Fire Island solution

[P5 Maths and up: Rate]

Kept you waiting, huh?

Still remember this puzzle?

I hope you've had a wonderful fortnight guessing the possible solutions to beating this puzzle. So, how would you beat this puzzle without burning to death?

To solve this, you need to find a piece of drywood lying around you that would catch fire easily, and use it as a torch. The fire travels at 100m/hr, which isn't as fast as you think. Most students would participate in the 2.4km run (save for those who are physically disabled) and that wouldn't take more than 30 minutes (worst-case scenario of a person with crutches needing 2 hours to travel that distance), not even for the people who aren't fit. Once you have a torch, simply head eastward towards the right side of the island, and carefully start your own burn-row. (If the torch threatens to burn your hand, carefully transfer the flame to a new branch & extinguish the first torch by stabbing its tip into soil firmly to stop a potential burn-row from happening behind you. Make absolutely sure the first fire is extinguished fully, it's your life at stake here!)

Visuals to help explain the process:

Make sure to stay at the west of the row of fire you are starting. Given enough time, the fire would burn through the right side of the island, as shown in the picture below. The picture below assumes the worst case, that a person with a crutch hobbled his way to the East of the island. Since the fire burns at a rate of 100m/hr, there's more than enough time to set a burn-row pre-emptively. If we take real life into account, it normally wouldn't exceed 5 hours for a patch of forest to char completely into scorched earth.

Once the earth is scorched, there won't be enough fuel (combustible trees) for the westward fire to burn.

And here's the most important part that stops you from burning to death: When enough scorched earth eastward is created, move into the space to avoid the westward fire. It's kind of obvious, but yeah: Get out of harm's way, take care of yourself.

With this method, you avoid a fiery, grisly death on Fire Island & you can survive to Thursday, where a helicopter would come and rescue you. Congratulations. The stuff in your bag (compass, calculator etc.) doesn't really help much for this, though if you're tempted, you may revise the book while idling and waiting for rescue so you don't get bored to death.

Until next we meet again.