[nullc]

> But many things can negligently cause sparks, including dozens of human and natural causes.

My favourite: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-mendocino-compl...

Someone tried to stop an angry yellowjacket nest by driving a concrete stake into the hole in the ground and their hammer thew off sparks and started a 459,123 acre fire-- the largest recorded in state history at the time.

[londons_explore]

I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...

Yet if you had a wasps nest, you'd totally be tempted to douse it with a bit of gasoline, believing you could put it out before it spread to anything else... Except you couldn't...

And when the investigators came round, you'd totally tell them about the stake but not the petrol...

[chmod775]

> I suspect that man was lying... It is very very very hard to start a fire with a hammer, even deliberately...

Out of the millions of people who use a hammer to strike metal on metal every day, one of them will manage start a fire eventually.

Even the unlikeliest events are actually pretty likely at scale.

Sure, two thirds of them may just be lying, but unless you can prove they are (which really shouldn't be that hard, considering burning fuel leaves obvious traces), you should assume each of them are telling the truth.

[mensetmanusman]

I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people hammering bees with hammers, with one of them causing a fire.

[ithkuil]

I laugh at the image of a statistical ensemble of people claiming to to bees with a hammer while instead setting them on fire with gasoline, with one of them actually hammering bees with a hammer.

[jsymolon]

Aside, I use a very large clear glass bowl to kill the nest. Flip it over the hole, leave it for a little over a week and the nest will be dead.

It has to be a clear bowl to trick the wasps to think that they can still get out otherwise they will dig a new exit.

[pixl97]

Heh, and you might just be the next person to start a massive fire from a lensing effect.

[scollet]

Problem solved, I guess.

[beamatronic]

If the forest is so sensitive that hammer sparks set off a fire, maybe no humans belong in the forest - except for the humans proactively trying to manage burns.

[frob]

The fire started in grassland, not in a forest. As it grew, it spread to forested areas. There is a lot of grassland out in California and it gets very flammable in the summer when it all dies out and dries up. Dead grass is basically well-aerated vertical kindling. It's so easy to light that when I was growing up outside of Sacramento, a common cause of local wildfires was cigarette butts flicked out a car window. When we mowed the lawn in the summer, we would keep the garden hose charged. Basically, it burns, burns easily, and burns quickly.