Wallow fire 6-5-2011. Photo: Jayson Coil/US Forest Service

Climate change and wildfires

The New York Times has a very interesting article about the real effects of climate change, bringing the issue into the practical realm. Wildfires are playing and will continue to play an integral part. Here is an excerpt:

“The amount of area burning now in Siberia is just startling — individual years with 30 million acres burned,” Dr. Swetnam said, describing an area the size of Pennsylvania. “The big fires that are occurring in the American Southwest are extraordinary in terms of their severity, on time scales of thousands of years. If we were to continue at this rate through the century, you’re looking at the loss of at least half the forest landscape of the Southwest.”

Seasonal wildland firefighters arrested for drinking in front of fire station

Two wildland firefighters working for the Santa Fe Fire Department in New Mexico were arrested and fired for drinking beer in front of a fire station and on city property. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Albuquerque Journal:

Two seasonal employees for the Santa Fe Fire Department were arrested Wednesday night after police caught one of them, who is 19, drinking beer on city property. And he may have been noticed because that station is in the same area as the Santa Fe Police Department’s Professional Standards division.

“There’s police driving down the street all the time,” said Santa Fe police Capt. Aric Wheeler. “You’re rolling the dice thinking you’re not gonna be seen by somebody.”

An officer spotted Genaro Romero drinking a beer in front of the fire station at 2501 Camino Entrado just after 11 p.m. Wednesday. When the officer asked why he was drinking beer on city property, Romero said he was a firefighter. The officer then checked Romero’s identification and saw he was 19. Under questioning, Romero said he got the beer from Rene Arellano, 24, who was inside the building and admitted providing the booze, according to Wheeler.

Romero and Arellano were temporary firefighters for the city’s Wildland Fire Team. The two had been working as forestry technicians during the area’s wildfire season and their last day was scheduled for today, according to Santa Fe Fire Department Assistant Fire Chief Eric Litzenberg.

Until they were arrested Wednesday.

“They’re no longer employed by us,” said Litzenberg, who would not elaborate when asked if they were terminated.

Romero was arrested on a charge of minor in possession of alcohol, while Arellano was charged with providing alcohol to a minor, which is a felony, according to Wheeler.

Report: SEI to buy Premo

There is a report that SEI Industries is buying Premo. SEI makes Bambi Buckets and a line of aerial and ground-based ignition devices, Plastic Sphere Dispensers (PSD), and ignition spheres. SEI is is fairly new to the aerial ignition market. Premo has been making aerial ignition devices and ignition spheres used from helicopters for a long time. If the deal goes through, SEI will support and service the Premo PSD machines as well as supplying 1.25-inch spheres.

Trivia question

The death of which U. S. President’s father was related to a wildfire? The answer after the jump.
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The U. S. Forest Service announced on August 15 that they intended to award a non-competitive multi-million dollar contract to the Rand Corporation to continue studying the air tanker issue. Rand had a previous contract with the USFS to provide advice about the long term management of the air tanker and helicopter fleet. The report from that study was due in January, 2011, but rumor has it that their product was virtually worthless and they were sent back to the drawing board. Now the USFS wants to throw good money after bad, giving Rand what appears to be an additional $7 million to milk the public coffers even more. This issue has been studied to death already. The USFS staff in Washington simply needs to review the previous four studies and make a damn decision about how to reconstitute the large air tanker fleet which has declined through mismanagement from 44 to 11. This is turning into a very bad joke on the American taxpayers. Someone needs to put some firefighters in charge a making the decision, like in this classic video.

UPDATE at 4:14 p.m. Sept. 26, 2011; we just found at another web page a “modification/amendment” to the above announcement:

Added: Sep 01, 2011 5:01 pm. Due to the responses received expressing interest in this procurement, the program has decided to withdraw its sole source determination. A competitive acquisition will be conducted after the end of the fiscal year.

This is a good news/bad news announcement. Good, in that there is a chance that someone who actually has knowledge about aerial firefighting might do the study. Bad, in that… ARE YOU KIDDING ME? STILL ANOTHER STUDY! The previous five are not enough? How many do we need? 10? 15?

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Dollar Lake fire, 9-2-2011. Photo by S. Swetland

The Dollar Lake fire burning on the slopes of Mt. Hood in Oregon received some rain and is being turned over to a Type 3 incident management team. They are calling it 90% contained after burning 6,304 acres.

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Texas wildfires became political fodder on Sunday when President Obama, speaking at a fund-raiser in Woodside, California, said:

I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.

Mark Miner, a spokesperson for Governor Rick Perry of Texas, shot back saying it was “outrageous” that the president…

…would use the burning of 1,500 homes, the worst fires in state history as a political attack.

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And in more wildfire-related political news, if Congress can’t get their s**t together and pass a bill funding disaster relief, thousands of victims of the Texas fires may not get the help they need to rebuild home and businesses. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 Texans have registered for about $5.8 million in federal government wildfire-related aid from FEMA, including Housing Assistance, Other Needs Assistance, and Disaster Unemployment Assistance.

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Canoe training for firefighters on the Pagami Creek fire - Photo by Luke Macho

Some firefighting resources are being released from the Pagami Creek fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota. The fire has not increased in size in a week or so and the incident management team is calling it 93,459 acres and 53% contained.  (Definitions of “contain” and “control”). Yesterday, air resources dropped 267,000 gallons of water and delivered 11,000 pounds of cargo.

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On Sunday the Norton Point fire southeast of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming grew by 3,000 to 3,500 acres and has burned a total of 20,500 acres. It is staffed with two people.

Smoke from the Wallow and Horseshoe 2 fires, photographed by a NASA weather satellite June 8, 2011. Notations added by Wildfire Today.

Chip Ward has written an opinion piece for CBSnews.com about the “monster” wildfires that have been turning large swaths of Texas and Arizona black over the last few months. From his home in Utah he does not really break much new ground, but he lays out the current situation in a style that makes it a worthwhile read.

Here is how the article begins:

Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.

Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained “zero contained” for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather’s forest fires.

Thanks Dick

Record-breaking fire years are occurring with increasing frequency in British Columbia, causing land managers to rethink how they manage their forests. The government has been maintaining wildlife corridors which it turns out, also provide paths for wildfires. The Forest Minister intends to modify their timber harvesting procedures, creating fire breaks in the wildlife corridors.

From the Vancouver Sun:

VANCOUVER — British Columbia Forest Minister Pat Bell has introduced an overhaul of the province’s wildfire strategy to take into account the increasing frequency and intensity of forest fires brought about by climate change.

The past two fire seasons have racked up bills between three and four times the long-term average cost for fighting fires in B.C., and the growing instability in local weather patterns means things will have to be done differently, Bell said in an interview.

“We need to start thinking about how we harvest our forests to minimize the ability of fire complexes to grow together.”

In July, several small fires in central B.C.’s Cariboo region linked together through wildlife corridors to form one large fire, forcing evacuations and a very expensive firefighting operation. Harvesting forests to create man-made breaks between stands of timber that mimic the natural fire breaks exploited by firefighters could help contain fires, Bell said.

The Wildfire Management Strategy notes that “record” fire years — as measured by area destroyed — are coming with increasing frequency.

Climate models predict more of the same as temperatures rise in the north and interior of the province.

And there is some evidence that measurable climate change is already here. Average temperatures recorded in Canada’s north this past summer are among the highest in 63 years of data collection, according to preliminary figures released by Environment Canada.

Firefighter unlikely to be charged for starting Fourmile fire

The District Attorney for Boulder County, Colorado, announced Wednesday that their office will not file charges against the volunteer firefighter whose debris burning fire escaped and started the Fourmile fire that burned 169 structures and 6,400 acres earlier this month.

George Fairer told investigators he burned debris on September 2, and that he applied water and stirred the ashes that day and the following day. The Fourmile fire began on September 6.

Ecologist says climate change will increase the number of fires

From the HJNews:

Utah experienced fewer wildfires than usual this summer, but the number of blazes will likely increase over time as a result of climate change, according to a local expert.

Michael Jenkins, Utah State University associate professor of disturbance/wildfire ecology, says there is good evidence that rising temperatures will boost the available fire “fuel load” by killing trees, particularly conifers. In addition, heat and low humidity are conducive to blazes.

“Given that the climate is warming, fuels are drying and it’s stressing plants,” Jenkins explained. “I think that has been reflected in the number of acres burned per year over the last 10 or maybe 20 years.”

Jenkins also pointed to intensive firefighting practices that suppress blazes quickly, but boost the “fuel load” by sparing vegetation that would have burned. As a result, when fires do get out of control, they find plenty of shrubs, grasses and trees to feed them.

You can monitor the Antelope fire in Yellowstone

One of the two live web cams on Mt. Washburn in Yellowstone National Park has an excellent view of the 2,800-acre Antelope fire in the northeast area of the park. Here is a screen grab of an image from the cam taken at 11:49 a.m. today. The fire at that time was not very active; earlier in the morning the camera was shrouded in fog. More information about the fire can be found on InciWeb.

The image below was taken by the cam on September 21.

Home owners thank “Bulldozer Man” for saving their houses

The Unified Fire Authority is giving a dozer operator and his D-9 Cat from the nearby landfill credit for saving 32 homes that were threatened by the Machine Gun fire. The fire started during .50-caliber machine gun target practice at a National Guard base near Herriman, Utah.

This gives us an excuse to post this photo of an air tanker working on the fire. Am I the only one that is not fond of the paint job on Tanker 48? Here is a Google search link to a few more photos of the air tanker.

Photo by David Cise

Minimal hero-worship of firefighters

Michael Wolcott writing about the Schultz fire near Flagstaff for Writers on the Range has some interesting thoughts. Here is an excerpt.

My own response was intense curiosity. I wasn’t worried about “destruction” of the San Francisco Peaks: About the only thing that could destroy the mountain is the same thing that created it — a volcanic eruption. As for the threat to Flagstaff’s neighborhoods, I’m glad nobody’s home got burned. But houses built on the forest edge are obviously at risk. The people who choose to live in them are presumably aware of this, and so take their chances. And, having worked on wildland fire crews, my fund of hero-worship for the firefighters was minimal. It’s just a job. Most firefighters will tell you that they are in it because the money is good and because they like the “juice.” Like the rest of us, firefighters are fascinated by fire.

Can the entire New York Fire Department stop an enormous wildfire?

Pam Slater-Price and Howard Windsor, writing for SignOnSanDiego, say no. Here is an excerpt from an article about preparing for wildfires:

Some critics believe only a blank check can solve our fire problem. Yet fire losses still occur because there are times when fire conditions exceed all reasonable capabilities. To be blunt, you could put the entire New York City Fire Department in front an enormous wildfire and the wildfire would still win.

It is interesting that of all the fire organizations the authors could choose from, they picked New York City, a department not best known for their wildfire prowess, although they probably handle structure fires very well. Here is a photo we posted in an article on September 8 about a fire on Staten Island:

You gotta love that full turnout gear on a vegetation fire. Photo: FDNY