Wildfire news, June 24, 2009

Three firefighters injured in Texas

One firefighter was entrapped and took refuge in his fire shelter. From the Houston Chronicle:

Three firemen with the Texas Forest Service were injured Monday and Tuesday battling wildfires that starting to intensify as the Houston-area copes with a hotter and dryer summer than usual.

The firemen were hurt battling a 200-acre inferno near Huntsville in Walker County. Two suffered from heat exhaustion and one suffered minor burns before he could crawl inside his emergency aluminum fire shelter.

“This fire spread rapidly. The flames jumped from the crown of a one tree to another,” said Justice Jones, spokesman for the fire service.

 

The Governor of Wyoming wants more USFS dollars

Here is an excerpt from the Little Chicago Review.

Cheyenne – Wyoming has been left out in the cold by the U.S. Forest Service as that agency allocated federal economic stimulus dollars to western states for wildland fire mitigation projects, Gov. Dave Freudenthal said today in a sharply worded letter to U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

The Governor criticized the agency for allocating millions in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 based on
inaccurate data and a model that he said the Forest Service is unwilling to disclose to the states.

“I have had the opportunity to review the list of projects that were selected to get wildland fire funding and this list paints an interesting but somewhat disturbing picture regarding Forest Service priorities,” he said, “even when glossed with a thick shellac of
rhetoric tied to unemployment numbers and other ‘economic stimulus’ veneers.”

The Governor wants an additional $26.5 million for fire mitigation, biomass development, capital construction, and fuels reduction.

Popular Science on firefighting tech

An article in Popular Science examines the use of:

  • Unmanned aerial vehicles,
  • A network of sensors, 1 per acre, to monitor weather, which Wildfire Today told you about on September 22, 2008; and
  • The Wildland Fire Decision Support System.

 

San Diego County Supervisors oppose SDG&E pre-emptive power shutoff scheme

The latest in San Diego Gas and Electric’s plan to shut off the power to large sections of San Diego County during periods of high fire danger is that the county Board of Supervisors voted four to zero to oppose the plan. Wildfire Today has covered this issue extensively.

 

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