Firestorm
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A firestorm is a conflagration which attains such intensity that it creates and sustains its own wind system. It is most commonly a natural phenomenon, created during some of the largest bushfires and
A view of one of the Tillamook Burn fires in August 1933
A firestorm after the bombing of Hiroshima
A picture of a pyro-cumulonimbus taken from a commercial airliner cruising at about 10 km. In 2002 various sensing instruments detected 17 distinct pyrocumulonimbus cloud events in North America alone.
Joseph Pennell's 1918 prophetic Liberty bond poster calls up the pictorial image of a destroyed New York City, totally engulfed in a firestorm. At the time, the armaments available to the world's various air forces were not powerful enough to produce such a result.
Bombing of Dresden
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In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary
Firestorm
…the Great Hinckley Fire. Firestorms have also occurred in cities, usually due to targeted explosives, such as in the aerial firebombings of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. A firestorm is created as a result of the stack effect as the heat of the original fire draws in more…
Dresden after the bombing
Destruction visible from the Rathaus ('townhall') in 1945
Colourised photograph of Dresden during the 1890s with the Frauenkirche, Augustus Bridge, and Katholische Hofkirche visible
The Altstadt ('old town') in 1910 from the town hall