Distribution of smoke from wildfires, September 10, 2016. NOAA.
The National Weather Service has posted Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and South Dakota for today.
The Red Flag map was current as of 9:45 a.m. MDT on Saturday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts and maps. For the most current data visit this NWS site. However, that site has not been properly displaying warning areas in recent days. This one may work better.
Sully, the movie about the Miracle on the Hudson that opened today has so far received pretty good reviews. As you may know, it is about the aircraft that struck a flock of geese at 3,200 feet about 100 seconds after taking off from La Guardia airport near New York City.
Captain Chesley Sullenberger. Photo by Ingrid Taylar.
Chesley B. Sullenberger III was the pilot in command. After both engines went silent he said to his First Officer whose turn it was to take off on that flight, “My aircraft”.
Captain Sullenberger, now often called “Sully”, was selected for a cadet glider program while attending the Air Force Academy. By the end of that year he was an instructor pilot. When he graduated in 1973 he received the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship award, as the class “top flyer”. He went on to fly F-4 Phantoms in the Air Force and served as a member of an aircraft accident investigation board in the Air Force. After he became a commercial pilot for US Airways he occasionally assisted the NTSB on accident investigations and taught courses on Crew Resource Management.
When the geese hit the engines January 15, 2009, Sully felt the impact, but more disturbing was the the sensation after the engines quit of slightly moving forward in his harness as the aircraft suddenly went from accelerating to slowing — at low altitude over New York City when they were supposed to be climbing.
US Airways did not have a checklist for the loss of both engines in an Airbus A320 at low altitude. The First Officer, Jeffery Skiles, went through the checklist for restarting the engines, but of course had no success. Sully evaluated their options — returning to La Guardia, diverting to Teterboro airport, or the third choice, a water landing in the Hudson River. Based on his experience, and drawing on his background as a glider pilot, he determined that it was impossible to make it to either airport. He lowered the nose and headed toward the river.
Passing 900 feet above the George Washington Bridge he pointed the aircraft so it would come to rest near a boat he spotted, thinking that it could help pull the passengers out of the very cold water on that winter day. Working with his First Officer, they made the only non-fatal water landing of a large commercial aircraft in recent history.
US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Photo by Greg L.
As the 150 passengers and four other crew members climbed out onto the wings and waited for rescue by ferry boats, Sully walked through the passenger compartment as it took on water to make sure everyone was off, then grabbed the maintenance log book and was the last one to exit the aircraft.
In a recent interview Katie Couric conducted with Sully director Clint Eastwood and actors Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart, she recalled something Sully, who at the time had 19,663 flight hours, told her not long after the successful water landing:
For 42 years I’ve been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. On January 15 the balance was sufficient so I could make a very large withdrawal.
In the last few decades wildland firefighters have used another name for the “bank of experience”, their “slide file” — memories of the situations they have been in over the course of their careers, good experiences and bad ones, all of which left data from which they can extrapolate solutions to new situations.
There is of course no substitute for an account balance in a bank of experience or a slide file. You can acquire incremental bits of it from books and training. But you can’t write a check and easily transfer it to someone else, not entirely, anyway. It has to be earned and learned, organically.
And here’s hoping you don’t have to “make a very large withdrawal”, on the ground or in the air.
This is the forecast for the distribution of wildfire smoke at 6 p.m. MDT, September 8, 2016. It includes quite a bit of fire activity in the southeast U.S.
At least five very large fires are currently active in the United States:
Gap in northern California,
Pioneer in central Idaho,
Maple in Yellowstone National Park,
Soberanes on the central coast of California, and,
Beaver Creek in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming.
Below we have progression maps of these fires (in that order).
We recently found out about a new website that has developed a very impressive mapping service for wildfires. It was the source of these maps. The site not only shows the locations, but in some cases for large fires it displays the perimeters — which can be animated to see the growth or progression of the fire over time. They have this information going back to 2003. It is on the EcoWest website and was created by a collaboration of the Sea to Snow company and the Bill Lance Center for the American West at Stanford University.
The perimeter data is dependent on what is made available by the agencies managing the fire, so there is not always a perimeter for every day.
You can minimize the Description box by clicking the down arrow at the top-right of the box.
(Update Sept. 22, 2020: the data from EcoWest previously posted below is no longer available.)
This is a rather surprising 2-minute video about attributing wildfires to climate change. It was produced by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Above: Trabuco Fire, September 6, 2016. Orange County Fire Authority photo.
Investigators with the Orange County Fire Authority have determined that the September 6, 2016 Trabuco Fire started from sparks created when a golf club struck a rock. The fire burned about 20 acres adjacent to the Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club (map) in Mission Viejo in Orange County, California.
From the Orange County Register:
“The golfer had hit the ball into the rough,” Orange County Fire Authority Capt. Larry Kurtz said. “As he was trying to get it out he accidentally hit a rock and it started a fire.”
Kurtz said the golfer was cooperative and tried to put out the sparks but the flames grew fast and “got out of control.”
This is not the first time this has happened. It is at least the third time in Orange County and the second time at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club.
In June, 2011 at the Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club Steve Parsons used a titanium-clad 3-iron to punch his ball out of the rough. The club struck an unexposed rock and seconds later he looked down to see that he was standing in a ring of fire. Mr. Parsons and his golfing partner called 911 and tried putting it out with ice from a cooler and an open beverage, but had no success. Thankfully the fire burned up to a cart path and went out.
A fire investigator determined that a golf club striking a rock was one of the possible causes for the Poinsettia Fire that burned five homes, 18 apartment units, one commercial building, and 600 acres on May 14, 2014 in Carlsbad, California. The fire started near a cart path on the 7th hole on the Omni La Costa Resort and Spa’s golf course.
In 2014 researchers at the University of California at Irvine studied how golf clubs can cause vegetation fires after two fires in Orange County where golf clubs were suspected as the culprit. Below are excerpts from their report:
Titanium alloy golf clubs can cause dangerous wildfires, according to UC Irvine scientists. When a club coated with the lightweight metal is swung and strikes a rock, it creates sparks that can heat to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to ignite dry foliage, according to findings published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Fire and Materials.
The researchers painstakingly re-created in the lab course conditions on the days of the fires. Using high-speed video cameras and powerful scanning electron microscope analysis, they found that when titanium clubs were abraded by striking or grazing hard surfaces, intensely hot sparks flew out of them. In contrast, when standard stainless steel clubs were used, there was no reaction.
“Rocks are often embedded in the ground in these rough areas of dry foliage,” Earthman noted. “When the club strikes a ball, nearby rocks can tear particles of titanium from the sole of the head. Bits of the particle surfaces will react violently with oxygen or nitrogen in the air, and a tremendous amount of heat is produced. The foliage ignites in flames.”
