Guest Post: Comparing Wildfires - New Wildland fire Data Base

Comparing Wildfires

When people think wildfires they often don’t think Michigan or Wisconsin and yet the worst recorded wildfire of all-time was the Peshtigo fire of 1871, which burned 3.8 million acres and took the lives of nearly 1,500 Wisconsinites.

Wildfires are truly some of the most destructive disasters on the planet; if you look at the largest United States wildfires of all-time the amount of acres burned and death tolls are shocking.

Because of the destructive power of wildfires it’s important to get greater awareness and educate people on the dangers of wildfires.  A new set of tools from FindTheData.org should help to do just that.  FindTheData’s new Famous Wildfires and Wildfires and Acres Burned comparisons allow users to truly visualize the destructive capabilities of wildfires through their interactive and easy to use platform.  Users are able to sort and filter on a variety of different aspects of wildfires.  For instance, the Famous Wildfires (comparison) allows an individual to sort and filter by state, acres burned, and year of fire.  If you’re from California you could easily see the largest California wildfires of all-time.  Furthermore, if you wanted to filter even further, you could find California wildfires that burned more than 500,000 acres after the year 1980 and you would be directed towards the Siege of 87’.

You can also use the Wildfires and Acres Burned (comparison) to see the damage of wildfires based on year and not just individual famous fires.  Wildfires and Acres Burned gives the user the ability to filter and sort by number of fires, acres burned, and average acres burned per fire (per year).  So if you wanted to find what year had the greatest number of wildfires, you could easily filter to find that it was 1981 (in 1981 there was 249,370 wildfires, etc.).

Check out FindTheData.org  as an educational resource for just about everything and remember wildfires are serious disasters that must be treated with the up most respect. FTD’s Famous Wildfires Comparison and Wildfires and Acres Burned Comparison are meant to raise awareness and better educate people on the dangers of wildfires.  Together lets help save the precious planet we live on.