The little of a focus on a. Plane to lead the unknown look in the middle of what is called god. All over the world make of fires are destroying entire towns and reaching. The red circle. Like a Freight Train coming torture. Me. Please help. Make a farmers are different they are beyond our control they are insatiable see indigo what the precise since some tar nuclear dust. Mites will be dropping wet paper dollar bills from your plans for all the good its going to come out by the we are in conflict with nature. But why has it unleashed this inferno on our forests and homes. In many areas were literally setting on a powder keg we need to face some tough true. Scientists and firefighters are taking up the challenge with new methods. This is the missile Fire Science Laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire. Going pump and down off air on this it was. Also under scrutiny our own role in creating this crisis. Because of all of the fire a social problems thought when to use the thought of when nobody could win an instrument. Its really up to humans to figure out how to rebalance everything and we can do that its a race against time to save our habitat and our lives and we have about 20 years to get the needed work done. How can we survive the new era of mega fires. May 1st 2016 in Fort Mcmurray canada. A forest fire starts belching al smoke but for people in this Prosperous Oil sands town its business as usual. Part of living here is you get used to forest fires and you get used to smoke from a big part of the summer and so nobody really worries when small craft floats and town. But this time the town was faced with a mega fire. And suddenly of 911 alarm went off it was actually. The city dispatcher who said hey it looks like this fire is going to make contact with the city we need your help and our captain said well what do you need how much do you need and they said sand Everything Everything that you have nobody has ever said sand and everything. And nobody expected the finer to attack peoples homes. The very 1st place we were dispatched was this area in. Terrorism about 5 minutes after we took this short and 2nd video there was 10 houses on fire. And. A 1000 firefighters were mobilized from all over canada. But they were powerless before the Destructive Force of what locals called the beast. In just a few days 3 suburbs were burnt to ashes. And just cost the last day after day after day and its really wasnt safe for us to be in there anymore. But here we are leaving the room to vote. For and im going to dodge i can feel the heat here. In theory fully. 88000 people the whole town. Ran for their lives this gravy. Were an industry town based on oil based on shift work so in the middle of the day theres thousands of people that could be sleeping. We started knocking on doors we use the speaker systems on our cars are allowed healers the city was announced and its time to leave. You can see the big red line that runs through the middle is our highway 63 and thats the main highway through town its the only way out. Everyone whos trying to get out at the same time the gas stations are running out of gasoline i had like a quarter of a tank of gas that we were panicked about and then as we got maybe 40 minutes out of town everything hit me and i realized. I might never see you again. Adrian and everyone else who spent a month in emergency shelters. Nobody died in that fire and that is the absolute best we could hope for to get everybody out and save those lives. The beast swallowed several 1000 homes and 5000 square kilometers of forced were actually nearly 10000000000. 00 Canadian Dollars it was the most destructive wildfire in the history of canada. Even worse the beast was not an exception but it is part of a global trend. Uncontrollable make a farmers have struck in canada and in california they are burning millions of acres in the amazon and are threatening lives in Europe Russia and even siberia they have reached china indonesia and australia the worlds forests are on fire. At this center in brussels the European Union monitors emergencies around the globe from earthquakes and floods to volcano outbreaks and tropical cyclones. But a 3rd of all emergency calls are for wildfires and. If you want. Forest fires in italy going to affect the south there are regions of the contrie particular city firefighter claire cover left ski has firsthand experience battling flames now she helps European Countries tackle wildfires. 3 supposed to hold just she didnt tell me. I want back to the contract at 70 also and means i know the divorce rate on the whole insult and of me is foolish when they would. All that if. We get more and performs feel what shes doing. Will. Make a fire as can be seen from space. Europe satellites are on far watch and capturing some worrying trends. In that almost going to have on the Political International into the simply folk to dish to legs up to the guys on the media even to produce some pats on the phone this idiot asked me to do this if it for a. More extreme fires also struck in portugal and spain. The in the philippines the fur on the fair its a beauty contest it was a pretty good season for toy taken in addition scholorship. Fires are now striking all year round in california we saw 2 shoot blazes in november and over christmas. Jim fetch me compared to yesterday twice as much forested land to fountain sweden. Unexpectedly mega fires are also threatening New Territories in the north on the medias you couldnt type out where australia oh you mean you dont know my you know put on your name when you to say peach and should want to some perfect of us if in the men on here its. Different for you. Its a time when you were to decide on other any. All. All over the world the fires are pushing our resources to the limit to. Trade fairs for aerial firefighting like here in france all for a growing arsenal of weapons for the war against far. And. This will put the new technology. Like simulators Virtual Reality and chemical flame retardants does not come cheap. E. U. Countries are now spending 2000000000. 00 euros a year on firefighting the u. S. Is spending more than 2000000000. 00. But can Technology Protect Us from mega fires. We have very large airplanes very large helicopters lots of equipment on the ground lots of people fire engines all of that and there is no trend that we can say that indicates that we will ever be able to control extreme wildfire. Like the swedish government which called in the army to stop a fire by bombing it in. The rush of air from the explosion snuffed out the fire. But are we winning the battle and losing the war. And some folks wonder if we just before up Fire Suppression a little bit more more tankers more fire crews more retardant bombers we can deal with wildfire effectively the evidence says otherwise the return on our investment with expanding Fire Suppression investment in the u. S. Is actually declining. Are getting less effect of us so were pretty clear we cant solve this with our suppression alone. Can we find a different strategy to save our forests and our habitat. Today wildfire is a hungry beast that devours for us and it wasnt always like. It was a friend of man once upon a time. Fire ecologist paul has berg is an internationally renowned expert who has dedicated several decades to the question of why the fires are becoming more extreme. So the bottom line is that we need to face some tough truths. And this starts with a trip into the past to the time when european settlers arrived in the u. S. The knew what happens immediately expose the forest to a higher fire risk as they set up logging off or a sions constructed homesteads and lit fires to cook food and clear land. New technology further increase the fire risk. There are 4 major road lines that are crisscrossing the country east to west from north to south and the trains in the heat of the summer would give up spark said and they would often spread into nearby slashing grasses and so fires would start with the passage of drain. The turning point was the 910 big burn. Not. 910. 00 was a year of drought then a sudden wind whipped up some small fires into a giant blaze all across idaho montana and washington state. This catastrophe would fundamentally change our approach to far fighting. A witness left a testimony. The canyon seemed to act as chimneys through which the wind and fire swept with the roar of a 1000 Freight Trains. Then you really thought it was the end of the world. This search for survivors and bodies went on for weeks. The big burn was the largest fire in u. S. History in just 2 days it destroyed 3000000. 00 acres of forest and 1000000000. 00 worth of timber. 87 people lost their lives the community was left traumatized. It paralyzed us with a fear of wild fire suddenly a wildfire becomes public enemy number one in the United States. A new enemy needs a new type of defense in the u. S. And in canada a new Firefighting Service declared war on far. The United StatesForest Service people of its own right. Jumpers. Fire fighters. A deadline was set all fires were to be put out by 10 am the next morning. They had to develop a machine a mechanism to be able to do that so there was new Training Programs and firefighting crews that had to be developed and methods had to be developed to successfully deploy people safely and put fires out. And we got so good at it that we were able to put out 95 to 98 percent of all wildfires coast to coast every single year. As most of the fires were caused by humans the all forties recruited the general population into the war against fire with the help of a very special mascot. Remember your group and forest fire. You were. I think. For suppression work for a really long time from lets say 1935 to 198550 years of hyper success then after 1905 we see acres burned going back up just like before the pre Fire Suppression era where was this benefit of Fire Suppression it was going away it was looking like a leaky bucket. Like to show us something ive got these great panoramic photos showing this landscape from the 1930 s. And then again today and what we see is in the 1930 s. There was so far fewer trees maybe 10 or 20 percent of the trees that we see today. And why did that happened. The small and medium size fires were really frequent on this landscape and they played an incredibly Important Role there burning up dead wouldnt sending out trees you had this patchwork of burned in recovering and forested area so this limited the frequency of the really large fires because fires would run into already burned places where the fuel was consumed and so they couldnt get big that often. That patchiness is gone from the landscape during that period of 100 years when we kept fire out of the woods all sorts of trees of different sizes and species from seedlings and saplings to small poles they filled in the spaces between the big trees and they created what we call a fuel ladder to vast areas have these fuel ladders they convey fire from the forest floor up through the branches and into the canopies of the large trees now you add a continuous puff of wind to that and that wildfire can spread through the canopy for hector after hector after actor. California and greece in 201840 mcmurray in 2016 black saturday in australia. All these fires spread out of control because humans stacked the furnace with decades of accumulated fuel. And now yet another manmade factor is bringing things to a head. My 1st experience of fireworks was when i was one year old it was my birthday i had a birthday cake and one candle and i was drawn to that lame like a moth and i stuck my finger in the flame and started to holler and cry but because i was so fast it i kept my finger in the flame and ever since then ive been studying fire. My clan again has uncovered the complex relationship that exists between fire and climate. For him thats the secret to what happened in Fort Mcmurray. In canada our area burned has doubled since the seventys and my colleagues and i attribute this to human caused Climate Change. In winter arboreal forests are covered with snow but instead of a snow melting slowly and the yser soaking into the ground now because of Climate Change the snow is melting rapidly and a lot of oyster runs off so theres not enough moisture for the trees and the vegetation during the growing season making them more prone to drought during the summer. For each degree of warming trees would need 20 percent more water but because of drought the opposite happens. And with Climate Change comes hotter and drier summers which means trees lose more moisture through transpiration in other words even more water evaporates from the leaves into the atmosphere. Now the trees can defend themselves by shutting down the pores. But when they do this they dont grow as well making them more susceptible to disease insect and fire. The impact can be seen not only in canada but all over the globe. An example is the ideal it scenery of lake tahoe on the border between california and nevada. Here drought has taken a terrible toll and multiplied the fire risk. There was an article back in april that listed the 10 most risk towns in california particularly in the Sierra Nevada and kings speech was listed as one of. A forest and conservation biologist at the university of california Patricia Maloney is investigating a huge catastrophe that has befallen forests in the u. S. Canada and in europe. When the drought started hitting in 2015 i was really curious and want to know why and how some trees were dying. This is a 12 trap for capturing bark beetles and this lure here attracts the Mountain Pine beetle and bark beetles for the most part have very poor sight and theyre thinking its a tree and so they fly over here and then they cant fly out once they capture down to get into the funnel and then they fall down into the cut below. So today in this track weve captured about 35 to 50 Mountain Pine beetle in 2016 in this location each week over the course of 4 weeks we captured between 500 to a 1000 in pine beetle. And those beetles know how to plan a mass invasion. Here we have a drought affected tree and when theyre stressed by drought theyll emit ethylene and this and beetles go by smell so they smell that the tree is stress because they can smell that ethylene so they come moving towards this tree to try to attack it and then once you have enough bark beetles that are trying to invade a tree they in turn send pheromone a chemical that basically tells all their friends to come over party in this tree. We see a number of pitch tubes here and you can see there are many pits tubes that go all the way up this and then you see all this streaming pitch coming down and thats a physical defense of the tree trying to pitch out and wall off the bark beetle from getting inside the tree and killing it. This tree is still alive right now its still trying to defend itself. But drought leaves other trees to dry to produce any resin at all free entry to the party. You get thousands of the beatles in there and they begin to compromise water uptake and so between a drought event and massive amounts of bark beetles this tree is just about dead. Just in california beetles have invaded and killed an estimated 120000000 trees. In europe as well heat waves and drought have caused ways of deadly beetle attacks in france spain and even scandinavia more fodder for the next beast on the problem. In many areas were literally sitting on a powder keg the area burned in the u. S. By wildfires since 2002 and today it is going to double or triple and the next 30 years. But even the biggest powder keg will only explode if the fuse is lit what makes forest fires go off. So this is the the famous 2 minute canadian match dropped us which really is the foundation of our system you had to go off into the bush like we just did and light a wooden match put it down and watch it for 2 minutes. Mike wotton is an Eminent Research scientist working for the canadian Forest Service his specialty fire behavior. This this one didnt spread it was only the match burning and so this tells me that this fuel is not flammable today. But i can tell how quickly this took off that the fuels are very foul farmable here so this area would be at a high fire risk. Starting shortly after the big burn the canadian scientists performed no less then 30000 match tests over 30 years to one cover the hidden mechanism of flammability. The basis of how fire spreads all comes down to what we call the fire triangle. On one side of this triangle we have oxygen we need oxygen to burn on another side we need fuel. To burn as well and on the other we have. Energy a source of heat and so we need all of these 3 sides of the triangle for fire to continue i take one of them away and that reaction doesnt work anymore in the fire goes out. The canadian scientists are the inventors of an ingenious system of universal warning signs. In. Countries all across the globe have adopted the system. More mega fires are coming our way. But once ignited how does a fire grow into a raging mega fire that is beyond human control. Weve come to montana science of the big burn in 1010 to unravel the innermost mechanisms of fun. So this is the missile Fire Sciences laboratory the entire building is filled with people studying fire many different aspects of fire ecology Atmospheric Science smoke and history and fire behavior. This is one of the largest and oldest fire labs in the world. Here scientists get right inside the mind of fires like the beast to find out hell the feed themselves. This is our Brain Chamber this is where we do many kinds of experiments burning different kinds of fuels and all of them produce a lot of smoke thats why we have to have a very large ventilation system to remove all that smoke. Coming out of. This apparatus was a big some tilting sand burner we call it big sandy it consists of a sand box here in the middle where we pump gas so we can control exactly the characteristics of the flames of. This is very much like an arbitrary segment of a large while and fire thats spreading outward and so what were trying to understand with this apparatus is how the heat is transferred any way it every minute counts when fighting a while far crews can only save lives and homes if they are in the right place at the right time but until recently fire spread could not be predicted for more than 30 minutes in advance. Thats because its mechanism was unknown. And now mark and his team have solved the ancient riddle. You see very clearly those peaks and troughs and. Those are actually key to how fires behave and how fires spread flame gases are very low density and they want to rise up but in order for them to rise colder has to come down and replace the volume vacated by that rising parcel hot air. That sets up a repeating pattern of hot flames rising cold air descending heart flames rising core where the center. And its in the troughs where the cold air is descending that is pushing flames down into the fuel. And this forces them on to the fresh fuel just ahead of the flame front advances. If this fire did not have the peak and trough out he would not get it spring. Finally the secret is unravels of how fire spreads well like wildfire. This paves the way for a new generation of fire science and better strategies for those battling the flames on the front line. Guys going to be hot. Over the have to get raybans for everybody yeah ok. Were going to have the best sun but its going to freeze any of. The 4 issues appetite of todays mega fires knows no boundaries the secret behind this airflow and wind. Combustion specialist several mcalister has found a way to simulate the process. First she simulates an ordinary wall far. So narrow i let it burn a little bit here when you can see it theres a lot of unburned fuel in there so its not burning very well. The plume of the fire is narrow so the flames can pull in fresh replacement air from all sides. But then a question in here. No using a Chimney Service simulates the air flow of a mega fire. Burns much faster much more clearly or get sparked up and people all over. They can hear the flow but it creates. This flow which is the result of an astonishing mechanism as the fuels accumulate and you get more and more fuel down on the ground they burn longer so instead of having simple line of fire you end up with an area of fuel thats on fire so as that area gets bigger and bigger the plume above it gets wider and wider the. Hot air rushes upwards and forms a natural chimney which blocks the air coming in from above and the sides instead the fire sucks in fresh air from down below generating strong winds on the ground. And. The fire creatures are very human with machine to fan the flames. Nearby sensually blowing on the coal of the fire and if youve ever played with a campfire and you blew out you blow out and you can see it close a lot hotter and stuff that was already in funding its going to burn much faster stuff that was smoldering is going to transition to plane and so youre going to involve more fuels that are going to burn without that when. A mega fire is for. The rising heat and when turbulence you can even spin it into far tornadoes socalled far natos which going to reach. The force of a hurricane and temperatures of a 1000. 00 degree celsius. In the age of mega fires far natos are becoming more and more common. There. Lets see how this wind machine led to the inferno in Fort Mcmurray. They have the power to send embers in lightning far ahead of the fire sparking new ignitions all over the region. Firefighters on the ground were overwhelmed and faced with tough decisions. This area sits on a kind of a corner you go left to a buffalo and right to dickens field and we had to choose if we were going to defend what buffalo. And were dickens field. We decided to defend the dickens field stretcher forest and we ended up being able to stop the fire from getting into that neighborhood and we felt pretty good about ourselves we felt like heroes actually we felt like superheroes and that well meant and we packed up our hoses we drove around the corner and toward buffalo only to discover that 60 houses from fire. That was a difficult moment for us logically we look back and decision we made was the like right doesnt always make you feel better though. The fire of Fort Mcmurray has been studied by scientists all around the globe. Their investigations reveal that the impact doesnt stop here. Because 2. So in g m. A lazy Holiday Season and we heard in the news that there was a very intense fires going on in the northwest canada. Sirrah gaikai can is from russia and a specialist in the impact of volcanic eruptions. But the air of mega fires has expanded his field of study. I thought why not check whether we see something can fly their measurements here at the station. Measure objects by bouncing laser beams off them. Laser beam comes out of their jets computer through this mirrors and then it is sent for the beam expand there on the disk or for inexpensive and this sent into the atmosphere and then b. Was a telescope to get the scattered signal back from as high as one was going to suck. And thats how we get information on the composition of the atmosphere. In addition to the light our at the station sergei also used the space based calypso lidar which covers the entire globe. When i assure you checked of the data from the raiders i saw something really extraordinary these invent spiders in general. They send lots of small can ised into the stratosphere and then these plumes they crossed the atlantic in just one week and arrived in europe. Passing through europe on its way east the smoke created a series of stunning sunsets. And then the smoke went further to so. And then crossed the globe in the new 2 weeks and we have been seeing it is for us here for at least 7 months that followed far. This is assuming that comes off the mother it will kind of option and this one is from this new go fire event and since you we found that the wildfires can have as last year booked on the atmosphere as the mothers will conquer options. Sergei was the 1st scientist to discover that the reach of mega fires is global and out of the ordinary. Every fire season our entire airspace fills up with smoke. We urgently need to find out more about the chemical composition of what were taking in with every breath. Nasa has launched an International Air borne science expedition to investigate the potential impact of this new type of pollution. One of the Mission Controllers is bob jocose and from Montana University who has dedicated his life to understanding wild fire smoke. This plane is the world supposed to advance by laboratory the summary of the flight plan for today is to head to the shirt it fires Southern Arizona and. There the team members are planning to collect fresh smoke samples for their research with the help of pioneering prototypes. You have to bring the lab to the fire to the smoke to better understand the thousands of chemicals that are emitted fresh smoke and how those change as the. Smoke evolves in the atmosphere. When the plane reaches the smoke plume we get strong turbulence. Caused by the hot air rising from the far end. When were flying really big fires and you have to make maneuvers like that it will feel like youre on a roller coaster which is fine but you dont want to be on a roller coaster for 8 hours its kind of a high intensity type of work but its also something able to see the measurements that were making in real time. The full analysis of all the new data will take years but bob is already sounding the alarm bells the health risks links to al far smoke are enormous. Theres a lot of concerns about smoke for instance the particles are solid or liquid droplets and they can clog the passageways in your lungs and they can also inject poison into your bloodstream along with the toxic gases and when those poisons get in your bloodstream it actually changes your biochemistry in your body and that can lead to Heart Disease theres even a statistic called premature deaths we know that these premature deaths increase as pollution increases. In our fire prone world risk for a tour of diseases including asthma are on the increase. And a vital activity like breathing is becoming a deadly risk. And. I think. It. Has been working in italy fields for many years he has no Legal Protection no rights and barely enough to live on. In june a new law came into effect in order for him and about 350000 other Migrant Workers it meant hope but their dreams of legal status seemed to have been dashed focus on europe. 90 minutes on d w. Wall did beethoven kowtows film. I see a sure shot not. Bad ragged out beethoven i cant even begin to imagine the face told the. Story september 16th on d w. The time and place captured in pictures. Images of gaza. A Photo Studios archive documents lives in bygone eras. And leads to those living today. They are guarding gazas past in a box. A legacy in black and white. Collective memories. This 14 on t. W. This is the news live from but it is germany dropping its guard against the corona of the countrys Health Ministry people to be very. Records the highest single day number of new infections more than 3 months also coming up. U. S. Democratic president ial hopeful joe biden holds his 1st Campaign Event with his newly named running mate comedy of errors. Senator the 1st woman of color to run on a major party ticket