What exactly are the Oregon Arsonists guilty of?

[hfojvt]

16. if you can start a 139 acre fire

with just a handful of matches, then the place sounds like a bit of a fire hazard.

In 1987 I bought some land. Spent a few months cutting down underbrush and small trees. By 1988 I had a fairly large brush pile. Which I piled up in the hole where I had tried to hand dig a well (a hole perhaps 4 feet deep).

Like an idiot, I decided to burn it.

At one point it sorta felt like a small piece of the sun had come down onto my field. Flames were shooting well over ten feet into the air. In fact the top of a tree some forty feet above it got toasted. (The fire was in a large pit at the bottom of an eight foot slope, where an open area had been carved out)

Total acres burned - 0.01

Admittedly I spent something like an hour running around like a maniac with a shovel trying to put dirt on various fires (I say 'trying' because it seemed like every time I tried to get a shovel full of dirt, my shovel would hit roots and not get much of anything) and stomping on some others, but that did not make much difference.

Point is, even with a brush pile, which I started blazing using some newspapers, I failed to burn even an acre (thankfully). Yet they started a 139 acre fire with just a few matches? No paper? No lighter fluid? No gasoline?

I am not saying it didn't happen. Only that if it did, seems like the woods were kind of an accident waiting to happen.