What are fire whirls? | Things to Know

In a fire whirl, rising hot air twists flames into a towering pillar. Although fire whirls in wildlands are normally small, fire whirls can grow large and destructive, forming into a burning tornado, as in the case of the 2018 Carr fire in California. In this video, engineer Michael Gollner of University of Maryland, College Park, explains the characteristics of fire whirls, his lab’s investigation of their behavior and their surprising potential to help clean up oil spills.

Learn more: Firenadoes and drifting embers: The secrets of extreme wildfires

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Video Transcript:

Michael Gollner (Fire Protection Engineering Lab, University of Maryland): “Fire whirls are sort of exciting and incredibly terrifying phenomena, where fires will intensify. It almost looks like a tornado, basically this vertical column of flame.

“And fire whirls are found actually very often in wildland fires. They’re usually very small. But on rare occasions, like the Carr Fire in Northern California, they can become very large and very destructive, and result in loss of life.

“So we study these because we’re trying to understand their behavior, their formation and their structure.

“Fire whirls have been reported since, I think, there was a giant earthquake in 1923 in Japan outside of Tokyo, and that fire whirl was responsible for maybe up to 40,000 deaths. Now at certain scales, you might classify that as a fire tornado, and as you know that’s already going to be incredibly destructive. Add the fact that there’s a whole bunch of fire inside, which is incinerating everything. They have very tall flames, a very strong updraft, and as they go through, they fling stuff in the air just like you think a tornado would. And then those light new fires, and so that’s very dangerous. And I don’t think we know all of the possible formation conditions — just extreme fire behavior. It’s unpredictable.

“We’ve studied them in terms of safety, but something that hasn’t been used as often is actually looking at turning some of that energy and actually using it for good. So a lot of our work on fire whirls has actually been focused for part of Department of Interior which looks at oil spills. And so we’ve actually looked at using fire whirls to clean up oil spills over open water.

“And so our technique of using a fire whirl generates much greater heat to the surface, but then it sustains the fire and it burns out the fire much faster. It also burns it much cleaner — and that just means you’ve at least 50 percent reduction in the amount of soot and emissions that you get out. And so that’s something that we continue to study.”