Lightning during the 24-hour period ending at 6:44 a.m. PDT Sept. 10, 2021. The red strikes are the most recent.
Lightning, strong winds, and showers moved into California, Nevada, and Oregon Thursday afternoon. Friday morning at about 7 a.m. the National Weather Service reported approximately 1,100 ground strikes had occurred in California.
Most of Northern California and Central Oregon received at least a small amount of rain. While some weather stations recorded none or less than 0.05″ others measured more than 0.25″.
Precipitation, Western US, 24 hours ending at 7:10 am PDT Sept. 10, 2021.
All of the precipitation amounts below are for the 24-hour period ending at 7:10 a.m. PDT Sept. 10.
Maps of precipitation in California and Oregon–
Precipitation, Northern California, 24 hours ending at 7:10 am PDT Sept. 10, 2021.Precipitation, Oregon, 24 hours ending at 7:10 am PDT Sept. 10, 2021
“In many cases, we’re still fighting fire with sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks,” said Bill Gabbert.
Members of the Washington National Guard assisting on the Summit Trail fire near Inchelium, WA. WNG photo.
Here are excerpts from an article published September 8 by ABC News.
As wildfires in California and beyond have grown larger and deadlier in recent years, some in the firefighting sector say the tools and technologies used to combat new blazes have not kept up with the impact of climate change’s fury.
“In many cases, we’re still fighting fire with sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks,” Bill Gabbert, who worked as a full-time firefighter for more than 30 years before becoming managing editor of the industry publication Wildfire Today, told ABC News. “Hand crews, using hand tools and chainsaws to remove the fuel on the edge of a fire so the fire burns up to that area where there is no fuel and then it stops spreading, that’s how we put out fires.”
Some major technological leaps, including computer modeling simulators have been made to help assist firefighters, but funding and bureaucratic hurdles in many cases have prevented their widespread adoption in communities that may need them. Meanwhile, a handful of entrepreneurs see the blank space as a ripe opportunity for new innovations they say can ultimately help save lives as the West now grapples with some of its largest fires ever recorded.
[…]
Jon Heggie, a battalion chief at Cal Fire, told ABC News that many fire agencies in recent years have explored emerging technologies as a way to address issues that arise in firefighting, noting how Gov. Gavin Newsom of California put out a call for “innovative ideas” to create “cutting-edge firefighting technology” in fall 2019.
One of the results of this effort — and “really, the one that stands out,” according to Heggie — was the creation and adoption of a computer modeling service that predicts a fire’s spread developed by the Bellevue, Washington-based firm Technosylva.
MORE: Nevada records worst air quality on record as wildfire smoke spreads
The software integrates weather, topography, fuel (combustable material) and more to “give us a real-time estimation of fire growth over a given period of time,” Heggie said.
“Anytime there is a fire started anywhere in California, a simulation is started so that the field commanders have that real-time information from the minute a fire starts,” he added. “It populates that fire based on where the fire was reported, that may not be accurate of where the fire actually is, so when the first arriving engines get on scene, they give a more updated report of location and then another report is generated and that will be more accurate.”
The data is critical for giving early evacuation notifications to communities that could be in the path of the fire, as well as for decision-making on how to best combat a blaze.
Lightning with little or no rain could start more wildfires
Forecast for lightning with little or no precipitation for 6 a.m. MDT Thursday until 6 a.m. MDT Friday.
Areas in 10 western states are included in forecasts for isolated or scattered thunderstorms with little or no rain Thursday afternoon and night, prompting Red Flag Warnings.
Nationally 23,467 firefighters are actively attempting to suppress 58 large fires and another 47 are being managed under a less than full suppression strategy. If this dry lightning event in drought-affected desiccated vegetation creates a new round of wildfires it would put additional stress on the wildfire suppression system that is already struggling to mobilize enough personnel and equipment for the existing 105 fires. Only one of the 16 Type 1 Incident Management Teams is available for new fires.
The National Weather Service predicts “…dry and breezy conditions conducive to fire spread across portions of the western Great Basin northeastward to the northern High Plains. Deep-layer ascent associated with the approaching upper trough will also support isolated to scattered thunderstorms across the western Great Basin and portions of the Pacific Northwest into the northern Rockies. Several fire starts will be possible where thunderstorms occur given the extremely dry fuels in place.”
Some locations from central Nevada northwestward to central Oregon and eastward to south-central Montana could receive more than half an inch of rain, but lightning could occur with no rain. Of particular concern is the area from central Oregon into far Northern California where fire managers should expect dry thunderstorms.
Red Flag Warnings Sept. 9, 2021.
The analysis in the tweet below raises the possibility of lightning with little or no rain in California’s South Bay, Central Coast, Santa Cruz Mountains, and the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County. This area is under a Red Flag Watch.
Important update in the fire weather discussion by @NWSBayArea noting more widespread lightning potential with incoming weather pattern (not limited to the North Bay and East Bay) this is in line with evening model and satellite trends (1/2) #CAwx#FireWxpic.twitter.com/eqYUECguRI
Firefighters on the Monument Fire in Northern California, August, 2021. USFS photo.
By Steve Pyne
Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of Western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk like Esalen and avocados.
Now the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year even Greenland burned.
Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger; fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry, but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going.
The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichés, ready to spill into the culture wars.
The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, we’ve hit field capacity. What more can we say?
One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species, and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.
~
I’m a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening, but as an emergent property that’s intrinsic to life on Earth.
So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest — all the flames we see.
But then there are fires that should be present and aren’t — the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed “a second nature.”
But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower we remade second nature into “a third nature,” one organized around industrial combustion.
Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good, and way too much combustion overall.
Add up all those varieties of burning, and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction, and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.
It’s said that every model fails but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age — a Pyrocene — gives us, is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.
What we have made — if with unintended consequences — we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.
We have a lot of fire in our future, and a lot to learn about living with it.
Two engine crews and a dozer install 16,000 feet of hose on the Dixie Fire. CAL FIRE photo.
The hardest part of installing long hose lays in rugged terrain is hauling the hose, and it is usually uphill. When the plans called for 16,000 feet of hose to be installed on the Dixie Fire it just took two engine crews and some ingenuity to get it done. They enlisted the help of dozer E2085 from Paula and sons Earthwork.
The CAL FIRE crews were Lassen Modoc engines E2271 and E2251.
Two engine crews and a dozer install 16,000 feet of hose on the Dixie Fire. CAL FIRE photo.Two engine crews and a dozer install 16,000 feet of hose on the Dixie Fire. CAL FIRE photo.Two engine crews and a dozer install 16,000 feet of hose on the Dixie Fire. CAL FIRE photo.
One day in the not too distant future it will become routine to haul hose with drones.
To see all articles on Wildfire Today about the Dixie Fire, including the most recent, click here.
Active duty US Army soldiers receive fire training before assisting at the Dixie Fire Sept. 1, 2021. About 200 soldiers have been activated to assist with wildfires in California. InciWeb.
Two firefighters assigned to wildfires in California have died.
One of two emails sent to employees on the Stanislaus National Forest about the fatality of one of their employee/retirees said he “passed away earlier this week due to complications of COVID-19 while assigned to the French Fire near Kernville, CA. He had been hospitalized in Bakersfield.”
The person’s name has not been released by the Stanislaus, but at least three sources confirm it was Allen Johnson.
Allen Johnson. USFS.
Allen was a Forest Service retiree and was working as an Administratively Determined (AD) employee on the French Fire. The email to the forest’s staff said it’s very early in the process, but “Tentative plans for honoring Allen include a Dignified Transport of remains followed by a Memorial Service. To the best of our current knowledge, Allen’s dignified transport and Memorial Service will occur on or after September 26.”
California Interagency Incident Management Team 14 posted on Facebook Sept. 1, 2021, “Our team, the firefighting community, and the world lost a great friend, mentor, teacher and comrade last night. Retired South Central Sierra Interagency Incident Management Team IC and Liaison Officer Allen Johnson passed away from complications related to COVID 19.”
So in the absence of official information from the US Forest Service about this line of duty death, it appears from the post by his incident management team that Allen died August 31, 2021.
Saturday night NBC Bay Area reported another fatality — a US Forest Service firefighter assigned to the Dixie Fire near Susanville, California.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service told NBC Bay Area Saturday that the firefighter, an employee with the Lassen National Forest died from an illness. The official added that the firefighter’s death was not related to the fire. No other details have been released at this time.
The official information from CAL FIRE about the Dixie Fire confirms there was a first responder fatality from an illness on September 2.
UPDATE at 11:08 a.m. PDT Sept. 6, 2021: NEWS4 reported today that the US Forest Service said the firefighter that died who had been assigned to the Dixie Fire was Marcus Pacheco, an assistant fire engine operator for the Lassen NF with 30 years of fire experience. He passed away Sept. 2 from what the USFS is calling an "unspecified illness". Late at night on September 5 the Lassen National Forest created a post on Facebook announcing the two fatalities and confirming the names.
The Dixie Fire has burned more than 889,000 acres near Susanville, California and is still actively spreading.
The 25,000-acre French Fire is west of Kernville, California.
Last week a strike team of five engines with 16 firefighters on the Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe was quarantined for two weeks due to one of their members testing positive for COVID. There have been other reports of firefighters and crews sidelined, quarantined, or sickened, but specifics are hard to come by.
Two weeks ago Wildfire Today asked the five federal land management agencies for the number of their firefighters that have tested positive for COVID or had to quarantine after exposure. All five refused to release any information on the topic and would not explain their reasoning for keeping it secret. On September 2 we asked the US Forest Service again for the numbers of their firefighters who have tested positive for COVID, were hospitalized, or died. We are still waiting for the answers.
We send out our sincere condolences to the family, friends, and co-workers of the two firefighters who passed away while on duty.
(Edited to include the names of the firefighters.)
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to people who passed along this information.
