And that makes the work far riskier, which was painfully clear earlier this summer when the winds abruptly shifted and 19 elite firefighters died trying to control blazes near Yarnell, Ariz.
But the winds abruptly shifted following a report last week by the gossip columnist Cindy Adams in The New York Post that "Sir Beatle is inviting 300 people" to Castle Leslie, a 14-bedroom pile nestled among the rolling green hillsides of County Monaghan.
In the wake of the snowfall itself came strong winds that abruptly resculpted the landscape, undoing in an hour or two all the hard work of snow clearing that many people undertook too early.
Although the impolite host wound up abruptly canceling the bonfire, there are several lessons one could garner from the barbecue that wasn't.
Last March, China's Sinovel, the world's second largest wind turbine manufacturer, abruptly refused shipments of American Superconductor's wind turbine electrical systems and control software.
From childhood, he learned that winds could shift abruptly, currents change, waters turn choppy, and sunshine give way to winds and rain.
But it diverged from its original course, blown around by changing winds, then fell abruptly to earth, making an emergency landing.
Under the cool, watchful eye of Jeremy Northam's Foreign Office spook, a sabre-rattling MP (David Tennant) urges action against Hitler and then abruptly winds up dead.
Abruptly, the wind subsided and the mountain fell silent.
Morocco's mountains create a significant rain shadow, directly east of the mountains, where in the lee of the prevailing winds, desert conditions begin abruptly.
