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[Grahar]

Happening right now. The Mountainhomes Volalrėrith, "Whitechaos" is experiencing enormous amounts of cave-ins. The reason? A forest fire.

Just beneath the surface are indoor pastures with sheep. Directly one layer down: more sheep and kangaroos. Next: Giant Tiger pens. Then: A spacious corridor, the main entrance to the fortress. The next three levels belong to my central hall, with masterwork statues and everything. Next: Graves. Next: mausoleums for nobles and legendary warriors and other professions. All those collapsing surface falls all the way down, taking livestock, dwarves, masterworks with it, while spraying yellow sand everywhere.

The biggest lost may be the natural floor, because it can't be replaced, constructed floors cannot be engraved. But my defense is weakened as well: Almost all of the wooden cages in the traps overground burned down, my roof has holes in it.

The cause for all this: Cobim Ruluebbak Tul Luto, an ancient dragon, older than time (which makes her at least 432 years old). She appeared on the map, lit a small fire on the edge and walked right into one of my cage traps. I thought it was my lucky day, I finally caught a live dragon (the only previous dragon that attacked one of my fortresses (in DF2012) was only about hundred years old and unceremoniously stabbed to death by two human caravan guards (they didn't even take a scratch or a blister). Only that the small fire turned out to be a lot worse than I thought.

Right now the fire is moving towards the dragon, who is IN A WOODEN CAGE. Since dragons are fireproof, I suppose there will be a dragon outside of my base in the near future, and most of my cage traps are uncharched, so I would have to let her come into my entrance hall, where I have a few more traps.

So remeber: Only you can prevent forest fires. Unless a dragon comes around.

[Grahar]

Update: No more casualties, but the ≡dragon (♀) cage (black-cap)≡ is now a x≡dragon (♀) cage (black-cap)≡x.
There is only a small area left that  is dangerous in respect to cave-ins. The green glass cages and the nether-cap cages are fine. I guess I should make more of those, but unfortunately my legendary (and only) Carpenter is dead.

Update: ‼x≡dragon (♀) cage (black-cap)≡x‼

Update: BEWARE! Cobim Ruluebbak Tul Luto is free once again!

[Immortal-D]

I demand pics of the aftermath!

[Grahar]

The picture will take until tomorrow, because I have no time to select/scale/upload them now. One of the last cave-ins got my duke. I am kind of happy about this, because I have quite enough statues. Oh, and he wanted a common snapping turtle shell statue in his office. You can't even make regular statues out of shell! And there ever was only one common snapping turtle in my fortress, and that one was turned into Ngubmulkethil, a common snapping turtle shell helm.

He has no heirs, so what happens next?

Oh, and the dragon was caught in a nearby nickel cage. Which is lucky, because normally I try to melt all metal cages.

[Albedo]

@ OP -

Just so I can sleep well at night...

All fire is dangerous
Water is dangerous.
Magma is dangerous.
Mining is dangerous.
Wildlife is dangerous.
Dwarves are dangerous.
Dwarf Fortress is dangerous.

You have now been told.

[synyster31]

...
Dwarves are dangerous.
...

I feel this part should be in bold, underlined, large, red text. Probably with a few exclamation marks after it, just to get the gravity of the statement across

[Grahar]

Ironically, the only thing on this list that has not killed one of my dwarves (yet) is magma.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ironically, the only thing on this list that has not killed one of my dwarves (yet) is magma.

Magma's actually pretty benign most of the time.  You really have to go out of your way doing something stupid to cause magma to (literally) burn you.  You're much more likely to be playing with water in stupid ways. 

Anyway, back to the main point of all this: How did a fire cause a cave-in, anyway? (I guess this means that in this version, trees actually burn... I remember when trees stopped the grass fires that were a real threat...)

[Grahar]

I guess it's the trees collapsing. I remember random surface collapses in earlier versions of DF2014 and hole in my roof where trees used to be (trees that my dwarves cut down). Since some of the collapses occure in the air (as far as I can tell from the autofocus), at least some of them must be caused by trees. And yes, the trees burn. Or at least, their leaves do. At least some of the trees are still alive after the fire.

By the way: unfortunately, rivers don't protect against fire spread anymore, at least if there are enough trees on both sides of the river.

[Sizik]

A quick hop in the Arena shows that indeed, trees do catch fire from, and they can sometimes cave-in from doing so. Also, it's worth noting that while magma itself won't start a grass fire, it WILL ignite trees, which can then spread fire to the grass.

[NW_Kohaku]

What's DF coming to?  Next you're going to tell me that closed wooden doors burn when in contact with magma instead of being as effective as wooden aqueducts at transporting magma!  MADNESS!

Anyway, this seems more a problem of dividing up your fortress.  I'm taking to building roads specifically as tree-repellant.  (And I'm building my fortress more on the desert half of my current map...) I always build roads in my plumbing (tower caps are the bane of aqueducts), and now do to keep trees from ruining marksdwarf LOS, and use special "greenhouses" that are indoors to keep dwarves safe while visiting the farms and orchards.  That stops any source of fire from reaching my controlled trees.

What you need are tree-proof barriers to contain fires.  This may be nearly megaproject-level work, however.  A few tall walls of stone could divide up the map from fires, as could roads.  Trees do not spread branches more than 3 tiles apart, so a 7-tile-wide road made of stone or other non-flammable material is safe.  (Walls would also be useful as creature-control, but roads are nearly 4 times as stone-efficient.  Roads can be made of glass blocks or clay bricks for infinite building material.)

This seems like a problem that can be solved with nothing more than a single wall of soil, as well, which means just digging down two z-levels, rather than one before making your big stockpiles. 

[Kishmond]

Wait, how do burnt trees cause cave ins? From destroyed roots?

[omega_dwarf]

Parts of the trees themselves fall, I think? They can only damage things if there is a cavity immediately below the surface.

[Albedo]

They can only damage things if there is a cavity immediately below the surface.

Like, you mean when their roots burn away @ z-1, and you have rooms at z-2 thru z-10? Yeah, that just might do it...

[Varnifane]

In case nobody ever told you these things are also dangerous.