News and opinion about wildland fire
Or… you could have a job like this:
This is one of the photographs by Edward Burtynsky, part of the Earth, Art of a Changing World exhibit at the Royal Academy in the UK. It shows a chicken processing plant in China where identically-clad workers robotically sort pieces of chicken for human consumption.
For some of us the debate about whether to use the 10-code or “clear text” for radio communication ended in the mid-1970s when the Incident Command System (ICS) was introduced in southern California. In 2003 the ICS morphed into the National Incident Management System (NIMS) with the signing of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 5 which mandated all federal, state, and local agencies to use NIMS (which is based on the ICS) to manage emergencies beginning in 2005 if they were to continue to receive federal funding for “grants, contracts, or other activities”.
The ICS and NIMS require that “clear text” be used instead of number codes which are not standardized across jurisdictions. Here is an excerpt from IS-100, the Introduction to the Incident Command System:
Use of Plain English:
- Communications should be in plain English or clear text.
- Do not use radio codes, agency-specific codes, or jargon.
and:
But many agencies, especially those involved in law enforcement, are still using codes for routine and emergency communication. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Ventura County Star in California:
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If federal Homeland Security officials have their way, the next time a police officer arrives on scene, he’ll simply radio back “I’m here” rather than saying “10-97.”
Police have long used “10-codes” to communicate with each other and dispatchers. The codes were developed in the 1930s, when radio channels were scarce. They allowed police to succinctly relay information through a four-digit number rather than clog the airwaves with wordy descriptions.
But problems developed over time. For starters, there is no universal code. To one agency, a “10-50” might mean “officer down,” while to another it stands for a routine traffic stop.
The problem became especially evident during big emergencies, such as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., where police and fire agencies from across the nation rushed to help.
“When they got there, many of them were unable to communicate with each other effectively,” said Chris Essid, director of the Office of Emergency Communications for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Many agencies faced the same problem four years later when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Essid said.
Federal officials now require that officers use “plain language” when responding to a crisis involving multiple agencies.
“Very often, it doesn’t take anymore time to just say it in English,” Essid said.
Federal officials are also urging departments to replace their jumble of codes with “plain language” in their day-to-day operations.
Essid and others point to a 2005 incident in Missouri in which a local police officer radioed late one night to his dispatcher that he had just seen a state highway patrol officer’s car with a door open stopped along a highway. The officer said he was going to go back to make sure the patrolman was OK.
It turns out the Missouri Highway Patrol officer was lying in a ditch, barely alive, having been shot eight times with a rifle. The local police dispatcher decided to use plain English in sending out a call for help.
Had she said “10-33,” her department’s code for “officer down,” it would have meant something very different to the Missouri Highway Patrol: “traffic backup.” Instead, every state trooper within miles responded, and the officer lived.
In many cases, “being able to communicate quickly and effectively can mean the difference between life and death,” Essid said.
It is not even summer yet in Australia, but record heat and a drought are bringing an early start to the bushfire season down under.
We received an email from an Australian newspaper photographer who said:
Hi , things are pretty dangerous for the state of NSW in Australia this summer , we have had the hottest November and August on record. I work as a photographer for a newspaper in Sydney and specialise in bushfires and I have never seen such a dangerous preseason.
Here are some links to some articles about the fire situation from November 23.
(updated @ 12:12 p.m. MT, Dec. 1)
The U. S. Forest Service, apparently in response to criticism from the Los Angeles County Fire Department and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, is again considering using water-dropping helicopters at night.
The USFS experimented with night flying in the 1970s, but abandoned it after a helicopter collision and since then has said it is too dangerous to fly helicopters 30 minutes after sunset.
The Associated Press reports that USFS Fire and Aviation Management Director Tom Harbor said:
“We are in the process . . . of one more time taking a look at night-flying operations. But we will have to make sure that those operations, before we change our policy, are worth the benefits.”
In a report they issued on November 18, the LA County Fire Department criticized the USFS for not using helicopters at night during the early stages of the August-September 160,000-acre Station Fire near Los Angeles that killed two LA County firefighters.
In 1977 two night flying helicopters collided, one operated by the USFS and the other by the Los Angeles County Fire Department. The helicopters were preparing to land at a water reloading point. Both pilots were wearing night-vision goggles. One of the pilots was killed, and the other sustained serious injuries.
After that collision, some pilots abandoned night-vision goggles for a while, or wore them only during certain phases of the mission. The goggles produce “tunnel vision”, providing a narrow field of view and very little peripheral vision. If a fire has a significant amount of flames, enough light is sometimes available in the active fire area that night-vision goggles are not necessary to actually make the water drop, but may be required flying to and from the drop area.
Several fire agencies in southern California currently use helicopters to suppress fires at night, including Los Angeles County, San Diego County, and Kern County. San Bernardino County operates helicopters at night for law enforcement operations, but the last we heard, they did not use them on fires at night. Orange County recently bought $25 million worth of specially equipped helicopters so they could operate at night, but a dispute with their union has kept their ships grounded after dark.
One of the modifications that must be made to a helicopter in order to be used with night-vision goggles is to enable the instrument panel lights to be adjusted to a very low level, because the goggles magnify all light by hundreds of thousands of times. Normal panel lights would overwhelm the goggles.
The Hepburn Wildlife Shelter in central Victoria, Australia is beginning construction this week on a large concrete bunker that could be used to shelter their animals if the facility is threatened by a bushfire. The bunker, four meters wide by nine meters long, will be built into a slope and will include separate areas for wombats, birds, kangaroos, possums, koalas, alpacas, and emus.
The Hepburn Wildlife Shelter is surrounded by the Hepburn Regional Park and the operators are aware that they would not be able to evacuate the 60 to 100 animals normally housed at the facility in the event of a threatening bushfire.
The Shelter is raising funds for the $10,000 bunker by selling used items in a mobile “junk stall” and by selling Christmas cards.
This is the first time Wildfire Today has heard of a wildfire shelter specifically built for animals.
Two recent newspaper articles on two different continents discuss the role of wildfire and how it may be connected in various ways to climate change, by reducing or worsening it.
The article in the New York Times covers the health of forests and how big, healthy trees soak up and store carbon dioxide, and how important it is to prevent fires which emit carbon into the atmosphere.
Conversely, an Australian organization, West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (WALFA), is promoting prescribed fire as a tool to prevent bushfires or wildfires which would emit more carbon into the atmosphere than the much smaller prescribed fires. Their “indigenous fire management technique” has led to a landmark greenhouse gas offset agreement between a giant oil company, ConocoPhillips, and the indigenous peoples in west Arnhem Land in Australia. They expect the project to produce at least 1 million tons worth of carbon credits annually while creating 200 new jobs. WALFA members will attend the climate change talks in Copenhagen to propose that similar projects be adopted in the savannas of Africa, where the potential for carbon reduction is huge.
