Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: This is Alison Madamer like the science Center at how
Speaker 1: stuff wriks dot com. And this is Robert Lamb Signs
Speaker 1: writer at how stuff works dot com. Hey Allison, Hey Robert.
Speaker 1: What do you think of when you hear the phrase
Speaker 1: fight fire with fire? Well, I think of a song
Speaker 1: and it goes a little something like this, do others
Speaker 1: as they do? Do you? So on and so on.
Speaker 1: It's fight fire with fire, Yes, the classic fight fire
Speaker 1: with Fire from the Metallica album Ride the Lightning. Indeed,
Speaker 1: Metallica is a fine man. Yeah, at one point I
Speaker 1: was really into him. Back in college, I think, what
Speaker 1: do you think of well? When well, Also, when I
Speaker 1: was in college, I took a bunch of Shakespeare classes,
Speaker 1: So I remember a certain line from the Life and
Speaker 1: Death of King John which went a little something like
Speaker 1: this be stirring as the time be fire with fire threatened,
Speaker 1: the threatening and outface the brow of bragging horror. So
Speaker 1: this phrase has clearly been around the black. I mean,
Speaker 1: Shakespeare is invoking it, and talk has been invoking it exactly.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's pretty simple. Meet violence with violence.
Speaker 1: You know, an eye for and eye, if you prefer
Speaker 1: the biblical one. He sends one of yours to the hospital,
Speaker 1: you send one of his to the morgue, the Chicago
Speaker 1: way exactly. But does it make any literal sense? That's
Speaker 1: the question, right, Can you really fight fire with fire? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Can you hurl a ball of flames out of fire?
Speaker 1: And is that going to do any good? Um? It
Speaker 1: might be entertaining, Um, that kind of thing might fly
Speaker 1: burning man, but it's it's not really gonna actually fight
Speaker 1: a fire. It's a lot less exciting than that, right,
Speaker 1: But to a to a certain extent, yes, firefighters do
Speaker 1: fight fire with fire. They use fire um as a
Speaker 1: means of either preventing or um hall thing or just
Speaker 1: redirecting the course of wildfires and forest fires. So let's
Speaker 1: let's review it for a second. I know, you guys
Speaker 1: know what fire is. Of course, it's a chemical reaction.
Speaker 1: It requires oxygen and fuel, and if you take one
Speaker 1: or the other away, your fire is going to die
Speaker 1: out right, right. So one way people have done this
Speaker 1: in the past, um, you know, to throw some water
Speaker 1: on it. Hey, that's yeah, basically robbing him. But if
Speaker 1: it's robbing the fire of its oxygen and the same
Speaker 1: deal if you've ever seen like an old John Wayne
Speaker 1: movie or there will be blood. You have an oil
Speaker 1: rig fire, you know, you have just a limitless or
Speaker 1: maybe not limitless, but you have a um this constant
Speaker 1: flow of of combustible material coming out of the ground
Speaker 1: and the fires just raging and raging. Then they throw
Speaker 1: in a stick of dynamite. It's a big explosion, and
Speaker 1: then all you have is just the oil going up.
Speaker 1: So you still have plenty of fuel for the fire,
Speaker 1: but there's no more fire because you took away the
Speaker 1: oxygen with the blast, right, So this sounds like kind
Speaker 1: of a dangerous way to to fight a fire. It
Speaker 1: makes me a little uncomfortable. But it has worked in
Speaker 1: the past, and there are actually some pretty cool stories
Speaker 1: about this. One guy who specialized in fighting oil wil fires.
Speaker 1: I read a really need article on Time about it,
Speaker 1: and he would go around and this was his job.
Speaker 1: It sounds extraordinarily dangerous to me. I think I prefer
Speaker 1: the life of an editor. Oh yes, well, well you
Speaker 1: also have to put out fires as an editor. But
Speaker 1: but this is already guy you're talking about. I don't
Speaker 1: think you'd really do that great of a job against
Speaker 1: a forest fire or wildfire, because that's going to take
Speaker 1: a lot of dynamite to put out, say you know,
Speaker 1: a square acre of flame. Um, So yeah, you really
Speaker 1: can't um take away the oxygen for it for that
Speaker 1: kind of a fire, but you can take away, um,
Speaker 1: it's fuel. And that's where fighting fire with fire really
Speaker 1: comes into its own right. So they're two basic strategies
Speaker 1: with fighting fire with fire. You have the preemptive let's
Speaker 1: let's take care of this beforehand. Let's get all the
Speaker 1: fuel out of here. Let's look around my my home
Speaker 1: site and gee, that pile would leaning up against the
Speaker 1: house really isn't such a good idea. Yeah, It's like
Speaker 1: if you live in say New York or London, and
Speaker 1: you see the signs that say please don't feed the rats,
Speaker 1: don't leave food out. You know, I don't want rats
Speaker 1: in my house, so I shouldn't leave a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of junk food laying in the floor or throw it
Speaker 1: down in the street. You know, it's a preemptive move
Speaker 1: to remove the substance that the enemy will consume to
Speaker 1: put Another great analogy that we're talking about is the
Speaker 1: uh the war analogy. This is a when you institute
Speaker 1: a control burn and remove the fuel through a control burn,
Speaker 1: you are it's it's like going out and digging a
Speaker 1: moat to keep an advancing army from getting to you. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: I see that. I will say that I feel obligated
Speaker 1: to throw this in. Occasionally you have controlled burns that
Speaker 1: do get out of control, like I read about one
Speaker 1: in back in two thousand UM in New Mexico where
Speaker 1: the National Park Service set a controlled burn um and
Speaker 1: end up consuming something like two hundred homes. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: not that's not the ideal. Yeah, the the the idea,
Speaker 1: of course is you're gonna you're gonna set the fire
Speaker 1: under control circumstances, you're gonna watch it, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: you know, water on hand, etcetera. UM, and you're just
Speaker 1: going to go ahead and let nature take its course
Speaker 1: to a certain extent under control circumstances. Because it's easy
Speaker 1: to forget this um since fire is such a hindrance
Speaker 1: to human endeavor and in human uh um, you know, settlements, etcetera.
Speaker 1: That as farest fire or wildfire is really part of
Speaker 1: the natural process. In many ecosystems, right, absolutely, I mean
Speaker 1: just like you can live in a flood zone or
Speaker 1: you can live in a fire zone, and vegetations dependent
Speaker 1: on it. Um. You know, it's the way that the
Speaker 1: canopy and the trees might be controlled, you know, so
Speaker 1: that there was an excessive growth, sequoias actually depend on fire. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this square seeds actually remain dormant until the fire breaks
Speaker 1: down the outer coating, and a number of other plants
Speaker 1: have grown, if not to depend upon the fire, um
Speaker 1: to at least whether the storm of regular wildfires. So
Speaker 1: so when you see something, if you happen to see
Speaker 1: somebody performing a control burn, you know, don't feel sorry
Speaker 1: for the vegetation because there's a good chance. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is something they've evolved to deal with, right.
Speaker 1: And then the ultimate goal of the control of burns
Speaker 1: a firebreak. It's a gap, that's what you're really looking
Speaker 1: at there. Yeah, it's just it's leg. We're saying, it's
Speaker 1: a moat to keep the advancing army the flame from
Speaker 1: reaching um, you know, your fortress, all right, So let's
Speaker 1: talk about the armies a little closer. They're they're encroaching
Speaker 1: upon our moat. Yeah, yeah, This is where the analogy
Speaker 1: would would be more if you go out and say,
Speaker 1: destroy the bridge to keep the to keep the army
Speaker 1: from advancing. Right, the wildfires rampaging at this point, right,
Speaker 1: the rats are closing in and the only thing you
Speaker 1: can do is just get rid of all the food.
Speaker 1: So so yeah, this is this is backfiring. You just
Speaker 1: go out and um and they start instituting a control burn, uh,
Speaker 1: so as to either to cut off the flames or
Speaker 1: to redirect them. So backfires ultimately may not stop the fire,
Speaker 1: but they may divert it, right, they'll, yeah, they'll at
Speaker 1: least you know, the idea is to divert the flames
Speaker 1: away from a settlement or or another area that's you know,
Speaker 1: laden with fuel. Yeah, and that's where you get those
Speaker 1: cool tools like fire torches and propean torches or drip torches. Right.
Speaker 1: The drip torches are the ones you really see a
Speaker 1: lot of. And this this kind of looks like a
Speaker 1: little handheld canister. It's just dripping flaming liquid. Um. And
Speaker 1: the ideas they just go out there and then you know,
Speaker 1: you can start doing basically a line of flame on
Speaker 1: the ground. It's not a flamethrower, but it's uh, it
Speaker 1: is an implement that drips flame. A propane torches are
Speaker 1: a little more flame there were like, but but yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're those are the key implemency see used and
Speaker 1: the of course the proplane torches particularly interesting. That well,
Speaker 1: that's because when we were researching this, I found um
Speaker 1: an ad for one on a gardening website and apparently
Speaker 1: it just has tons of uses just around around the house.
Speaker 1: I mean, sure, you want to burn some weeds, because
Speaker 1: I love how this ad points out that you can
Speaker 1: have more fun this way. Pulling weeds that's kind of boring,
Speaker 1: but if you can set fire to them. Imagine we're
Speaker 1: not advocating this, but so this this appeals to the
Speaker 1: pyromaniac and the gardener lake right, yeah, and apparently you
Speaker 1: can use it to like you need to use the
Speaker 1: driveway needs to be de iced, You don't need salt
Speaker 1: or de icing agent. You need a propane torch. Good lord.
Speaker 1: You can sterilize bird and animal cages, etcetera. Anyway, that's
Speaker 1: that's a whole tangent. So that's how you fight fire
Speaker 1: with fire. So do you feel feel a little better
Speaker 1: about the flames now fire has wildfires, I will say
Speaker 1: I feel a little better about wildfires. Um, However, I
Speaker 1: don't feel all that good about leaving my curling irons on. Still,
Speaker 1: I still might be a little I'm nervous about that.
Speaker 1: Maybe the toaster, I'm still gonna plug it. I think
Speaker 1: good call. I'm gonna go home and check on my
Speaker 1: coaster too. So if you want to learn more about
Speaker 1: anything from toasters to fire breathing, to firefighters to weather,
Speaker 1: an iPod can set your pants on fire, head on
Speaker 1: over to how stuff works dot com or check out
Speaker 1: the blogs that blogs dot how stuff works dot com.
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