Category: Uncategorized

The University of California at Davis is beginning a program to certify those involved in emergency response aviation. It appears that the curriculum is designed for individuals who manage aviation, and not necessarily pilots. They will cater to:

“aviation safety officers, emergency services pilots, forest firefighter aviators, border patrol aviators, medical-air transport personnel, law enforcement, homeland security officers and anyone involved in the field of emergency response aviation.”

The program consists of six courses, offered between October, 2008, and February, 2009:

• Aircraft Health Management
• Communications: Program Management
• Communications: Operations Management
• Aviation Leadership
• Human Factors and Operational Risk Management
• Safety Program Management

The certificate program focuses on:

“monitoring aircraft health, developing effective communication strategies, and instituting the principles of safe aviation operations”.

The courses will be held at the U. S. Forest Service training facility at McClellan Park, Sacramento, CA. UC Davis brags that the facility has

“high-tech resources and equipment, including a 10-megawatt nuclear reactor.”

I always prefer to conduct training at a classroom that has access to a nuclear reactor too.

More information can be found HERE.

The first 140 characters of our blog posts are now being distributed by Twitter. You can receive them by instant message, as a text message on your cell phone, or on your Twitter web page . Our twitter name is: wildfiretoday

We just started this, so there may be a few bugs to work out. We’ll have to concentrate on putting the most important information in the first 140 characters. In most cases, you’ll have to come here to read the whole story since obviously we can’t tell you everything in 140 characters.

The Twitter web site is rather pathetic, so if you want to know more about it, check out the Wikipedia entry for Twitter. But here’s a quote from the Twitter site:

The New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”

No doubt you heard about the huge fire at Universal Studios near Los Angeles today. The equivalent of two city blocks were on fire at the same time.

It burned furiously for hours. Early on, they had some water pressure problems, so they had engines drafting from a lake and even used some helicopters for water drops. Here is a still image captured from a video:

HERE is a link to the video on CNN.

The fire was adjacent to several acres of vegetation, and for a while they were worried about having a brush fire and a huge structure fire at the same time. It developed a convection column, not unlike a vegetation fire.

Still photos courtesy of ABC7 and LA Times.

On May 29 we posted information about two firefighters, members of a Hot Shot Crew, that were injured by lightning while working on a prescribed fire west of Whitefish, MT on the Flathead National Forest. We are pleased to report that they have been released from the hospital. Apparently lightning struck some trees near where they were working.

By the way, the photo is not of that incident.