Rating:

0.0 (0 votes)

MISSOULA - This year marks the centennial anniversary of the devastating 1910 fires and the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula has spent the last two years working on one of their largest exhibits ever; "When the Mountains Roared. The Fire of 1910".

Robert Brown of the Historical Museum says specific weather conditions along with homestead fires and railroad slash piles ignited one of the deadliest series of fires in American History.

"On August 20^th, in ten minutes, there was a 19 degree drop in temperature around the Denver area, and there's also a very low pressure over in Canada. That combination created hurricane forest winds. They call it the big blow up and it was. It was kind of an explosion" the museum's executive director, Robert Brown said.

The explosion rippled with destruction, burning nearly five million acres in the west, three million in Montana and Idaho alone.

"Entire watersheds and ecosystems that were destroyed" explained Mariah Leuschen with the U.S. Forest Service. "Seventy-eight firefighters lost their lives, so there's a lot of impact that came out of that...How we have dealt with fire in the 20's and 30's...How we've learned to evolve and work within fire adapted ecosystems now."

The museum is targeting all the senses in their labor of love project, from never before seen photographs to artifacts which survived the burn, to an interactive touch screen.

But Brown says it's the potential of what fire can do that's really sparking people's interest. "What fascinates people, fire itself, it could happen again. We're looking at beetle kill, dry forest, undergrowth, this could happen again."

The exhibit aims to use the past as a blueprint to educate us about our future. Brown says the exhibit cost nearly $20,000 and will be up for two years. The public can see the exhibit for free on Sunday at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula.