For at least the last 42 years, the Stoughton, Massachusetts (map) Department of Public Works had burned the brush at Mead’s Meadow to prepare the area around the pond for ice skating season. There had been no major problems until Monday, when an unexpected wind shift pushed the fire toward DPW employee Steve Lewandowski. He tried to run, but he got stuck in mud. John Batchelder, Superintendent of the DPW, said Lewandowski was able to bend over and get his face in the mud and water while the flames burned across his body.
Lewandowski was admitted to the Burn Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital Monday evening. Later the hospital listed him in good condition. His girlfriend said he has burns on his neck, and back, and his face is reddened.
No one from the Fire Department was present during the prescribed fire. A local resident called 911 when she heard a man at the project site screaming repeatedly, and saw that the flames were higher than she usually saw when the DPW burned the meadow. Police and fire units responded and helped Lewandowski walk out of the burn area to a ground ambulance.
According to an article at the Taunton Gazette, Batchelder said the DPW employees responsible for starting and controlling the fire have no training to do so. Fire Chief Mark Dolloff said he will investigate the incident.
The Coal Canyon fire in South Dakota left one firefighter dead and another hospitalized with serious burns. Trampus Haskvitz was killed but his crew mate, Austin Whitney, is out of the hospital and recently submitted to an interview on a local television station. The video is HERE, and below is a portion of the transcript:
It’s a nightmare scenario for firefighters: being trapped in a fire with no way out.
“I just thought, ‘I’m never going to see my family again,'” Austin Whitney said.
On the afternoon of August 11, Whitney was battling the Coal Canyon Fire with two other men, KC Fees and Trampus Haskvitz, when the fire overtook them.
“When I looked up and seen nothing but a wall of flame, I tried to make a run for it. I wasn’t thinking straight,” Whitney said.
The fire had gotten below the crew and was racing up the hill towards them.
“Then I realized that it wasn’t worth running and I just dropped to the ground, no time to get to my fire shelter,” Whitney said.
Unprotected on the ground, Whitney believed that his life was over.
“As soon as I got turned around and saw that wall of flame I was like, ‘I’m dying at 22 years old. I’m dead,’ was the only thing I could repeat in my mind. ‘I’m dead,'” Whitney said.
A single engine air tanker (SEAT) on two occasions in August had to dump part of its retardant load in order to avoid crashing. According to an article in the Missoulian, on August 27 an Air Tractor 802 was attempting to take off from the Ravalli County Airport at Hamilton, Montana (map) when it became evident that it was too heavy to lift off the runway. The pilot released 75 gallons of retardant on the last 75 feet of the runway, which lightened the aircraft enough to allow it to take off. The Hamilton Fire Department rinsed the retardant off the runway.
On August 30 an Air Tractor 802 had cleared the runway but was “in a negative rate of climb”, said Dean Bitterman, forest aviation officer for the Bitterroot National Forest. It was not going to make it over a hill, so pilot Jackie Shadowens released 75 gallons of retardant just north of the runway into grass and wetlands.
The SEAT can hold about 800 gallons of retardant, but had been downloaded by 20% to account for density altitude, which is affected by higher temperatures and altitude.
USFS extends air tanker availability to account for longer fire seasons
This winter for the first time in recent history, the U.S. Forest Service will have a large air tanker on contract through the winter. Butch Weedon reports that Neptune Aviation will have one of their large air tankers, probably a P2V, on contract through the 2011-2012 winter months. In addition, three air tankers will come on earlier next year than usual, on March 1, because the USFS expects the 2012 fire season to start early, as was the case this year.
Neptune still has three air tankers deployed in Texas. One P2V is in Austin and another is at Longview, where their new BAe-146 jet powered air tanker has been stationed for several weeks.
Columbia Helicopters has had one of its twin-rotor Columbia 107 helicopters on extended duty in east Texas, out of Huntsville, since March, under a State contract. Normally that helicopter would end its season in September, but they expect it to remain there until the end of the year, due to the high fire danger.
Other air tankers in Texas
The DC-10 very large air tanker was released from its Texas assignment around October 28, along with three Convair 580 air tankers from Canada.
The Rand air tanker report
The U.S. Forest Service is still not interested in offering exclusive use contracts for very large air tankers (VLAT) that carry 11,600 to 20,000 gallons, which is 6 to 11 times more retardant than the largest “large” air tankers with a capacity of 1,800 to 3,000 gallons. When the Rand Corporation conducted the air tanker study for the USFS, they were instructed by the USFS to not even consider VLATs. Here is a quote from a July, 2010 draft of the 104-page report which has still not been released to the public:
At Forest Service direction, we did not examine smaller SEATs that carry 800-900 gallons of retardant nor larger VLATs that carry 12,000-20,000 gallons of retardant.
Astounding, to say the least. The USFS paid Rand $840,092 for the report.
The draft version of the report recommends 11 to 28 3,000-gallon air tankers, and 14 to 20 2,700-gallon helicopters depending on how they are based, their mobility, and the “prescience” of dispatchers to be able to predict where fires will start. But those are only for initial attack. If the USFS plans to use the aircraft on large fires, they will need more, but the report did not provide a recommendation for that contingency. This year there were 11 large air tankers on exclusive use contracts.
Few people would recommend that air tankers not be used on large fires. And of course they are used routinely and extensively on large fires. For example, on the 6,200-acre Fourmile Canyon fire that burned west of Boulder, Colorado in September, air tankers dropped 86 loads of retardant over a four day period. Below is a map showing the locations of most, but not all, of the retardant drops by large air tankers on that fire. (Click on it to see a larger version.)
Today Google enabled a new feature on Google+, “Pages”, for organizations. So, we jumped in with both feet and created a new official Wildfire Today Google+ Page.
Wildfire Today on Google+
If you are not familiar with Google+, HERE is one description, but Geek.com describes it this way:
Google announced a new social networking layer that may compete with Facebook but, at the same time, is utterly different. The Google+ project will do some of the same general things as Facebook, such as sending messages to friends, sharing links, chatting, and sharing pictures, but the big difference is that with Google+, you can choose who you want to share these things with. Unlike with Facebook where posting a link will show up on your profile for all of your 500 “friends” to see, Google+ lets you do things a little differently.
And here is a video with more information:
We will be deleting the other “standard” Google+ account we created before they enabled Google+ “Pages” for organizations.
Fire retardant tanks at Santa Maria air tanker base. Photo: Central Coast Jet Center
Since the staffing at the Santa Maria air tanker base 55 miles northwest of Santa Barbara, California was eliminated on March 19, 2009, which downgraded the staff to call when needed, several fire chiefs in the area have been campaigning to reinstate the full time positions at the base. At that time two key tanker base positions — fixed-wing base manager and assistant fixed-wing base manager — were eliminated as part of a reorganization of the Los Padres National Forest staff.
Today Peggy Hernandez, the Forest Supervisor announced that the appropriate staff will be on hand at Santa Maria from October 21 through November 15 of this year, and during next year’s declared fire season, to reload air tankers if there is a fire in the area.
The call when needed status meant that if there was a nearby fire on which air tankers were used, the aircraft had to fly to Paso Robles to reload with fire retardant, which is 58 miles north of Santa Maria. Without a full time staff, it can take several hours or perhaps much longer to round up personnel qualified and available to run the base at Santa Maria, and then the mechanical systems have to be put back into service. [Corrected to say Paso Robles instead of Porterville for the alternate base.]
Summerland-Carpenteria Fire Chief Michael Mingee, who serves as President of the Association of Santa Barbara Fire Chiefs, welcomed the announcement.
“This has been a great example of government agencies at all levels working in cooperation for the betterment of public safety,” Chief Mingee said.
During a red flag warning last week for predicted strong winds in southern California, San Diego Gas and Electric staged contract wildland firefighters in remote areas of San Diego County to be able to respond quickly if a power line failure caused a fire. Using an automatic system, SDG&E called 11,500 residents in the eastern parts of the county to warn them that the utility could turn off their power if they determined that the fire danger reached a predetermined threshold. The utility has recently installed 130 weather stations in their service area that transmit data via a cell phone network to their headquarters.
…“We used to have only one weather station per circuit, and now some circuits have as many as five, so we can try to pinpoint the potential impact of weather on our system,” [SDG&E spokesman Stephanie] Donovan said. “We also began staging crews in wind-prone areas to hasten response time.”
A typical crew is four SDG&E troubleshooters and two or three firefighters, who are part of a contract wildfire strike team hired by the utility.
“SDG&E had about 90 people staged in the areas where the highest winds were forecast,” Donovan said. “This included our distribution crews, contract firefighters, transmission construction and maintenance crews, and even Telecomm personnel.”
The staging of observers turned out to be “invaluable,” she said.
“Specifically, an electric troubleshooter out of SDG&E’s construction and operations center in Escondido followed fire trucks onto Tribal Road within the Rincon Reservation to find poles and wire down with a half-acre fire. It was determined the line was a 2.4 kilovolt customer-owned equipment,” Donovan said.
“Another troubleshooter patrolling a line came across a leaning pole with secondary wire in the Rincon area, and was able to call it in and get it fixed. Finally, one of SDG&E’s weather stations in the Santa Ysabel area stopped updating in the middle of the event, so one of the stand-by crews was sent to troubleshoot the issue and soon had the weather station back on line communicating via cellular modem.”
