Blog: In the middle of the worst wildfires on record

Former Shropshire man Mark Ellis writes about life in his new home state of Arizona.

Blog: It is only the middle of June and Arizona has already broken a record that would be better left unbroken.

We are in the midst of the worst wildfire season on record. Currently there are three fires burning, the Wallow fire in NE Arizona is the largest and has torched, at the time of writing, more than 470,000 acres.

When I moved to Arizona I had no real grasp of the size of Arizona and the USA, so for those equally uninformed, a few facts to help try understand the size of the State and the fire.

The United Kingdom covers an area of 94,060 square miles and Shropshire is 1,346 sq miles; Arizona is the sixth largest state in the US and covers 113,998 sq miles. (These square mileage measurements are courtesy of Wikipedia, so if you disagree feel free to rewrite the free encyclopedia.)

Arizona alone is substantially bigger than the UK. You can drive for miles and see no signs of life or civilization. Of course some would argue that you would never find any signs of civilization here however hard you looked - but maybe I can return to that concept another time.

Back to the fire - using simple Math (as opposed to Maths) the Wallow has burned an area of approximately 730 sq miles, or the equivalent of more than half of Shropshire, and is nowhere near being contained.

Wildfires are a fact of life here. Ignoring the potential for careless people leaving camp fires that have not been properly extinguished (the likely cause of the Wallow fire) many fires are started by lightning. They generally happen as the temperature rises in the mountains and all the ground-level spring growth dries out - once this happens it takes very little to start a devastating fire.

Go back 100 years and these fires would be left to their own devices as there were so few inhabitants in Arizona and little potential for property damage. Generally the forests would benefit from the clean-out of brush and come back stronger and healthier with a reduced risk of fire.

Driven by strong winds, sadly these fires are ripping through towns, causing mass evacuations, razing homes, and destroying people's livelihoods, hence the need to try to contain and extinguish them. Thankfully they have not taken any lives - hopefully that will continue to be the case.

Unfortunately containing and eventually putting out the fires is not the end of the challenge. Another weather phenomenon we have in Arizona is monsoon storms that bring high winds and heavy localised rainfall from now until early September.

The wildfires remove the groundcover vegetation that normally helps absorb the rain and without that groundcover we can get massive mudslides and flooding where previously there were no problems - all we can do is hope that the rain comes but not too severely.

On a positive note, a benefit of these fires is seeing how kind our fellow citizens can be. There has been an outpouring of generosity (giving of both financial aid and time) to those that have suffered and lost everything.

Also there is the grateful recognition that hundreds of fire department workers are risking their lives to preserve the lives, livelihoods, and property of complete strangers.