What is the largest fire in the US?

Answer 1

Today, we can imagine the smoke -- thick and suffocating.

We can fathom the flames -- causing mountains and towns to glow red at midnight.

We can even imagine the heat, enough to peel paint off boxcars.

Yet there's one thing the survivors said was impossible for anyone to imagine: The roar.

A forest the size of Connecticut was exploding in a fearsome whoosh -- generating, with fire and oxygen, its own tornadoes and cyclones. One survivor called it "the sound of a thousand trains rushing over a thousand steel trestles." Another said it could be compared only to the "roar of Niagara falls."

The noise was a deafening combination of 60 mph gales, colossal fire-driven updrafts, and the clamor of hundreds of trees cracking, snapping and slamming against earth. One witness said it sounded like being in the midst of "heavy cannonading."

Some came to call it The Big Blowup. Others called it the Big Burn. By any name, it was easily the biggest forest fire in the Inland Northwest's history -- actually the biggest forest fire in U.S. history

A century ago this week, 3 million acres of North Idaho, Montana and Washington forest were turned to charcoal in two wind-whipped days. The towns of Taft, Haugan, DeBorgia in Montana, and Grand Forks and Falcon in Idaho, were destroyed. One-third of Wallace was obliterated. At least 85 people died.

One hundred years after the fact, the fire still burns in the nation's imagination. The event has recently spawned a mini literary genre, with two excellent books published in the past decade alone, Stephen Pyne's "Year of the Fires" in 2001 and Timothy Egan's best-selling "The Big Burn" in 2009 (see related interview). Before that, the story was told in Betty Goodwin Spencer's "The Big Blowup" in 1956, Ruby El Hult's "Northwest Disaster: Avalanche and Fire" in 1960 and Sandra A. Crowell and David O. Asleson's "Up the Swiftwater" in 1980.

(Much of the information in this story is derived from those books, along with newspaper archives and U.S. Forest Service records.)

In this centennial year, the Forest Service, in particular, has lavished new attention on what Pyne calls the agency's "Ur-Fire."

No witnesses survive today, but we have good reason to keep the story alive. For one thing, the 1910 trauma continues to shape the way America fights wildfires, according to Pyne. Also, the fire guaranteed the continued existence of the public lands and national forests we enjoy today, according to Egan.

And there's a third, more compelling reason: The Big Burn was, quite simply, a monumental human drama.

Elbert Dow would no doubt agree. This was a man who had survived the Great San Francisco Earthquake four yours before. Yet when he stumbled out of the St. Joe country, burned and dazed, here's what he said: For sheer "horror and suffering," the Big Burn was worse.