Firefighters on the Whitewater-Baldy found themselves conducting firing operations (burnouts or backfires) with the relative humidity as low as two percent and wind gusts up to 26 mph on Tuesday. One of the firing operations on the 152,000-acre blaze was on the northeast side of the fire where firefighters battled extreme fire behavior with spot fires occurring up to one mile ahead of the fire. The Incident Management Team reported that the Probability of Ignition today was 100%. That is, according to weather conditions and fire behavior models, if a firebrand landed in receptive fuels (vegetation) there was a 100 percent probability that it would start a new fire. Firefighters who were directed to ignite burnouts or backfires under those conditions deserve a raise. There were multiple spot fires across Forest Road 141, with one of them growing to 20 acres, but remarkably they were all suppressed by firefighters, engines, a dozer, and two air tankers. Neptune’s Tanker 40, the BAe-146 jet, was one of the air tankers used on the fire today. A big pat on the back goes out to those folks who did great work under interesting conditions.
Other aircraft on the fire included twelve helicopters: three Type 1 (the largest helicopters), four Type 2, and five Type 3.
A U.S. Forest Service fixed wing infrared imaging airplane, N144Z, a Cessna Citation jet, has been mapping the fire during the night for the last several nights providing accurate information about the location of the fire perimeter and the extent and intensity of heat sources across the fire. The data is digitized and transmitted via radio from the aircraft immediately after it is collected and ends up in internet servers on the ground . Then an Infrared Analyst, who can be located anyplace where there is a computer with internet access and ESRI software, interprets the imagery and sends it to the Situation Unit on the fire. When everything works perfectly, they will receive it with enough lead time to produce maps that are used for the morning briefing and the Incident Action Plan.
The map to the right shows the flight of N144Z between 10:38 p.m. May 28, and 1:09 a.m. May 29. It departed from Phoenix, mapped the Gladiator and Whitewater-Baldy fires, then landed at Farmington, New Mexico for fuel. Then it mapped one or two fires in Colorado before heading for home at Ogden, Utah.
The satellite photo below, taken at 7:40 p.m. today, which we helpfully annotated for your viewing pleasure, shows the smoke that was generated by the extreme fire behavior on the Whitewater-Baldy fire today.
You can compare the actual trajectory of the smoke with the projections created by computer models below. Each line is a 24-hour period, beginning at noon local time. The tic-marks on the lines are six hours apart.
