Month: February 2011

 

Do you ever wonder where that Pulaski that you carried for that 16-hour shift came from? Many of them are made by the Council Tool Company in Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina. Council has contracts with many government agencies, including the federal government’s General Services Administration, to supply tools to their wildland firefighters.

Here are some excerpts from an interesting article at starnewsonline.com about the company.

==============================================
Made in America – every bit of it. And in Lake Waccamaw, N.C.

And by the same Columbus County family for 125 years.

Council Tool Co. doesn’t make what most would consider sexy products. But they are sexy enough to have appeared on national television – namely, on an episode of the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels”, “The History of the Ax.”

Customers W.S. Darley and Forestry Suppliers go back to 1940, and Monroe Hardware of Morrisville goes back to the 1920s, Pickett said.

But other Council customers and markets have changed over the decades.

During 20 of the 30 years John Council has been at the plant, “we were in what we call the hardware business. We made a product that ended up in a retail hardware setting.”

Ten to 15 years ago, retail was 60 percent to 70 percent of Council Tool’s revenue, John said, and now it’s less than 5 percent.

Today, nearly half of its products are for fire-fighting and law-enforcement uses.

The company will design and manufacture tools under its own brand, but a big part of the business has been making products that are branded by other companies.

“We make stuff for Fortune 500 companies, for small companies that would equip a fire truck, or for companies that sell to the military, into that kind of world,” John said. “And they know the exact the specifications, what they want, and they expect us to be discreet.

The company needs to keep a low profile, Margo said. No tours, no visitors, they emphasized. And, they don’t sell the axes from their plant.

“It’s one of the reasons we’re here and that includes visibility and being discreet about who we make things for,” Pickett said.

There’s nothing discreet, however, about how the products are used.

The axes and forced-entry tools aren’t light, but they still are carried by the firefighter.

Most of Council’s products are made for the American market, but export “is a small but growing aspect of what we do,” Margo said. “We tend to export wildland fire fighting tools, and there is demand for that all over the globe. We shipped to 17 foreign companies.”

Some European companies have been producing and marketing axes to the high-end American market. Now Council has gotten into that game.

“We’re coming out with these premium lines of tools,” Margo said. “We have the first one almost ready to ship – a 4-pound Dayton that is known as a workhorse,” she said, referring to an engraved ax on the table next to a special carrying box.

The ax is made from an existing pattern but with special alloy and a special handle – a throwback to something you might have bought in the ‘20s.

It’s trademarked Velvicut, and costs $169.95.

 

In west Texas on Sunday strong winds pushed 21 wildfires across 110,000 120,000 acres, destroyed about 68 homes, and caused one death.

Smoke from a 21,000-acre fire blanketed Interstate 20 near Midland causing a traffic accident that killed a 5-year-old girl on Sunday. In dense smoke a tractor-trailer hit the pickup the girl was riding in, according to Trooper John Barton of the Texas Department of Public Safety. A man and another child were also injured in the seven-vehicle crash.

Mywesttexas.com has more details about the accident:

A Corvette slowed to a stop at 2:35 p.m. on the interstate west of Loop 250 when the driver couldn’t see past smoke caused by a grass fire that started in the median, said Department of Public Safety Trooper John Barton.

The trooper said a Ford F-250 then crashed into the stopped car, followed by a BMW, Chevrolet truck and tractor-trailer. Three other vehicles also added onto the pileup shortly after, Barton said. The driver of the Corvette, 58-year-old Luis Inguanzo of Cedar Hill, was hit several times as his car skidded, and he was in stable condition at Midland Memorial Hospital as of Sunday night, Barton said.

One firefighter suffered second-degree burns while working on a fire near Colorado City, about 240 miles west of Dallas. That fire also destroyed three large oil storage tanks and two homes.

Firefighting aircraft were grounded on Sunday due to the winds, according to Texas Forest Service spokesman Lewis Kearney, but they are expected to be able to fly on Monday. He said the largest fire burned about 30,000 acres and 27 homes in the Panhandle northeast of Amarillo. A firefighter, Daniel Cook, was forced to evacuate because of the fire and found out later that his home was one of those that burned. He said someone told him that his “whole street was ash.”

Sunday night in Barnhart, Texas, 50 miles west of San Angelo, about 100 people gathered at the community center, ready to board three school buses if a fire approached the town. But the wind shifted and the fire moved in a different direction.

The high fire danger was caused by a cold front that moved across west Texas on Sunday, resulting in relative humidities in the teens along with winds of 20 to 30 mph or greater. By Monday morning the humidities had increased and most of those red flag warnings were cancelled. However the cold front is now passing across east Texas causing much of the central and southeast part of the state to be affected by red flag warnings.

 

The Pine Log, which is “The Independent Voice of Stephen F. Austin State University” in Texas, has an interesting article about the local chapter of the Student Association of Fire Ecology and their wildland fire crew.

The article refers to “a devil-may-care mascot, Smokey the Hare, a buff rabbit in green cargos and red hard hat, hefting a drip torch over his shoulder”. Do any Wildfire Today readers have a photo of this critter they would like to share? Send us a copy and we would appreciate it.

Here is an excerpt from the article. We added the BOLD to the existing text in the last paragraph.

=================================

Many student organizations do things that some may consider exciting—going to national conventions, road trips, even outdoor activities such as rock climbing, mud-wrestling, the like. The organizations draw people of a similar mind together to accomplish their lofty goals or fill their resumes.

But what kind of club (and what minded people) would sign up to be pitted against a 4000-degrees Fahrenheit blaze in the middle of the Deep East Texas forest? [note from Bill: HERE is more information about the burning temperature of forest fires.]

These students, mentally stable from the looks of things, are in the Student Association of Fire Ecology

“SAFE at Stephen F. Austin State University was formed in 2003. It is a professional organization for those interested in fire ecology and the use of fire in natural resource management,” according to Penny Whisenant, Marble Falls senior and president elect of SAFE this semester.

The wry edge and charisma of the wildland firefighter manifests itself in their coincidental name and their devil-may-care mascot, Smokey the Hare, a buff rabbit in green cargos and red hard hat, hefting a drip torch over his shoulder, which many of the members of SAFE in fact are.

“The Student Fire Fighting Crew is a part of SAFE, and assists the US Forest Service with prescribed burns or wildland fire fighting,” Whisenant said. SAFE has joined forces with the Sabine National Forest Wildland Fire Firefighters.

“I have been a firefighter for the Texas Forest Service for about three years now.” said Andy Cripe, Lufkin senior.

Cripe is indeed a man capable of being on a fire line, a decathalon of a job involving 60-pound backpacks, cutting brush and digging lines in front of an oncoming blaze. However, Cripe has not yet had this chance with the Student Fire Crew.

“I have not been able to go on fires with the SAFE team yet, but I am looking forward to it,” he said.

In order to participate in wildland fire fighting, SAFE members must go through a rigorous training program called red card certification, which allows them to legally fight fire on the line.

Strangely enough though, wildland fire fighters also set what is called “prescribed fires” on purpose; not for clearing land for future Walmarts, but to improve the health of the forest. For some, according to the values of Association of Fire Ecology (SAFE’s nation-wide parent organization), “Fire is a critical ecological process in many ecosystems throughout the world.”

The Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma is conducting a series of prescribed fires in order to reduce hazardous fuel and the numbers of eastern red cedars.

Through the judicious use of chain saws, many of the cedars have already been reduced to slash, so the project is a little like burning a unit that has been selectively logged.

More about the project can be found on InciWeb. This is the first time we have seen a prescribed fire on InciWeb, but it’s a great way to provide the public with information — much more than you would see in a newspaper article. And you don’t have to depend on a reporter to get the facts straight.

A trash fire escaped into some nearby grass at a residence in Pearl River County, Mississippi on Thursday and burned 162 unoccupied trailers, according to Emergency Management Director Danny Manley. The trailers had been purchased from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and had previously housed Hurricane Katrina victims. Investors purchased about 250 trailers and parked them side by side on about 25 acres.

Exploding propane tanks forced firefighters to back off and take indirect action. The Mississippi Forestry Commission used dozers or tractor plows to construct a fireline around the property.

Thanks Dick