I'm glad they got out of there. Escaping by car is a valid choice but most people don't know how incredibly HOT the car can get rather quickly. A lot of people die in their cars. Something a lot of people don't seem to know as well, based on this thread, is how fucking fast these fires can spread, across rivers and everything. It's fucking scary.
Yeah, I had taken for granted that people understood fire.
So, for those who don't understand here are some basics.
Burning in this sense is the process of oxygen bonding to carbon in burnable material at high temperature. This produces carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Fires can move quickly, they can create their own weather as hot air rises. This pulls in cool oxygen rich air to replace it.
Really hot air rises really fast, this makes the cooler air move in really fast as well.
This wind feeds the fire more oxygen and makes the fire hotter.
Eventually, the air around a fire can get so hot that things outside of the burning area start to bond with the heated oxygen in the air and the fire jumps to a new area. This is how they can cross streets or rivers.
The hotter the fire, the hotter and harder the winds blow, the faster the fire can spread.
This is all without taking into account actual weather patterns and winds acting as an outside force on a fire. High winds, storms, and other weather can also cause fires to be even more damaging.
Here's a video about a very rare fire tornado (not to be confused with fire whirls) in which a fire actually generated a tornado-producing thunderstorm. (pyrocumulonimbus storm)
It's fascinating and terrifying.
