The Alaska Highway was closed to all traffic due to aggressive fire behavior observed on the Big Beaver Creek Fire in British Columbia Wednesday afternoon. The highway is closed between 386 km (Mile 250) and 418 km (Mile 260). British Columbia Wildfire Service photo.
It is barely mid-summer and wildfire activity in Alaska and western Canada has been much higher than average for this time of the year. As of July 8, the number of acres burned in Alaska is the second highest ever recorded for an entire year — 2004 holds the present record, but on a year to date basis, the state now is ahead of the same date in 2004 for acres burned.
The area blackened in Canada already exceeds the annual 10-year average for an entire year. The government has activated about 1,000 military personnel to help fight wildfires in Saskatchewan. Firefighters from eastern Canada have been mobilized to assist in the western provinces, and one BAe-146 air tanker from Missoula, Montana is also lending a hand.
Canada area burned on a weekly basis through July 1, 2015.
Alaska is also receiving help from firefighters in the lower 48 states. For example on Tuesday five 20-person crews were dispatched from California to Alaska, while snow flurries have been occurring for the past several days on the Inyo National Forest in California. Other Forests in the state received rain on Wednesday.
Here are some wildfire numbers, current on July 8, 2015:
United States: 30,017 fires, 3,821,726 acres
Alaska: 650 fires, 3,208,107 acres
Canada: 4,672 fires, 6,546,562 acres
Canada fires, July 8, 2015Alaska Fires July 8, 2015
A boater rescued campers who were stranded on the shore of a lake while the Cape Horn Fire was burning close to their camp site. The campers appeared to have a boat in their small cove that was partially submerged in Lake Pend Oreille. Near the beginning of the video you can hear a voice saying, “hey those people are waving to us.”
The people in the boat from which the video was shot were considering going in to rescue the individuals, and shouted “You’ll have to leave your stuff!”, but later another boat arrived that picked up the campers.
These photos are screen grabs from the video that was uploaded to YouTube by John Stenberg on June 6.
The 1,380-acre Cape Horn Fire in northern Idaho has destroyed six homes and two outbuildings. The incident management team reports that a fireline has been established around “much of the fire”, however some evacuations are still in effect.
The Tweet below is from a reporter, and includes some good photos of the fire. Click on them to see larger versions.
3-D map of the Sleepy Hollow Fire in Wenatchee, Washington, looking west, 1 a.m. PT, June 30, 2015. Note the spot fire near the river that is 1.2 miles east of the main fire. (click to enlarge)
The Sleepy Hollow Fire that swept into Wenatchee, Washington destroying 29 homes announced the early beginning of the wildfire season in the state. A spot fire 1.2 miles in front of the main fire that for a while was not noticed while structures were burning on the other side of town, spread into four industrial buildings.
The Los Angeles Times has an interesting article about the fire and the current situation in Washington that has led to concern about how the state will deal with the conditions this summer, and beyond. Below are excerpts from the article:
…”This is a stress test for 2070,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “We’re being tested now with the warmth and lack of snowpack that will be typical at the end of the century. How do we get through it?”
Climate experts say the current conditions in the Pacific Northwest are part of a short-term climate phenomenon, but they warn that temperatures are rising everywhere. In Seattle, for example, that means warmer, wetter winters and warmer, drier summers.
[…]
Two months ago, Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee declared a statewide drought emergency, a snowpack drought rather than a precipitation drought. At the time, state officials warned that the 2015 fire season could be earlier and fiercer than Washington has ever seen.
Now that it has begun in earnest, “it’s worse than I feared,” Goldmark said.
[…]
Sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck in front of what had been her home of 18 years, Sharon Cooper marveled Wednesday that all of the precautions she and her husband, Nick, had taken through the years did no good against the Sleepy Hollow fire.
Not the concrete shingles. Not the backyard fire hose with high-pressure water. Not the regular efforts to whack away the brush.
“This is August kind of stuff,” Cooper said, mourning the community’s loss, wondering whether she and Nick would rebuild. “Even sometimes the Fourth of July is rainy and yucky here…. Everything’s changing.”
…As of Monday, according to the CBC, Saskatchewan had 112 active fires across the province, bringing the year-to-date total to 569. That’s nearly three times the tally for 2014, and the acreage in flames is 10 times a normal year’s.
The newest fires near La Ronge, toward the northern fringe of settlement in the province, prompted evacuation of 8,000 more people, bringing to 13,000 the number waiting out the battles in emergency shelters — the largest evacuation in provincial history. More than half of them had to be lodged in neighboring Alberta…
A photo from the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service website showing firefighters using leaf blowers on a grass fire.
On one of the pages of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service website that features wildfires, there is some praise for their “new Forced Air Firefighting Units (FAFU)”, also known as leaf blowers:
Though they may be new to firefighters in the United Kingdom, leaf blowers have been used on fires in the southeast United States for decades. I have had a little experience with them and found that they can be very useful for building fireline in hardwood litter. A brief trial in directly controlling an active fire found that they can be tricky to use. You have to be very careful where you point that high-velocity stream of air because burning embers are constantly in motion and when airborne they can sometimes land in an undesired location. And wind direction is key.
I’d like to hear from firefighters that have experience using leaf blowers in a fire management operation.
The song and the photos in the video are about the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Washington — the 256,108-acre Carlton Complex of Fires. In July, 2014 it burned approximately 300 homes in and around the towns of Pateros and Malott as well others in more rural areas.
The video is very well done, beautifully sung by Brittany Jean, and is quite moving.
