mean that structures were targeted. It means that the ornamental trees, especially palm trees, contain a lot of water and the fast moving fires heated the wood inside the homes more quickly than the fibers of the trees. In some cases the trees survived when the houses burned. It means that fire spreads in a mosaic pattern, affecting different places in different ways. If you look at the media pictures, there are plenty of dramatic images of palm trees burning. When the resins in the tree reach a certain temperature they go up in flames and because of the accumulation of dead leaves under the canopy they often appear as giant torches with the tops burning more intensely and sometimes the trunks are left standing after the tops have burned off.

This is not a time for conspiracy theories. It is a time to bring support to firefighters and to those evacuated. It is a time to strategize about housing for those who have lost their homes and support for those who are grieving. There will be plenty of time to analyze the fires and even look for mistakes in prevention and in firefighting. I know that the falsehoods of social media will continue and I know that simply stating facts does little to convince people who prefer their conspiracy theories over objective information. We all watch with a mixture of horror and fascination as fires spread.

Anyone who claims to know exactly what has happened and why is either mistaken or simply lying.