Fire Weather Watch for Northern California and heat advisory for the southern part of the state
Southern California fire weather this week. NWS.
Firefighters in California could face another round of wildfires this week as the weather turns hot, dry, and windy in some locations.
In Southern California a heat advisory has been issued for Tuesday through Friday for highs in the lower elevations approaching 100 degrees.
A Fire Weather Watch for Northern California is in effect Wednesday through Friday for breezy conditions, with the strongest winds expected Wednesday and Thursday.
There is a possibility of electrical power being preemptively being shut off by PG&E due to windy and dry conditions.
Possibility of electrical power being preemptively being shut off this week by PG&E due to windy conditions.Northern California Fire Weather Watch this week.Sacramento area fire weather this week. NWS.
Pyregence fire forecasting tool, beta version. Forecast for the northeast side of the Red Salmon Complex of fires in Northern California at 4 p.m. PDT October 9, 2020.
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded 19 small businesses in 12 states a total of more than $4.4 million in grants to support innovative technology development. One of those grants, for $100,000, is to help build a system for automatically detecting and forecasting the spread of every wildfire in the continental United States and updating the forecasts as conditions change.
Reax Engineering Inc. of Berkeley, California, the company that received the grant, has a beta version of the forecasting tool online now just for the state of California. It is a work in progress and will eventually include data for fires in other states.
Wildfire forecasting is one of the four primary goals of Pyregence, a group of fire-science labs and researchers collaborating about wildland fire, where the forecasting tool now resides. The organization brings together initiatives and leading researchers from 18 institutions representing industry, academia, and government in an effort to transform how wildfire mitigation and adaptation measures are implemented. In addition to forecasting wildfire activity, wildfire scenario analyses will be produced to inform future wildfire risk and California’s 5th Climate Change Assessment, using open science and technology principles.
Pyregence working groups.
In order to predict the spread of wildfires, fire behavior models are run on computers. The versions that have been used for decades are not accurate for dealing with heavy dead and down fuels or fires spreading through the crowns of trees under extreme weather conditions. The goal of one of the four Pyregence workgroups, the Fire Behavior Workgroup, is to improve existing models or develop new ones. That effort is being led by Scott Stephens, Professor of Fire Science, and director of the University of California Center for Fire Research and Outreach.
U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Lab burn chamber, May 21, 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
Mark Finney, a researcher at the U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, is part of the Fire Behavior Workgroup and will soon have access to a burn chamber much larger than the one in the photo above. It will reportedly be the size of a grain silo. These wind tunnel/combustion chambers are used to conduct burning experiments in a controlled environment under varying fuel, temperature, humidity, and wind conditions. It can lead to a better understanding of how vegetation burns, leading to improvements in predicting fire spread.
An article at Wired describes the planned burn chamber:
Once complete, that chamber will let him replicate wildfire fuel beds by piling logs and other material as much as a few feet deep. He will then ignite them, hit them with wind and moisture, and quantify their burn rate and energy-release rate—what he calls the “heat-engine part of mass fires.”
“Really what we’re looking for,” Finney says, “is how these things transition to flaming. Instead of just smoldering on the forest floor, how do they become actively involved in these large fires?”
If all goes well, Finney’s working group will eventually code three-dimensional digital simulations of various wildland fuel beds—digital cubes, in essence, not unlike Minecraft voxels—that can be stacked and arranged in infinite variation across landscapes generated by GIS mapping data.
Four people died in the fire southwest of Redding, California
Map of the Zogg Fire October 9, 2020.
Investigators from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection looking for the cause of the Zogg Fire seized Pacific Gas and Electric equipment, the utility said Friday in a notification to the state Public Utilities Commission.
The Zogg Fire started about 9 miles southwest of Redding, California during hot, dry, and windy conditions on September 27, 2020 and ran south for 16 miles until firefighters were able to stop it at Highway 36 about 9 miles east of Platina.
Four people were killed in the fire and 103 residences and 101 other structures were destroyed. The estimated costs of suppressing the fire through October 9 are $29 million.
In PG&E’s filing to the PUC, the company said their equipment reported alarms and other activity in the area of Zogg Mine Road and Jenny bird Lane between approximately 2:40 p.m. and 3:06 p.m. on September 27, when the line recloser de-energized that portion of the circuit. The filing says wildfire detection cameras and satellite data showed heat or signs of smoke at that location between approximately 2:43 p.m. and 2:46 p.m.
BakersfieldNow has information about the four fatalities.
The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office identified one of the victims as Alaina Michelle Rowe, 45, who was found dead along a road on Sept. 28. The sheriff’s department said another victim was a minor but did not report the identity. KRCR-TV in Redding reported that Rowe and her eight-year-old daughter Feyla died as they tried to escape the fire.
The two other victims, also found a day after the fire started, are Karin King, 79, who was found on the road where the fire started, and Kenneth Vossen, 52, who suffered serious burns that day and later died in a hospital.
Neither PG&E or CAL FIRE have disclosed exactly what equipment the investigators seized.
CAL FIRE has not released their findings about the cause of the Zogg Fire.
After their equipment was blamed for starting the Camp Fire, in June of this year PG&E pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for the 84 people that were killed when the fire burned through Paradise, California November 8, 2018. The fire also burned 154,000 acres and destroyed more than 18,000 structures. As part of the investigation for that fire, CAL FIRE personnel seized electrical equipment on or near a 100-year old PG&E transmission tower near the point of origin.
Previously the power company has reached settlements with victims from wildfires in 2015, 2017 and 2018, totaling about $25.5 billion, NBC news reported.
The Glass Fire has burned over 67,000 acres and 643 residences
The north end of the Glass Fire, as seen from St Helena South camera at 225 p.m. PDT Oct. 6, 2020. Looking east. AlertWildfire.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is investigating allegations that an unauthorized backfire was set by private firefighters on the Glass Fire in California’s Wine Country.
ABC7 claims their video shows private firefighters being detained Friday October 2 by officers from CAL FIRE and the CHP.
A backfire or any burning operation can endanger the lives of firefighters and others if it is not carefully planned and coordinated with the fire organization. Fighting a fire in any area, but especially in an urban interface, can be chaotic as hell. Throw in an unauthorized backfire and it can put lives at risk. Many experienced wildland firefighters can tell you stories about a burning operation that meant well, but caught others unaware who had to scramble to escape the unexpected flames.
For the last 15 years we have been aware of insurance companies sending fire engines to protect high-valued homes that were covered by their policies when a wildfire approaches. Companies such as Chubb and Wildfire Defense figure keeping a multi-million dollar home from burning is less expensive than paying to rebuild it, so they contract with private companies to send firefighters to their customers properties when smoke is in the air.
The tricky part is intermixing the private crews with the existing incident management organization. Some jurisdictions view the insurance company crews as personnel that need to be protected, rather than fellow firefighters engaged in the fire fight. This became very evident during the 2017 Woolsey Fire when CAL FIRE prohibited the private engine crews from accessing their customers’ homes, including mansions in Malibu, California.
Our opinion:
First, firefighters that are not part of the incident management structure should not even consider putting fire on the ground unless they are coordinating closely with and have permission from the Division Supervisor or Branch Director.
Private engine crews can be helpful in keeping certain high-value structures from burning during a rapidly spreading wildfire when there are not enough government resources to protect every home. However, if they have no communication with the incident management organization which does not have any knowledge of their location, mission, or capabilities, it can throw a monkey wrench into an already chaotic situation.
CAL FIRE, the U.S. Forest Service, and the other large organizations involved in wildfire suppression need to sit down with the insurance companies and agree on some standard operating procedures. The Incident Management Team needs to know what the private crews are doing and where, and the private crews need to have direct communication with the Team.
One day, when all firefighting resources are carrying equipment that makes it possible to track their location, this will become much easier — and safer.
Smoke map, for near-surface smoke at 2 p.m. MDT October 8, 2020. NOAA.
The primary culprits for smoke in the United States on October 8, 2020 are the Red Salmon and August Fires that have been burning for weeks in Northern California, a few scattered fires in Oregon and Idaho, three fires in Colorado and Wyoming, one in northeast Utah, and the Cow Canyon Fire on the Arizona-New Mexico border.
It is more than simply dollars spent to knock down the flames
October 8, 2020 | 1:04 p.m. MDT
White Draw Fire near Edgemont, SD, June 29, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
An article at National Public Radio recommends what we should be focusing on when discussing the effects of wildfires instead of simply the number of acres burned.
That general topic can cover not only the dollars spent while knocking down the flames, but the actual cost of damage to infrastructure, community water sources, flooding, mud slides, health effects of smoke on populations, repairing the damage done in the burned areas, rebuilding structures, mental health of residents, and the economic effects of evacuations and reduced tourism.
Here is an excerpt from the NPR article:
Often, the human cost of wildfires has little to do with their size. California’s three most destructive wildfires aren’t among the state’s largest. The 1991 Tunnel fire in the Oakland hills was relatively tiny at 1,600 acres, but destroyed 2,900 structures and killed 25 people. Even the Camp Fire, which burned more than 18,000 structures in Paradise, California, isn’t even in the top 20, ranked by acreage.
“I think we should concentrate more on the human losses,” says Ernesto Alvarado, professor of wildland fire at the University of Washington. “Wildfires in populated areas, it doesn’t matter what size those are.”
Public authorities could also report on a broader human impact: the number of people experiencing harmful air due to smoke. While detailed maps are available with smoke concentrations, showing the air quality index, there are few measures of the scale of that public health impact. Poor air quality due to smoke is linked to a rise in emergency room visits due to asthma, stroke and heart attacks.
The article reminded us of one we published April 18, 2014, titled, “The true cost of wildfire.” For Throwback Thursday, here it is again:
A conference in Glenwood Springs, Colorado on Wednesday and Thursday of this week explored a topic that does not make the news very often. It was titled The True Cost of Wildfire.
Usually the costs we hear associated with wildfires are what firefighters run up during the suppression phase. The National Incident Management Situation Report provides those daily for most ongoing large fires.
But other costs may be many times that of just suppression, and can include structures burned, crops and pastures ruined, economic losses from decreased tourism, medical treatment for the effects of smoke, salaries of law enforcement and highway maintenance personnel, counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, costs incurred by evacuees, infrastructure shutdowns, rehab of denuded slopes, flood and debris flow prevention, and repairing damage to reservoirs filled with silt.
The total cost of a wildfire can be mitigated by fire-adaptive communities, hazard fuel mitigation, fire prevention campaigns, and prompt and aggressive initial attack of new fires with overwhelming force by ground and air resources. Investments in these areas can save large sums of money. And, it can save lives, something we don’t hear about very often when it comes to wildfire prevention and mitigation; or spending money on adequate fire suppression resources.
Below are some excerpts from a report on the conference that appeared in the Grand Junction Sentinel:
[Fire ecologist Robert] Gray said the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico ended up having a total estimated cost of $906 million, of which suppression accounted for only 3 percent.
Creede Mayor Eric Grossman said the [West Fork Complex] in the vicinity of that town last summer didn’t damage one structure other than a pumphouse. But the damage to its tourism-based economy was immense.
“We’re a three-, four-month (seasonal tourism) economy and once that fire started everybody left, and rightfully so, but the problem was they didn’t come back,” he said.
A lot of the consequences can play out over years or even decades, Gray said.
He cited a damaging wildfire in Slave Lake, in Alberta, Canada, where post-traumatic stress disorder in children didn’t surface until a year afterward. Yet thanks to the damage to homes from the fire there were fewer medical professionals still available in the town to treat them.
“You’re dealing with a grieving process” in the case of landowners who have lost homes, said Carol Ekarius, who as executive director of the Coalition for the Upper South Platte has dealt with watershed and other issues in the wake of the 2002 Hayman Fire and other Front Range fires.
The Hayman Fire was well over 100,000 acres in size and Ekarius has estimated its total costs at more than $2,000 an acre. That’s partly due to denuded slopes that were vulnerable to flooding, led to silt getting in reservoirs and required rehabilitation work.
“With big fires always come big floods and big debris flows,” Ekarius said.
Gray said measures such as mitigating fire danger through more forest thinning can reduce the risks. The 2013 Rim Fire in California caused $1.8 billion in environmental and property damage, or $7,800 an acre, he said.
“We can do an awful lot of treatment at $7,800 an acre and actually save money,” he said.
Bill Hahnenberg, who has served as incident commander on several fires, said many destructive fires are human-caused because humans live in the wildland-urban interface.
“That’s why I think we should maybe pay more attention to fire prevention,” he said.
Just how large the potential consequences of fire can be was demonstrated in Glenwood Springs’ Coal Seam Fire. In that case the incident commander was close to evacuating the entire town, Hahnenberg said.
“How would that play (out)?” he said. “I’m not just picking on Glenwood, it’s a question for many communities. How would you do that?”
He suggested it’s a scenario communities would do well to prepare for in advance.
The chart below from EcoWest.org shows that federal spending per wildfire has exceeded $100,000 on an annual basis several times since 2002. Since 2008 the cost per acre has varied between $500 and $1,000. These numbers do not include most of the other associated costs we listed above. (click on the chart to see a larger version)
