Fire

Burning Down the Neighbor’s House – MEL Magazine

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Burning Down the Neighbor’s House – MEL Magazine

We called farmstead number five the Old Magie Place for the people who once lived there. (Locals also knew it as “Skunk Hollow.”) I never knew these particular Magies, but some of their relatives are still around, and are part of the nearby farming community of Healy, which is home to the smallest school district in the state of Kansas, with a high school enrollment of less than 25 students. The Magies had been gone for decades by this point (circa 2009), and their farm house had become a refuge for wild animals and trespassers looking to drink light beer and break shit. As such, there were little piles of crushed cans, liquor bottles and cigarette butts throughout.

Near the house was fencing around the gardens, which I ripped out with a loader tractor. I demolished the other small barns on the property partly by hand before bulldozing them into a pile to burn. The farm ground all around the house was fallow and not in use. We would till it up later, but first, the house and barns needed to be dealt with.

When I’m out driving the backroads of western Kansas, there’s an empty home like the Old Magie Place every few miles. They remind me that the region has a serious population decline problem, where there’s only the bare minimum number of people to even call it a community. That is, my home county (Lane County) has been losing population since its population peak in the 1960s; the decline, however, has greatly accelerated in my lifetime. Statistically speaking, in the last 20 years, more than a fifth of the local population has gone: fled, retired, moved on or died.

Built to Burn – 99% Invisible

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Built to Burn – 99% Invisible

"One of the first things that Cohen did was to listen to emergency dispatch tapes from the day of the fire. And as he listened, he began to notice a pattern. People were calling in about houses on fire long before the fire front ever reached their neighborhoods."

"The houses were not burning because a wall of flames was racing through the community, destroying them. It was something else: embers. As wildfires burn, they generate embers that are lofted downwind ahead of the main body of the fire. And Cohen realized that most of the houses that burned had one, extremely problematic feature in common: the embers were accumulating in the crevices around their dry wood shingle roofs, and setting fire to the houses from above.

"Across the street, in a development without wood roofs, most of the houses had survived. The problem was that some houses were built to burn."

"It wasn’t a huge revelation that wood roofs were flammable — people had known that for ages. But for Cohen, it was a big moment. Because when he shifted his focus to the design of the homes, suddenly he found himself wondering if we were framing the whole problem of wildfire in the wrong way. Cohen wasn’t the first to have that thought, but he was the first to do extensive research into exactly how homes burn in wildfires."