Near the beginning of the video below, Rob Morrow, a retired Fire Management Officer, said we don’t put enough effort into honoring those in the wildland fire profession that deserve recognition.
I don’t know why we don’t have a book about our General Pattons … our Abe Lincolns. Rowdy is one of those in our outfit. We need a story about leaders in the Forest Service and the wildland fire community. Rowdy will be truly a shining star in that book.
Rowdy Muir came up through the ranks in the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and currently is a District Ranger on the Ashley National Forest in Utah and is an Area Commander on one of three existing Area Command Teams.
A third person featured in the video is Steve Jackson a retired “FOS”.
Screenshot from the firefighters health study video below.
This is the second year of a multi-year study that is following six crews and taking health data from them on fires as well as at the beginning and end of the fire seasons.
The video provides a brief overview of this new approach to examine the potential health effects that wildland firefighters may experience working on wildland fires. This effort is a collaboration between the National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (NIOSH), the U.S. Forest Service, and the National Park Service. As you will see in the video, a NIOSH team actually goes into the field on a wildfire in Idaho to test members of the Sawtooth Interagency Hotshot Crew on potential impacts to their overall health, including effects to their hearts, lungs, kidneys, and hearing. As results of this effort are made available, the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center will share them.
Manning Creek burn on June 20, 2019. (Photo by Roger Ottmar)
The Fire and Smoke Model Experiment (FASMEE) is a large, multi-agency effort funded by the Joint Fire Science Program and the U.S. Forest Service to identify and collect critical fuel, fire behavior, and other measurements that will be used to advance scientific understanding as well as operational and research modeling capabilities associated with wildland fire. The goal is to allow managers to increase the use of wildfire and prescribed fire.
On June 20, 2019, FASMEE completed data collection on Manning Creek, the first of two large, operational stand-replacement burns in a dense mixed conifer-aspen forest as part of FASMEE’s Phase 2 Southwest Campaign (Phase 1 was a planning phase and other campaigns are possible). The burn was conducted by the Richfield Ranger District located on the Fishlake National Forest in Utah. Over 40 scientists participated using ground sampling methods, drones carrying state of the art imagery and air quality sampling instrumentation, fire hardened video and still cameras, and LiDAR to collect a suite of data including fuel loading, fuel consumption, fire behavior, plume dynamics, and smoke data. Readers can view video and photographic imagery captured during the Manning Creek fire at https://fasmee.net/study-sites/manning-creek
Richfield Ranger District personnel will conduct a second stand replacement research fire this fall near Annabella Reservoir with over 120 scientists participating. In addition to the suite of instruments and sampling techniques deployed during the first research burn, two fixed wing aircraft including NASA/NOAA’s FIREX-AQ DC8 will be sampling plume smoke and heat release. Additional LiDAR and radar units have been acquired to better identify plume dynamics, with cameras and thermocouples added within the fire perimeter to capture data on soil heating and aspen regeneration.
Manning Creek burn on June 20, 2019. (Photo by Brett Butler)A wildland firefighter flies a drone over the Manning Creek burn on June 20, 2019. (Photo by Adam Watts)
This image of the Varney family — Braden and Jessica with children Maleah and Nolan — was seen around the world with news stories about Braden’s death. Photo courtesy Cal Fire
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story you have to read, about a CAL FIRE firefighter, his wife, and two small children. Braden Varney died July 14, 2018 while building fireline with his dozer at the Ferguson Fire on the west edge of Yosemite National Park in California. No one else was around when the 21-ton machine with Braden inside rolled 300 feet down a steep slope. Removing his remains proved to be very challenging, and progress came to a halt at one point when the fire burned through the recovery site.
The article is HERE. Be sure and view the six-minute video.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Today we are thinking about the 2,977 victims killed in the September 11 attacks. Of those, 412 were emergency workers in New York City who responded to the World Trade Center. This included:
343 firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics) of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY);
37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD);
23 police officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD);
8 emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services; and,
