An engine that was working on a prescribed fire near Covelo, California was burned over and appears to be destroyed.
Below is the summary from a “Green Sheet” report released by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
On October 22, 2018, a CAL FIRE fire engine staffed with one Fire Apparatus Engineer and two firefighters were participating in a Vegetation Management Program (VMP) hazardous fuel reduction burn near Covelo, CA. While the crew was away from the engine assisting with containment of several spot fires, the parked, unattended engine was impacted by spot fires burning outside of containment lines, and sustained major damage. No personnel were injured during the incident.
Engine burnover on prescribed fire near Covelo, California October 22, 2018.
The Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas fire storm of March, 2017
Wildfires that started March 6, 2017 in the Southern Great Plains burned about 1.8 million acres — 781,000 in Oklahoma, 608,000 in Kansas, and 482,000 in the Texas Panhandle. Residents whose families had lived there for generations said they had never seen anything like it. There was much more fire than there were firefighters to handle it.
Ian Frazier, a writer for the New Yorker who spent time in the area in recent months talking with many of the locals, has published a fascinating, gripping account of how the residents and firefighters dealt with the rapidly spreading, wind-driven blazes.
A satellite photo of smoke from the fires in Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas on March 7, 2018. The red dots represent heat detected by sensors on the satellite. NASA photo.
Attacking the flanks or head of the fires was not an option. They were moving too fast, so protecting structures and saving lives was their only choice.
The article is extremely well written. It tells not only the firefighting story, but also the immediate and long-lasting effects on everyone else in the area. If you appreciate great writing, and especially great writing about wildland fire, read it — and thank me later.
Below is a brief excerpt:
…Still the fire came on. Burning tumbleweeds flew forty feet above the ground, and the red cedars in the hollows roared as their resinous boughs ignited like kerosene. The wind swept up the dry grass until the air itself was on fire. Ashland’s firefighters had never seen a blaze that could not be outflanked and subdued. “But what could you do against this monster?” Millie [Fudge, Clark County’s head of emergency-management operations], asked. Like the Englewood firemen, Ashland’s tried to save structures and people. In outlying areas, they hosed houses with a flame-retardant foam. Some houses could not be saved. Here on the prairie, fires are fought from trucks, not on foot. Bumping over rough ground, the trucks threw the firemen around, banging them up and bruising them as burning sparks went down their necks. Several times, the fire’s front line jumped over the trucks, and the firemen kept from burning by spraying a mist around themselves.
Firefighters from the National Park Service and the US Fish and Wildlife Service conducted prescribed fires last week on two units of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas.
The treatments with fire maintain the ecological integrity, promote forage for cattle, and sustain the cultural history of the preserve.
Prescribed fire at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. NPS photo.Prescribed fire at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. NPS photo.
The incident occurred on the North Eden Fire which burned in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. No firefighters were injured.
Two engines burned on the North Eden Fire, August 16, 2018. Photo Credit: Brandon Everett, August 17, 2018.
A report has been released for an incident that occurred August 16, 2018 on the North Eden Fire. Two fire engines were burned over and destroyed but thankfully no one was injured. The fire eventually burned more than 13,000 acres in three states, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming.
While a 5-ton 6X6 former military cargo truck converted for use as a fire engine was making a mobile attack on the fire, the driver, the only person in the vehicle, was operating a nozzle out of his window. The truck was in the green unburned area suppressing the active fire edge when the Low Air Warning System activated and it suddenly came to a stop. The driver was not able to move the vehicle. He got out, looked at the fire, then went back to retrieve his fire shelter. The truck would still pump water and he used a nozzle to wet the area around the immobile vehicle. Another engine, with the Fire Warden and a Fire Chief, came over to help and also sprayed water, but the fire closed in quickly
From the report:
…The Fire Warden used Heavy Brush 13 as a shield and sprayed down the 20-foot flames as the Fire Chief and Engine Operator ran to the black. The Fire Chief looked back and saw the Fire Warden “on his knees spraying into a wall of fire.”
Instincts and training kicked in. The Fire Warden recalls “I pulled them to the front of my truck, dropped the nozzle and told them to get into the black.” The Fire Warden then dropped the hose and also retreated into the black. He went approximately 15 feet where he joined the Fire Chief and Engine Operator. Flames were shooting out of the window of both trucks.
Within seconds, the tires of the trucks began exploding. From the time the Heavy Brush 13 was first reported down until the two trucks were engulfed in fire was a total of approximately three minutes.
There were no injuries.
One hour after burn over at 2:51 p.m.. This photo from the report shows the fuels and topography. Photo Credit: David Stacey, Woodruff Fire Department.
The report does not conclude exactly what caused the engine to become immobile, but pointed out that the 5-ton M928A2 has an air compressor that feeds three separate air tanks and components for the 6-wheel drive, as well as the parking and braking systems. Air brake systems require compressed air to work. If a loss of air occurs, the brakes will engage and the truck cannot be moved.
When received from the military the M928A2 has poly air lines which can be vulnerable to getting snagged and broken by brush, or melted by extreme heat from a nearby fire. Owners and operators using these on wildfires are advised to shield the lines with heat-resistant materials, relocate the lines, or replace them with more durable braided lines.
Researchers studying how wildfires have burned at a particular location found that subsequent fires have a “memory” that helped to self-regulate fire sizes and fire severity. When historical fires burned unabated, landscape patterns of surface and canopy fuels developed that provided barriers to future fire spread. Those same barriers can continue to influence the spread of additional fires.
Here are some additional highlights from their findings:
The Reburn Project was motivated by a need to better understand wildfires as fuel reduction treatments and to assess the impacts of decades of wildland fire suppression activities on forested landscapes. The study examined three areas, located in the inland Pacific Northwest, central Idaho and interior British Columbia. Each area had experienced a recent large wildfire event in montane forests.
Reburn Highlights
Past wildfires generally mitigate burn severity for a time, even under extreme fire weather conditions that are associated with large fires.
Since around 1900-1934, fire suppression and not wildfire has been a primary influence on forest and fuel succession. Quantifying the effects of fire suppression on particular landscapes is difficult given the long history and its prevalence across the region. Results from simulation modeling have the potential to illustrate in compelling ways the combined effects of removing fires from landscapes that experienced variable fire severity and spatial extent.
The researchers developed a state-transition model that allowed them to simulate the growth and potential severity 20th century ignitions that were suppressed. Fire growth simulations were modeled using the daily meteorology available at the time of the ignitions and the FSPro model. The researchers found that the simulated landscapes were reburn landscapes; i.e., the complexity of forest seral stage conditions and fuelbeds was an emergent property of successive reburning over the centuries, and fuel succession explained most of the severity patterns observed.
Modern-day fire suppression scenarios led to “boom and bust” landscapes, where continuous mature forests developed, that were capable of supporting large fire spread, and were eventually burned with mostly high severity. However, using a variety of historical landscape conditions as an initial basis, in scenarios where most or all fires were allowed to burn, fine- to meso-grained patchworks resulted, and they provided a highly diverse range of habitats and values over time, and landscapes were much less susceptible to large, high severity events. Instead, more typical fire size distributions and more characteristic variation in fire severity were restored.
