Peshtigo Fire - Legacy

Legacy

The Peshtigo Fire Museum, just west of U.S. Route 41, has a small collection of artifacts from the fire, first-person descriptions about the event told by the survivors, and a graveyard dedicated to victims of the tragedy. A new memorial commemorating the fire was dedicated on 8 October 2012 at the bridge over the Peshtigo River.

National Fire Protection Week in October was started to commemorate the Chicago fire, which was ironically dwarfed by the unremembered Peshtigo conflagration. In the words of one author, "A firestorm is called nature's nuclear explosion. Here's a wall of flame, a mile high, five miles (8 km) wide, traveling 90 to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), hotter than a crematorium, turning sand into glass."

The combination of wind, topography, and ignition sources that created the firestorm, primarily representing the conditions at the boundaries of human settlement and natural areas, is known as the Peshtigo Paradigm. This paradigm was closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. The bombing of Dresden and the even more severe one of Tokyo by incendiary devices resulted in death tolls comparable to or exceeding those of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.