That’s right. Most people have not ever seen large-scale fires and don’t know how powerful they are. As a fire grows larger, it grows in intensity and spreads faster.

A campfire needs tending or it goes out. A bonfire will just burn until it runs out of fuel. A house fire will quickly turn into an inferno. Forest fires are hopefully like nothing you’ve ever seen—the sheer power of them is staggering.

I’ve been in small wildfires before. But yesterday I saw the Caldor fire from a plane… And the shear size of it was shocking. Photos and news clips don’t do the scale justice.

A very recent (Oregon) fire was so bad it was creating its own weather system.

"Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do."

https://www.salon.com/2021/07/20/an-oregon-wildfire-is-so-in...

Although that said, this article goes into how they defended the Sierra-at-Tahoe resort buildings: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Sierra-at-Tahoe-...

Spoiler: it turns out that if you have a multi-million dollar insurance policy, the insurance company sends over guys to spray everything with fire retardant gel.

Plus, not everyone has a bunch of snowmaking machines laying around that they can use to blow water on their structures.