Maine Fire #1
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During this month in 1947, a series of disastrous fires raged in Maine for ten days. The blaze followed 108 rainless days that summer. Sixteen people died, nearly 10,000 were injured and more than 200,000 acres of land burned.
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| Photo: The Bar Harbor Historical Society |
In her book, Wildfire Loose: The Week Maine Burned, Joyce Butler gathered extensive firsthand accounts of the Great Fire. Butler shared with The Weather Notebook a particularly harrowing survival story.
"One woman who worked in Biddeford, had gone to work in the mill, and while she was away from home, her home was burned. A relative, who lived at Goose Rocks Beach, took her and her daughter home with him because they had no place to stay. And while they were there at his home, in Goose Rocks Beach, the fire came and burned his home and she and her daughter along with many other people were literally forced to go into the ocean to get away from the flames. There is an island, not too far off shore from Goose Rocks, called Timber Island and the people who were in the ocean had their eye on it and thought, "well, if worse comes to worse we'll just swim our way to timber island", but before they could even begin that process the wind had carried the burning debris to the trees on Timber Island and they were on fire".
Luckily those people survived. A year later, the Northeastern Forest Fire Protection Commission was formed to study fire suppression.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is generously supported by Subaru. Special thanks today to assistant producer Doug Sanborn. For more on drought and forest fires, visit our website at mountwashington.org.
Historically Significant Wildland Fires
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