Lightning strikes tree, ignites gas line. Cynthia McInturff.
Wildland firefighters deal with a lot of lightning-struck trees, but thankfully they don’t have to worry about buried natural gas lines under their feet.
Earlier this week lightning struck a tree in Mississippi and apparently burst an underground natural gas line. The escaping gas ignited, producing a rather interesting scene.
It was captured on a security camera across the street which recorded the video. The owner of the camera said the lightning strike, “Shook the house and knocked a picture off the wall and broke it.”
Firefighters responded, but wisely did not try to suppress the fire on the tree until after the gas line had been turned off. They probably could have suppressed the flames, but you don’t want a bunch of unburned gas accumulating which could explode if it found another ignition source.
The number of acres burned in US wildfires in 2020 (not counting Alaska) was the highest ever recorded since reliable statistics have been available beginning in 1960
New climate data analyzed by NOAA shows that during July when the fire season in the West is typically nearing its maximum, the temperatures in the 11 Western states have been rising in recent years. The data from the last 10 years also indicates the amount of precipitation in the Northwest has decreased significantly.
Every 10 years NOAA recalculates the U.S. Climate Normals for the previous 30-year period. Normals act both as a ruler to compare today’s weather and tomorrow’s forecast, and as a predictor of conditions in the near future. They consist of annual/seasonal, monthly, daily, and hourly averages and statistics of temperature, precipitation, and other climatological variables from almost 15,000 U.S. weather stations.
The new annual mean data for 1991 through 2020 shows that most of the U.S. was warmer, and the eastern two-thirds of the contiguous U.S. was wetter, from 1991–2020 than the previous normals period, 1981–2010. The Southwest was considerably drier on an annual basis, while the central northern U.S. has cooled somewhat.
The weather in July has a direct effect on the number of acres burned in Western wildfires. The new data shows the Northwest is considerably drier as a percentage of the previous normal during what is already a dry season.
The rest of the West is pockmarked with wetter and drier zones. The eastern two-thirds of the U.S. has an indistinct pattern of changes in the precipitation normals. Most of the East also remained near the same temperature levels, except for persistent cooling in the north central U.S. and warming in the Northeast. However, the entire West and lee of the Rocky Mountains and Texas are all considerably (up to 2°) warmer.
This warming and drying trend in the West shows up in wildfire activity. The number of acres burned in the U.S. in 2020 — 9,941,167 (not counting Alaska) — was the highest ever recorded since reliable statistics have been available beginning in 1960.
The average fire size by decade is striking, increasing by about 400 percent from the 1980s to the 2010s. Some of that increase could be from the tendency of the U.S. Forest Service and other federal agencies to allow some fires to spread without an aggressive full suppression strategy, allowing an unplanned wildfire to accomplish fuel reduction targets and other objectives. They can do this by using virtually unlimited fire suppression funds and without having to bother with pesky steps like conventional project funding, planning documents, approvals, public input, and environmental compliance required by the National Environmental Policy Act.
Wall Street Journal reported PG&E’s power lines and equipment started more than 1,500 fires in a 4-year period
File photo of vegetation near an electrical line. (Texas A&M Engineering photo)
The California Public Utilities Commission has ordered Pacific Gas and Electric to revise its plan to reduce wildfire ignitions caused by their power lines. The company provides electrical service to areas of Central and Northern California.
PG&E missed a deadline for submitting and gaining approval of their 2021 Wildfire Mitigation Plan. The PUC ordered the company to revise a version they prepared earlier and granted a one-month extension of the deadline.
The PUC’s Wildfire Safety Division says that PG&E is actually spending less money on clearing vegetation from power lines and other equipment, contradicting claims that they are hiring more people to do the work.
Other concerns in the report include quality control and verifying how money spent reduces wildfire risk.
The Wall Street Journal (subscription) reported that investigators attributed more than 1,500 fires to PG&E power lines and hardware between June 2014 and December 2017.
CAL FIRE attributed 12 fires that started in Northern California on October 8 and 9, 2017 to PG&E power equipment.
A search through the Wildfire Today archives found numerous fires attributed to PG&E between 1999 and 2020. Some of the larger ones are below; it is not a complete or comprehensive list.
Zogg Fire, September, 2020, 56,338 acres, destroyed 204 structures, and caused the deaths of four people.
Kincade Fire, October, 2019, 77,000 acres, and destroyed 374 structures.
Camp Fire, November , 2018, 154,000 acres, destroyed 18,000 structures, and caused the deaths of 84 people. The company pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Cascade Fire, October 2017, 9,989 acres, destroyed 250 structures, and caused the deaths of five people, including one firefighter.
Redwood Valley Fire, October, 2017, 36,523 acres, destroyed 543 structures, and caused the deaths of 9 people.
Atlas Fire, October, 2017, 51,624 acres, destroyed 783 structures, and caused the deaths of 6 people.
Butte Fire, September 2015, 70,868 acres, destroyed a total of 921 structures, including 549 homes, 368 outbuildings, and 4 commercial properties, and caused the deaths of two people.
Three counties in Southern California will be boosting their aerial firefighting capability this year with each adding one large contractor-owned helicopter.
Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange counties each have their own fleets of helicopters that can be used for firefighting and search and rescue. But in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, the 3,000-gallon Boeing CH-47D Chinooks they will add this year can carry three to eight times the loads of their FireHawks, UH-1H’s, and Bell 412EP’s.
Ventura, Los Angeles, and Orange Counties will be contracting for large helicopters this year.
Ventura County has arranged to add a Sikorsky S-61 with a 1,000-gallon tank. It will supplement their UH-1’s and the new-to-them Firehawk that just returned from Colorado after being upgraded to Firehawk status with a new 1,000-gallon belly tank.
Orange County will also have a Sikorsky S-76 to provide intelligence, evaluate effectiveness of drops, and identify targets with a laser designator.
Coulson S-76 and S-61, L to R. Coulson photo.
The three counties will be calling this a “Quick Reaction Force Program.”
All four of these aircraft are being supplied by Coulson Aviation and will be staffed 24/7, capable of flying and dropping water on wildfires at night. They can also perform a maneuver that few helicopters have done in recent decades — refill their tanks while hovering over a water source at night. That is common, of course, during daylight, but rarely done in darkness using night-vision goggles.
The aircraft will be on contract starting June 15 ranging from 150 to 180 days.
Much of the funding for the helicopters is being supplied by Southern California Edison (SCE), expanding their program which supplied one or two helicopters based in Orange County in 2019 and 2020. In those years SCE paid the daily availability costs and when it was used on fires the hourly fees were covered by the jurisdiction in which the fire occurred.
In 2020 SCE and the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA) leased a CH-47D Chinook from Coulson. The night-flying helicopter was stationed at the Los Alamitos Joint Forces Training Base in Orange County on a 24/7 schedule.
In 2019 the OCFA also had an arrangement with SCE for a 24/7 night flying helicopter. In that case Coulson supplied an S-61 capable of 1,000 gallons and a Sikorsky S-76. The S-76 was not leased in 2020 because it was going through an avionics upgrade getting ready for fighting fire in the upcoming Australian summer, but it will be part of the Quick Reaction Force Program in 2021.
It is likely that these and other helicopters will occasionally make use of the 69Bravo Helistop that is being upgraded with four metal 8,000-gallon automatically refilling water tanks. Designed to efficiently refill helicopters’ buckets or tanks, it is located on one of the highest peaks in the Topanga area of the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles County.
The Chinook, Firehawk, and S-61 can get to and from water sources quickly cruising at 140 to 160 mph, while the S-76 with the pedal to the metal tops out at 178 mph.
Coulson Chinooks being unloaded at Houston after completing their firefighting contracts in South America. Coulson photo, May, 2021.
Four were killed Monday May 10 after a helicopter crashed in Erhai Lake in Dali, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. The Z-8X helicopter operated by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force had been assisting firefighters on the ground by dropping water with an external bucket. It crashed while attempting to refill at the lake.
Initially it was reported that the two pilots were killed and there were two missing crewmembers. After a search that involved 16 ships and more than 490 rescuers the crewmembers were found deceased about 16 hours later, very early Tuesday morning local time.
Videos show the aircraft start to slowly rotate or spin while it was a couple of hundred feet above the lake before the bucket was lowered into the water. The spin increased in speed and the helicopter descended, then there was an explosion that sent debris flying before the helicopter hit the water.
The video below has a different angle and includes footage after the crash.
Our sincere condolences go out to the crew’s family, friends, and coworkers.
The Z-8 helicopter is a Chinese version of the French Aérospatiale SA 321 Super Frelon helicopter.
The China Daily, owned by the Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party, reported that a huge number of people were assigned to the 118-acre wildfire the helicopter was working on:
“A total of 2,532 people were mobilized to extinguish the fire which scorched some 48 hectares of land, according to the forest and grassland fire prevention and control headquarters in Dali. No casualties as a result of the fire have been reported.”
A typical fire that size would have a perimeter of about 9,400 feet. If the 2,532 personnel on the fire were all standing on the perimeter they would be stationed every 3 feet, literally shoulder to shoulder.
In a response to the report from the Bushfire Royal Commission, Australia’s Federal government will create a new agency to provide relief, recovery, and mitigation from future weather events.
The National Recovery and Resilience Agency (NRRA) will be given $600 million to fund projects to bushfire and cyclone-proof houses, and build levees in disaster-prone areas. The money would also be put towards improving telecommunications infrastructure to better withstand disasters.
Two existing recovery agencies will fall under the umbrella of the new government body — the National Drought and North Queensland Flood Response and Recovery Agency (NDNQFRRA), and the National Bushfire Recovery Agency.
Control of the Bushfire Recovery Agency’s $2 billion fund will be handed to the new body.
The long-term recovery efforts in communities affected by recent floods across the east coast and cyclones in Western Australia will also become the responsibility of the NRRA.
NDNQFRRA coordinator-general Shane Stone, a former Northern Territory chief minister and Liberal Party president, will oversee the new agency.
