The headline this past weekend was that three fires in Australia have merged into one the size of Manhattan.
This is wrong on more than one level.† Here’s Business Insider:
A wildfire the size of Manhattan is currently burning through the Australian state of Victoria, CNN reports.
The blaze was formed when three separate fires joined up on Friday night, resulting in a blaze 23 square miles wide. The New York borough of Manhattan is just under 23 square miles in area.
Where to start?
How about “23 square miles wide”. That makes no sense. It’s either 23 square miles, or 23 miles wide. It could be both, but only if it’s 1 mile deep (which is possible, given how brushfires work). Which one is it?
If it’s 23 square miles, that works out to 14,720 acres, which is indeed a bit larger than the island of Manhattan. But, is that big? Around here, we had a fire 4 times that large 3 summers ago. And, overall, the fires in Australia have burned about 14,700,000 acres this summer … so this Manhattan-ey fire is just 0.1% of that, which isn’t that big.
Better context is provided by this document from the Congressional Research Service showing that this is more acres burned than in any fire season in the U.S. in the last 30 years (50% more actually). And, the U.S. numbers include Alaska, even though Australia is roughly comparable in size to just the contiguous 48 states.
† Nothing here should be construed as minimizing the horror of this fire season. I just find the grasping for context problematic … many have been wondering for decades what’s going to happen when journalism is filled with the clueless.
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