The National Weather Service has posted Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.
The Red Flag map was current as of 11:45 a.m. MDT on Monday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts and maps. For the most current data visit this NWS site. However, that site has not been properly displaying warning areas in recent days. This one may work better.
On September 11 the fire spread across Highway 89, closing the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park and forced evacuations at the Flagg Ranch, Grand Teton National Park entrance station, and a Forest Service campground. The highway reopened on September 13.
Above: The Berry Fire crosses Highway 89, September 11, 2016. InciWeb photo.
(Originally published at 10:59 a.m. MDT September 12, 2016. Updated at 1:50 a.m. MDT September 14, 2016.)
On September 11 winds gusting up to 35 mph on Sunday pushed the Berry Fire which had been relatively quiet for the last week, across Highway 89 for a second time, closing the south entrance into Yellowstone National Park.
The fire ran for about six miles toward the northeast, burning another 6,000 acres, and forced evacuations at the Flagg Ranch, the north entrance station into Grand Teton National Park, and Sheffield Campground on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. An overnight mapping flight determined that the Berry Fire burned very close to the facilities at the Flagg Ranch and appeared to have spread again from the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway into the Bridger-Teton National Forest and then into Yellowstone National Park.
Highway 89 is closed between Leeks Marina junction on the south and Grant Village in Yellowstone NP on the north side.
Since the fire started July 25 it has been managed but not totally suppressed in order to replicate natural conditions which includes periodic fire. It has now burned 20,801 acres.
Much of the western United States Sunday was under a Red Flag Warning due to dry and windy conditions. During the afternoon the Burro Hill weather station southeast of the fire recorded a high temperature of 75 degrees, 10 percent relative humidity, and west to southwest winds of 9 to 15 mph gusting at 23 to 35 mph. The weather will drastically change on Monday and Tuesday with lower temperatures, higher humidity, and a 30 to 60 percent chance of precipitation.
The National Weather Service has posted Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota
The Red Flag map was current as of 11:45 a.m. MDT on Sunday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts and maps. For the most current data visit this NWS site. However, that site has not been properly displaying warning areas in recent days. This one may work better.
The National Weather Service has posted Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and South Dakota for today.
The Red Flag map was current as of 9:45 a.m. MDT on Saturday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts and maps. For the most current data visit this NWS site. However, that site has not been properly displaying warning areas in recent days. This one may work better.
Sully, the movie about the Miracle on the Hudson that opened today has so far received pretty good reviews. As you may know, it is about the aircraft that struck a flock of geese at 3,200 feet about 100 seconds after taking off from La Guardia airport near New York City.
Chesley B. Sullenberger III was the pilot in command. After both engines went silent he said to his First Officer whose turn it was to take off on that flight, “My aircraft”.
Captain Sullenberger, now often called “Sully”, was selected for a cadet glider program while attending the Air Force Academy. By the end of that year he was an instructor pilot. When he graduated in 1973 he received the Outstanding Cadet in Airmanship award, as the class “top flyer”. He went on to fly F-4 Phantoms in the Air Force and served as a member of an aircraft accident investigation board in the Air Force. After he became a commercial pilot for US Airways he occasionally assisted the NTSB on accident investigations and taught courses on Crew Resource Management.
When the geese hit the engines January 15, 2009, Sully felt the impact, but more disturbing was the the sensation after the engines quit of slightly moving forward in his harness as the aircraft suddenly went from accelerating to slowing — at low altitude over New York City when they were supposed to be climbing.
US Airways did not have a checklist for the loss of both engines in an Airbus A320 at low altitude. The First Officer, Jeffery Skiles, went through the checklist for restarting the engines, but of course had no success. Sully evaluated their options — returning to La Guardia, diverting to Teterboro airport, or the third choice, a water landing in the Hudson River. Based on his experience, and drawing on his background as a glider pilot, he determined that it was impossible to make it to either airport. He lowered the nose and headed toward the river.
Passing 900 feet above the George Washington Bridge he pointed the aircraft so it would come to rest near a boat he spotted, thinking that it could help pull the passengers out of the very cold water on that winter day. Working with his First Officer, they made the only non-fatal water landing of a large commercial aircraft in recent history.
As the 150 passengers and four other crew members climbed out onto the wings and waited for rescue by ferry boats, Sully walked through the passenger compartment as it took on water to make sure everyone was off, then grabbed the maintenance log book and was the last one to exit the aircraft.
In a recent interview Katie Couric conducted with Sully director Clint Eastwood and actors Tom Hanks and Aaron Eckhart, she recalled something Sully, who at the time had 19,663 flight hours, told her not long after the successful water landing:
For 42 years I’ve been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. On January 15 the balance was sufficient so I could make a very large withdrawal.
In the last few decades wildland firefighters have used another name for the “bank of experience”, their “slide file” — memories of the situations they have been in over the course of their careers, good experiences and bad ones, all of which left data from which they can extrapolate solutions to new situations.
There is of course no substitute for an account balance in a bank of experience or a slide file. You can acquire incremental bits of it from books and training. But you can’t write a check and easily transfer it to someone else, not entirely, anyway. It has to be earned and learned, organically.
And here’s hoping you don’t have to “make a very large withdrawal”, on the ground or in the air.
This is the forecast for the distribution of wildfire smoke at 6 p.m. MDT, September 8, 2016. It includes quite a bit of fire activity in the southeast U.S.