Year number six begins

Like the sign says, welcome to the beginning of the sixth year of Wildfire Today!

Five years ago, on January 6, 2008, I started a little web site called Wildfire Today. It began on Blogger, Google’s free blogging service, and 3,818 articles later has evolved into what is still a little web site but has some loyal readers.

The number of site visitors peaked on June 27, 2012 as the Waldo Canyon and other fires were burning, when 89,858 pages were viewed. There would have been many more during that period but our site hosting service, Godaddy, was overwhelmed by the traffic, which made the site unavailable at times.

We are still covering news and issues related to wildland fire. And not simply that a fire occurred somewhere, but we prefer to write about topics and events that are interesting — not only to firefighters but to anyone with an interest in wildland fire, or who may live in a fire-prone environment. We don’t attempt to cover every fire, or even every very large fire, but if an event or news item interests us, we hope that you will find it to be worth your while.

In November we spun off a sister site, FireAviation.com, which is exclusively devoted to fire-related aviation. We realized that we had been writing a lot about the topic, but perhaps not every person who visits Wildfire Today has a passion for aerial firefighting.

And we could not exist without our loyal readers who frequently send us news tips via the Contact Us page — you’ll find their first names at the bottom of some of our articles. The comments that our visitors leave are sometimes more interesting than the articles. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as we do.

We also need to acknowledge the important support of companies like BFX Fire Apparatus and FireIce. Thank you!

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire. View all posts by Bill Gabbert