Author: Bill

The Siege of ’08 will be one for the history books. The map below shows some of the heat, in red, detected by satellites last night from the 911 fires in northern California. Click on it to see a larger version.

HERE is a link to a summary of the fires in northern California. CalFire’s Mendocino Unit had this to say in the remarks:

Multiple fires MINIMAL STAFFING with evacuations in place or imminent: Flynn Creek is 1400 acres, 5% contained and threatening homes; Orr Springs is 200 acres threatening 1 commercial property and approximately 25 residences; Cherry is 180 acres, evacuations of 40 residences and 0% containment; Table is approximately 1000 acres and threatening residences. Heavy resource drawdown is leaving 2/3 of the fires unstaffed. Inaccessible, steep terrain. No Unit coverage, all stations are unstaffed.

The Lime Complex on the Shasta-Trinity reported:

The Lime Complex is comprised of approximately 68 fires ranging in size from one acre to over 400 acres. A number of fires are located in remote areas with steep terrain and limited, or no access. We continue to concentrate on fires that have been initial attacked versus those fires which have not been attacked, and choosing winnable initial attack, or extended attack actions. We are determining resources assigned to each staffed fire.

Projections in the 24 to 72 hour time frames show the community of Hyampom may be surrounded by fire in the 24 hour time range with all ingress and egress severed. A similar forecast holds for the Town of Hayfork in the 72 hour time frame. A critical priority is maintaining the integrity of Highways 3 and 36.

The Gallery fire, now part of the Basin Complex burning south of Big Sur in California, is now reported to be 2,000 acres. Judging from the satellite map below it is at least that big. The coast highway, Highway 1, had been closed by the fire. Now it is closed by a landslide.

The Indians fire, also shown on the map, is 56,044 acres. Yesterday firefighters did some burning out and according to a spokesperson “We had a really good day today”. The heat shown on the map may be their burnout operations. It looks like there is a chance that Bill Molumby and his team may even catch this fire and it won’t be another Los Padres wilderness fire that burns all summer.

Click on the map to see a larger version.

As we reported yesterday, the Clover fire on the Sequoia National Forest in California, formerly a fire use fire, is now being suppressed. The problem is, it got up and ran yesterday…. big time.

I wonder if the bean counter regrets their decision to release some of the hot shot crews after working only 10 days so they would not have to pay overtime associated with mandatory days off with pay after working the normal 14 days on an assignment? They had planned to re-order the crews in a few days. Now with 911 new fires in the state all competing for resources, they will be lucky to get any orders filled.

The new policy of having U.S. Forest Service bean counters making strategic decisions like this could result in more Clover fires. Fires that actually cost much more than they would otherwise, while burning private land and putting citizens at a greater risk. This is the new “Accountable Cost Management” process. Who is going to be accountable for the Clover fire decisions?

Here is a map of the Clover fire that shows heat detected by satellites last night. Click on it to see a larger version. The yellow line is the last perimeter provided by the incident management team.

InciWeb can be a great place to get current information about ongoing fires. Agencies can post important information there including news, status of the fire, evacuations, maps, and photos. It works very well when there are just a few semi-active fires in the nation. But when you need it most, when there is one huge fire, or many medium-sized fires, the system cannot handle the load and it becomes totally unavailable. When that happens, either the web site will not load at all, or you get a screen like the one above, today, showing that there are no incidents in the system.

The federal and state agencies that manage this system need to ensure that the servers can handle the load when the citizens need it the most.