(Originally published at 8:55 p.m. PDT August 15, 2016. Updated at 7:46 a.m. PDT August 16 with a list of charges against him and an updated mug shot.)
A man has been arrested for starting the Clayton Fire and numerous others.
Below is an excerpt from an article in The San Francisco Chronicle:
County officials arrested a 40-year-old Clear Lake man Monday on 17 counts of arson related to numerous fires set over the last year, including the 4,000-acre Clayton Fire that has so far claimed 175 buildings and displaced hundreds of people.
Damin Anthony Pashilk
Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin and Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott announced the arrest of Damin Pashilk at a community meeting packed with evacuees at a casino doubling as a Red Cross shelter south of the blaze. Residents gasped at the announcement.
Chief Pimlott said Mr. Pashilk had been under investigation for about a year. The charges were enhanced because homes and businesses were destroyed. He has been arrested at least a dozen times before mostly for parole violations, but also on drug and weapons charges.
He was arrested at 4:30 p.m. on August 15 and booked into jail at 12:58 am. August 16. For now he has been charged with:
Arson: structure/forest land
Arson sentence enhancement
Aggravated arson with prior
The sentence enhancement is applicable if homes or businesses were destroyed.
Brian Hickey of KCRA News reports that “aggravated arson with prior” means he has been convicted of arson in the last 10 years.
Bail has been set at $5 million.
The Clayton Fire started Saturday evening and around mid-day on Sunday changed direction after the wind shifted and spread quickly into Lower Lake, California.
Weather observations at the Konocti weather station just west of Lower Lake, California, from about 8 a.m. on Sunday until 8 a.m. Monday.
The Clayton Fire that burned hundreds of structures in and near Lower Lake, California 31 air miles northeast of Santa Rosa, was rather benign Sunday morning, and some thought firefighters had a handle on it. But later in the day the wind increased and pushed it into the community, spreading much more quickly than firefighters expected or could keep up with.
We checked the weather conditions recorded at the Konocti weather station west of Lower Lake and found that the wind direction shifted by about 180 degrees at mid-day. Before noon there was a north to northeast wind at 0 to 6 mph blowing the fire away from Lower Lake. That changed very suddenly at around noon when the wind became out of the southwest and west at 12 to 14 mph with gusts of 19 to 24 mph. This pushed the fire into the community. The firefighters and other resources that were on hand were not able to keep up with the fire or protect every structure in the town.
At about the same time, the temperature went up to over 90 degrees and the relative humidity dropped from about 30 percent to around 18 percent, and may have briefly hit 8 percent.
Of all of the weather features that affect the behavior of a wildfire, a strong wind can override them all to a degree and control the direction of spread. Topography and fuels (vegetation) also help determine how a fire will spread, but if conditions are dry, wind is the ingredient that firefighters most respect.
Land managers and homeowners can control one of the three factors that determine fire behavior — fuel. It can be removed within 100 feet of structures. Large scale fuel reduction projects in the areas near communities can affect the intensity of a fire when it approaches structures, giving firefighters a chance to save them. But the other two factors, topography and weather, are out of their hands.
Weather forecast for the Clayton Fire area, Aug 15, 2016. NWS. Click to enlarge.
The weather forecast for the area of the Clayton Fire predicts clear skies for Monday, a high of 97 degrees, 14 percent relative humidity, and southeast to east winds of 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday will be about the same but with very variable winds blowing from virtually all directions during the day.
The fire is burning near the scars from three very large fires from 2015
(UPDATED at 7:35 p.m. PDT August 16, 2016)
The Clayton Fire grew by 67 acres on Monday, but it was on the northeast side near the footprint of last year’s Rocky Fire. This brings the size of the burned area up to 3,945 acres.
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(UPDATED at 8:40 p.m. PDT August 15, 2016)
CAL FIRE is now reporting that the size of the Clayton Fire at Lower Lake, California is estimated at 4,000 acres. There has been no change in the number of structures burned.
A man has been arrested for starting the Clayton Fire and numerous others. Below is an excerpt from an article in The San Francisco Chronicle:
County officials arrested a 40-year-old Clear Lake man Monday on 17 counts of arson related to numerous fires set over the last year, including the 4,000-acre Clayton Fire that has so far claimed 175 buildings and displaced hundreds of people.
Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin and Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott announced the arrest of Damin Pashilk at a community meeting packed with evacuees at a casino doubling as a Red Cross shelter south of the blaze. Residents gasped at the announcement.
“All 17 counts resulted from a very extensive investigation of numerous fire starts over the last year,” Pimlott said.
****
(UPDATED at 9:03 a.m. PDT August 15, 2016)
CAL FIRE public information officer Daniel Berlant reported at 9 a.m. on Monday that the Clayton Fire has burned approximately 175 structures.
****
(UPDATED at 7:33 a.m. PDT August 15, 2016)
The Clayton Fire burned into the community of Lower Lake, California Sunday afternoon preceded by spot fires started from the burning embers the wind threw out ahead of the blaze igniting many homes and businesses.
At 6:45 a.m. on Monday CAL FIRE estimated that “100+” structures and 3,000 acres have burned.
The fire started Saturday and had died down Sunday morning, but strong erratic winds developed that pushed the fire very rapidly to the north into Lower Lake.
The fire occurred in an area that experienced three large fires in 2015, the Valley, Rocky, and Jerusalem Fires which together burned approximately 159,000 acres.
Originally published at 8:32 p.m. PDT August 14, 2016 Updated at 10:06 p.m. PDT August 14.).
CAL FIRE reports that as of 8 p.m. on Sunday the Clayton Fire has burned 10 structures, including at least 4 residences, near Lower Lake, California, just southeast of Clearlake and 31 air miles northeast of Santa Rosa.
Based on reports from other sources, the actual number of structures destroyed is likely to rise.
After the fire started at 6 p.m. on Saturday, August 13, it burned aggressively north, crossing Morgan Valley Road and Cache Creek, impacting the communities of Lower Lake and Clearlake. St. Helena Hospital in Clearlake has been evacuated. Additional structures are threatened and mandatory evacuations are in place.
A wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service was killed Saturday August 13 while working on the Strawberry Fire near Baker, Nevada.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service confirmed that Justin Beebe, a firefighter with the Lolo Hotshots based in Missoula, Montana, succumbed to injuries suffered when he was struck by a tree. The line of duty death of the Bellows Falls, Vermont firefighter will be investigated by the Forest Service.
“This loss of life is tragic and heartbreaking,” said Park Superintendent, Steve Mietz “Please keep the family and Forest Service employees in your thoughts and prayers during this time.”
The Strawberry Fire is being managed jointly by Great Basin Incident Management Team 7, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. It is burning mostly in Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada 10 miles west of the Utah/Nevada state line. Since starting from lightning on August 8 it has burned 4,600 acres, but satellites have not detected much heat on the fire since Friday, August 12.
The yellow dots represent the location of the Strawberry Fire August 14, 2016.Strawberry Fire. Photo by Steve Mietz.
Our sincere condolences go out to Mr. Beebe’s family, friends, and coworkers.
These two recently filmed videos illustrate what can happen over a fire when thermal instability and available vorticity combine.
The Cornelius (Oregon) Fire Department posted this video on August 12, 2016 showing an impressive fire whirl.
The video below was filmed by Stewart Turner August 5, 2016 on the Pioneer Fire in Idaho. You will see a definite rotation, or convection column vortex. While this one is not as violent as, say, a conventional tornado, the change in wind direction or the collapse of the column can cause a serious problem for nearby firefighters.
The news media sometimes calls any little fire whirl a “fire tornado, or even a “firenado”. We found out today that these and related terms (except for “firenado”) were, if not founded, at least documented and defined in 1978 by a researcher for the National Weather Service in Missoula, David W. Goens. He grouped fire whirls into four classes:
Fire Devils. They are a natural part of fire turbulence with little influence on fire behavior or spread. They are usually on the order of 3 to 33 feet in diameter and have rotational velocities less than 22 MPH.
Fire Whirls. A meld of the fire, topograph, and meteorological factors. These play a significant role in fire spread and hazard to control personnel. The average size of this class is usually 33 to 100 feet, with rotational velocities of 22 to 67 MPH.
Fire Tornadoes. These systems begin to dominate the large scale fire dynamics. They lead to extreme hazard and control problems. In size, they average 100 to 1,000 feet in diameter and have rotational velocities up to 90 MPH.
Fire Storm. Fire behavior is extremely violent. Diameters have been observed to be from 1,000 to 10,000 feet and winds estimated in excess of 110 MPH. This is a rare phenomenon and hopefully one that is so unlikely in the forest environment that it can be disregarded.
Mr. Goens further described three different types of fire whirls generated:
The Thermally Driven Form. This results from some type of shear in the horizontal airflow coupled with the energy release (convection) from fire activity.
The Convection Column Vortex. This form is poorly understood. It originates high in the convection column (up to 1000 feet) and extends in the ground as much as a fourth (1/4) mile on the leeward side of the fire.
The Wake-Type Whirl. This results from the generation of eddies caused by airflow around an obstacle coupled with heat released by the fire.
Mr. Gowns continued:
All three of these types can be a significant problem in the spread or control of fire. The fire whirl in its steady-state form, i.e., after it has formed and before it begins to collapse, has two sharply defined regions of differing airflow (Byron and Martin 1970). The cooler, slowly rotating zone surrounds a central core of hot gases with high horizontal and vertical velocities. This central core can have temperatures from 1,800° to 2,400°F and burning rates two to seven times normal. Flame height can be 10 to 50 times the core diameter. Fire spread occurs when burning debris entrained into the column just above the surface boundary layer is carried aloft and then cast out from the upper portion of the whirl core some time later. The path of the whirl can be quite erratic; therefore, direction and rate of spread are almost impossible to forecast.
One of the best videos of a large fire whirl or fire tornado was shot by Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television in 2012 while he was scouting locations near Curtin Springs station in Australia. It is used here with his permission.
And lastly, I filmed this next video at the USFS Fire Lab in Missoula in 2014, showing an artificially created fire whirl.
Often on a wildfire we see members of the community displaying signs thanking the firefighters. It is less common to see an organized effort that goes in the other direction — firefighters thanking the community.
On the Roaring Lion Fire southwest of Hamilton, Montana five people representing the first responders and firefighters appeared in a video expressing their appreciation for the support they received from the community.
In the video you’ll see:
Hamilton Fire Chief Brad Mohn
Ravalli County Sheriff Chris Hoffman
Northern Rockies Incident Management Team Incident Commander Greg Poncin
