I received an email that listed some fire-related news articles, and one of the headlines got my attention:
Fire Retardant Paint Saved Calif. Timber Mill Building
The link took me to an article at Firehouse.com that the website lifted from the Associated Press, and sure enough, there was that headline. I had never heard of paint saving a building from a wildfire, so I was quite curious. I quickly scanned the article looking for how a building was saved by paint, and didn’t see it, so I read the whole thing more carefully.
It was referring to the Boles Fire that burned 150 structures in Weed, California. Much of the story covered the impacts to the damaged lumber mill and the 170 workers. Here is what the headline writer saw that resulted in the misleading headline:
With a maintenance shed reduced to twisted sheet-metal and the main manufacturing facility suffering structural damage, but still standing with a new coat of pink fire retardant, the Roseburg Forest Products veneer mill on the outskirts of Weed was out of commission Tuesday while workers began assessing the damage, said Kellye Wise, vice president for human resources of the company based in Dillard, Oregon.
There was no indication in the article of how much damage was done to the facility, including if it was “saved”, or not, by air tankers dropping retardant, or house paint. The mill has their own fire crew responsible for fighting fires within the facility, and air tankers were not mentioned in the article, except indirectly: “pink fire retardant”.
The same AP story published at the Daily Mail, a UK paper in a country having little experience with large wildfires, had a different headline:
Fire damage to mill another blow to timber town
Often the person that writes the headline is not the author of the story, and this is not the first time that a headline has been misleading.
Airtankers were used to protect structures and the log decks at the mill. Many structures including the mill were “painted with retardant” from the DC-10’s and other air tankers. One side of the mill is very pink from a direct hit of the retardant.
Tim’s got it right. Fire now shown as 350 or so acres. Last report I saw was 110 homes destroyed. Massive relief effort for Siskiyou County is underway.
Today CAL FIRE lists the fire at 479 acres with 150 structures destroyed.
Back in the “old days of plentiful water” all of the mill log decks had sprinkler systems running on them round-the-clock: helped prevent fires, and also kept the bark loose for the de-barker. Now, in the days of drought, I’m sure that is considered a waste of water?
If I remember right, there are substances that can be painted onto wood to reduce its flame spread index significantly, buying time for fire fighters to get to a building, though at least some of the substances may need time (24/48 hours or some such) to permeate into the wood. Some of these substances only work on bare wood and others claim to be effective on painted wood. However, they aren’t cheap and would take a lot of work and time to apply, so they might not be at all practical or effective for something as big as a mill facing a fast-moving fire. These are different from foams that can be sprayed on at short notice.
NICE ONE, BILL!
You are correct that the writers rarely do the headlines. It’s quite likely, though, that Firehouse is a member/subscriber to the Associated Press and thus did not “lift” the story. The AP has staff writers, but a story can also be written for a small local paper (or a big one) and then picked up by the AP and run over the wire — meaning it will show up tomorrow all over the country.