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.