Month: March 2009

Wildfire Today will be hosting another interactive live discussion. This time the topic will be Fire Aviation.  The last live discussion we held on Feb. 13 was on the topic of Leave Early, or Prepare, Stay and Defend. You can play back that discussion HERE.

WHO:
Anyone can participate as described below.  The featured guest and subject matter specialist will be Hugh Carson.  Hugh has been an Air Operations Branch Director (AOBD) for a long time, working on Type 1 incident management teams supervising all of the air tankers and helicopters working on some of the largest fires.  He semi-retired a few years ago, but continues to work as an AOBD, teach, and consult.

HOW:
The format will be text. You will be able to type in your comments or questions in real time and anyone will be able to comment or answer back. However, not necessarily everyone’s comments will appear. If the traffic is heavy, we will selectively choose which comments would be of the most interest to the audience. And, of course, rude or obscene comments will not be approved. You do not need any special software to participate, nor do you need to register. Just choose a name for yourself, then type in your thoughts.

WHERE:
It will be at https://wildfiretoday.com and will be obvious when you go to the site on Friday (or Saturday down under).  The post with the discussion feature will appear 5 minutes before the official start time. You will need to refresh your screen if you get there early.

WHEN:
It will begin at:
9:00 p.m. ET (Friday, March. 13);
8:00 p.m. CT (Friday);
7:00 p.m. MT (Friday);
6:00 p.m. PT (Friday);
12:00 noon (Saturday, Feb. 14) Melbourne, Australia;
03:00 a.m. (Saturday) in Athens, Greece; and
01:00 a.m. (Saturday) Feb. 14) UTC (GMT).

Arizona Daily Star photos

The Arizona Daily Star, based in Tucson, has an excellent collection of about 35 photos of fire they have collected over the last couple of years. Here is one photo.

Leave early, or prepare, stay, and defend gets another look

California Fire Chiefs in Ventura, Orange county, and within Firescope are taking another look at the leave early, or prepare, stay and defend policy.  All three organizations had been considering adopting it, but after the February 7 “Black Saturday” fires in Australia in which 210 people died, they are having second thoughts.  The LA Times has more details.

The above images depict aircraft traffic over the United States.  They are very nice, but check out this animation of flights over a day or so.  It’s mesmerizing.

The maps and the animation were created by Aaron Koblin in collaboration with Wired Magzine.  They break down the 205,000 daily flights monitored by the FAA, with different colors for different airplane models and cruising altitudes.