& how do firefighters ‘contain’ a fire and keep it contained?
[This is the fire I’m referencing.](https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2022/9/5/fairview-fire/)
In: 2
Fires keep moving when they have stuff to burn and the wind at their backs.
To stop them, we usually try to create a “firebreak” by clearing out a strip of vegetation ahead of where it’s likely to move.
The fire will reach this barren section of land and be unable to spread further due to lack of fuel.
Very large or windy fires can sometimes jump across these, so it doesn’t always work.
If the fire is 5% contained, a small section has been successfully quarantined with firebreaks but most of it has not.
The percentage contained is the amount of the perimeter of the fire area that they have a control line of which the fire won’t cross. So, if a fire is 25% contained, 1/4 of the perimeter has been stopped from spreading further with the control lines.
It’s a rough estimate of how much of the perimeter the fire technicians are confident will not spread any further. If they’re confident that roughly 5 miles of a fire that’s 100 miles around won’t spread further then that’s 5% containment.
Containing a fire means that you stop the fire from spreading. So anything that is not on fire already will not catch on fire. However thing that is on fire may still continue to burn for some time. So the fire is not out, just contained. The percentage contained may be a bit arbitrary or depend on the standards used.
Firefighters use various different techniques to contain a fire. A common quick way of containing a fire is to spray foam around the edge of the fire. If foam is not available then water will often do to soak things and make them harder to ignite. You might also see the firefighters remove any easily ignitable things in front of a fire in order to create a gap that the fire have a hard time jumping.
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