Estonian Fires

I associate forest fires primarily with dry, hot conditions — the conditions we have in Southern California every year, and also in much of the rest of the Western U.S. Of course we also have forest fires in damper places, such as Maine and Minnesota. But somehow Estonia has always seemed to me like it should be relatively immune to fires, with its extensive swamps and utter lack of anything even remotely resembling a desert. So it was with some surprise that I read this story:

TALLINN - With temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius and no rain for quite a while, firefighters have been frantically trying to put out 22 forest fires, the largest of which are burning through Kurtna and Kuusalu.

About 180 hectares of woods are ablaze in Kurtna, located in the northeastern Ida-Virumaa region. In Kuusalu, some 30 kilometers east of Tallinn, 20 hectares of forest are burning, the Rescue Board duty officer told the Baltic News Service.

Soon after midday on July 11, rescuers were informed about a fire in the western Laane County where two hectares of fields were in flames.

Fire fighting also continues on Saaremaa Island and in Jarva County, where forests have been burning for several days now.

For the Celsius-challenged out there, 30C is about 86F — not quite as hot as we are, but certainly not cool. And a quick look at the relative humidity shows that it’s 50% right now, so (compare to us) its pretty muggy there. But 22 forest fires! One hectare is about two and a half acres, so these are (by our standards) very small forest fires. No area of Estonia is truly remote, though there are plenty of areas without established roads. I know all of the areas with fires quite well; the fires in Kurtna and Saaremaa particularly surprise me, as they’re relatively close to “civilization”. Fires that small and that close to civilization here would be extinguished with great speed. I can only guess why that’s not true in Estonia: that they don’t have the equipment and organization that we do, because they don’t have forest fires that often. But I’m just guessing…