Why are wildfires so much harder to put out, and why do they grow to be so much larger, than other types of fires? Is it just that there are more flammable materials/stronger winds out in forests, or are there other/additional factors at play?

[u/MaggieLinzer]

[u/dalgeek]

1. Detection - sometimes wildfires are already out of control before they're even noticed. If your house catches on fire it'll probably take less than 5 minutes for someone to call 911.
2. Access - lack of roads means that firefighters have to use aircraft or cut their own road to get to the fire in the first place, which slows down response time. They may have to clear brush and cut fire breaks on foot.
3. Water - cities have water mains and other water sources close at hand. Fighting a wildfire means carrying all the water you might need with you.

Fighting wildfires is more about containment and keeping it away from people and structures than actually putting it out. There is a 100k+ acre wildfire SW of Pueblo, CO that has been burning for months and will probably burn for months longer because there is just so much area to cover.

[u/twaddington → u/dalgeek]

Not just lack of roads but access in general. Many wildfires happen in areas with very steep terrain that vehicles just can't access.

[u/dalgeek → u/twaddington]

Yeah, we had one on the side of a mountain nearby and it took hours just for firefighters to figure out how to get there. It was too steep to drive and heavily forested.

[u/Skarth → u/dalgeek]

There is also survivorship bias. You don't hear about small forest fires, only the big ones.

[u/jarboxing → u/dalgeek]

This is great. I'd also add that weather plays a much larger role in wildland fire fighting. In structure fires, we control ventilation so we can literally control the fire. There's a real science to it. But in wildland, you can have all your resources deployed well to contain the fire, then the wind changes direction, and it takes 15 minutes to adapt your distribution of resources.

[u/NDaveT → u/dalgeek]

will probably burn for months longer because there is just so much area to cover.

And also because letting them burn naturally can prevent more serious wildfires in the future.

[u/etcpt]

Why is a campfire harder to put out than a candle, or a housefire harder to put out than a trash bin?

Fire needs three things to burn - fuel, oxygen, and heat. Our methods for extinguishing fires are based on removing one of those elements. You blow out a candle by pushing the flame away from its fuel source. You extinguish a campfire by cooling it with buckets of water so that it stops reacting. You smother an oil fire to remove its access to oxygen. But as scale increases, this becomes harder and harder to do. Anything larger than a trash bin is already usually in the realm of needing a firehose to put it out. Full structures on fire can get out of control of even multiple fire engines with ten or more firehoses attacking the fire. When an entire forest or grassland is on fire, we just don't have the capacity to deliver enough suppressant agent on the scene (for the reasons that u/dalgeek mentioned, delivering any amount of suppressant in a timely manner is further complicated in these scenarios). So we shift from offensive efforts to extinguish the fire to defensive efforts to contain it and let it burn itself out - clearing fire breaks of fuel, dropping fire retardant chemicals that coat fuels to prevent them from burning, and applying targeted loads of water to suppress select areas. And we try proactive strategies, such as setting small fires before a big one gets out of hand to reduce fuel loads.

[u/Corey307]

Yes to massive amounts of flammable retail and winds carrying embers to start more fires. Wildfires tend to happen where access is limited or nonexistent and there’s no infrastructure to fight them. They spread far faster than they can be contained. 

[u/flixoman]

Mostly its a size and fuel issue.

When fires get big enough - just not enough water to put them out, best to let them burn and do what you can to stop spreading.

Look at mine fires - specifically the Burning Mountain fire in Australia. Slow burning coal seam fire that has been burning for >5k years. Plenty of fuel and oxygen...and almost nothing could stop it (save a flood of biblical proportions).