aggiehawg said:
Quote:
I want to know YOUR thoughts, and and what YOU want to know about the situation on the ground here on Maui.
With a fire hot enough to melt aluminum alloy wheels and glass, why are so many trees still standing? Shouldn't those be charred stumps?
This is a long reply going down the rabbit hole of the supposed significance of melted aluminum. I will provide some photos that will hopefully make it worth a quick scan. BLUF: A fire fanned by wind can create some extremely hot temperatures that will melt aluminum in a very localized area.
About 14 years ago, I had to do a line of duty investigation (LODI) on the loss of >$1MM worth of MRAP parts that got burned up in a laydown lot adjacent to the big stretched fabric shelter where MRAPs where rebuilt and repaired at Taqqadum Air Base. The fire was started from sparks from a burn pit on the opposite side of a cantonment berm from MRAP parts. The fire marshal did the fire investigation, I was merely determining if the Marines using the burn pit were guilty of misconduct or not so I was reviewing the findings of the fire marshal which included photos of burned equipment including molten aluminum that has flowed and solidified on the sand.
Here's a photo of the fire in progress. Note the arrow stating that the burn put was ~50 meters on the other side of the berm and cinders had been blow by heavy winds that far before starting the fire
I would not have guessed that the pallets of vehicle parts that are mostly not flammable, would catch fire from cinders blown from a small burn put 50m away but, they did. Ironically, the fire truck in the photo had stopped at the burn pit 45 minutes earlier to tell the two Marines burning trash that the wind was too high to be burning trash. This is a photo of the burn pit shortly after the fire. It's pretty small and they weren't burning a large quantity of trash.
So, the fire truck stayed there and watched the fire until it was mostly ashes and when they were confident that the fire had burned down to a safe size and the threat of spreading was gone, they went to the chow hall for lunch. Shortly after the two Marines decided that the fire was out and went to lunch also. 45 minutes later, the fire crew got the call while they were still eating lunch that there was a fire at the location that had just come from before sitting down to lunch. If they had taken a peek on the opposite side of the berm before they left for lunch, they would probably have seen the fire in the parts lot already smoldering.
As you can see from the photos, the fire burned very intensely in small areas but nearby, other wooden containers were left unburned.
