In other posts, here and here, we covered the Terry Barton situation. She is the US Forest Service Fire Prevention Technician who started the 138,000 Hayman fire in Colorado in 2002. On March 27 her 12-year state sentence was thrown out by an Appeals court, leaving her with a 6-year federal sentence.
The father of one of the firefighters that died in a vehicle accident while driving to the Hayman fire wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Post expressing his opinion that a 6-year sentence is not adequate.
An article in the Colorado Springs Gazette has a similar view.
We have a new use for one of our post labels. Used only once before for Glenn Beck of CNN, now the post label “idiot” is awarded to Representative Darrell Issa of San Diego. He made a series of stupid statements about the 9/11 attacks, minimized the health effects on the rescuers and workers, and argued against extending benefits to the people that are still hugely affected by the incident.
Many firefighters are still suffering from the long term effects of working in the contaminated Ground Zero area.
The California congressman who called the Sept. 11 attacks “simply” a plane crash ran for cover Wednesday under a barrage of ridicule from fellow Republicans, first responders and victims’ families.
San Diego GOP Rep. Darrell Issa was under siege for suggesting the federal government had already done enough to help New York cope with “a fire” that “simply was an aircraft” hitting the World Trade Center.
“That is a pretty distorted view of things,” said Frank Fraone, a Menlo Park, Calif., fire chief who led a 67-man crew at Ground Zero. “Whether they’re a couple of planes or a couple of missiles, they still did the same damage.”
“New York was attacked by Al Qaeda. It doesn’t have to be attacked by Congress,” added Long Island Rep. Pete King, a Republican.
“I’m really surprised by Darrell Issa,” King added. “It showed such a cavalier dismissal of what happened to New York. It’s wrong and inexcusable.”
Lorie Van Aucken, who lost her husband, Kenneth, in the attacks, slammed Issa’s “cruel and heartless” comments.
“It’s really discouraging. People stepped up and did the right thing. They sacrificed themselves and now a lot of people are getting really horrible illnesses,” she added.
Under pressure from all sides, the Golden State pol – who got rich selling car alarms after getting busted for car theft as a teen – pulled a partial U-turn. He issued a statement but cowered from the press.
“I continue to support federal assistance for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” he said.
But he didn’t retract his wacked-out rhetoric claiming the feds “just threw” buckets of cash at New York for an attack “that had no dirty bomb in it, it had no chemical munitions in it.”
He went on: “I have to ask … why the firefighters who went there and everybody in the city of New York needs to come to the federal government for the dollars versus this being primarily a state consideration.”
A 150-acre fire in Chowan county in North Carolina destroyed two unoccupied hog houses, but yielded some interesting photos. Here’s one, courtesy of WAVY TV, but go to the site to see several more.
I stopped trying to predict the severity of fire seasons long ago. The most important factor is the weather during the season. If it is hot, dry, and windy, you can have a busy season. If it is not, even with a heavy fuel buildup and/or drought, you are not likely to have numerous large fires.
An article in the March/April issue of Wildfire by Krista Gebert, an economist with the US Forest Service, showed a relationship between the average spring-summer temperature and total fire suppression expenditures in the US Forest Service’s Northern Region (Montana, and parts of Idaho, North Dakota, and Washington). The threshold was 59-degrees (15 degrees C). When the average was below 59, the total fire suppression expenditures were generally less than $50 million per year. When the average was above 59, expenditures ranged from as low as $25 million to as high as $350 million.
Isn’t it great when a researcher, or even an economist, crunches numbers at a desk and tells us what experienced fire managers already know. But you don’t see experienced fire managers writing up stuff like this. The fact that Ms. Gebert is documenting it, and backing it up with data, reduces the learning curve for people coming into the wildland fire game. And this data may improve some of the predictive services tools and products.
In the article below, from the San Diego Union about the fuel buildup in Arizona, a fire meteorologist takes a bold step and predicts a “substantial fire season” for the greater Phoenix area.
By Amanda Lee Myers
ASSOCIATED PRESS
12:45 p.m. April 3, 2008
PHOENIX – An abnormally wet winter has spawned a rare profusion of grass and brush in the Phoenix metro area and other parts of the state – setting up much of Arizona’s desert lands for an active wildfire season, according to fire management officials.
That same wet weather has been a blessing for the state’s higher-elevation forests, which have been dried out by years of drought and left with millions of dead trees because of a beetle infestation.
For the forests, above-normal snowfalls mean trees and undergrowth will have high moisture content, and the fire danger is expected to be relatively low.
But by May, searing temperatures and arid conditions are expected to dry out the often hip-high grasses now blanketing desert areas.
“It’s almost like Ireland it’s so green out there right now,” state Forester Kirk Rowdabaugh said recently, referring to one area just north of Phoenix. “But we know that’s going to turn brown here in a few weeks, and certainly by early May it’ll be cured out enough to start to carry fire.”
The conditions are reminiscent of those in 2005, when a blaze named the Cave Creek Complex became the second-largest wildfire in state history. It scorched nearly 250,000 acres of desert and destroyed 11 homes in a small community northeast of Phoenix.
“It looks like the greater Phoenix metro area and for many miles around that has grass growing at this point is going to see some kind of substantial fire season,” said Chuck Maxwell, a fire meteorologist at the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque. “It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of how severe it is.”
Today there was a fire at the Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters in Washington, DC. It was contained to an office on the first floor by automatic sprinklers and the fire department, but 200 employees evacuated for 50 minutes.
More FEMA news:
An internal FEMA evaluation gave themselves solid ratings in seven out of nine categories of readiness while raising concerns about coordinating federal resources and the agency’s ability to provide housing for displaced disaster victims. The coordination issue is not good news for state and federal agencies providing support for disasters through FEMA.
David Paulison, the FEMA Administrator, said yesterday that hurricane victims should not expect to receive free ice and generators during future FEMA-managed recovery efforts.
Paulison said that regardless of who is elected as our next President, he will resign before the new President takes office.
“An environmental watchdog group on Wednesday sued the U.S. Forest Service for a second time over the agency’s use of aerial fire retardants.
The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an Oregon-based nonprofit group, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Missoula.
The lawsuit is part of the group’s campaign to reform the Forest Service’s wildland firefighting mission.
The campaign includes banning retardant airdrops nationwide unless people or homes are threatened, focusing on fire prevention around communities, and allowing more remote wildfires to burn as a natural part of the ecosystem. The lawsuit accuses the Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service of failing to fully evaluate the environmental impact of the aerial retardants.
Studies show the ammonium-based retardants are toxic to fish and other aquatic organisms, and promote the spread of flammable invasive weeds.
FSEEE won an earlier retardant-related lawsuit against the Forest Service when U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ruled that the agency had violated federal law by failing to properly review the environmental impact of retardants on national forests.
That lawsuit – which was filed in 2003, a year after a retardant airdrop killed 20,000 fish in an Oregon stream – was dismissed in February when the Forest Service complied with Molloy’s order to complete an environmental assessment of aerial retardants.
FSEEE’s latest lawsuit challenges the Forest Service’s assessment, which found that the chemical red slurry has no significant environmental impact.
In their biological opinions, the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service said retardants jeopardize 45 endangered or threatened fish, plant, insect, mussel and amphibian species and their critical habitats.
The lawsuit includes those two agencies because they said the Forest Service could avoid jeopardizing the environment if it followed “reasonable and prudent alternatives” when dropping retardants.
[…]
The new lawsuit challenges the three agencies’ environmental analyses, conclusions and decisions, saying they violate the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws.
FSEEE said the Forest Service should be forced to complete an environmental impact statement, which is more detailed than an environmental assessment, and that the “reasonable and prudent alternatives” do not prevent harm to the protected species and their critical habitat.”
The Flathead Beacon at Kalispell, Montana had this to say, in part:
[…] “Nuts? Yep, yet FSEEE righteously claims its “mission is to forge a socially responsible value system for the U.S. Forest Service.” They intend to ram their retardant version of social responsibility through the courts, and just might.
Don’t be surprised if FSEEE files their case, and on some trivial technicality, an injunction comes down at the worst possible time. Some poor fire boss will have to announce: “Folks, we need to ground our air fleet and wash out the tanks today. We’re also pulling all our crews, as the bombers were the last chance we had of holding this line without killing someone. Sorry. The judge says a one in 5,000 chance of killing a few minnows overrides any of your trivial concerns. We hope you got your heirlooms and families out in time, have a nice day.”
