News and opinion about wildland fire
While it may appear in the screen grab from a video that firefighters in Bermuda colored the water in their fire truck for the Christmas season, it gets its color from the flashing red and blue lights on the fire apparatus and a nearby police car. Check out the video below to see the light show as the firefighters extinguished a small brush fire.
Tanker 40, the BAe-146 jet-powered air tanker that was used for the first time on fires this fall, is taking the winter off, like most air tankers. The lease that Neptune had with Tronos, which converted and still owns the aircraft, ended yesterday, December 22. Since it is due for its C-check, which is required every 5,000 cycles or every 2.5 years, the aircraft is en route back home, to Prince Edward Island, Canada. This is major maintenance and usually takes about 21 days for a BAe-146.
Dan Snyder, the President of Neptune, told Wildfire Today that the aircraft and tank performed well in Texas in November, and also on the Willow fire last weekend near Hollister, California. Tanker 40 was the only large air tanker on the fire in California. Mr. Snyder said they expect to have the aircraft back under contract in the spring of 2012.
Neptune is planning on responding to the USFS’ Request for Proposal that the agency issued on November 30, which seeks to contract for 7 to 35 “next generation air tankers”. These next-gen aircraft must be turbine-powered and be capable of hauling 3,000 to 5,000 gallons of retardant while cruising at a minimum of 300 knots (345 mph). It is our understanding that turbofan engines, frequently called jets, qualify as “turbine powered”, which means the BAe-146 would most likely meet the standards in the RFP since it carries 3,000 gallons, and earlier today cruised at 430 knots (495 mph) flying back to Canada.
As we reported on November 8, 2011, the U.S. Forest Service has committed to have at least one large air tanker on contract through the winter of 2011-2012, and Mr. Snyder said one of their P2Vs, Tanker 5, has been filling that role. As of December 22 Tanker 5 was in California.
The USFS will bring on most of Neptune’s P2Vs earlier than usual in 2012, beginning as early as March 1, due to the longer fire seasons we have been experiencing and to make up for the loss of Aero Union’s eight P-3 air tankers last summer. The USFS said they cancelled the Aero Union contracts because certain required inspections were not being performed. This left only 11 large air tankers under exclusive use contracts, down from 44 in 2002.
Based on a news report, here is the story that I assume Michael Meyers will be telling for years:
And there I was — on December 21, driving my pickup on McAlister St. near La Grande, Oregon pulling a trailer with four tons of hay. I happened to see something unusual in my rear view mirror and did a double-take. The hay was on fire. I looked around for a place to pull over and saw to my left some fire trucks. So pulling the load of burning hay, I drove over and parked near the firefighters who were finishing up putting out a fire in a shed. The shed and its contents were a total loss, as was my hay, but the firefighters saved my trailer.
The Wildfire Lessons Learned Center has posted quite a few new documents over the last couple of months. Visit their site for the details, but here are some samples:
Helicopter overturns north of Juneau, Alaska
On September 26, 2011 personnel from the Tongass National Forest were installing a weather station on a remote mountaintop and were using a helicopter to transport workers and equipment. During cool down after landing, with the contract pilot and a Helicopter Manager still onboard, the helicopter lifted off the helispot and violently flipped over. There were no injuries, and the pilot, the Helicopter manger, and two other employees were evacuated from the site by a rescue helicopter. The facilitated learning analysis includes this quote:
The helicopter cool down time is not a safe time – it’s two minutes of danger.
National Park Service engine burns in Arizona
A Type 6 engine from Redwood National and State Parks in California was returning from an assignment on June 27, 2011 when it suffered a catastrophic engine or drive line failure and caught fire.
As it traveled down Interstate 10 near Buckeye, Arizona, parts that flew off the truck started a wildfire and another fire started under the engine after the driver pulled to a stop in the median. There were no injuries but the truck appears to be totaled.
Continue reading “Wildfire lessons update”
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized6 Comments on Wildfire Today app for your smart phone 
UPDATE NOVEMBER 23, 2019: THIS APP IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE
There is a new FREE application, or app, which puts Wildfire Today at your fingertips on a smart phone, including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows phones, and android tablets. The app will give you a Notification on your phone when a new article has been downloaded.
The buttons in the red bar across the bottom, left to right, are:
In addition to providing the articles on Wildfire Today, it also has feeds from InciWeb and the Wildfire Lessons Learned Center. Near the top of the screen, swipe left or right to see each feed. Clicking on a Wildfire Today article will take you to the entire article within the app, but you will not see comments and it will only show one photograph for each article. However, you can click on “See original story” and it takes you to the Wildfire Today web site, using your browser, where you CAN leave comments, see what others have written, and view more than one photo per article.
Clicking on an InciWeb item takes you to a summary of the incident which will also provide a link to the full incident information on the InciWeb site. And the same thing applies to the Lessons Learned articles, however after you click and see the expanded summary, the link that is provided when clicked will download the full article to your phone, which will require a file manager app to find and view it. For Android users, the Astro File Manager works well and the downloaded file will be in the “Download” folder.
This is the web site that you can visit using your smart phone to download the Wildfire Today app: http://mippin.com/app/wildfiretoday
Or, if you have a bar code reader app on your phone, scan this which will take you to the download site:
Android users find that the free Bar Code Scanner app works very well.
In order to download an app from a source other than the Android Market or the Apple App Store, you will need to go to your settings and enable app installation from Unknown Sources, or “allow installation of non-market apps”.
Your Input
Please leave a comment here or go to our Contact Us page and let us know what you think… the good points and things you don’t like. However, the system I used to make the app leaves very little to no capability to make any significant changes. What you see is what we are stuck with.
UPDATE at 12:22 p.m. MT, December 22, 2011
We are hearing from folks that the app works on an Android tablet, but it does not fill the entire screen. It will not work on an iPad, but may sometime in the future.
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized1 Comment on Study: Forest thinning increases carbon releases Some writers have theorized that thinning a forest would help to prevent atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from increasing because it would reduce the amount of carbon released during forest fires. However, a healthy forest stores carbon and keeps it out of the atmosphere.
A new study by John L Campbell, Mark E Harmon, and Stephen R Mitchell found that forest thinning results in MORE carbon being released. In a nutshell:
