Wildfire Today

Which do YOU think were the most significant stories about wildfire that occurred in 2011?

As we have done for the last 2 years, we will be listing the most significant news stories about wildfire that occurred during the last year and will ask you to cast your vote in a poll for those that you think are the MOST significant. As before, we won’t list the fatalities, because I don’t think any of us want to rate one fatality as more significant than another.

I am working on the list now, but you have a chance to contribute before it is complete. In a comment below, let us know which stories you think were most significant in 2011. If you want to, you can copy and paste into your comment the web address to the story. Hopefully the incident will have been covered on Wildfire Today, but if not, we’d certainly like to know about it.

Nominate your significant stories by the end of the day on Saturday, January 14, 2012 in a comment below. I will evaluate your nominations, compare them with what I came up with, and in a completely arbitrary and capricious manner, decide which ones make the final poll. On January 16 I’ll post the new poll, and then you can vote.

You can still vote in the previous polls, unless you have already:  2009 and 2010

 

The wildfires near Browning, Montana that Wildfire Today told you about yesterday were approximately 85% contained by Thursday afternoon. The earlier estimates of the number of acres burned has been revised to a total of 18,000 in the two largest fires.

The  6,000-acre Y Fire that started south of Browning near the intersection of Highways 89 and 2, pushed by winds gusting up to 60 mph, was about 19 miles long between Browning and Cut Bank.

The Boy Fire north of Browning on the east side of Route 464 blackened 12,000 acres and was approximately 10 miles long.

About 90 students at the Blackfeet Boarding Dormitory, a Bureau of Indian Affairs housing facility that provides living accommodations for Blackfeet children attending school in Browning, were in the path of the Boy Fire. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Great Falls Tribune:

“Because the fire was moving so darn fast, one of our very first concerns was that boarding school with all those kids that are staying down there,” Running Wolf, [Fire Management Officer for Blackfeet Wildland Fire Management] said. “It became apparent that we had to make an evacuation plan. We wanted to be 2 to 5 miles ahead in evacuating those people before this fire was ever a threat to them.”

But the staff at the boarding dormitory already had taken the initiative by the time crews arrived. According to Lyle McDonald [director of the dormitory], when smoke from the blaze began filtering into the cafeteria, the dormitory activated its evacuation plan. The plan called for the 90 or so students and staff to be loaded into school buses driven in from Browning, and then transported to safety in town. However, as news of the fire spread through Browning, the road leading to the dormitory quickly filled with people coming to see the fire and emergency vehicles heading out to combat the blaze. The school buses from Browning were stuck in traffic.

“Thick smoke was flying down the coulee,” McDonald said. “We were waiting for the buses and smoke started drifting into the building.”

Given the speed of the fire and the delayed buses, dormitory staff decided to load the kids into every available vehicle on campus and get out on their own. Using three Ford Expedition SUVs, all the staff vehicles and several emergency vehicles that arrived on scene, the entire population of the Blackfeet Boarding Dormitory was able to get out in one trip.

If the information that the Department of Interior is providing is accurate, the following information about a “brief compromise of personal information” of 18,000 DOI employees may amount to nothing. Perhaps we are just overly sensitive about our personal information ending up the wrong hands, or maybe this had the potential to cause major problems for a lot of employees.

Below is the text of a memo distributed by the National Interagency Fire Center on January 5, 2012:

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United States Department of the Interior

NATIONAL INTERAGENCY FIRE CENTER

3833 South Development Avenue

Boise, Idaho  83705-5354

NEWS

Contact:  Randy Eardley, 208-387-5895

DOI Fire Managers Take Precautionary Measure in Notifying 18,000 Personnel About Brief Compromise of Personal Information

(January 5, 2011) Boise – Fire program leaders of the four Department of the Interior bureaus represented at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, are taking a precautionary step in notifying 18,000 employees and contractors across the country that electronic personal information was outside secure government systems for several hours in November.  The incident occurred when an employee emailed a spreadsheet containing the information from NIFC to the employee’s unsecured home computer with the intent of teleworking.

Sophisticated security software detected the information immediately as the email was traveling out to the internet and within hours the spreadsheet had been removed from both the sending computer and, with full cooperation of the employee, the receiving home computer.  An investigation determined there was no malicious intent on the employee’s part and there is no indication the information was intercepted or has been illegally used.

“This was detected and resolved so quickly that the risk of the information having been intercepted is extremely low,” said Howard Hedrick, acting director for the Bureau of Land Management’s Fire and Aviation program, one of the bureaus affected by the incident.  “We certainly have no evidence the information was taken or used in any fraudulent manner, and our notification to personnel is very much a proactive and precautionary step.”

The notification includes mention of the low risk and lack of evidence regarding fraudulent use of the information but also provides advice and guidance on how to monitor credit reports and be vigilant for potential issues indicating a misuse of personal information.

This incident affects employees within and contracted by the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service throughout the nation. Other partner agencies at the National Interagency Fire Center are not affected.

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