A heat map of the West Antelope fire, captured at 4:12 a.m on Saturday, July 23, 2016, two days after the fire’s start.
Since Friday, Salt Lake City residents have been watching smoke billowing from Antelope Island, where a wildfire grew exponentially overnight.
Lightning is believed to be cause of the fire, which ignited Thursday night in the Utah State Park northwest of Salt Lake City. The fire grew from a few hundred acres on Friday to around 8,000 acres by Saturday morning, said Shayne Ward, a public information officer.
“That’s coming from some of the resources on the ground,” Ward said of the estimated size. An aircraft has yet to fly over the fire to take a more exact reading of its size, Ward said on Saturday.
Meanwhile, several Bureau of Land Management Engines, a dozer, a helicopter and two Single Engine Airtankers are helping crews contain the blaze. Officials have requested a larger airtanker, which is on its way, Ward said.
Fire and smoke were visible from Salt Lake City on Friday night.
Officials from the Utah Department of Natural Resources posted on Twitter to warn area residents to keep their drones out of the skies while firefighting aircraft headed to Antelope Island.
On a state-run website, utahfireinfo.gov, officials listed seven active wildfires in the state.
Check back on wildfiretoday.com for more updates on this fire.
The National Weather Service has posted Red Flag Warnings for areas in Southern California, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota.
The maps were current as of 10:36 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.
Above: Aravaipa crew superintendent Greg Smith, center in black shirt, briefs the crew on the thinning project in the Garden Canyon area of Fort Huachuca.
The photos and article are by Tom Story
Greg Smith has had more preparation than usual to get his crew ready for the upcoming fire season. He is starting the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Aravaipa hand crew from scratch and the task is almost complete.
Greg Smith, superintendent of the Ariavaipa Hand Crew.
“This is unique. I know the overhead, most of the overhead, but we know nothing about any of the seasonals, except on paper”, said Mr. Smith. “We are trying to do a veterans crew and right now the numbers are 75 percent vets”.
“The reason that the numbers aren’t higher”, Mr. Smith continued, “is because there aren’t a whole lot of vets with the experience at those higher GS levels; the captain and squad boss positions. All the old vets have moved on into higher up positions or got away from the fire service in general. So now we’re getting a new group of entry-level folks”.
“I was able to pick up a few non-vets with extensive experience: three or four years on a shot crew, which brings a lot to the table where you are starting a new crew” said Mr. Smith who had learned earlier that “strong overhead is key”.
The crew’s overhead positions are all Jackson Hotshot alumni. Mr. Smith brought with him to Sierra Vista both his assistants, Wade Irish and Ryan Hagenah, one of the squad bosses, Anthony Ashalintubbi, and a former squad boss, Daric Burrwith.
Arturo de Leon cuts and Shane O’Farrell swamps as the Ariavaipa crew thins vegetation near a recreation site in the Garden Canyon area of Fort Huachca.
“I think we have a pretty good blend. At least seventy-five percent of the crew have some fire experience. Some of the vets came from the vet program. I picked up quite a few of those folks”, continued Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith started his wildfire career in Arizona with the Coconino National Forest’s Flagstaff Hotshots in 1993 after serving in the Navy. Two years later he moved to the Globe Hotshots on the Tonto National Forest where he spent the next thirteen years, eventually becoming the crew’s superintendent in 2001.
In late 2007, he moved to the Northwest Fire District, outside of Tucson, AZ to help convert Northwest’s highly regarded Type Two Initial Attack crew into a Type One crew. They achieved Type One status in October of 2009, becoming the Ironwood Hotshots. Mr. Smith ran the crew until the Fire District disbanded the crew in 2014. He then joined the BLM and moved to Mississippi to become superintendent of the Jackson Hotshots.
Squad Boss Anthony Ashalintubbi (center) coaches Aravaipa crew members Zach Wolf (left) and Sean O’Malley on safe chainsaw handling while limbing of trees on the ground.
According to BLM State Fire Management Officer Kelly Castillo, in 2015 the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) approached the Arizona State office of the Bureau of Land Management about hosting Mississippi’s Jackson Hotshots early in the fire season. “We said yes, but hotshot crews are expensive”, said Mr. Castillo “and being frugal we asked the Gila District folks to find a housing solution”. The district contacted Brad Nicholson, Chief of the Fort Huachuca Fire Department, with the idea of hosting the crew on the Army base adjacent Sierra Vista, Arizona. Chief Nicholson was very enthusiastic about the idea and worked with the base commander to allow the crew to use some available dormitory space. After the BLM and the Army drafted a formal use agreement the Jackson Hotshots completed a successful multi-week tour of southern Arizona in 2015.
“The idea of starting a crew in southern Arizona grew out of bringing Jackson down early in the 2015 season” continued Mr. Castillo, “and since the BLM has a history of having veterans crews, it made good business sense to base them at the Fort”. Besides having the crew be all veterans, the other goal was to have them attain Type One (hotshot) status within three years.
Cory Hall (left) and Ben Evans work on one of the new saws.
“NIFC allocated the funding for the crew start up and for the remodel of an unused motor pool facility on base” said Mr. Castillo “as well as an increase in annual preparedness funding”.
Mr. Castillo also indicated that the presence of the Aravaipa crew at Ft. Huachuca will serve as a recruiting tool for those in the military looking for opportunities following their military service.
The crew is expected to become available for fire assignments around April 25th.
A University of California Riverside study shows biomass grown in areas of poor air quality releases more pollutants when burned than biomass grown in clean air.
Fire in the Lake San Antonio area of Monterey County, California, August, 2009. Photo by Vern Fisher.
The following article was contributed by Frank Carroll.
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Only You…
For the United States Forest Service and the other major federal, state and local wildland fire agencies, the music is playing the band. It worked OK for the Grateful Dead. It’s a different story when it comes to developing and conducting wildland fire policy.
It may surprise no one to discover that wildland fires are bigger, more costly, more damaging, and more out of control than in any decade before the present, all the way back to 1910. There was so much large fire on the ground in the 2015 fire season we ran out of superlatives to describe how big and bad they were. In many cases the fires burned together forming “charismatic megafires” of untold destruction, sometimes because we had no choice.
Author Stephen Pyne, in an often brutally honest book about where we’ve been and where we’re headed with fire management in America, observes that fire is managing us; we’re not managing fire (Between Two Fires 2015).
What began in the late 1960s as a scarcely heard warning siren that wildfire should be left to its own devices on certain wild lands (prescribed natural fire or “let burn” fires pioneered by the National Park Service) became, by 2000, a five alarm screaming wail heard round the world. Our best laid plans have come to naught. We are caught in a blizzard of falling ash, awash in a river of flying embers, and blinded by the smoke. It is clear that no human power will stop the rising tide of flames in wildlands and Red Zone suburbs where 10 percent of our homes are, no matter what the cost.
How we got here is a tale worth reading. Where we’re headed is into the fog of war, but not without guideposts and markers. Based on the very sound idea that fire should play a natural role in natural resource management, agencies and scientists spent the past 50 years trying to work out how to get it done. And they had help. The Nature Conservancy can field its own firefighters and burn its own ground. Environmentalists looked for ways to burn without having to pay for the work of preparing and herding fires, and without the expertise to help. Their grand experiment in the theology/ecology of hope over the last 50 years accelerated the fuels problem. The fuels situation is also exacerbated in places where logging results in activity fuels with resulting backlogs needing treatment and feeding wildfires.
The National Weather Service has issued Red Flag Warnings for Montana and Wyoming.
The map was current as of 9 a.m. MDT on Wednesday. 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 or this NWS site.
Smoke severity has dissipated greatly from the Pacific Northwest fires, although some “unhealthy” air quality advisories remain in place for Idaho and Montana.
Smoke map, Aug. 30, 2015
To see the most current smoke reports on Wildfire Today, visit the articles tagged “smoke” at https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/smoke/
The general area of the fatalities. They were found 40 feet off Woods Canyon Road. The 3-D map is looking north.
Could the fatal fire behavior near Twisp, Washington have been predicted?
One scientist, Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, thinks the erratic winds on Aug. 19 that fueled the flames that killed three firefighters were forecasted at least a day before.
In a recent blog post, Mass gave an in-depth analysis of wind patterns and weather on Aug. 19 to back-up his assertion that all crews should have been pulled from the line before the winds picked up.
“I believe the windshift/wind acceleration that occurred Wed. afternoon was entirely predictable. It was not random, it was not extreme or a new normal,” Mass wrote. “My profession needs to work with the fire community to ensure such tragedies are prevented.”
The goal of the blog isn’t to place blame, Mass said, but instead to highlight an important issue while there are still crews fighting fires around the Pacific Northwest.
Cliff Mass blog, Aug. 30, 2015
Mass’ analysis of the models shows a major wind transition across the Cascades between noon and 3 p.m. But Mass also found weather prediction models released at 5 p.m. the day before that predicted the same shift in winds.
“Thus, wildfire folks should have been pre-warned of a major wind shift and acceleration and probably should have been pulled back that afternoon,” Mass said.
The National Weather Service has issued Red Flag Warnings for areas in California, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota and Montana.
The map was current as of 8:45 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 or this NWS site.
Smoke from western wildfires continues to generate air quality advisories across the west, while the heaviest smoke drifts northeast towards Canada and the midwest.
Smoke map, Aug. 29, 2015. AirNow.gov.
The map below shows the active spreading for smoke over the next 24 hours. To see the active map, visit this site.
Smoke map, Airimpact, Aug. 29, 2015
To see the most current smoke reports on Wildfire Today, visit the articles tagged “smoke” at https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/smoke/
