ORCHARD, Colo. — A farmer trying to control a fire on his property died Wednesday afternoon when the tractor he was driving flipped into an irrigation ditch.
Morgan County Sheriff Jim Crone said the man was driving his tractor on top of a ditch to get ahead of the fire when the ground shifted or partially collapsed, causing the tractor to flip and roll on top of the farmer. The farmer was killed instantly.
The man, who has not been identified, called for the fire department before his tractor flipped at 2:30 p.m. Deputies believe he was burning brush near the irrigation ditch and it got out of control.
About 100 acres were burned by the brush fire, located northwest of the town of Orchard, Colo.
This was published in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago. Here is an excerpt:
HAMILTON, Mont. — Reeling from the high cost of fighting wildfires, federal land agencies have been imposing new fees and increasing existing ones at recreation sites across the West in an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars.
Additionally, hundreds of marginally profitable campsites and other public facilities on federal lands have been closed, and thousands more, from overlooks to picnic tables, are being considered for removal.
“As fire costs increase, I’ve got less and less money for other programs,” said Dave Bull, superintendent of the Bitterroot National Forest here in Hamilton. The charge for access to Lake Como, a popular boating destination in the national forest, will be increased this year to $5 from $2.
Last year, the Forest Service collected $60 million in fees nationwide, nearly double the $32 million in 2000. The Bureau of Land Management, the country’s biggest landlord, doubled its revenues over the same period, to more than $14 million from $7 million. The agency projects revenues from the fees will grow an additional $1 million this year.
[…]
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., has introduced a bill that would repeal the authority of the Forest Service and other agencies to raise or institute many of the fees.
“The authority given land managers is being abused,” Baucus said. “They are using it to pad their budgets at the expense of the public. I think it’s just wrong.”
In the western US we call this type of fire a “fire use fire”. But only if a fire management plan allows for this type of fire, and all of the predetermined conditions are met.
A fire has been burning on an island near marker 10 off Stonemarker Point on Lake Norman since Tuesday evening, officials said.
The fire was reported around 7 p.m. Tuesday to the N.C. Division of Forest Resources district office in Mount Holly.
Brian Haines, a spokesman for NCDFR in Raleigh, said rangers from the division have been allowing the fire to burn on the 18-acre uninhabited island because it doesn’t pose a threat to people or properties.
“It’s not going to go anywhere,” Haines said. “It’s surrounded by water so you have a natural fire break there.”
The island is located in Lincoln County off McConnell Road, and can also be seen from southern Iredell County at the end of Brawley School Road peninsula in Mooresville.
This morning, two rangers went to the island that’s about 500 yards off shore to torch the fire to help it burn faster and reduce the amount of smoke.
Haines said most of the smoke in the area is drifting into the Charlotte area from controlled burning occurring South Carolina and not the island.
“The island is not the major factor of smoke coming into Charlotte, “he said.
The cause of the fire hasn’t been determined yet.
“It may have been somebody who camped over the weekend and did not fully extinguished their fire,” Haines said.
A B-1 bomber based at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, South Dakota, apparently started seven vegetation fires last Thursday. The flight crew declared an in-flight emergency and made an emergency landing at Ellsworth. Construction workers in the area reported seeing smoke and flames coming from the aircraft. The B-1 landed safely while Air Force and Box Elder fire departments put out the fires.
This happened about 2 weeks after an Ellsworth B-1 made another emergency landing at Anderson Air Force Base on Guam on March 8. In that incident, after the crew exited the aircraft it rolled into some emergency vehicles, causing major damage to the aircraft and the vehicles. The reports do not say if the crew simply forgot to set the parking brakes. The B-1 was in transit from an air show at Singapore back to Ellsworth when the crew declared an in-flight emergency and landed at Guam.
UPDATE, MARCH 26, 2008
You have to wonder if maintenance issues or the heavy use of our military assets on conflicts and wars has anything to do with these two incidents. Our B-1’s have been used fairly heavily since 1998 in Kosovo, Iraq, Afganistan, and again in Iraq. Much of our military equipment has been damaged, destroyed, or just worn out while serving as the World Police. If we ever need the military to actually defend our country, I hope it’s ready.
You also might question the wisdom of sending a bomber from South Dakota to Singapore and back to appear in an air show. Do you think the hourly cost of a B-1 is more than a Type 1 helicopter or air tanker?
UPDATE, September 18, 2008
An investigation by the Air Force into the Guam incident determined that a brake valve failure caused the B-1 to collide with the two aircraft rescue firefighting vehicles. The right side hand-brake metering valve malfunctioned, depleting the brake system’s hydraulic pressure, “rendering the aircraft’s brake systems inoperative when the engines shut down”.
As you probably know, Ellreese Daniels was the Crew Boss and Type 3 Incident Commander on the Thirtymile Fire near Winthrop, Washington in 2001 on which four members of his crew were overrun by fire and died. On January 30, 2007 the U.S. Attorney in Spokane, Washington charged him with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven counts of making false statements.
On February 20, 2007, the IAWF released a survey of 3,362 firefighters which showed that 36 percent of the full-time wildland firefighters surveyed will make themselves less available to be assigned to wildland fires as a direct result of these federal charges.
Here is an update from Wildlandfire.com
“I met with Ellreesse’s Federal Public Defender Tina Hunt here in Missoula on Thursday: she seems well prepared for the May 5th trial date, and hopes that the Judge will approve a site visit for the jurors. We talked about many of the issues that are well known to all of us, as well as some tactics and qualifications issues. Tina still expects a 6+ week long trial.
There will be lots of witnesses, especially on the Government side, telling their stories about what they saw, heard, were told, experienced. The 10/18 will be an important focus!
Maybe by July 1st, we’ll have a clearer picture of the impacts of this attempted mis-carriage of justice. Tina was highly complimentary of many of the R-6 Fire Overhead that she has interviewed.
She encouraged firefighter attendance in support of Ellreese at the trial, yellow Nomex shirts and all!
This has been talked about off and on for years, but recently a subcommittee told the Government Accounting Office to study the possibility of moving the US Forest Service from the Dept. of Agriculture to the Dept. of Interior. Just because they are talking about it does not mean it’s going to happen, but now the Washington Post has picked up the story:
In Washington, the organizational chart helps bring order to chaos, sorting the many federal agencies of the vast bureaucracy into manageable boxes. Among some lawmakers who hold the purse strings, there is a belief that the U.S. Forest Service is out of place.
The 103-year-old agency, which manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands, is part of the Department of Agriculture. Its bureaucratic cousins — the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, which manage 84 million acres, 96 million acres and 258 million acres of public land, respectively — are in the Interior Department.
The five agencies have overlapping missions that include fire prevention and suppression, natural resource conservation, fostering recreational uses, and regulating commercial activities such as logging, drilling, mining and livestock grazing.
At the request of the House Appropriations subcommittee on interior, environment and related agencies, the Government Accountability Office this month began examining whether it would make sense to move the Forest Service to Interior’s purview. The subcommittee has jurisdiction over both agencies.
“The public perceives them as being very similar,” said Robin M. Nazzaro, director of the Natural Resources and Environment group at GAO, which is conducting the study. “They’ve just asked us to look at, could any money be saved, and would it result in a more efficient, effective and coordinated management of federal lands and the natural resources?”
One argument in favor of such a move is that the Forest Service no longer is chiefly devoted to managing the harvesting of timber.
“Today the evolution of our forests has gone away from production and more towards preservation, and it seems to me that the natural move has made it over under the umbrella of the Department of the Interior rather than the Department of Agriculture,” Rep. Todd Tiahrt (Kan.), the top Republican on the subcommittee, said at a Feb. 12 hearing on the agency.
