Area Command Team 2 led by Tim Sexton was assigned to the Southern California Operations Center in mid-September to assist with strategic planning for the rest of the fire year.
These screen shots are borrowed from a PowerPoint presentation the team developed (3.6 Mb) of the likely fire activity, scheduled resource availability, likely resources needs, the gap between needs and availability, and suggestions on how to address the gap.
The group looked back at the previous four years of fire activity and the use of firefighting resources to help predict what the needs are going to be during the rest of the calendar year, or “Fire Year” as we are hearing these days. Of those four years, one was an outlier, 2019, with much less fire activity than average, so it was not used to predict resource needs. The 2,210,266 acres burned in the 49 states outside of Alaska in 2019 was the lowest total since 2004. Almost twice that many acres have already burned in just California so far this year, according to CAL FIRE October 2, 2020.
The slides shown here are 11 of the 15 in the presentation.
There’s far too many acronyms and terms unknow to those who are interested, but are unfamiliar with the meaning of many of the Alphabet Soup designations.
The conclusion I gained from scanning most of this post is that there’s a very high risk that available personnel and air support, and possibly other normally available equipment will fail to meet demand if weather forecasts and anticipated fire ignitions and Santa Ana Winds match normal years.
This is a good year to avoid traveling to southern regions if not absolutely necessary unless you thrive on lousy environmental conditoons.
Bute
Any Idea if the Feds will restore Leave if these fires keep up ?