Fire and Scale
Discover more from Fragmentary
There was a fire in Cascais last night. It was about a forty minute walk from where we were sleeping, but the wind was always blowing from our location towards the flames, so it wasn’t like being on holiday in Rhodes. Because I’m not a crazy person, I didn’t run out and try to get photographs, so the header is just the twilight sky facing in the opposite direction.
The fire was between the forest and the hospital. I just drove through the scar on the A5. It was a big fire, but not huge like you’d see in California. The scar is horrible - hillsides all ash - but it doesn’t look immense.
It required six hundred firefighters, a hundred ground vehicles and a dozen air units to contain it.
I don’t think we remotely understand the scale of what will happen if we don’t start taking serious measures to curb global heating. The sheer resources required to manage what will be regular challenges. I think we’re smug, sleepy and over-confident.
Fire and Scale
Tourists, even those who get caught up in such fires, would rather wait for teleportals to be invented than empty the pool and use public transport.
And the people who seem to understand the least are those with the greatest power to effect positive change.