Ten air tankers have been ordered from California to help slow down a fire that began as a 900 acre prescribed fire near Williams, Arizona.
Here is the news release issued by the U. S. Forest Service:
WILLIAMS, Ariz. – Kaibab National Forest fire managers today transitioned the Twin Prescribed Burn to a wildfire. Suppression actions are being taken to stop fire spread on the northeast side of the fire. The Twin Fire is approximately 950 acres, three miles southwest of Williams and west of Bill Williams Mountain.
The prescribed burn was initiated yesterday. During the burn, winds shifted from the northeast to the southwest. Several spot fires occurred outside the project area on the northeast side of the burn as a result. Today, additional resources, including air tankers were ordered to suppress the fire.
The extended forecast calls for moderate winds through the weekend with a chance of precipitation.
The Twin fire is southwest of Williams and Friday afternoon was being pushed by a southwest wind. About 350 acres have burned since it was declared an escape. A Type 1 incident management team has been ordered.
The weather forecast (issued Friday night) for Saturday calls for the temperature to be in the high 60s, relative humidity of 19%, and southwest winds at 15-18 with gusts of 30-36. There is a 32% chance of a small amount of rain after 1 a.m. Sunday. By 5 p.m. on Sunday the chance of precipitation should decrease to 3% with an RH of 28% and southwest winds at 32 mph with gusts up to 44.
I guess the evacuation order has been lifted for the residents. I am all for logging. Having a prescribed burn out of control is crazy stuff.
AzFRP is proposing an OSB plant in Winslow. The have full enviromental and local support, but the USFS has yet to make a decision on their proposal. The park like condition may be a little over stated, but overall they want to manage the forest through controlled thinning and logging. The cleaner the forest is from waste and slash creates better grass lands and less chance of damaging wildfires or even the need for prescribed burning. I believe AZFRP has a web site that you can get more information than I can give. I don’t have the site address but you should be able to find it through Google. They have been working on the project for 3 years and for all intents and purposes it proposes better forest management than what the USFS is doing with their controlled/prescribed burns. The new supervisor has been setting on his decision for months now.
To Rancher and Tom: Thanks for stating the obvious. A little common sense could go along way. The powers that be—govt. and lawyers and corporations have been training it out of the population for years. To Pilot: to say participate is foolish. How can someone want to work with people that have no common sense. What a futile thought.
I spent many summers in Williams as a child. Growing up in Phoenix my summers in the high cool air of Williams was the only thing I really looked forward to. Pilot talks about "participation", well buddy I live in an even more rural area than Williams and for the past 35 years I have been very into "participation" with the forest service and I can tell you the "green shirts" will do whatever their "highly educated" experts tell them to do. I know more about the wildlife, plant life, wildfire managemant than those just out of college experts. Pilot must have never sat through a 5 hour public hearing where the federal overlords sit in chairs looking board as the people who live there (my 35 years in very rural Northern California) and tell us what is best for our land! Governments job is to not protect us from ourselves! Prescribed burns can work, but you must do it with a little brain power. If it’s too dry, too windy don’t burn. Yahoo to Rancher, the stewarts of the land know more about the land than to "green shirts". Stay in the air pilot, those of us who live on the ground can take care of it better than you’ll ever know.
Hats off to "Rancher"[October 4 post]. The Forest Service wastes millions of dollars each and every year with its fire activities; once upon a time it actually generated revenue through timber management, but that’s been abandoned in favor of "prescribed burns"(which do nothing but burn timber and waste money). It’s as much of a racket as the so-called "war on drugs." If the Forest Service would employ local, experienced people(loggers, millworkers, ranchers) to thin out merchantable timber, remove firewood, and generally clean up the "public lands" we’d have fewer conflagrations, more folks employed, and a modicum of respect for governmental policies. But incompetence and criminal behavior seems to be rewarded by advancement up the government food chain, and this has been going on for a long time.
Hi "Rancher," you obviously know just about as much about fire management and firefighting as the typical municipal firefighter or newbie VFD guy knows about cattle ranching and range management. They’ve "just about had it" with your ranching practices too. You and Gundelach ought to compare notes about "the clean air we so love up here" and come up with a plan. Don’t like living with wildfire? I hear they don’t have many wildfires in Iowa. Don’t like management practices on federal lands in Arizona? I hear they don’t have much for federal land in Illinois either. People in Montana bitch about FS management practices, but they sure like living in a state where more than half the land is federal land, and the population of the whole state is less than the population of Phoenix. Rather than bitch about how those public lands are managed, why don’t you try being part of the solution? There is a process, you know, in this country, and it’s called participation. You might want to try it out.
I was driving on Highway 40 going East on Friday and saw the fire up ahead of me and could not believe how big it was (and this was in the daytime). I was very worried as it looked as it was just in front of me. I didn’t know where to stop and inquire as to whether it was safe or not for me to continue. Eventually, I saw a flashing light sign saying it was a controlled burn, so I thought it might be safe, but I could see how strong it was even then and how much smoke was in the air and felt sorry for anyone trying to do business around there. I just wanted to get as far as possible from that horrid smoke!
I’ve just about had it with the US Forest Service and their so-called PRESCRIBED/CONTROLLED BURNS! They need to open these forests back up to the loggers……..thin it out that way. Obviously the Forest Service is NOT capable of MONITORING and successfully accomplishing CONTROLLED BURNS!!!! The wind WAS INDEED PREDICTED and they continued to burn……….this is completely unacceptable! How many times does this have to happen…….i.e., a "CONTROLLED burn" getting away from them BECAUSE of the high winds!!! You can’t fix STUPID, and so there needs to be an immediate HALT to these rediculous controlled (haha!) burns! We who live here can hardly breathe the clean air we so love up here because of the constant ‘CONTROLLED’ burns on a weekly, if not daily basis. Who is responsible for this burn being conducted on a very windy day and who is responsible for the damage, both to humans and wildlife and the beautiful forest, that has been done because they chose to burn in unacceptable conditions?
What is AzFRP??Sounds like "park-like conditions" may not be the desired situation for other resources besides timber?
The tankers were reloading in Prescott yesterday in Prescott, late morning and most of the afternoon. Seems that every few monutes one was taking off and circling back north towards Williams.
I have to go along with the comment that people making decisions are evidently not qualified to make decisions. There seems to be no common sense being used when it comes to prescribed burns. i.e. the New Mexico fire was started during high winds also that caused substantial damage.I believe the USFS needs to review the qualifications of people hired to manage our forests. I notice on many prescibed burns that hundreds of pine trees are killed from the heat, rather than just burning out the under brush. There are people working on using and managing the forests in a much more productive way than trying to control growth by burning it out. The US Forest supervisor needs to get off his duff and approve the proposals submitted by AzFRP and others. Their proposals offer job creation, controlled forest management, controlled thinning, forest cleaning to almost park like conditions.
I believe they are working on re-openning either Cedar City of Prescott. Due to most of the major threat being gone and the lack of funding, the Prescott Tanker base was closed for the 09 FIre Season in early to mid Sept, as it usually does. That can re-open a base, but it take about 24 hrs to get supplies and personnel back to the base, de-winterize it, and make the retardant.
Whycan’t the aerial tankers reload at Prescott.? I thought there was a reloading facility there.
In weather prediction nothing is absolute and no one is perfect.
Spot Forecast Request (0824 MST 02-Oct-09) (Issued 0921 MST 02-Oct-09):Spot Forecast Request (1513 MST 30-Sep-09) (Issued/Amended 1120 MST 01-Oct-09):Based upon the escape date of Thursday, October 1st (late PM), it would appear that a SW wind change was not expected or predicted until Friday PM. I’d put the possible Lessons Learned squarely upon the NWS folks who mostly only follow "model guidance".Hopefully they got some moisture from dying Tropical Storm Olaf as debris clouds, showers, and thunderstorms moved across Baja into Southern California and Western/Central Arizona today. As a fire person with my head on a swivel (situational awareness)… I always fact check the forecasts I’m given before fire is ever put on the ground. I’ve been watching the convection and outflows from TS Olaf for days as it slowly crept northward influencing fire weather in the southwestern US..Gordon Graham says….. "If it is predictable, it is preventable". It sure as heck isn’t rocket science….. It IS wildland fire science (an actual profession)…. but we are still just stupid semi-skilled laborer Forestry Technicians in the larger scheme…. working for some un-named biologist called a Line Officer who somehow got qualified to "perform oversight and leadership".. I’ve been on the pointy end of the stick when good biologists go rogue. I learned….. get a larger stick.