A photo of some of the structures that burned in the Puntzi Lake Fire in British Columbia.
While Geordie Ferguson was loading fire retardant into air tankers to fight the Puntzi Lake Fire 130 kilometers (81 miles) west of Williams Lake, British Columbia, he found out that his house burned in the fire. But he kept loading air tankers.
A GoFundMe account has been set up for Mr. Ferguson.
Below are excerpts from an article at GlobalNews.ca:
As his house burned to the ground, Geordie Ferguson was doing what he always does: thinking about others.
“I had a job to do,” says the man who loaded 29 planes with fire retardant on the day he lost his home next to Puntzi Lake.
“I could not put myself first. I could not hold my head down and pout and cry. I had planes to load, I had more houses to save. I had a community depending on me to do my job, and I did it.”
Ferguson works as a loader technician for ICL Canada. For the last eight years, he’s lived in a home on the shores of Puntzi Lake, driving 15 minutes each day to his job at the Royal Canadian Air Force station on Puntzi Mountain.
In the summer, he services the many planes using the base to fight fires throughout the Chilcotin and Cariboo regions.
“We supply the manpower, pumps and retardants to forestry for loading the aircraft for fighting the forest fires. Those guys are my heroes. The guys in the aircraft, the ground crew, everyone involved [in fighting fires] is a stellar person,” said Ferguson.
He made a quick call to a friend, who confirmed that while his house was gone, his dog had escaped and was being taken care of.
Then Ferguson went back to work. He’s stayed there, working and sleeping at the base, ever since.
“I don’t want to go anywhere else. Once I learned my dog was safe, I was staying here. Anyone who was trying to get me out of here, win lose or draw, it’d be one hell of a fight. I am here, I’m going to load planes,” he says.
“All I wanted could do is make sure I could save other people’s houses and some lives in between, and be supportive of ground crew. Everything else is immaterial.”
Ferguson lost everything but his dog, wallet, iPhone, iPad and pickup truck.
“I had a lot of things, but I can get new things. None of that matters to me. None of that is important in life. It’s what I signed up to do, and the job that I have is a proud, prestigious job, and I love it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
“I’m just a simple man, and everyone deserves more of a prop than I do. They hired me to load planes, and come hell or high water, I’m going to load planes,” he says.
“I was brought up old-school. There was no whining, or would ofs, or thinking about yourself. Think about others. And let’s get the job done, and we’ll work out all the other stuff later.”…
Five firefighters were injured, one seriously, when this engine collided with another vehicle near Clovis, California. Photo by California Highway Patrol.
Five U.S. Forest Service firefighters were injured when their Stanislaus National Forest fire engine collided with a small SUV at 7:30 a.m. Sunday, July 12 near Clovis, California (map).
According to the U.S. Forest Service, one of the firefighters had major injuries, another had moderate injuries, and the other three firefighters sustained minor injuries.
The driver of the SUV had minor injuries as well.
The firefighters were providing additional fire suppression coverage for the Sierra National Forest and were traveling from their hotel to the High Sierra Ranger District in Prather, California. There are no major wildfires on the Sierra National Forest at this time.
MyMotherload.com had some information about the cause of the crash:
Update on July 12 at 6am: The CHP reports that 53-year-old Maria Constable of Fresno was attempting to pass the fire engine in her Kia SUV, but collided with the side door. Both vehicles had been traveling east on Highway 168. The sideswipe caused the fire truck to drive off the road and overturn four times before ending up on its side. Constable’s SUV rolled over twice and landed on its rooftop. The crash is under investigation.
Puntzi Lake Wildfire. Photo by British Columbia Wildfire Service.
Multiple structures have been destroyed in a 7,000-hectare (17,300-acre) wildfire at Puntzi Lake about 130 kilometers (81 miles) west of Williams Lake, British Columbia.
Structures destroyed on the Puntzi Lake Fire. Screen grab from video by Cariboo Regional District.
The Cariboo Regional District reported on July 10 that one resort, two permanent homes, one seasonal home and multiple outbuildings on a total of four properties were confirmed lost as a result of the Puntzi Lake fire. All affected property owners have been notified.
The video below shows the impacts to the structures near the shore of Puntzi Lake.
As of July 11 approximately 90 properties were affected by an Evacuation Order and 183 properties were in the Evacuation Alert area, according to the Cariboo Regional District.
Firefighting resources on scene July 11 from the BC Wildfire Service included two airtankers, four helicopters, 102 firefighters, 26 support personnel and 9 pieces of heavy equipment.
A single engine air tanker fighting the fire crashed in Puntzi Lake Friday afternoon, July 10. The Air Tractor 802-F Fire Boss amphibious air tanker was scooping water from the lake at about 2:15 p.m. when the Conair plane had some sort of difficulty and sank. The pilot was not injured, according to Bill Yearwood with Transportation Safety Board.
Map of heat detected by a satellite on the Puntzi Lake Fire, 4 a.m. MT, July 11.Puntzi Lake Wildfire July 9, 2015. Photo by British Columbia Wildfire Service.
Five wildland fire suppression crews and 30 fireline management personnel are being mobilized to Canada to assist with fire suppression operations. Canada is experiencing an intense fire season and has requested wildland firefighting assistance from the United States.
The five 20-person wildland fire suppression crews were dispatched through the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise, Idaho. Four of the crews are comprised of U.S. Forest Service firefighters from California, while one is a hotshot crew from the National Park Service in Estes Park, Colorado. The crews and the fireline management personnel will arrive in Edmonton, Alberta and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, over the weekend and will deploy to wildland fire incidents in both provinces. The U.S. also sent one heavy air tanker, a BAe-146, to Grande Prairie, Canada on July 5.
This important research about a little known weather phenomenon that affects wildfires was conducted by government employees working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado at Boulder. However, to get a copy of this taxpayer-funded research, you will have to pay $38 to a private organization, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., a corporation that for the year that ended April 30, 2015 had $1.8 billion in revenue and a net income of $176 million. In that year, 64 percent of their revenue came from journal subscriptions.
While some government and university employees may be able to access this and other research papers, they can only do it because their employer pays tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscription fees to these private companies. The employees can seamlessly read the papers, and don’t always realize that non-employees can’t.
Gowers Weblog has an exhaustive article about this issue in which he lists the exorbitant subscription fees paid by some universities in the United States.
He noted, for example, that the state universities in Arizona pay a total of $2.7 million to just one of these private outfits, Elsevier.
The authors of the paper are Andrew O. Langford (U. of Colo.), R. B. Pierce (NOAA), and P. J. Schultz (NOAA).
The University of Colorado and NOAA have graciously allowed this brief summary of the publicly-funded research to be released — to the public:
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Southern Californians and writers love to blame the hot, dry Santa Ana winds for tense, ugly moods, and the winds have long been associated with destructive wildfires. Now, NOAA researchers have found that on occasion, the winds have an accomplice with respect to fires, at least: Natural atmospheric events known as stratospheric intrusions, which bring extremely dry air from the upper atmosphere down to the surface, adding to the fire danger effects of the Santa Anas, and exacerbating some air pollution episodes.
Satellite image of the smoke on 2 May 2013, the first day of the Springs Fire northwest of Los Angeles. The photo was taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite.
The findings suggest that forecast models with the capacity to predict stratospheric intrusions may provide valuable lead time for agencies to issue air quality alerts and fire weather warnings, or to reallocate fire fighting resources before these extreme events occur.
“The atmosphere could give us an early warning for some wildfires,” said Andrew Langford, a research chemist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the study. Researchers at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder coauthored the work, which was accepted for publication this week in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The authors took a detailed look at the May 2013 “Springs Fire” that burned 25,000 acres about 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The researchers used a NOAA forecast model that incorporates satellite observations of ozone, wind data, and other atmospheric information to detect the occurrence of the intrusions.
The analysis showed that in the early hours before the Springs Fire, a tongue of air characteristic of the stratosphere—extremely dry and very high in ozone from the stratosphere’s ozone layer—reached to the surface in southern California and extended as far south as Baja California.
The researchers found that ground-based monitoring stations near the fire’s origin also confirmed the telltale signs of the intrusion right before the fire broke out: A large drop in relative humidity and a rise in ozone. As the day went on, a combination of factors accelerated the fire: Low humidity, persistent high winds, dry condition of the grasses and other vegetation, clear skies and bright sunlight, and very warm surface temperatures. A few days later, cloudy skies, a drop in temperature, a shift in winds, and widespread rainfall helped extinguish the fire.
The stratospheric intrusion also had another downside during the Springs Fire: it added ozone from the upper atmosphere to the urban and fire-related pollution produced in the lower atmosphere. On the second and third days of the fire, this helped to push levels of ozone—which can harm people’s lungs and damage crops—over the federal ozone limit at 24 monitoring sites across southern California. Monitors as far away as Las Vegas also saw a spike in ozone on the third day of the fire. The observed exceedances of the ozone standard were unusual for the region for that time period, suggesting that the stratospheric intrusions were a contributing factor.
“Stratospheric intrusions are double trouble for Southern California,” said Langford. “We knew that the intrusions can add to surface ozone pollution. Now we know that they also can contribute to the fire danger, particularly during La Niña years when deep intrusions are more frequent, as recently shown by our NOAA colleagues at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. The good news is that with models and observations, we can get an early warning from the atmosphere in some cases.”
The authors note that stratospheric intrusions have previously been implicated in the explosive development of wildland fires in New Jersey and Michigan, but have not previously been connected to fires in southern California or to the Santa Ana winds. The frequent occurrence of stratospheric intrusions above the west coast during the fall, winter, and spring suggests that similar circumstances may have played a role in other major southern California fires, including the series of destructive fires that burned more than 800,000 acres in October of 2003, and burned nearly a million acres in October of 2007, say the authors.
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(UPDATE July 12, 2015: We contacted one of the authors, Andrew Langford, and he sent us a copy of the paper, which has not been copyedited and typeset yet.)
