We just enabled a feature making it possible for your mugshot or a graphic of your choice to appear by your comments at the bottom of posts here on the site. It’s called an “avatar” and in this case an avatar is an image that follows you from one website to another, appearing beside your name when you comment on avatar-enabled sites. If you set up an image associated with your email address just once at Gravator.com, the image will appear with your comments on enabled sites. As usual, though, when you fill in your email address as you leave a comment on Wildfire Today, it will not be displayed.
Here is a 2-minute video from Gravatar.com that explains how easy it is to set up an avatar.
Here and here are some posts with avatars associated with some comments. Scroll down to see the commenters who use these.
Verizon and Motorola are finally sending their over-the-air update to their Droid cell phones, which upgrades the Android operating system to version 2.1. As we reported on January 5, 2010, this version of the Android system was on Google’s Nexus One phone when it was released that day, but it has taken three months to get it out to the Droid.
I have been looking forward to Android 2.1 because as I explained on January 5, this version has the “News and Weather” widget. This feature can be useful for wildland firefighters because it can instantly display the current and forecasted weather, including temperature, wind speed, relative humidity, and chance of precipitation. The weather data is based on either your location as determined by the GPS receiver in the phone, or you can manually select a location.
The News and Weather widget on one of the Droid's three home screens.
I took these photos of the Droid screen with my Canon SD1000 camera, so obviously the program will look much better in person.
The photo above shows the widget itself on one of the three home screens on the Droid. The “widget” is a small window that displays your current temperature and state of weather, plus a little banner that displays the recent headlines from the news, rotating the headlines from various categories of news. If you tap on the widget, it takes you to the News and Weather program itself (see below).
The home screen for the News and Weather
The home screen for the News and Weather, above, displays the current temperature, maximum and minimum temperature for today, the relative humidity, and the wind speed, unfortunately in kilometers per hour. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change km/h to miles per hour, but you CAN select either Celsius or Fahrenheit for the temperature. This page also displays for the next seven days, the forecasted state of weather (sun, partly cloudy, rain, etc.) as well as the max. and min. temperatures.
If you touch anywhere on the above screen, it takes you to the screen below.
Weather data graph for next 24 hours, annotated (in pink)
…were forced to carry water on their backs to fight a brush fire off Edic Road on Easter Sunday.
The accidental blaze was ignited at about 2 p.m. after a man clearing brush in a field spilled gasoline near his tractor, according to Maynard Fire Chief Joseph Mack. The field was located between Mulaney and Glass Factory roads.
“He spilled some gas, and when he started his tractor it started a fire,” Mack explained. The flames spread to cover about “an acre and a half of burnt grass.”
Crews from three departments responded, and Mack said heavy winds and lack of roads hindered the firefight. “With the winds yesterday, the fire kept changing directions on us,” Mack said. Water was tankered to the scene, but the hoses could not reach all of the flames from the roadway.
Mack said volunteers strapped portable tanks onto their back and marched out into the field to reach the fire before it could spread to a wooded area. Mack said the flames were completely knocked down after about an hour of firefighters trudging back and forth to Edic Road to refill the tanks.
“There were a couple of people that we had sit down and drink water,” but there were no serious cases of exhaustion due to carrying the portable tanks, Mack said.
When the Mill Flat “fire use” fire, which had been managed for almost a month, escaped, ran out of the Dixie National Forest, and burned six homes in New Harmony, Utah on August 29, 2009, the U.S. Forest Service District Ranger, Bevan Killpack said:
The identification and management of risk to firefighters was consistently the highest priority, and this diligence to minimizing human risk exposure contributed to the most important outcome; there were no fatalities or serious injuries as a result of the management of the Mill Flat Fire.
Fire Behavior:
Fire behavior projections have a shelf life. Early modeling provided predictions that informed management decisions in late July and early August, but as live fuel moisture conditions changed the earlier projections were no longer accurate or reliable.
Policy:
Late breaking changes in policy interpretation, new terminology and new decision support software should be seen as a red flag. While these changes just prior to the onset of western fire season were not determined to be responsible for negative outcomes at Mill Flat, it added to the overall confusion and uncertainty and was often a barrier to communication internally and externally. The Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS) was new in 2009, and there were issues related to clarifying objectives and strategies within WFDSS as it differs from the old system in several important ways. A protocol to guide risk-assessment and decisions on long duration fires would benefit fire managers nationwide.
Situational Awareness:
Managers on the Dixie National Forest have a great deal of experience in successfully managing unplanned ignitions, and one of the results of that history is an expectation of success. Fire managers expected a positive result, fostering a “can do” attitude among the staff in which people who felt concerns about the fire did not feel they could speak up. This view became a lens through which information was filtered, to some extent de-emphasizing concerns raised by the public, obscuring indicators that may have pointed toward changing conditions, and emphasizing the importance of data that supported their vision of a successful outcome.
The National Interagency Coordination Center has released their assessment of the wildland fire potential outlook for April through July. If it is correct, it could be a pretty quiet first part of the fire season for most of the West.
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(Note: the images above replaced one that was taken from the NICC site, where it said “issued the first business day of each month”, but it was for the first day of April, 2009, not 2010. Thanks to Ken for pointing out the error. NICC has since fixed the error.)
The National Parks Traveler has an article that assesses the wildfire potential for the National Parks for this summer.
A man in Mitchell County, North Carolina died after he tried to put out a fire that escaped from his trash burning project. The unidentified man died as firefighters arrived at the scene. Few other details about the incident, which happened on Friday, April 1, are available.
A second fatality
Fire officials still have not released the name of the individual that was found on Wednesday, March 30, dead in the middle of a 2-acre fire 15 km north of Kingston, Ontario, Canada. When firefighters first arrived at the fire, they were told by a neighbor that the owner of the property was missing.
UPDATE at 2:20 p.m. April 3:
A third fatality
Geeze–what’s going on? A third fatality of a civilian on a vegetation fire has been reported by WSB TV in Georgia:
FORSYTH COUNTY, Ga. — A body was found in a brush fire in Forsyth County Saturday, investigators said. Forsyth County Police Capt. Jason Shivers confirmed to Channel 2 that a body was found as firefighters battled a brush and structure fire near Chamblee Gap Road.
Channel 2 Action News reporter Tony Thomas said that one home was destroyed in the fire.
The Forsyth County Fire Department and the Georgia Forestry were both fighting the fire that covers 5- 8 acres.
