User:Rtcity/blacksaturday

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Black Saturday wildfires
Black saturday map.png
Map of the burned area during the Black Saturday wildfires. The area of the fires is denoted by     .
Location Yerljasqar Province, Kryfona Kingdom
Date 8 July–18 August, 1961
Causes Arson, fallen power wires
Type Wildfire
Deaths 79
Injuries 488
Damages 753,000,000 Kryfona currency.png

The Black Saturday wildfires were a series of wildfires that largely began in the exceedingly dry month of July, 1961 in the province of Yerljasqar, subsequently exploding in size and ferocity on 22 July, 1961–which came to be called Black Saturday and lent the wildfires their name–and resulting in the deaths of 79 people, largely civilians. Although for the most part they started as individual wildfires deep within the Gelaa Mountains between 8 July and 13 July, by 21 July the three major fire complexes that exploded on Black Saturday–labeled Walek, Lyze, and Jazsowa–had coalesced into singular fires, and after 22 July continued to rage into mid-August. Firefighting efforts, valiant as they were, played little role in ultimately putting out the fires, and it was not until cooler, wetter weather prevailed that the fires finally died down. The disaster was the worst fire-related incident in the history of Yerljasqar Province, as well as the costliest, and led to sweeping reforms in mountain firefighting in the province. There has never been such a disastrous fire since in Yerljasqar.

Background

Although wildfires are ubiquitous to much of the Kryfona Kingdom, the history of firefighting in the province of Yerljasqar is historically quite slim. The land on which the province sits–which is roughly split into two halves, one of which is a flat expanse of plain and the other a chain of scraggly mountains which were named for Gelaa–does not lend itself to the explosive wildfires and bushfires that are common in other provinces such as Peiretsaja. Prior to the 1961 fire season, there had been only two or three significant fires in the history of the province and the territory which for many decades proceeded it, and these fires had essentially been confined to the mountain ranges and left to peter themselves out. At the time of those fires, there were virtually no settlers in the mountains and conversely no population to protect there, and as such fire efforts were not directed to them in the same manner as they might ordinarily be.

Gradually, however–and particularly throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s–the Gelaa Mountains came to be populated by a few settlers at first, and then later what came to be described as a "torrent" by the leaders of the province. Eschewing the big city life, and sensing an opportunity for fortunes and simple living, many of those who sought out the metaphorical shores of Yerljasqar established themselves at the base of the mountains, and before long well within them. The now-significant town of Ganzise came to exist in much this manner in 1897, and not long thereafter in 1917, the same came to be with Diriuszarazses, the easternmost town in all of the Kryfona Kingdom. By around 1930, the mountains of Yerljasqar were said to have as many as sixty thousand settlers, many of whom had staked claims on land or established small, frontier-like towns within the hundreds of mountain valleys–connected, it must be said, only by a hastily established road system that more resembled the trails of the Azsaehan Range on the other side of the country. Even as late as 1960, many of the roads which connected this rudimentary system were unpaved or, as was the case with some of the roads as far in as Diriuszarazses, wholly unmarked.

The shift in population did not go unnoticed by the fire services–rudimentary as they were themselves. Although there were no big fires in Yerljasqar during this shift, little fires always came and went as they did in other parts of the Kingdom. What had once been a non-issue quickly spiraled into one that the fire services could not quickly enough address; that issue, of course, being the sudden potential for loss of property among the settlers in the mountains. There was essentially nothing the fire services could do, however, but watch. Even in the 1950s, when technology had significantly advanced from when the first waves of settlers established themselves in Yerljasqar, the fire services had little in the way of transportation and, in any case, much of that transportation would be worthless on the trails–that's what they called the roads derogatorily–of their home province. So it was, in a lot of respects, predictable when in 1961–still the technological advances were on the whole not very useful–the fire services of Yerljasqar, rickety and ragged as they were, found great trouble in fighting a battle they had never encountered meaningfully before.

1960-61: the Long, Dry Summer

In a usual year, Yerljasqar is a rainy, wet province in which the humidity is often excessive and the temperatures vary between cold and mild, only rarely being outright hot except in unusual circumstances. Between 1960 and 1961, those "unusual circumstances" manifested themselves in a weather pattern that brought the region into the worst drought it had ever seen, and set the stage for the Black Saturday wildfires to explode in the way they did. The period between February 1960 and August 1961 was a dry spell like none seen before in the history of Yerljasqar and, to a lesser extent, in the history of the entire Eastern Kryfona Kingdom, and subsequently the forests of Yerljasqar's mountains became vast quantities of fuel just waiting to be lit. It was a catastrophe which, over the course of a year and a half, played itself out before exploding onto the scene in a way that has only been seen a few times before in the history of wildfires in the Kryfona Kingdom.

1960: The Year the Rain Never Came

In February of 1960, what had previously been a wet, snowy winter suddenly became one of the mildest on record when the first in a series of abnormal weather patterns developed over the Eastern Kryfona Kingdom, and set into motion the first stages of the drought that came to grip the region. Aided by a significant northward march of the jet stream when normally the jet stream dipped to the province, a pattern of relentless warmth flooded over Yerljasqar and would, for essentially the next year, remain in place unabated. Snow fell in March and April in a number of places, nevertheless, but for many towns and cities within the province, the late winter and early spring was among the warmest in history.

All this, of course, was the precursor to what was to come. Spring rainfall was below average, although not abnormally so, but more than anything it seemed to only get warmer and warmer, and by early April it was well above average in the majority of Yerljasqar, to the point of being remarkable. Snow melted early, and the seasonal surge of the rivers came almost a week earlier than usual. This, in retrospect, was the first true sign that something unusual was going on, but it was almost certainly not heeded by anybody. It would have been hard for such a thing to happen in any case.

The real troubles began in late spring of 1960, when temperatures rose to well above average and stayed there. Throughout most of Yerljasqar, temperatures exceeded their norms by ten, fifteen, or in some cases twenty or thirty degrees. Voizieze and the surrounding area in particular were well above average, and remained that way for virtually all of spring. The above-average temperatures were less extreme in the mountains, as well as in Gelaa and Maszje, but it was obvious that there was something unusual going on that spring. Places that were ordinarily wet saw rainfall totals that were well below what they expected, and by the end of June in 1960, almost all of the province was behind on its average rainfall totals for the year.

As the spring became summer, the heat intensified and the rains simply refused to fall. Most of the crop in rural Yerljasqar partially or totally failed in 1960, a year in which many areas saw less than a quarter of the precipitation they ordinarily would. Gelaa, the largest city in Yerljasqar, ran a little under sixteen inches below average by the end of it all, with exactly thirteen days of measurable precipitation. There were usually at least fifty in a given year, often times more than that. Maszje, farther to the west, ran ten inches below average, good for the worst year of drought in its history. Smaller towns often saw even worse precipitation droughts; in Voizieze, home to eleven thousand people at the time, there were three days of measurable rainfall in the summer. Total precipitation on the year before the snow fell was exactly one and three fourths of an inch.

There was even worse to be said of the heat, which had begun in the spring but built up in the summer and seemed to only worsen with time even as summer wound down into autumn. On 13 July, 1960, a string of twelve days consecutively in which the temperature peaked above 100 degrees Fahrenheit began in both Gelaa and Maszje. Previously, there had been four days above 100 in the entire history of Gelaa. There had been eight in Maszje. Both have topped 100 only once since, during a similar heatwave. The heat was slightly better in the rural towns, where often it was only in the high 90s–most of the time, anyways. But regardless of peak, the heat seemed simply to not end. Between 13 July and 13 September, it dipped below 85 degrees one time in Gelaa, and four times in Maszje. It was so unseasonable that many of the residents of both cities were not used to it, and suffered greatly. There was low humidity, to be fair, but that meant little in a place where the average summer temperature was fifteen, twenty, or even twenty five degrees cooler than it was that summer. Once, the heat was so stifling in Gelaa, that four people died in a single day from it. Eighty-six heat-related deaths occurred in the province that summer.

Fall and winter brought relief from the heat, but rainfall remained slim and snowfall was well below average in the mountains of Yerljasqar that year. The snow pack around Ganzise was said to be the worst in the short history of the town, and similar things were said of the snow pack deeper into the mountains, where many tiny towns established by settlers now grew. Maszje had slightly below average snowfall–better in many respects than any other place, but woefully inadequate to deal with what would next spring be declared as an exceptional drought. The snow, in any case, melted early from the heat. By mid-February of 1961, it was as if there had been no winter, and in many places snow that would have ordinarily continued into March or April had transitioned into rain–if, of course, there was any rain to be had in the first place. In many places, there was not.

Spring 1961: Preparation

As the winter of 1960-61 came to a close and the spring of 1961 began, it was very clear to the provincial authorities of Yerljasqar and even more-so to the fire services and disaster services of the province that there was a crisis brewing in the summer to come. The winter snowfall had done virtually nothing to alleviate the precipitation deficits of the province, and there was little evidence to suggest that the situation would change anytime soon or that rainfall would suddenly arrive to douse the countryside. Fire danger in particular was seen as the biggest threat–Yerljasqar had never really dealt with a fire season in which serious drought was occurring–and it was obvious to those involved that the coming fire season would be catastrophic if no preparations were taken.

For the first time in its history, Yerljasqar formally organized its wildfire services into a provincial fire agency that came to be called the Yerljasqar Fire Service Bureau, and began training those who were a part of the fire services into a legitimate force that could handle what was coming. In April, 1961, shortly before the fire season was expected to "begin," the YFSB's firemen received training from a group of wildland firefighters based out of Peiretsaja and Azsaeh, and was soon thereafter bolstered in size by agents from those provinces who were veterans of the trade. This was a significant and important moment, in many respects, as it would greatly aid the YFSB going forward–they of course did not know this would be the case at the time. Training had for the most part been completed by early May (although new volunteers would continue to undergo training throughout the year as the YFSB pressed for more men), which turned out to be quite a lucky coincidence for the YFSB. The fire season, which ordinarily did not begin in the province until June or later, suddenly broke out just a few days after.

Fire season of 1961

There is no analogue for the fire season of 1961 in the history, before or since, of Yerljasqar. It began historically early, was historically destructive and fatal, and was so overwhelming to the paltry YFSB that some of the fires which ignited during it were not fully controlled until December of 1961 or even later. Nearly two thousand small and large fires were set by a multitude of events, but mostly arson and transportation, throughout the province from May to December, and a significant number of these small fires came to become raging infernos that would devastate the mountains and plains of the province in ways they had never been devastated before.

May-early June: First fires

The first wildfires in Yerljasqar broke out on 18 May, 1961, when a line of dry thunderstorms rumbled their way across the plains, starting fires in the tinder-dry grasses. There were thirty-six reported fires that day and the day after–almost all of which were confined to the lowlands of the province–an ominous sign of the future. Many of these fires were quickly suppressed by the YFSB, but within a few days it was obvious that there would be a significant problem in firefighting that year. A second, followed quickly by a third round of dry thunderstorms lit the foothills of the mountains and in some cases the mountains themselves up with flame, and this round of fires was much harder to get under control than the first set. Nearly a hundred small fires at one point burned, and in one case a number of them were blown together into the first significant conflagration that burned just under 2,000 acres.