Wildfire Today

Double firefighter fatalities in Portugal

Bill GabbertSeptember 24, 2012August 25, 2019Uncategorizedfatality, lodd, Portugal1 Comment

FirefighterCloseCalls is reporting that two Portuguese firefighters have died as a result of burns they received while working on a wildfire:

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DOUBLE FIREFIGHTER LINE OF DUTY DEATH IN PORTUGAL

In Portugal, on September, 21st, Volunteer FF Pedro Manuel Santos Brito died in the Line of Duty from burns. He passed away in the University of Coimbra Hospital. A member of the Corpo de Bombeiros Voluntários de Côja, FF Brito suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns while operating in a wildland fire in the woods of Casal Cimeiro, in Arganil, Portugal on Sep. 15th. The same fire also had already claimed the life of 25-year-old Volunteer FF Patrícia Alexandra Rodrigues Abreu. Three other FFs were injured in the blaze, but are recovering well. Our condolences to all affected. RIP.

Exceptionally good fire photo, Table Mountain Fire

Bill GabbertSeptember 24, 2012September 25, 2012Uncategorized4 Comments

The photo above of the Table Mountain Fire in Washington was taken by the Wenatchee Rappel Crew on September 19 as they were on the way to another fire. It’s one of the most interesting fire photos I have ever seen. Congratulations, Wenatchee folks!

Thanks go out to Lone Ranger

Wildfire Today on NPR

Bill GabbertSeptember 24, 2012August 21, 2013Uncategorized6 Comments

A few weeks ago I received a call from a producer for The Story, a program on National Public Radio hosted by Dick Gordon. The Story is created at North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC, and can be heard on about 130 radio stations. The producer said she had been reading Wildfire Today and asked me a lot of questions about my background and the web site. I realized later that the phone call was really an audition for the show, and at the end of the call she said they wanted to interview me for the program.

She asked if I lived in a big city where I could go in to a radio station and be interviewed by Mr. Gordon remotely. I explained that at that moment I was in Portugal doing some fire-related consulting work, but I could be available when I returned — and after I had a couple of days to recover from jet lag so I could sound, uh, awake. My little town in the United States has no radio stations, so she said they could arrange for an audio engineer to come to my home with a high-quality microphone and recording equipment.

I flew back to the United States a couple of days later. The next week the engineer arrived at my home with a microphone and a digital recorder. He held the mike in front of me at my dining room table while I talked to Mr. Gordon on my cell phone using a wired headset. After the interview the engineer emailed the audio file to WUNC in North Carolina where they did some editing magic, combining Mr. Gordon’s side of the interview which was recorded there, with mine recorded at my home, so it sounds like we were in the same radio studio.

Mr. Gordon got me to talk about refusing a fire assignment, managing fires rather than putting them out, the work I did recently in Portugal, air tankers, the state of the 2012 wildfire season, and he prompted me to tell some war stories from early in my career.

The interview aired on NPR September 19, 2012 as the second half of a 50-minute program. You can hear it HERE.

I realized later I made at least one error in the interview. I said the US Forest Service issued contracts for six “next generation” air tankers to begin over the next two years. They actually issued contracts for seven additional air tankers. (UPDATE May 20, 2013: protests were filed against the contracting procedure, and they were cancelled. As of this date, they still have not been awarded.)

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We did another, shorter, interview with NPR back in July about air tankers.

US Forest Service Chief does damage control

Bill GabbertSeptember 24, 2012March 14, 2013UncategorizedTidwell8 Comments

As a government employee for an agency that provides essential emergency management services, you are not expected to say that your agency does not have enough resources to conduct their routine activities. But that is what Jim Hubbard, the Deputy Chief for State and Private Forestry for the U.S. Forest Service was quoted as saying in an article in the San Francisco Examiner which we covered September 17. Mr. Hubbard, according to the article, said the USFS does not have enough resources to manage long-duration wildfires. This was the reason he gave for their policy this summer of full suppression of all fires, rather than letting some fires burn through remote areas for weeks or months with only minimum intervention by firefighters. In a two-page memo earlier this summer he directed that any fire strategy with restoration as one of the objectives must first be approved by a Regional Forester.

In the Associated Press article that was published on September 16, Mr. Hubbard was quoted as saying, “It looked like a fire year that would exceed our resource capacity to respond. We didn’t have the resources to cover long-duration events”.

Mr. Hubbard’s boss, Chief of the U.S. Forest Service Tom Tidwell, in a “guest commentary” at the Denver Post, is now doing damage control about Mr. Hubbard’s comments, saying “our fire-management policy has not changed” and that restoring the health of our nation’s forests continues to be a “cornerstone”. He said “The Forest Service has the personnel and equipment to continue our policy of restoring the health of our nation’s forests”, and, “A national guidance memo by Deputy Chief Jim Hubbard in no way represents a departure from our standard fire-response policy.”

Mr. Tidwell explained that with the predicted severity of this summer’s fire season, they decided to be conservative in their approach to managing long-term fires, and directed that Regional Foresters be involved in decisions that had the potential to tie up large numbers of firefighting resources.

Our take on this is that to an extent, Mr. Tidwell confirms that a shortage of firefighting resources was indeed an issue. The primary theme of his article was that forest restoration will continue. While saying there were enough personnel and equipment “to continue our policy of restoring the health of our nation’s forests”, he never actually said there were enough to run a successful fire management program. The article emphasized restoration far more than fire suppression — which is not surprising for an agency that primarily grows trees, and has been forced to run a fire suppression organization on the side.

This approach will only encourage those who have been saying for decades that the five federal land management agencies need to divorce themselves from their fire management organizations to allow them to marry-up as a Wildland Fire Management Agency.

Thanks go out to Kelly

Predicted lightning bust in the Northwest was a bust

Bill GabbertSeptember 23, 2012August 25, 2019Uncategorized4 Comments

Originally posted at 11:45 a.m. MT, September 23, 2012

The Red Flag Warning for dry lightning in Washington and Oregon for this weekend has been cancelled. As far as we know there have been no lightning strikes in the two states over the last 24 hours, but there have been a few reports of light, scattered rain showers. The National Weather Service first said the lightning, some of it without rain, would begin Friday night, then revised the forecast saying it would occur Saturday and Sunday. Today, Sunday, at 8:43 a.m. local time, they cancelled the Red Flag Warning which had covered central and northeast Oregon as well as south central and southeast Washington.

The weather system that moved through the area on Saturday did have some strong winds which created a few problems on the Pole Creek Fire near Sisters, Oregon causing the fire to spot over the line on the west side of Trout Creek Butte. A Surge Task Force consisting of two Hotshot Crews and one other crew helped contain the spot fires. A small amount of rain fell on the fire yesterday but the fuels may dry out again on Sunday with the winds that are predicted. The fire grew by about 300 acres on Saturday, and now stands at 25,886 acres. The incident management team is calling it 55 percent contained.

And speaking of the Pole Creek Fire, the IMTeam has posted some excellent photos on their InciWeb page. Here are a few examples:

Pole Creek Fire, smoke plume as seen from ICP 9-14-2012, photo by Tracy Keebler

Pole Creek Fire, smoke plume, condensation — Pole Creek Fire, showing some very impressive “ice capping”, or condensation, at the top of the smoke plume, 9-14-2012. Photo by Matthew Noble

More photos are below:

Continue reading “Predicted lightning bust in the Northwest was a bust”

Dry lightning could bring more fires to the Northwest

Bill GabbertSeptember 22, 2012September 22, 2012Uncategorizedweather1 Comment

Originally published September 22, 2012, 8:47 a.m. PT

The dry lightning that is in the forecast for portions of Washington and Oregon could bring more fires to an area that already has its hands full dealing with dozens of blazes. On Friday the National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning for the lightning, but now the timing of the event has changed. That forecast predicted it would begin Friday night, but a revision now says isolated to scattered lightning will start Saturday night and continue through Sunday night.

The areas affected include the Cascade Mountains in central and north Oregon, the southern Washington Cascades, and the Columbia basin in Washington. If any rain occurs, it will be light and amounting to less than 1/10 inch. The thunderstorms will be high-based and could produce outflow winds of up to 45 mph.

We are not aware of a large amount of lightning that has occurred in this area yet this weekend, however as of 8:45 a.m. PT, there have been a couple of positive strikes detected very recently in north-central Oregon, which seems to be ahead of the NWS’s revised schedule.

We will update this article later on Saturday if we hear of any significant dry lightning occurring. I hope our loyal readers in Washington and Oregon will post comments about their observations as well.

The map below shows the Red Flag Warnings for Washington and Oregon and a Fire Weather Watch for western Utah.