Prevent the wild-fires. Keep the forests wet and damp during summer/dry season - drought seasons.

How possible can this be?

What makes wildfires spread so fast and dangerously so? It's very dry air/atmosphere, drought. When the weather is very dry and hot, it becomes easy for fire to start and spread fast, destroying lives and properties. It's why here in Nigeria, during harmattan season characterized by excessive dryness, fire incidents are very common.

So why do wildfires spread so fast even when drastic measures are put in place to stop the fires while the fires are burning? These wildfires usually start in forests, in the midst of abundant oxygen. While humans breathe in oxygen and expire carbon dioxide, the reverse is the case for plants, trees.

Fires will not start in the absence of oxygen. And when there is an abundance of oxygen in a place, coupled with other factors that make fire burn well like dryness of a surface or the material to be burnt; the fires burn well and when there is a congestion like in a forest, it becomes difficult to contain. Interesting to note also is that when a material is wet, it will be very difficult for fire to start.

Take a wet matchbox for instance. Strike a matchstick against it. No matter how hard you strike, and inspite of the availability of oxygen in the atmosphere, it won't light up. Take a dry matchbox however and at the first strike of a matchstick, you get fire. This means that fire requires 2 things to be present for it to start: Oxygen and dryness of materials to be burned.

Yesterday, I read about an article where President Buhari promised to help Turkey fight the wildfires and I remembered an idea that was laid in my subconscious on the wildfires while asleep some days ago. I decided to google the possibility of artificial rain (once read about this on Nairaland where it was reported that Dubai created artificial rain by leveraging technology) in preventing wildfires.

The results that popped out were all about using artificial rain to stop the already raging fires. A forest fire that has already started and is spreading fast and wide may be difficult to put out by natural rain let alone artificial rain because of the intensity with which forest fires burn.

The solution to prevent future recurrences may be employing a preventive strategy, and not a curative strategy. What I mean is that it's better to prevent it from happening altogether than wait for it to happen before looking for ways to stop it.

Countries that are prone to having forest wildfires yearly should adopt using artificial rain to wet their forests at the start of dry seasons - summer, fall. This should be done constantly throughout the season until the rains start again or until it starts snowing or when the weather becomes 'wet.'

As long as the trees and plants in forests remain wet/damp, even in the presence of oxygen, fires won't start. This is a good preventive strategy to prevent wildfires. Even though this method is expensive, more expensive are the loss of lives and properties so it's better to go for a method that is less expensive and has better outcomes.

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Alternatively, they should create artificial dam reserves for their dry seasons only. Then during summers and dry seasons, water is released gradually through underground channels and other means like showers to keep the forests damp.

It may not be possible to keep every part of the forests damp. However, they can make sure that the forest extremes from every angle, entry point are so damp/dense with water that when the fires start, it's contained within the forests. The downside of this is that the intense heat can dry out the damp trees and eventually, they catch fire too. So it's best to try to keep the entire area damp.

It will cost a lot of money to do this but this is nothing compared to the loss of properties, wildlife and human lives that these wildfires cause.

Written by Joy-Odia Iyoha

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