Hells Canyon Fire in foreground, Raft Fire in the distance. Photo by Keith Lannon.
Firefighters are beginning to get a handle on one of the two fires burning 70 miles northwest of Boise, Idaho. The Raft and Hells Canyon fires are three miles from each other on the east side of Brownlee Reservoir.
The Hells Canyon Fire only grew by 10 acres Saturday, bringing the total to 9,373 acres. It is 85% contained. The Raft has burned 12,000 acres, is only 8% contained, and is actively burning within Benton Creek on the Payette National Forest.
A Type 2 Incident Management team with Mike Whalen as the Incident Commander will assume command of the fires Sunday. They will be managed as the Weiser Complex.
Hells Canyon Fire August 29, 2013. InciWeb photo.Raft Fire burning in Benton Creek August 31, 2013. InciWeb photo.
Rim Fire becomes fourth largest in California history
Yosemite Valley’s Half Dome, normally seen in this view, was obscured by smoke at 8:36 a.m. September 1, 2013
Our main article about the Rim Fire is updated daily but here are a few recent facts about the fire. On Saturday it continued to grow, adding another 3,000 acres to become at 222,77 acres the fourth largest fire in California history. Winds that shifted to come out of the west over the last two days have blown smoke into downtown Yosemite National Park, into the heavily visited Yosemite Valley. Compare these two photos of the valley; the one above was taken Sunday morning by a web cam, and the photo below we took on a day when the air was much cleaner. The fire is still eight to ten miles away from Yosemite Valley.
Yosemite Valley January, 1997, a few days after a flood caused major damage to National Park Service facilities in the valley. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
The 5,115 personnel assigned to the fire are fighting it by constructing direct fireline along the fire’s edge, and by indirect methods including burning out the fuel ahead of the fire. The smoke has limited the use of air tankers and helicopters for the last two days.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the fire may have been caused by activities at an illegal marijuana farm.
“We don’t know the exact cause,” Todd McNeal, fire chief in Twain Harte, a town that has been in the path of the flames, said on Friday. But he told a community meeting that it was “highly suspect that there might have been some sort of illicit grove, a marijuana-grow-type thing.”
“We know it’s human caused. There was no lightning in the area,” he said.
LA Times article about the Rim Fire
Julie Cart, who with Bettina Boxall wrote a series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles in 2008 about wildfires for the Los Angeles Times, has a new article about the Rim Fire. She mentions how firefighting policy differs between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, but greatly over-simplifies to the point of distortion the concept of “fire use” fires which are not aggressively and immediately suppressed.
Reuters: how budgets affect fires
Reuters has an article about how federal budgets may be contributing to the occurrence of larger fires by reducing the number of fuel treatment projects and prescribed fires. They have a quote from Jonathan B. Jarvis, the Director of the National Park Service:
Part of the problem, experts and many fire officials say, is that funding has been low for the controlled burns and forest-thinning work that makes it harder for a wildfire to spread.
“We’ve got to invest up front in terms of controlling and managing these fires,” said Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service from his smoke-filled post in Yosemite National Park. “Just waiting for the big fire and then throwing everything you’ve got at it makes no sense.”
In recent years, Jarvis said, the trend has been to shift money from fire prevention to firefighting.
Montana Supreme Court will decide case about firefighting strategy
The Montana Supreme Court will make a decision by November that could have an effect on how firefighters select a strategy for suppressing a fire. A Montana rancher who said firefighters’ backfires ruined his ranch won a suit against the state of Montana in 2012 which is being appealed to the Supreme Court. A jury awarded Fred and Joan Weaver $730,000 in a trial over the strategy and tactics that were used on the Ryan Gulch fire in 2000 – $150,000 was for the loss of timber, $200,000 for rehabilitation of pasture land, and the balance was for the mental suffering and anguish of seeing their ranch threatened by the fire. About 900 acres of the Weaver’s land burned during the fire.
The heart of the Weavers’ case was their contention that firefighters who usually fought fire in the flat, wet southeast United States used poor judgement in selecting and implementing an indirect strategy of backfiring, rather than constructing direct fireline on the edge of the fire. In the process, they argued, more land burned than was necessary, including 900 acres of their ranch.
Prescott’s Granite Mountain Hotshot crew nearly paid for itself
When the Granite Mountain Hotshots worked on federal fires the terms were established by their contract or agreement with the U.S. Forest Service. The Prescott Fire Department paid the personnel on the crew around $12 an hour according to The Daily Courier, but the department was reimbursed by the federal government at the rate of $39.50 an hour. Below is an excerpt from the article:
In fiscal year 2012, the city estimated that the crew brought in $1,375,191, and had $1,437,444 in operating expenses – for a difference of $62,253.
On June 30 of this year 19 members of the crew were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire near Prescott, Arizona. A controversy is brewing in Prescott and the state of Arizona about the differences in compensation for the survivors of the seasonal and permanent firefighters on the crew.
It is not unusual for firefighting resources that are contracted to the federal government through local fire departments to be compensated at rates far higher than those at which federal firefighters are paid.
This video includes time lapse views from Yosemite National Park of the Rim Fire, which has burned 201,894 acres. If you’re at work, turn down the volume on your speakers — the music at the beginning is especially loud and annoying.
The video was compiled by Yosemite National Park. They describe it like this:
The first part of this video is from the Crane Flat Helibase. The fire is currently burning in wilderness and is not immediately threatening visitors or employees. The second half of the video is from Glacier Point, showing Yosemite Valley, and how little the smoke from the fire has impacted the Valley.
Firefighters at Pilot Peak on the Rim Fire, August 26, 2013. Photo by Mike McMillan.
Today on the NOW with Alex Wagner show there was a 10-minute discussion by a five-person panel about the current state of wildfires, how climate change affects wildfires, funding for fire management, and the risk of firefighters while protecting houses. We don’t get involved in politics here on Wildfire Today unless it directly affects fire management. But, even though the host mentions a particular political party once or twice, we believe this video has value here since it is the most in-depth nationally broadcast discussion about wildfires that we have seen.
Unfortunately the scientist who was asked to explain why we are “seeing violent, dangerous wildfires at what would seem to be historic rates”, was from NASA and his expertise appeared to be remote sensing, rather than wildfires or fire behavior.
We encourage you to comment on the video, but any that are strictly political and bash individual politicians or either party will be quickly deleted.
After the 10-second ad plays, you can click on Options/Full Screen to fill your screen with the video.
Wildfire Today has written previously about the Veterans Fire Corps which is training and employing military veterans in several western states. The Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota has also been participating in the program for the last two years and they sent us this information about their program.
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2013 Veteran Fire Corps team, Black Hills National Forest. L to R: Alleyn Friedrich – Project Leader, Juan Rangel, Bryan Hardgrove, David Herbert, Preston Keough. USFS photo.
“Black Hills National Forest Hosts Veterans Fire Corps
Custer, SD – For the past two summers, the Black Hills National Forest has had veterans working side by side with firefighters and other forest employees as part of the Veterans Fire Corps program.
This summer, both Mystic and Hell Canyon Ranger Districts hosted these veteran teams. Each team has a project leader and 5 members.
This unique program, specifically for men and women who have served in the armed forces, is designed to prepare veterans for positions as wildland firefighters. The program is geared toward training veterans to protect public lands from the threat of wildfire. The program is operated as a partnership with the Student Conservation Association.
Tim Gurnett, from Omaha, Neb. is a Project Leader for the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado. He worked as a Project Leader on Hell Canyon Ranger District on the Black Hills National Forest last summer. Gurnett served in the Navy for five years and is now a member of the Naval Reserve. He is in his third year with the program and likes everything about it. “It is refreshing to be with people that have similar experiences and similar issues,” said Gurnett. “I love this kind of work and it is good to be around fellow veterans. It is good to talk together and work together and gives us something to be proud of again.” Gurnett is a senior at the University of Nebraska and is working on a double major in Environmental Studies and Criminal Justice. He hopes to land a Law Enforcement position with a land management agency such as the U.S. Forest Service. Continue reading “Veterans train to be firefighters in the Black Hills”
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Risk Management Committee compiled a list of the fatalities, entrapments, burn-overs and other life-threatening accidents and injuries associated with wildfires in the United States in calendar year 2012.
