Authors: Bill Streever
The various stages of heat illness are presented in different ways by different “experts,” usually without reference to W. J. McGee’s classification system. However, all these classification systems are similar. A typical classification system might describe six stages: heat stress (fatigue, dizziness, some swelling of fingers or toes, stumbling, heat rash, headache, thirst), heat fatigue (burning sensation, excessively dry lips, cracking of lips, dry mouth), heat syncope (body temperature rises, pale skin, some difficulty talking, mind starts to wander, rapid heartbeat), heat cramps (muscle cramps, stomach cramps, clumsiness, muscle pain), heat exhaustion (high fever, nausea, loss of will, pounding heart, shallow and rapid breathing, skin cold to touch, possibility of heart attack, loss of consciousness, tunnel vision, hearing anomalies, mild hallucinations), and heatstroke (sweating stops, body temperature spikes, blushing as blood is sent to skin, burst blood vessels in eyes, hypersensitivity to touching or rubbing sometimes leads to abandonment of clothes, severe hallucinations, irrational digging, organ failure). However, symptoms vary from person to person and case to case. It is possible to suffer from heatstroke even when adequate water is available, and to reach the point of heatstroke very quickly—for example, through forced exercise.
People continue to die of heat and thirst in the United States. In 2009 a female prisoner left in an outdoor holding cell in Arizona died. Also in 2009, an eleven-year-old boy died when he and his mother’s car got stuck in sand near Death Valley (the mother was severely dehydrated but survived). In 2011 two farm supervisors in California negotiated plea bargains over charges related to the heat death of a young farmworker. Every year, weekend vacationers die in the desert, often within a mile or two of a road and sometimes during relatively short forays—for example, during hikes as short as four hours. Aside from the elderly and infirm, perhaps the single largest group of people likely to die from heat and thirst consists of illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into the United States. Luis Alberto Urrea’s
The Devil’s Highway
(New York: Little, Brown, 2004) offers a gripping account of twenty-six illegal immigrants who crossed the desert in the same general area that Pedro Valencia had wandered. Fourteen of them died.
In keeping with changing times and changing threats, the Nevada Test Site was renamed the Nevada National Security Site in 2010.
The Death Valley forty-niner who wrote about Owen’s Lake was the Reverend John Wells Brier, who crossed the desert with his wife and family. His words are quoted in Charles W. Meier,
Before the Nukes: The Remarkable History of the Area of the Nevada Test Site
(Lansing Publications, 2006). Brier was not popular among the other forty-niners. William Manly’s famous memoir comments on Brier. From the Manly memoir, first published in 1886 as
From Vermont to California
, and later, in 1894, supplemented by information provided by other survivors of the Death Valley crossing, as
Death Valley in ’49
, and readily available today as an electronic book through both Google Books and Project Gutenberg: “Some were quite sarcastic in their remarks about the invalid preacher [Brier] who never earned his bread by the sweat of his brow, and by their actions showed that they did not care very much whether he ever got through or not.” Later, in Death Valley, Manly went on to save the lives of his fellow travelers, finding a way out of the valley, finding water, and then returning for the others, who, close to death, were lying under their wagon, surrounded by dead oxen. According to Manly and others, Death Valley was named when one of the forty-niners, upon leaving the valley, turned back and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley!” In fact, only one of the forty-niners died in Death Valley itself, though the entire party certainly could have died there and seemed to have survived only by a combination of luck, trail sense, sheer toughness, and, for a few of them, Manly’s willingness to return with water and aid. Another source of information on the forty-niners’ crossing of Death Valley is Louis Nusbaumer’s much-lesser-known
Valley of Salt, Memories of Wine: A Journal of Death Valley, 1849
(Friends of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1967). Nusbaumer was with Manly but spoke little English. He kept his diary in German and wrote across adjacent pages, some of which were subsequently lost, so that Nusbaumer’s surviving work includes partial sentences. From a left page, with its matching right page missing: “When I [missing words] I almost died of thirst [missing words].”
Pliny’s description of fever comes from
The Natural History of Pliny, Translated, with Copious Notes and Illustrations, by the Late John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S., and H. T. Riley, Late Scholar of Clare Hall, Cambridge
, vol. 2 (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890). The book is available electronically at http://books.google.com. Bostock, one of the volume’s two translators, died with the fever that accompanies cholera in 1846. Other editions of Pliny’s work are available from various sources, such as http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Pliny_the_Elder/home.html.
Pliny also recognized that malaria would not begin in winter, but he did not link this recognition to the scarcity of mosquitoes, and he certainly did not understand that mosquitoes were the vector that carried malaria to humans. Pliny was not the first to recognize the periodic fevers associated with malaria—the ancient Chinese recognized this phenomenon by 2700 BC.
Carl Wunderlich is also credited with introducing the routine use of temperature records in hospitals. His
Medical Thermometry and Human Temperature
(New York: William Wood, 1876) was translated into English by E. Seguin, M.D. The medical thermometers of that time required a skillful operator and were far less accurate than those used today.
Robert Fortuine’s
Chills and Fever: Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska
(Anchorage: University of Alaska Press, 1992) offers a fascinating history of the spread of disease through native populations that lacked immunity to European germs and viruses. Fortuine attributes the description of “the man and his wife and three or four children” to A. Parodi, who was writing about the village of Holy Cross, an inland community with a population of about two hundred people in 2000. James W. Van Stone’s
Ingalik Contact Ecology: An Ethnohistory of the Lower-Middle Yukon
(Chicago: Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, 1979) also offers the Parodi quote and references a document called “Process of the Plague at Holy Cross Mission, Alaska,” written in 1900.
The description of Kuda Box’s firewalking came from a chapter called “Science Solves the Fire-Walk Mystery” in Harry Price,
Fifty Years of Psychical Research
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1939). “The experiments with Kuda Box,” Price wrote, “were held under the auspices of the University of London Council for Psychical Investigation and proved very interesting and instructive.” Price investigated various other paranormal phenomena. In addition to the chapter on firewalking, his book includes chapters on “mental mediums,” “ESP,” and “the mechanics of spiritualism.” The book remains widely available in print form and can be viewed in part on Google Books. Kuda Box went on to perform firewalking in front of New York’s Rockefeller Center in a 1938 demonstration set up by Robert Ripley, creator of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
.
The film clip of Tolly Burkan walking through fire was recorded as part of Michael Shermer’s series
The Unexplained
. The clip, available on YouTube, is called “Michael Shermer Firewalking across Hot Coals.”
The Firewalking Institute of Research and Education is based in Texas. From their website: “Fire has been around since our beginnings as humans and holds us in thrall with conflicting emotions. Fire is a comfort, a warm home, a tool for empowerment in more ways than one and a source of fear of physical contact with it.…Now you can learn another use of fire by walking on it. Sound crazy? I guarantee you it’s not. Learn how something as unrecognized as fire can change your perception of life and the world around you through the act of confronting and conquering your fear, building a coherent bond between you and co-workers, team mates, your family, your friends, and even yourself. Believe in the power that you possess to walk on fire and face down any challenge life can throw at you.” The firewalking instructor whom I interviewed repeatedly by telephone was Matt Carr, whose insights and enthusiasm were nothing short of inspirational.
The story of the USS
Indianapolis
is well known. Although about one hundred men survived without freshwater for four days, it is believed that an equal number died from dehydration during those four days. Woody Eugene James’s story, in his own words, can be found in full at www.ussindianapolis.org/woody.htm.
The photographer whose house burned down is David Gala. His outlook on the Tea Fire, which destroyed most of his possessions, including hundreds of photographs taken all over the world, was admirably philosophical, without a hint of bitterness. Some of his fire artifact photographs can be viewed at www.teafireartproject.com. From the Tea Fire Project website: “On the night of November 13, 2008, fire swept through the hillsides above Santa Barbara, burning in its wake more than 200 homes. In its aftermath, as we searched through the rubble and the ashes for anything to salvage from among the emptiness and desolation, we were struck by the discovery of objects and artifacts unexpectedly transformed by the fire into pieces of art.”
The twenty-foot-tall fungus or lichen is
Prototaxites.
It is usually thought of as a fungus, although it may have supported symbiotic algae, which would make it a lichen. The tree-sized fossil remains probably represent fruiting bodies, analogous to mushrooms in today’s world.
The quotation regarding Michael Faraday’s burning of lycopodium comes from his lecture series
The Chemical History of a Candle
(1860; reprinted in
The Harvard Classics
, vol. 30, ed. Charles Eliot). Faraday, in a footnote appended to his lecture, pointed out that the lycopodium powder was “found in the fruit of the club moss (
Lycopodium clavatum
).” In the same footnote, he mentioned the use of the powder in fireworks.
Joseph Fourier’s key papers on the temperature of the earth are “Remarques générales sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires,”
Annales de Chimie et de Physique
27 (1824): 136–67, translated by E. Burgess as “General Remarks on the Temperature of the Terrestrial Globe and the Planetary Spaces; by Baron Fourier,”
American Journal of Science
32 (1837): 1–20; and “Memoir sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planétaires,”
Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences de l’Institut de France
7 (1827): 570–604.
There is, of course, nothing new about chaparral fires. From the
San Bernardino Daily Courier
in 1889: “During the past three or four days destructive fires have been raging in San Bernardino, Orange, and San Diego.…It is a year of disaster, wide spread destruction of life and property—and well, a year of horrors.”
The scientist whom I describe as a mapper is Professor Dar Roberts of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his many fine qualities, Dr. Roberts is a dedicated teacher who is clearly excited to talk about his work with students—both those enrolled in his classes and those who show up in the guise of curious writers. He is known for his work using satellite imagery to better understand what is happening here on earth, mapping everything from fires to deforestation to roads.
The role of pine beetle impact in fires has been studied in part on the basis of satellite imagery. www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/beetles-fire.html summarizes one study.
CalFire News
posts succinct and interesting fire notes on a website in real time to keep the public informed about fires. Not surprisingly, most wildland fires and fire responses can be characterized as confusing.
CalFire News
carries the following note in the banner: “
INFORMATION PROVIDED RAW MAY NOT BE TIMELY OR UPDATED REGULARLY
.”
CalFire News
is not affiliated with CalFire, the largest fire department in California.
There are many accounts of “mopping up” in the literature of fires and firefighting. One, by Stephen J. Pyne, is especially interesting, in part because Pyne is best known for his academic accounts of fire history. It is a pleasure to come across a writer known for his academic work only to find that he led a previous life as a firefighter and describes this life in the first person. There is no glory in mopping up. It is dirty, hot, menial labor. Most would agree that Pyne made the right choice in switching to academics.
In “Historical Santa Barbara Up in Flames: A Study of Fire History and Historical Urban Growth Modeling,” a paper presented to “The Fourth International Conference on Integrating GIS and Environmental Modeling (GIS/EM4): Problems, Prospects and Research Needs,” Banff, Canada, September 2000, Noah Goldstein, Jeannette Candau, and Max Moritz used map data to estimate the size of well-known fires. The total area burned in historical fires that touched the greater Santa Barbara urban area from 1955 through 1979 (the Refugio Fire, the Polo Fire, the Coyote Fire, the Romero Canyon Fire, the Sycamore Canyon Fire, and the Eagle Fire) was 69,697 hectares, or about 172,000 acres. The paper can be found online at www.geog.ucsb.edu/~kclarke/ucime/banff2000/530-ng-paper.htm.