Oh, I Can Make You a Fire

For spirit week leading up to homecoming there was a traditional bonfire that I was put in charge of. I was supposed to round up a huge pile of wood and put it in the empty field across the street from the high school. I went to an orchard and got a load of wood that filled up the biggest trailer I could find and went back and unloaded it into an unimpressive pile on the ground. Well, crap, that took a long time for not much to show for it. That is not how I roll. I made some calls to some local lumber companies and to a company that built trusses and a couple agreed to drop us a semi trailer load of scrap. Two semi loads looked better but the best looking was a whole load of pallets. They were easy to stack and looked like a whole lot of wood for not much effort. A few helpers and I went over and stacked the pallets first into a tower and then laid all of the other wood on and around it into a pile that was about 30' at the base and about 14' tall. I thought that was pretty impressive indeed. I even thought that because the pallets provided a natural chimney the fire would be easy to get going. That was true it was very easy. The day leading up to the bonfire the vice principal got on the announcements and reminded everyone of some really awesome things that they should not do. He announced that he wanted us all to be safe at the bonfire and then went in to specific unsafe things that we shouldn't do: Do not bring firecrackers to throw in the fire, do not bring glass bottles filled with gasoline to throw in the fire, do not bring cans of paint or WD-40 to throw into the fire. . . He literally said all of that and more giving plenty of specific advice many had never even thought of.
What none of us suspected was that this bad boy right here and a gajillion of his friends where the ones that were going to ruin the bonfire. 
That night when all was ready I poured five gallons of diesel fuel on the fire and waited impatiently for the seven o'clock start time. A few minutes early I lit the fire thinking that it would need some time to get going. That was not even remotely the case. The diesel caught fire and burned slowly and smokey making me worry this may need a helping hand to get going. About a minute in while I was wondering how to get this thing going while the early crowd was growing restless the fire started and flames started to snake out of one piece, then several, then all of the wood. The natural draft that the pallets provided started drawin in air at an unbelievable rate so that there was a gentle breeze I could feel feeding the fire at it grew to be 20, 30 and then nearly a hundred feet tall. In two minutes it was an immense pillar of fire so hot that students who parked their cars a hundred feet away had to move them because the heat was so intense. When the fir e was first taking there were some hoots of excitement but the spectacle was too great and terrible to do anything be walk backwards from in awe as you shielded your face from the scorching heat. At five minutes the fuel started to give out and the fire started to die down. By ten minutes it was mainly just smoldering coals that were still very hot but not very fun to stand by. The bonfire had been scheduled to last for two hours and I had built a fire that burned itself out in less than twenty. My mistake was the pallets, they allowed for too fast a reaction and too efficient a burn and what I should have been looking for a some nice slow burning natural wood. After the initial shocked awe of the massive fire column people started complaining about how fast the fire went out and saying how much this sucked and how whoever made the fire should have gotten more wood. I tried to explain to anyone that would listen that there had been plenty of wood it was the burn rate that was the problem. No one cares about a post fire physics debriefing when they were expecting a nice leisurely make-out-able and marshmallow roasting fire. The people who were really mad were the ones who came at 7:20 and didn't see anything but coals. I was frustrated with the situation and the fact that these complaining idiots did nothing to help be were complaining about their free entertainment not being good enough. I stayed for the full two hours and then the fir department put the little remaining soot out cold and I went home more knowledgeable about bonfire dynamics, information I have never had the need to use again.