Higher humidities and lower temperatures have enabled firefighters on the Reading fire in Lassen National Park in Californina to make some progress in the last couple of days. That may change a little today with the forecast for warmer and drier conditions, including a high in the mid-eighties and a relative humidity of 21 percent.
While the fire behavior has slowed, firefighters have been conducting burnouts and constructing direct fireline where it is feasible. The fire is 46 miles east of Redding, has burned over 25,000 acres, and is listed at 25 percent containment.
While the firefighters work their butts off today, we can appreciate these photographs provided by the National Park Service.
Lightning caused fire in a National Park with no immediate infrastructure in danger = adhoc prescription burn fire.
Celebration ensues in the ‘ologists cubicles as they pull out the dusty wish lists of all areas they wanted to regenerate and cleanse for years but couldn’t due to the bureaucratic nightmare of getting an Rx fire funded and approved.
Nurture this naturally burning snag until it is large enough to get all the areas at once. Going to miss an area? Well, a burnout will take care of that. These opportunities to burn with limited and no liability don’t come around very often. What could possibly go wrong?
Scoopers are pretty effective on initial attack by overwhelming a small blaze by sheer volume of water. Therefore they are simply not wanted or needed with current land management thinking.
Looking at the first picture, it shows a very nice scooping lake close by. To bad they didn’t put a group of scoopers on it when that pic was taken, or sooner and that fire would be history by now. Doesn’t look like anything a few scoopers backed up by some ground crews couldn’t have handled.