News and opinion about wildland fire
With strong winds and low humidities in the forecast, the National Weather Service has issued Red Flag Warnings for areas in New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma.
The map was current as of 9:50 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 or this NWS site.
When we published our report on the number wildland firefighter fatalities on January 19, we didn’t include the percentages for each category because the numbers got cluttered among the smaller sections on the pie chart. But in order to discuss it, the percentages are helpful, so in spite of the clutter, we revised the graphic — above — as well as the one in the earlier article.
In text form, here are the percentages for general classifications of fatalities from 1990 through 2014:
Related:
How do we reduce the number of Fatalities?
Wildfire fatality trends.
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized2 Comments on Rocky Barker: Our federal public servants deserve better Rocky Barker, a reporter for the Idaho Statesman, frequently writes about outdoor issues, including fires, and spent a lot of time in Yellowstone covering the 1988 fire siege. Recently he was in Burns, Oregon reporting on the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and the effects it has had on the community and especially the federal employees.
One person who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he wrote, upon returning from a Christmas trip was immediately ordered to take his family and leave. The USFWS had heard that one of their employees was going to be taken hostage.
It is an excellent article which you should read.
In the excerpt below, Mr. Barker was talking about harassment of federal employees in the West:
****
“…What makes the harassment, threats, intimidation, bullying and disrespect worse is that it happens routinely around the West. I saw it with firefighters just trying to do their job near Kamiah last summer, when armed landowners confronted them and told them to leave. I wrote about a similar incident near Riggins.
In the Riggins incident, the ranchers said they were not trying to intimidate the firefighters. But to many people, wearing a gun and being aggressive is quite threatening.
[…]
“The notion that on the ground federal land workers are some sort of jack-booted thugs out to take over others and their way of life is horrible and it’s nonsense,” said John Freemuth, senior fellow at the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University.
“I just have to laugh at this,” said Freemuth, a former park ranger who has worked with lots of federal and state natural resources workers. “Except that it leads to the twisted paranoia that oozes out of the Bundys of this world.”
[…]
Freemuth reminds us that the employees on the ground, the ones on the front line, are not usually the policymakers. The courts, Congress and the executive branch are usually the architects of the policy that employees take the heat for.
“Congress doesn’t fund these agencies like they should be funded, employees are overworked and they are not on the ground as much as they used to be,” Freemuth said.
In our small towns across Idaho and the West, as my BLM employee said, federal employees have spouses who are ranchers and loggers, and loggers and ranchers have spouses who are federal conservationists or other staffers. “You just go down the line; that’s how you are a part of the community,” he said. “You’re integrated.”
The men and women who work on our rangeland and in our forests, often alone in green and white pickup trucks way out in the boonies, need to know they won’t be held hostage to someone’s alternative view of the Constitution or their own brand of justice. The Burns siege should teach us that it’s time for a bipartisan salute to federal public servants…”
Warming caused by climate change is moving the suitable habitat for some plant species farther north in the northern hemisphere. A plant that was once comfortable in one location may be finding it is becoming too warm for it to thrive.
British Columbia, unlike the other Canadian provinces, has changed their rules about replanting forests, hoping to ensure that adapted tree varieties can keep up with the moving habitats. Critics say assisted migration, as it is called, has sometimes produced disastrous results in the past when species were placed in new environments.
Vice’s Motherboard web site has a fascinating article by Stephen Buranyi on the subject. Here is an excerpt:
****
“The Western Larch can live for hundreds of years and grow to over 200 feet, but the oldest Larch trees in northern British Columbia’s Bulkley Valley are only about four feet tall. In fact, the nearest full grown Western Larch is nearly 900 kilometers south by the US border, which has been the Larch’s natural range for thousands of years. These are the first trees of their kind to be planted so far north.
If the disastrous history of invasive species has taught us anything, it’s that it’s often difficult to predict the consequences of such a change. Ecologists and conservationists generally caution against moving a species outside of the areas they naturally live—a process known as assisted migration—and governments generally agree with this take. Across North America there are strict prohibitions against the large scale movement of living populations.
But for the past seven years the province of BC has allowed millions of trees to be planted toward the northernmost reaches of their natural range and beyond. The government is working with scientists who predict that our climate is changing so quickly that, 50 years from now, when the trees are fully grown, the conditions in the trees’ new homes will actually be more like their old ones.
“It restores the tree to the environment for which they are best suited,” said Greg O’Neill, an adaptation and climate change scientist with the BC government, who helped design and implement the province’s assisted migration program. But while BC scientists think that they’ve acted just in time to prepare their forests for the future, no other province appears ready to adopt assisted migration as a strategy anytime soon.
Many trees are what ecologists call foundational species—organisms whose removal would cause enormous disruption in the ecosystem. Trees are a sort of infrastructure for forests; they bind the soil, retain water, and provide food and shelter. Just like the infrastructure unpinning cities, it takes years to establish a tree population, and they are virtually impossible to move.
And yet, because BC’s northern regions are warming at nearly twice the average rate, much of the province’s 55 million hectares of forest may find that their homes have moved north without them. A 2006 paper from the University of British Columbia applied a climate based model to forest ecosystems and showed that some species ranges could shift by up to 100 kilometers each decade.
Rules in BC require that, as trees are cut down, planters use seeds from the same area to re-plant, preserving the genetic character of the forest. O’Neill and his colleagues produced a forestry report in 2008 that drew on the projected range expansions due to climate change, and their own extensive experiments testing various tree species in different climates. They suggested that the province instead expand the distance seeds could be moved uphill, to track with global warming. Later that year the Chief Forester’s Standards for Seed Use were changed for the majority of BC’s commercial tree species to reflect the suggestions in the report.
According to O’Neill, “these were the first policy changes that addressed climate change in forestry.”
Then, in 2010 the standards were changed again, to allow Western Larch to be planted hundreds of kilometres away from its current range. “That had been a long-standing paradigm that no-one dared transgress,” said O’Neill. One ecologist had even called BC’s migration plans “a little scary.”
It’s difficult to overstate how deeply rooted the aversion to moving nature is for many biologists. In 2009 assisted migration was called “planned invasion” in a report that listed our really awful, truly just stupendously bad track record with species that unexpectedly turn invasive…”
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized9 Comments on Adding to the list of common denominators of tragedy fires More common denominators of tragedy fires.
(Photo: Happy Camp Complex, 2014, by Kari Greer.)
About forty years ago Carl Wilson, one of the early wildland fire researchers, developed his list of four “Common Denominators of Fire Behavior on Tragedy Fires”, that is, fatal and near-fatal fires.
Our study of the 440 fatalities from 1990 through 2014 shows that entrapments are the fourth leading cause of deaths on wildland fires. The top four categories which account for 88 percent are, in descending order, medical issues, aircraft accidents, vehicle accidents, and entrapments. The numbers for those four are remarkably similar, ranging from 23 to 21 percent of the total. Entrapments were at 21 percent.
But as Matt Holmstrom, Superintendent of the Lewis and Clark Interagency Hotshot Crew recently wrote for an article in Wildfire Magazine, Mr. Wilson’s common denominators only address fire behavior.
Mr. Holmstrom explored eight human factors that he believes merit consideration. I’m generously paraphrasing, but here are the areas he mentioned:
He goes into much detail for each item and cites numerous fires which he said were examples. It is a thought-provoking article. Check it out.
UPDATE January 29, 2016. Larry Sutton authored an article in a 2011 issue of Fire Management Today (pages 13-17) that also explored the Common Denominators of Human Behavior on Tragedy Fires. At the time Mr. Sutton was the fire operations risk management officer for the U.S. Forest Service at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
Researching how fire spreads.
Rocky Mountain Research Station Research Mechanical Engineer Sara McAllister talks about and demonstrates her research on the understanding of fire ignition and the dynamics behind the spread of wildfire.
