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Final arrangements for Luke Sheehy

Bill GabbertJune 18, 2013June 18, 2013UncategorizedCalifornia, lodd

Below is information provided by the U.S. Forest Service about the final arrangements for Luke Sheehy who lost his life while suppressing a wildfire in northern California on June 10. Mr. Sheehy was struck by a falling portion of a tree on the Saddle Back Fire in the South Warner Wilderness about 15 miles southeast of Alturas, Calif.

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“UPDATE: Latest on Saddle Back Incident Support

Release Date: Jun 17, 2013

Contact(s): Saddle Back Support Public Information (530) 638-3319

REDDING, Calif.– Preparations are underway to support the family of recently deceased firefighter Luke Sheehy. The 28-year-old perished on June 10 as a result of injuries received on the Saddle Back Fire on the Modoc National Forest in northeast California.

There will be a procession to honor and transport Luke Sheehy on Wednesday from Alturas, Calif. to Susanville, Calif. The Sheehy family would like the procession in Alturas to remain a private family affair. For Susanville, close family and the firefighter community are invited.

Details on the agency memorial ceremony are currently pending. The ceremony is planned for June 23 at 1 p.m. at the Civic Auditorium in Redding, Calif. The Sheehy family has requested that family members, close friends, fire community and all those who want to honor Luke are invited to attend.

The family will be holding a separate memorial at the Walker Mansion Inn located in Westwood, Calif. on June 22 at 2 p.m.

Those interested in showing support for the Sheehy family can send flowers, cards and donations to: Doug and Lynn Sheehy or Sheehy Family, 2850 Main St., Suite 12 #386, Susanville, CA 96130

Or the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. Mail in a donation: Care of Sheehy Family. Make your check payable to: Wildland Firefighter Foundation, 2049 Airport Way, Boise ID 83705. Or, online at: http://www.wffoundation.org/ Or to any U.S. Bank location; account number: 157501822199 “

Report: The Rising Cost of Wildfire Protection

Bill GabbertJune 18, 2013June 18, 2013Uncategorizedreport, WUI2 Comments

Headwaters Economics has released a report titled “The Rising Cost of Wildfire Protection”, written by Ross Gorte, Ph.D., a retired Senior Policy Analyst with the Congressional Research Service. It is an effort to better understand and address why wildfires are becoming more severe and expensive and it describes how the protection of homes in the Wildland-Urban Interface has added to these costs.

Below are some excerpts:

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Federal wildfire appropriations — Figure 1. Federal Wildfire Appropriations to the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, 1994 – 2012. Source, Headwaters Economics (click to enlarge)

Fuel Reduction on Federal Lands

Programs to protect the WUI also affect fuel reduction on other federal lands. First, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act directed that half of federal fuel reduction funds were to be used in the WUI. As a result, the proportion of fuel treatments in the WUI increased after FY2001 (the first year for which such data are available), from 37 percent (45% for the FS, 22% for DOI) to about 60 percent from FY2003 to FY2006 (73% for the FS, 42% for DOI), and 70 percent in FY2008 (83% for the FS, 47% for DOI).

More recent comparable data are not available, because the FS has modified the way fuel treatments are reported and has proposed shifting non-WUI fuel treatment funding to land and resource management accounts (instead of wildfire protection accounts).

This shift in fuel treatments to the WUI has two effects on federal fuel reduction efforts:

It raises the average costs of reducing fuels on an acre of land. Treatments in the WUI are closer and more visible to humans and thus the public involvement process commonly takes longer and costs more. Mechanical treatments may require additional steps to reduce the visual impacts of removing biomass. Also, prescribed burning is, in many ways, the most effective means of reducing fuels, but the higher values and closer proximity of humans necessitate more personnel and more oversight to try to prevent the prescribed fires from becoming wildfires.23 One study found per-acre fuel reduction in the WUI costs 43 percent more for prescribed burning and nearly three times more for mechanical fuel reduction than in non-WUI areas.24
It results in less fuel reduction on other lands. The level of fuel reduction over the past decade has remained relatively stable—averaging about 3 million acres annually according to the agency budget justifications. Because efforts are increasingly being focused on the WUI, the level of fuel reduction on non-WUI lands is probably declining. Furthermore, as discussed in more detail in other reports, 25 the 3 million-acre effort is insufficient to treat the 230 million acres of federal lands at high or moderate risk of ecological damage from wildfires in a timely manner. Thus, wildfire fuel levels are currently increasing, and shifting more fuel reduction to the WUI will exacerbate the current situation. This is likely to lead to more severe wildfire seasons in the future.

Another Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory — this time, Arizona and New Mexico

Bill GabbertJune 18, 2013August 25, 2019UncategorizedArizona, fire behavior, fire behavior advisory, New Mexico, safety, weather

One of the Predictive Services offices has issued another Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory. The last one, issued June 10, was for California. This new one, dated June 16, is for portions of Arizona and New Mexico.

The advisory does not mention the “Southwest Monsoon,” an event that typically starts in early July and generally begins to draw the curtain on the fire season in Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, southern Utah and southwestern Colorado.

Below is the full text of the advisory.

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“Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory

Arizona and New Mexico

June 16, 2013

Subject: Persistent multi-year drought across much of New Mexico and Arizona has dropped fuel moistures to critically low levels in the large dead and live foliar fuels. These critically low fuel moistures increase available fuel loading which contributes to and supports active crown fire in timber fuels when critical fire weather is present.

Discussion: The multi-year drought has reduced the fine fuel loading across most of the region so the focus for this advisory will be the timber fuels within the region.

Difference from normal conditions: Drought creates more available fuel in timber fuel types which will increase fire intensities, crown fire potential and difficulty of control for fire suppression resources. Short duration rain events provide only short term fuel moisture improvement in timber litter fuels (1, 10, and 100 hour dead fuels). Fuels rebound quickly to previous dryness levels. Short duration rain events provide no fuel moisture recovery in large dead and live foliar fuels.

Concerns to Firefighters and the Public:

Surface fire will quickly transition to crown fire and only requires low to moderate surface fire intensity to transition.
Active/running crown fire has produced long range spotting up to one mile under the influence of an unstable atmosphere.
Active fire behavior can extend well into night and early morning hours even with moderate RH recovery.
Thunderstorm activity will create a mosaic pattern of surface fuel moistures. Surface fire intensity and fire behavior may change abruptly when fires cross these boundaries of moist and dry surface fuels.

Mitigation Measures:

Local briefings need to be thorough and highlight specific fire environment conditions. These include but are not limited to local weather forecasts, Pocket Cards, ERC’s, live and dead fuel moistures, and special fuel conditions such as drought and insect mortality
Lookouts, both on the ground and in the air, can help identify the initiation and location of crown fire. They can also provide the location of resultant spot fires from active crown fire.
Firefighters should acknowledge that fire growth and fire behavior they encounter this year may exceed anything they have experienced before due to the drought factor. Normal strategies and tactics may need to be adjusted to account for the drought factor.

Area of Concern: Please reference the map posted on the National Fuel Advisory Page.

http://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/fuels_fire-danger/fuels_fire-danger.htm

The timber fuels within this area of concern are the target for this fire behavior advisory.”

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(End of text)

Thanks go out to Ken

CAL FIRE Situation Report, June 17, 2013

Bill GabbertJune 18, 2013UncategorizedCAL FIRE, California

Wildfire briefing, June 17, 2013

Bill GabbertJune 17, 2013August 25, 2019Uncategorized747 air tanker, air tanker, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, P\2V1 Comment

The worst wildfires

The Mother Nature Network has assembled what they call “10 of the Worst Wildfires in U.S. History”. Check it out to see if you agree with their list.

Furloughs cancelled for NWS

As wildfire season heats up the National Weather Service has cancelled their plans to force their employees to take four days off without pay before September 30. While a memo to all 12,000 NWS employees did not mention fire weather forecasts or Incident Meteorologists, it did refer to the tornadoes that plowed through Midwestern states last month. The Las Cruces Sun-News has more details.

Photos and videos of the 747 Supertanker, and a new CWN contract for the 20,000-gallon beast

Fire Aviation has some photos and videos of Evergreen’s 747 Supertanker that is receiving a new call when needed contract from the U.S. Forest Service. When you see the two photos of the 747 dropping on a fire in Mexico, compare them to this photo of a P2V dropping on a fire in the San Diego area Monday.

Denver post on the shortage of air tankers

The Denver Post has an article about the shortage of large air tankers in the United States and how that may have affected the early stages of the recent fires in Colorado. They also quote a very reliable source about the number of Unable to Fill (UTF) requests for air tankers.

Aspen Fire on Mount Lemmon, 10 years ago

It was 10 years ago today that the Aspen Fire ripped across the top of Mount Lemmon in Arizona, destroying nearly 340 homes and burning 84,000 acres.

Birds start fires in California and Nevada

A deluded conspiracy theorist might assume that terrorists have trained birds to fly into power lines and start fires, since over the last two days it happened in Chico, California and in Reno, Nevada. But in spite of the tin foil hat I’m wearing, I don’t think this quite meets the threshold for our Animal Arson series, since it is fairly common.

Update on air tanker contracts

Bill GabbertJune 17, 2013August 25, 2019Uncategorizedair tanker2 Comments

DC-10, Tanker 911, dropping on Black Forest Fire — A DC-10, Tanker 911, dropping on the Black Forest Fire, June 12, 2013. Photo by Army National Guard 2nd Lt Skye A. Robinson.

In case you have not been following the reports over at Fire Aviation closely, you may not be up to speed on what has happened in the last few months concerning air tanker contracts, so here is a quick summary.

Legacy air tankers

Exclusive use contracts for eight air tankers were announced by the U.S. Forest Service on March 27, 2013, saying that during the first year of the contract, 2013, Minden would have one P2V, and Neptune would have six P2Vs and one BAe-146. A few weeks later an additional BAe-146 from Neptune was quietly added, bringing the total to nine air tankers for the first year. If the USFS decides not to activate optional years in the contract, there could be as few as six legacy air tankers after 2013.

Next Generation air tankers

After many false starts, a contract protest by Neptune, and 555 days after the USFS issued the first solicitation, the USFS announced on June 7 that exclusive use contracts were going to be awarded for seven next generation air tankers.

Minden Air Corporation; Minden, Nev., for 1 BAe-146
Aero Air, LLC; Hillsboro, Ore., for 2 MD87s
Aero Flite, Inc.; Kingman, Ariz., for 2 Avro RJ85s
Coulson Aircrane (USA), Inc.; Portland, Ore., for 1 C130Q
10 Tanker Air Carrier, LLC; Adelanto, Calif., for 1 DC-10

Only one of these seven aircraft has both a Supplemental Type Certificate from the FAA and the approval of the Interagency AirTanker Board (IATB), and that is the Very Large Air Tanker, the DC-10, which has been busy since the award dropping on fires in California, New Mexico, and Colorado. The other six have a limited amount of time, a couple of months or so, to become fully certified in order to meet the Mandatory Availability Period in the contracts. It would be surprising if all six met the deadline, since some of them are still going through the retrofitting process, and then will begin the FAA and IATB reviews, with the latter being lengthy and expensive.

Very Large Air Tankers

Call when needed contracts were announced June 14 for two call when needed Very Large Air Tankers — a second DC-10 from 10 Tanker Air Carrier, and a 747 “Supertanker” from Evergreen. These three-year contracts start July 1, 2013. The second DC-10 already has a CWN contract expiring June 30, and was activated for fires in New Mexico June 14. The 747 has the required FAA and IATB approvals from earlier CWN contracts, so it should be ready to go on July 1 — unless a little thing like two missing engines could be a problem. We posted some photos and videos of the 747 doing some demo drops with water, as well as dropping on a fire in the United States and one in Mexico.

To summarize the summary:

9 legacy air tankers (seven 50- year old legacy, and 2 next-gen that are twenty-something years old)
7 next-gen air tankers (6 large and 1 very large)
2 very large air tankers on CWN

Totals by date in 2013, including CWN:

Available now, June 17 — 11 total
Expected beginning July 1 — 12 total
If the additional 6 next-gen obtain approvals — 18 total

And yes, it’s confusing that two next-gen aircraft are included in the legacy contract, and a very large air tanker is mixed in with the next-gen. (I am almost surprised that a Single Engine Air Tanker is not clumped in with the Very Large Air Tankers.)

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