It’s always fun to see the local fire engines in the 4th of July parades.
Wildland engines from the State of South Dakota led the fire truck portion of the parade.
The Hot Springs Fire Department brought out their finest antique apparatus.
It was a hot day and the kids enjoyed being wet down by the remote controlled front-mounted nozzles.
I’ll thank Firegeezer for the idea, but if you have photos of engines, preferably wildland, in your 4th of July parade, send them to me. I’ll try to post a few here. To email me, scroll down to the bottom of the column on the left, to the “About Me” section, and click on “View my complete profile”.
The Basin fire at Big Sur took out another three homes late yesterday, which brings the total to 20. The fire was very active on the north side in the Puerto Suelo Creek drainage, on the east side near Tassajara, and on the northwest side around Big Sur where it has burned across some dozer lines and is within 1/2 mile or less of the coast highway.
There is also a lot of fire activity on the south side where firefighters are attempting to hold the fire at dozer lines from the ridge down to the coast, and along the North Coast Ridge Trail where they conducted a firing operation, hoping to hold the fire north of the trail and tie it in with the Indians fire using the Rodeo Flats Trail.
The evacuation order has been extended from Andrew Molera State Park north to Palo Colorado Canyon Road. The fire is 64,304 acres and 5% contained.
A Forest Service spokesperson said:
Offshore winds have caused the fire to make a substantial advance along the coast toward Big Sur. The fire spotted across numerous locations from Ventana Inn north to Manuel Peak and burned actively downslope through the night. This is causing major control problems in protecting the Big Sur community.
Some residents are refusing to evacuate.
Kirk Gafill, general manager of Nepenthe, said he and five employees were up all night trying to protect the cliffside restaurant his grandparents built in 1949. Wearing dust masks, the crew scrambled to stamp out embers, some the size of dinner plates, that were dropping from the sky, he said.
“We know fire officials don’t have the manpower to secure our properties,” Gafill said. “There are a lot of people in this community not following evacuation orders. Based on what we saw during Katrina and other disasters, we know we can only rely on ourselves and our neighbors.”
Greg Ambrosio, who lives next to Nepenthe, signed a waiver Wednesday night to stay in his house. But his plans to stay were disrupted when he was awoken by a neighbor in the middle of the night who warned of the approaching inferno.
“Then there’s a knock on the door, and we go outside and the fire had just expanded. It was Armageddon,” he said. “Just yellow smoke and ash mixed with fire. It was just raining down.”
Ambrosio said he and his wife grabbed their cat and drove to a relative’s house for the night.
The map below was current as of late yesterday, Thursday. Click on it for a larger version.
The map below shows heat, in red, orange, and black, detected by satellites last night, with the red areas being the most recently burned. The yellow lines are the perimeters uploaded by the incident management teams yesterday. Click on the map to see a larger version.
Have a great 4th of July. The 30,000 folks watching the fireworks at Mount Rushmore last night got an early start on the holiday.
Usually the fireworks at Mount Rushmore, set in a ponderosa pine forest, start a few small fires, sometimes as many at 10 to 15, which are put out by the dozens of firefighters staged around the monument. But it has been a wet early summer and the heavy growth of grass has not cured yet… it’s pretty green right now, so it is unlikely that any fires would have any potential.
Here is a pretty good 5 minute video of the Martin Mars air tanker dropping on the Motion fire near Shasta Like north of Redding, CA. It has a musical sound track that is only a little obnoxious. (I don’t know why, but the media keeps insisting on calling it a “water bomber”.)
Two dozer operators rolled their dozers on Tuesday. One was wearing a seat belt and one was not.
A private contractor assigned to the Cold fire in Plumas County suffered a fractured skull, a dislocated shoulder and injuries to one ear when the bulldozer he was operating rolled over, said Dave Olson, a fire information officer for the Canyon Complex of fires on Plumas National Forest.
The employee of Oilar Agricultural Services, based in MacArthur, was flown to Enloe Medical Facility in Chico, where he was in stable condition Wednesday with no life-threatening injuries, Olson said.
In Siskiyou County, a contract operator was digging a fire line between the Alps Complex fire and the Ironside fire when his bulldozer rolled 80 feet down an embankment, said Alexis West, a fire information officer on the complex of fires burning on Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
The operator was wearing a seat belt, which probably saved his life, West said. He was taken to a Redding hospital, where he was treated for arm and shoulder injuries.
He was conscious and alert in Mercy Medical Center on Wednesday morning, West said.
Wildland engines from the State of South Dakota led the fire truck portion of the parade.
The Hot Springs Fire Department brought out their finest antique apparatus.
It was a hot day and the kids enjoyed being wet down by the remote controlled front-mounted nozzles. 
