The problem with seeing that as good news...
If your neighbors kids have set fire to the forest you live in...
Early on in the development of a blaze, in the first 5 minutes, when it occupies only a couple of hundred square feet, a single burning pitch covered ember drifts down onto your property, and sets the dry tinder alight... In trying to put that nascent blaze out, you find the ember is sticky... it sticks to you, and accidentally catches your shoes on fire... and now, having under-estimated the danger initially, every step you take lights another spot on fire. Each of those spots of tinder also explodes... and, suddenly you have 16 little fires instead of one...
You shift your focus back to your own property, remove your shoes and extinguish each of the little fires, and after half an hour battling the blazes whose source you know about, while hoping there aren't any other embers drifting in that you've missed... you get those sixteen little fires put out... and proceed to celebrate having dodged that bullet... ?
Meanwhile, the fire that started next door has grown so large, so fast, that no one knows how big it is... but, you can hear it, and smell it... there's a lot of smoke...
Half of the firefighters going into the region to fight the fire die in the blaze... many as a result of having inadequate protective gear, or due to a lack of training in how to use it effectively... others simply because those sending them into the region are clueless... but, in the result, none of the survivors have any ability to determine how large the problem is... and as long as the problems that exist aren't addressed, the numbers of firefighters willing to come fight the fire dwindles rapidly...
For the moment, the wind seems it is blowing all the embers off the other way... but, no one really knows what is going on...
Still, if the wind suddenly shifts... that massively larger fire now raging could easily turn back and burn your property to cinders...
News comes out that someone now knows how to insulate firefighters from the risk... all you have to do is make the stuff, inject them with it, then wait 60 days... and then they should be ready and able to fight the fire without risking dying in the process ? |
