Lance Armstrong posted on Twitter an image of the x-ray that was taken of his pieced-together broken right collarbone, or clavicle. While riding in the Castilla and Leon bike race in Spain on March 23 he went down in a pile-up of 20 riders. With his arm in a sling, he flew back home to Texas where he had surgery on March 25. The bone was in four pieces, and fixing it required 12 screws and a metal plate which will eventually have to be removed.
Broken clavicles are common among competive bike riders, but this is the first time Armstrong has broken one.
HERE is a link to a 2 minute video of Armstrong explaining his situation.
Jim Means (left), with the Farmington Pennsylvania Volunteer Fire Department and Fayette County Fire Warden District 4, greets helicopter pilot Rick Harmon from Wyoming after he demonstrates a water drop using a “Bambi Bucket.” Evan Sanders/Daily Courier
While many areas in the western U.S. are coping with snow, much of the eastern part of the country is just beginning their spring fire season. In Pennsylvania the season officially began yesterday even though they also had a little snow on the ground near the Ohiopyle helibase where they welcomed the contract helicopter and crew that will be stationed there until May 5.
This year a Jet Ranger III, owned by Big Sky Beck Properties Inc. out of Big Sky, Montana will be stationed at the facility near Ohiopyle State Park, about 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh (map). The Jet Ranger can carry about 110 gallons of water in the bucket.
Pilot Rick Harmon of Wyoming flew the Jet Ranger across the country in a two-day 14-hour journey.
In Lake City, Florida (map) the U. S. Forest Service has contracted for a Sikorsky S-58ET owned by Heli-Flite from Corona, California. It can carry about 625 gallons of water in a bucket, according to pilot Scott Donley who has been flying for 20 years.
The full story of Remembering Rick Gale can be viewed at the NPS Daily Digest- Daily Headlines page. Below is a brief update on the remembrance ceremony this coming Friday and on other matters, including where to send condolences.
Rick Gale, retired NPS chief of fire operations and a ranger with more than 40 years of field experience, died unexpectedly of a heart attack at his home in Boise, Idaho, on Friday, March 27th.
Rick Gale, speaking at the IAWF/NPS conference in Jackson Hole, WY Sept. 2008.
Rick is survived by his sister, Anne Berardi, and her husband, Pete Prince, of Goodyears Bar, California; his sister, Judy Gale, and partner, Gale Jensen, of Omaha, Nebraska; his daughter Beth Spencer, her husband Cliff, and their daughter, Lily, of Show Low, Arizona; his daughter, Cindy O’Neill, of Jackson, Wyoming, and her sons senior airman Matthew Wadsworth, stationed at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, and Cameron O’Neill, of Port Angeles, Washington; his daughter, Sarah Fisher, her husband Chad, and their son Beckett of Boise, Idaho; and his companion, Sherry Clark of Napa, California.
Condolences may be sent to The Gale Family, c/o Fisher, 4252 E. Homestead Rim Drive, Boise, Idaho 83716. You can also send them online .
In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that contributions be made to the Association of National Park Rangers. Donations can be made online by credit card via ANPR’s secure server . Please type “Rick Gale Memorial Fund” in the comments section of the donation webpage. If your preference is to donate by personal check or money order, please mail either of them to ANPR, 25958 Genesee Trail Road, PMB 222, Golden, CO 80401 and write “Rick Gale Memorial Fund” on the memo line.
A remembrance celebration will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, April 3rd, at the Barber Park Education Center, 4049 S. Eckert Rd., Boise, ID 83716. It will be followed by a pot luck lunch. If you are coming and able to bring a dish, please notify Jes Benson at galememorial at gmail.com. If you would like to speak at the celebration, please contact either Chad Fisher or Dan Buckley via email (chad_fisher at nps.gov, dan_buckleyat nps.gov ).
A compilation of memories of Rick is being put together for his family. If you would like to contribute a memory, story or experience, please send same to Bill Wade at jwbillwade at earthlink.net .
The U.S. Forest Service has released a narrated 11-minute PowerPoint-like presentation that addresses the problems associated with management of the 0.25% of fires that become large and how the USFS is going to deal with some of these issues. It is narrated by Marc Rounsaville, Deputy Director of USFS Fire and Aviation. (UPDATE 4:00 p.m. April 5; the presentation has been removed from the USFS site.)
Here are a couple of images from the presentation. The numbers and statistics appear to refer only to the USFS and are not national interagency figures.
While the presentation does refer to safety, we are thinking that the primary driver behind the program is to reduce spiraling fire costs, which are becoming ridiculous. That is a very laudable goal but the fatality trend is what caught my eye. Since 1950 the average number of US Forest Service fatalities has doubled, from 10 to 20.
Since 1950 we have added to our fire management system multiple checklists, personal protective equipment, hundreds of training courses with high-tech PowerPoint presentations, improved vehicles, Supertankers, computers, a vast array of fire behavior prediction systems, and radios, but we are still fighting fire with water and sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks. And we are killing twice as many USFS employees.
The presentation makes the point that fires are getting larger. Here is graph I put together that shows the average size of fires, nationally, not just USFS, has increased by almost 400% from 21 to 82 acres, since the 1970’s.
Originally placed at 210, the total number of fatalities in the February Black Saturday fires in Australia has been reduced to 173. This is due primarily to some remains being found to be animal bones and others thought to be from multiple victims were actually from the same person.
Reporter’s personal account of Black Saturday
Gary Hughes, a reporter for The Australian, has written a gripping account of how he and his wife escaped their house as it burned around them, and then how they coped in the four days that followed. Here is an excerpt.
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Surreal. That’s the term we and other survivors like us will begin to use in the days and weeks to come. But this first morning I grope unsuccessfully with a still-numbed mind for the right word to describe what is happening to us.
There have been brief snatches of exhausted sleep haunted by fiery images playing through my mind like an endless video loop. They call it “ember attack”, but the term nowhere near describes the terrifying reality.
On that endless video loop the hail of glowing demons fly at us relentlessly out of the artificial darkness of the smoke. We are trapped, eternally flailing at the embers with wet towels as they hunt for us through every tiny crack and crevasse of our house.
This first morning, having escaped from our house after it was engulfed and consumed by the Black Saturday firestorms, we are still driven by adrenalin. In coming days that adrenalin surge will end, replaced by waves of intense weariness that will plague our efforts to struggle through this first week. But today, adrenalin is our friend.
Wrapped in numbness and disbelief, our priorities are dictated by necessity. We leave the security of the relative’s house where we found shelter the night before to seek medical treatment for superficial burns and smoke inhalation. We had stayed huddled in our burning hilltop home of almost 25 years in St Andrews, just south of Kinglake, until the flames and toxic smoke left us with a choice between staying and certainly dying, or probably dying outside from radiant heat on the run to the car.
But the deepest injuries, as we will quickly discover, are not physical. That run for our lives had been so desperate that we escaped with virtually nothing, not even loose change. The firestorm has stolen our identities, destroying the plastic cards that define who you are in our computerised, cashless world. We are non-people. With cash provided by relatives and wearing borrowed clothes we buy basic necessities such as underwear, a razor, toothbrushes and toothpaste. I am amazed at how little we really need.
I obtain a replacement SIM card and using an old, borrowed mobile telephone I reconnect to the outside world. It’s a move I’ll regret in coming days.
On February 26 Wildfire Today posted some of the history of the “18 Watch Out Situations”. As we explained then, they began with the “13 Situations that Shout Watch Out” in the 1960s, and evolved in 1987 into the “18 Watch Out Situations”.
Each day between March 19 through March 30 (and on Feb. 26) we posted images depicting each of the original 13 Situations that were in the “Basic 32” wildland firefighter training program that was developed by the El Cariso Hot Shots 1972-1973.
The image above is the 13th and final one we have posted. It is similar to Situation #18 on the present day list of 18.
To see all of the “13 Watch Out Situation” images that have been posted to date, click on the “13/18 Situations” tag below.
To Use the Images
The 13 images we have posted here are rather low resolution, but feel free to use them. The black and white images were originally produced by the U.S. Government, and were colorized in 1972 by a member of the El Cariso Hot Shots.
They should work well in PowerPoint presentations or on web sites, but if you want to print them larger than 5″ x 7″, you will need higher resolution images, which I have. The higher resolution copies are 300 dots per inch (DPI) and each file is about 1.2 Mb. But if you need them go to our Documents page and download the zipped file with all 13 images; the file is about 14 Mb.
