Like the sign says, welcome to the beginning of the twelfth year of Wildfire Today!
Twelve years ago, on January 6, 2008, I started a little niche web site called Wildfire Today. It began on Blogger, Google’s free blogging service, and has grown to a body of work that now includes 8,890 articles.
We are still covering news and issues related to wildland fire. And not simply that a fire occurred somewhere, but we prefer to write about topics and events that have an impact and are interesting, not only to firefighters but to anyone concerned about wildland fire, or who may live in a fire-prone environment. We don’t attempt to cover every fire, or even every very large fire, but if an event or news item interests us, we hope that you will also find it to be worth your while. We are especially keen on covering issues related to the heath and safety of those who are dedicated to helping others — who manage land and respond to incidents while everyone else is heading in the other direction.
The success of the site would not have been possible without the loyal readers who come back on a regular basis, read the articles, leave insightful comments, and occasionally send us a message informing us of breaking news in the world of wildland fire. And the supporters who allow us to keep the doors open by placing ads. Thank you!
Officials say the only safe areas on the island are the Kingscote and Penneshaw communities
Satellite photo from January 3, 2020 local time showing the Ravine Fire on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. The red dots represent heat. Later the wind shifted, blowing the smoke toward the northeast. NASA.
A very large bushfire has burned a considerable portion of the western half of Kangaroo Island south of Adelaide, South Australia. The police say the only safe places from the Ravine Fire are on the east end of the 88-mile long island in the Kingscote and Penneshaw communities.
The island is an 8-mile ferry ride away from the mainland south of Adelaide. The western third is forested and is the location of Flinders Chase National Park, much of which has burned in the fire. There are reports of significant damage to hotels and other facilities in and near the park.
Kangaroo Island is at the lower left. Fires are indicated by the cross-hatched areas, but as of January 4 local time the areas shown as burned were not up to date.
Below is an excerpt from an article at The Islander:
The son of the owner of the cafe at the Flinders Chase National Park has posted this on social media: “For anyone wondering the Flinders Chase Visitor Centre and most surrounding buildings have been burnt down by the fire decimating the west end of the island. To my knowledge many families are now out of a steady income and will require as much assistance as possible, I’m sure the island will accommodate the needs of those suffering.
File photo of the Southern Ocean Lodge on the southwest coast of Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Southern Ocean Lodge photo.
A very high end resort on the southwest coast, the Southern Ocean Lodge, sustained damage from the fire after guests were evacuated from the rooms that cost over $1,000 a night. Six senior staff members remained on site to monitor the situation and activate the sprinkler system designed to protect the structures. Photos taken before the fire show brush growing very close to structures at the facility.
File photo of the Southern Ocean Lodge on the southwest coast of Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Southern Ocean Lodge photo.
The lightning-caused fire is burning toward the town of Parndana in the center of Kangaroo Island, prompting officials to issue an evacuation order for the community.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is reporting that “up to 150,000 hectares” (370,000 acres) have burned in the fire. If accurate, that would be about half of the island.
On Friday a northwest wind was pushing the fire to the southeast, but by early Saturday (local time) a southwest wind was blowing the smoke over the mainland south of Adelaide. Relative humidity at Parndana is predicted to be 60 to 80 percent Saturday, which should slow the fire’s spread. In addition, much of the eastern half of the island is agricultural or ranch land with occasional stringers of trees, which would reduce fire’s resistance to control and the spotting potential.
Bomber 137, a Boeing 737, made several drops on the Ravine Fire January 3, 2020 reloading near Adelaide.
A 737 air tanker, Bomber 137, normally based this summer at Richmond, made several water or retardant drops on the fire Friday, reloading at RAAF Edinburgh near Adelaide.
Country Fire Service (CFS) deputy chief officer Andrew Stark said a decision will have to be made concerning the plans for cruise ships to arrive in the coming days, anchoring off the coast of Penneshaw on the east end of the island.
Hot, dry, and windy weather in southeastern Australia on Saturday could cause the bushfires to spread even more rapidly
One of the fires in the East Gippsland region of Victoria, December 30, 2019. Photo by Ned Dawson for Victoria State Government.
One of the first clues that the bushfire season in eastern Australia was going to be abnormal was when the 737 air tanker just purchased by the government began to be used on a fairly regular basis shortly after it arrived during the southern hemisphere winter. It made its first drop on August 8, 2019 more than three months before summer began.
Since that first drop the intensity of the fire season slowly grew during the rest of the winter and fall, and by the end of November was in full swing showing signs of what has become an unprecedented fire season.
The hot, dry, and windy conditions predicted for Saturday could make a bad situation worse. At Canberra, the capital, the wind will shift 180 degrees in the morning to come out of the northwest at 20 mph. The temperature will max out under mostly sunny skies at 105F with the relative humidity in the lower teens.
Based on the expected conditions, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service is recommending that holiday makers leave certain areas before burning conditions become even more dangerous on Saturday. Some of the “Tourist Leave Zones” include Khancoban, Snow Monaro, Shoalhaven, Batlow, Wondalga, and South Coast.
Here is an example:
Leave Zone – Shoalhaven
Widespread extreme Fire Danger forecast for Shoalhaven Sat 4 Jan 2020. If you’re holidaying in areas identified on the map, you need to leave before Saturday. Residents should be aware & prepare. For road closure info @LiveTrafficNSW#nswrfs#nswfirespic.twitter.com/rmDW7tZlnp
Navy ships have been mobilized to help feed and evacuate the evacuees, but it’s not as easy as it might seem. One of the first tasks is to determine who among the thousands at Mallacoota, Victoria, are willing and able to climb a ladder from a small boat up to the much larger Navy vessel built to carry 300 soldiers and 23 tanks. It is expected to transport about 800 evacuees. Those who can’t board the ship and still want to leave, may be removed from the burnt-over area by helicopters, but visibility degraded by smoke could make flying difficult.
Since Australia does not have a central point for collecting and distributing information about widespread bushfires, exact numbers are difficult to obtain, but on the continent between July and December approximately 12 million acres (4.8 million hectares) burned, the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
In New South Wales alone as of January 1, 2020, the numbers of destroyed structures include 916 homes, 73 facilities, and 2,107 outbuildings.
There have been approximately 17 deaths related to the fires in Australia, including three firefighters.
Rural Fire Service commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons on Tuesday described the crisis as the “worst bushfire season on record”.
Meanwhile, two senior members of the government decided it was a good time to take vacations. The New South Wales Emergency Services Minister, David Elliot, came back home from the UK shortly after his personal trip was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. Earlier he had said, according to the newspaper, that he would return “if the bushfire situation should demand it.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison cut his Hawaii vacation short following intense criticism.
Among the dead are orangutans, gorillas, a chimpanzee and several monkeys
Krefeld Zoo. Photo by Alexander Forstreuter
From Meaww.com:
BERLIN: A fire at a zoo in western Germany in the first minutes of 2020 killed more than 30 animals, including apes, monkeys, bats and birds, authorities said. Police said the fire may have been caused by sky lanterns launched to celebrate the new year.
Several witnesses reported that they had seen the cylindrical paper lanterns with little fires inside flying in the night sky shortly after midnight Wednesday near the Krefeld zoo, Gerd Hoppmann, the city’s head of criminal police told reporters.
“People reported seeing those sky lanterns flying at low altitude near the zoo and then it started burning,” Hoppmann said.
Police and firefighters received the first emergency calls at 12:38 a.m.
The zoo near the Dutch border said that the entire ape house burned down and more than 30 animals, including five orangutans, two gorillas, a chimpanzee and several monkeys, as well as fruit bats and birds, were killed.
Only two chimpanzees could be rescued from the flames by firefighters. They suffered burns but are in stable condition, zoo director Wolfgang Dressen said.
Wildfire Today has published many articles about fires caused by sky lanterns. These dangerous devices use burning material to loft a small paper or plastic hot air balloon into the air. The perpetrator has no control over where it lands. Usually the fire goes out before it hits the ground, but not always. Sometimes the envelope catches fire while in flight or it can get blown down to the ground or on the roof of a structure by the wind. Numerous fires have been started by sky lanterns. Even if they don’t ignite a fire, they leave litter on the ground. Metal parts have been picked up by hay balers causing serious problems when fed to livestock. They are banned in most U.S. states and many countries.
UPDATE January 2, 2020. From NBCDFW: “Three women are under investigation in Germany for launching paper sky lanterns for the new year which apparently ignited a devastating fire that killed more than 30 animals at a zoo, officials said Thursday.”
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Robert. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
That ambient winds influence fire behavior is well known. Less understood is how fire influences the winds and how the feedback affects the fire’s evolution.
One freeze-frame moment in a simulation illustrating the dynamics of wind fields in a vertical plane as a wildfire approaches — towers and troughs. From the video.Towers and troughs, in reality. In this experimental grass fire, the few visible peaks are separated by gaps in which the wind currents sweep downward between the flames and feed the peaks on opposite sides. (Courtesy of Mark Finney, US Forest Service, Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory.)
The more knowledge firefighters have about the fluid dynamics of wildfires the better equipped they will be to take on the tasks of igniting prescribed fires and suppressing wildfires.
Below is an article written by Rod Linn, who leads development, implementation, testing, and application of computational models of wildfire behavior in the Earth and environmental sciences division at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. From Physics Today 72, 11, 70 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.4350
Fluid dynamics of wildfires
Wildland fires are an unavoidable and essential feature of the natural environment. They’re also increasingly dangerous as communities continue to spread away from urban areas. Unfortunately, a century of wildfire exclusion—the strategy of putting out fires as fast as they start—has led to a significant buildup of fuel in the form of overgrown forests. Continuing to keep wildfires at bay is simply not sustainable. In 2018, nearly 60,000 fires scorched parts of the continental US. California wildfires exemplify what can happen when they burn through communities: In November alone that year fires killed more than 90 people and destroyed some 14,000 homes and businesses.
Decision makers are striving to find ways to manage the consequences of those fires and yet still allow them to thin out dense, fuel-heavy forests and reset ecosystems. Among other things, the goal requires that land managers be able to predict the behavior of wildland fires and their sensitivity to ever-changing conditions. Many factors, including the interactions between fire, surrounding winds, vegetation, and terrain, complicate those predictions.
That ambient winds influence fire behavior is well known. Less understood is how fire influences the winds and how the feedback affects the fire’s evolution. As the fire rages, it releases energy and heats the air. The rising air draws in air below it to fill the gap in much the same way as air is drawn into a fireplace and rises up a chimney. The interaction between rising air and ambient winds controls the rate at which surrounding vegetation heats up and whether it ignites. The interaction thus determines how quickly a fire spreads.
FUEL MATTERS
The influence of the fire–atmosphere coupling is much greater in wildland fires than in building fires. Wildland fires are fed by fine fuels—typically grasses, needles, leaves, and twigs; often, tree trunks and large branches do not even burn. Buildings burn thicker fuels, such as boards, furniture, and stacks of books. The difference matters because fine fuels exchange energy more efficiently with surrounding hot air and gases. In those hot, fast-moving gases, the fuels’ temperature rises quickly to the point where they ignite.
But the converse is also true. Because wildland fuels are primarily fine, they are also efficiently cooled when the surrounding ambient air is cooler than they are. That means that the indraft of air caused by a fire may actually impede its spread. A rising plume can draw cool air over foliage and litter near a fire line and prevent those fine fuels from heating. The grasses just outside a campfire ring are a case in point: They are continuously exposed to the fire’s radiant heat, but the cool indraft effectively prevents them from reaching the point of ignition.
The spread of a wildfire is sometimes conceptualized as an advancing wall of flame that the wind forces to lean toward unburned fuels that then ignite in front of the fire. Although that wall-of-flame paradigm simplifies models of fire behavior, it is not correct. Convective cooling would prevent the wall of flame from spreading by radiation alone, and for convective heating to spread the fire, the wind would have to be strong enough to lean the flame to the point where it touches the unburned fuel. Were that true, the fires would be unable to spread in low-wind conditions because the buoyancy-driven updrafts would keep the flames too upright.
If you were to look upon an advancing wildfire from the front, you would actually see a series of strong updrafts, visible as towers of flame that are separated by gaps, as shown in figures 1 and 2. The towers are regions where the buoyancy-driven updrafts carry heat upward. They are fed by ambient wind drawn into the gaps between them, as described earlier. When the ambient wind is strong enough, it pushes air through the gaps between the towers, but that air is heated as it blows over burning vegetation. The motion of hot gases through the fire line disrupts the indraft of cool ambient air and ignites grasses and foliage in front of the fire. That’s the primary way a wildfire spreads.
A second factor that influences the spread is the shape of the fire line, because different parts of the blaze compete for wind. The headfire, the portion moving the fastest, often has trailing flanking fires that form a horseshoe shape and open up to the ambient wind. Part of that wind gets redirected toward the flanks of the horseshoe. The strength, length, and proximity of the flanking fires to each other thus help determine how much wind reaches the headfire. The narrower the horseshoe is, the larger the fraction of wind diverted to the flanks, the lower the wind speed reaching the headfire, and the slower it spreads.
Another factor to be considered is the spatial arrangements of fuels. The potential for wildfires spreading from the crown of one tree to another is reduced when the spacing between trees increases. In that case more horizontal wind is required for flames to jump between trees. Indeed, removing trees is a common fire-risk-management practice. But the strategy behind it is more complex than just removing fuel. Gaps in a forest canopy also make it easier for high-speed winds above the canopy to reach fires on the ground. So although reducing the number of trees might reduce the crown-to-crown fire activity, it might increase the spread rate of a surface fire.
PRESCRIBED FIRE
In some regions of the US, land managers counter the threat of wildfires and promote ecosystem sustainability by purposefully lighting fires. Carefully controlled, prescribed burns, which clear duff and deadwood on the forest floor, are often lit at multiple locations; fire-induced indrafts at one location influence fires at other locations. For example, a single line of fire under moderate winds might reach spread rates and intensities that are undesirable or uncontrollable, but the addition of another line of fire upwind can influence how much ambient wind reaches the original fire and thus reduces its intensity.
The spread of the upstream fire line, ignited second, is purposefully limited, as it converges on the area downwind where the first fire has burned off fuel. Practitioners can manipulate the flow of wind between fire lines by adjusting the spacing between ignitions. Fire managers might tie the various ignition lines together—reducing the fresh-air ventilation, increasing the interaction between the lines, and causing fire lines to rapidly pull together—to give themselves more control over the spread.
The interaction between multiple fire lines can even stop a wildfire in its tracks. When firefighters place a new fire line downwind of a fire, they often hope that the indrafts will pull the so-called “counter fire” toward the wildfire and remove fuel in front of it. Unfortunately, the maneuver requires a good understanding of the wildfire’s indraft strength. Too weak an indraft could turn the counter fire into a second wildfire.
After realizing the huge significance of the wind interactions in wildfires over the past two decades, the science community is striving to better account for them. Those efforts should improve predictions of how a wildfire will behave in various conditions. To that end, some researchers, including me, use computer models to explicitly account for the motion of the atmosphere, wildfire processes, and the two-way feedbacks between them. Others perform experiments at scales ranging from meters (such as in wind tunnels) to kilometers (such as in high-intensity fires on rugged topography) for new insight on the nature of those fire–atmosphere interactions or to confirm existing models.
The [above] simulation illustrates the dynamics of wind fields in a vertical plane, located at the white horizontal line, as a wildfire approaches it. The colors mark the speed u of the wind perpendicular to the plane, with red indicating motion toward the viewer (out of the screen), and blue indicating motion away from the viewer. As the clip shows, the fire starts to influence the winds long before it reaches the plane, and the wind patterns change in scale and character as the fire approaches. As the fire crosses the plane, the towers and trough flow patterns become apparent. Some locations show strong upward motion, whereas others have strong horizontal or even slightly downward motion. The colors on the ground surface illustrate the convective cooling (blue) that occurs as a result of the movement of cool air over the fuel— grasses in this simulation—and locations in front of the fire where the fuels are being convectively heated (red).
You might have noticed that there have been some changes at Wildfire Today over the last week. I wanted the site to load faster and it needed a facelift so I hired a graphic artist and a software developer to tweak the layout, the back end, and the header at the top of the page .
I think it’s very close to complete, but if you run across something that appears to be broken or does not work well, let us know in a comment on this article, or contact us by email.
Here is a list of what has changed:
Faster. The site loads more quickly.
New Site Search. The previous Google-powered search function that showed ads is replaced by a customized advanced search with filters; pull-down lists that can help zero in on what you’re searching for. You don’t have to select any of the filter items; you can simply enter a term in the search box. You may restrict the search to a particular year or a month. On the “Countries” list the United States is not listed, so if that’s where you think the target may be, just leave that at “Countries”. If you want to narrow the search to one of the other 10 countries in the pull-down list, you’re free to do that. Provinces in Canada and Australia are in the “States/Pr” list along with the 50 U.S. states. “Topics” is a selection of 21 of the most commonly used tags (what the article is about). Tags make it easier for you (and Google) to search for a topic. To date we have used over 1,500 different tags. Some are obviously used more often than others.
Sort by seven commonly used topics. In main navigation at the top of the page you can click on “Articles” to see posts on one of seven of the most-frequent topics, including recent fires. It uses tags that are applied to articles. Not all articles on Wildfire Today are represented by these seven tags.
Lazy Loading of images. The images “lazy load”. That is, the ones that are lower down don’t load into your browser until it appears that you are about to scroll down to display that image. So initially you only load what you need, then the loading stops. As you scroll down, more images download. You don’t have to download six articles if you’re only going to view one or two.
New Header. The header image at the top of the page is new and consumes less vertical real estate.
The main navigation (Home, Articles, Documents, etc.) was moved to the very top of the page and embedded in a dark background. It now remains visible as you scroll down the page.
Less white space. There is less empty space at the top of the home page, and the mostly empty column on the left is gone.
Info at top of article. Below the headline for each article you will now see the original posting date for the article, the category if applicable, tags, and a link to view or leave comments.
