Matchbox/Superlift Ford F-350 brush truck. Photo credit: Ford
(Scroll down for an update.)
Ford, Matchbox™, and Superlift Suspensions collaborated to convert a 2011 Ford F-350 XLT Super Duty into the Matchbox Superlift Brush Truck exhibited at the SEMA automotive specialty products trade event in Las Vegas last week. The truck was lifted 10 inches by Superlift and it sits on 41-inch Interco IROK tires. The tube armor that surrounds the truck looks like something you might see on wildland fire engines in New Jersey or Australia.
Visitors to the SEMA show received miniature die-cast versions of the truck, however the show was not open to the general public. A call to Mattel/Matchbox to ask if the die-cast will be available for sale was not immediately returned.
UPDATE: November 8, 2011: we heard from Dan Salazar at Mattel, who told us the Matchbox brush truck that was distributed at the SEMA show will not be sold or given away outside the show. Next year they will have a brush truck in their product line, but it will have a different color scheme and won’t come in the display case the truck at SEMA came in.
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center produced this excellent video that every firefighter in a supervisory position should see before the next fire season. It was uploaded to YouTube on November 4, 2011.
The tragic and possibly unnecessary death of Andrew Palmer on the Iron Complex fire in northern California may lead to a slightly safer work environment for wildland firefighters. Andrew was injured by a falling tree and bled to death before he was transported to the Redding, California airport three hours and 20 minutes after the accident. An investigation discovered many mistakes, indecisiveness, and a lack of planning that all contributed to the disastrous outcome.
In an effort to reduce the chances of similar tragedies, we now have:
Dutch Creek Protocol, guidelines for emergency medical response and extractions.
We have devoted a lot of “ink” to the Pagami Creek fire that burned over 92,000 acres in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in September. The U.S. Forest Service has received much criticism for their decision to only manage it, rather than suppress it, not expecting the wind events that pushed the fire dozens of miles to the east and south.
Taking a view that differs from many others that have been expressed publicly is Rod Sando, a former commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Here is an excerpt from an article he wrote for the Star Tribune:
…When the Pagami Creek fire started, the decision was made to allow it to burn. It was located well inside the wilderness, and it was unlikely under normal conditions that it would travel outside the wilderness boundary.
That, of course, changed with the very unusual weather, which caused the fire to completely change its character. The probability of this was extremely low, and the actions taken before Sept. 10 were prudent and within the usual assessment of risk.
One significant fact that should be understood is that when a fire has extreme behavior, as in the case of the Pagami Creek fire, it is nearly impossible to control. The only alternative is to let it run its course and get out of the way.
It also needs to be appreciated that predicting fire behavior is one of the most complex and difficult tasks land managers must face. Even with good weather forecasts, it is still very difficult to predict how fire will behave.
Meanwhile, the long-term benefits of the Pagami Creek fire (and others in the future) will enhance the values of the BWCA. It may not seem so at the moment, but restoring fire to the system in this fashion is the best alternative if long-term ecological integrity is to be protected.
[…]
It is important that we support the managers who have the courage to take the risks necessary to use fire to manage the land rather than second-guessing their decisions.
The official review of the fire will help everyone assess what was done, and I expect it to show that the Forest Service operated in a competent and professional manner. To continue with blame and recrimination at this point is counterproductive.
Will suggestions for improvement emerge? You can count on it.
The lessons learned from this fire will certainly strengthen the program, and we should have confidence that the next time this occurs (which could be as long as 100 years from now), it will be managed as well or better.
My thanks to the Forest Service for doing the best that it could under very difficult circumstances.
Evacuating horses during a fire storm
The wildfires of October, 2007 in southern California required over 1,000,000 people to evacuate, destroyed at least 1,500 homes, and burned 500,000 acres. An article at the Horse Channel describes the plight of Micaela Myers, a horse owner that struggled to relocate two horses that were in the path of one of the fires.
As standards for particulate pollution continue to tighten, land managers that approve or conduct prescribed burns must manage smoke production carefully to minimize smoke impacts in sensitive areas. BlueSky Playground is an interactive, web-based tool for exploring smoke emissions and resulting downwind smoke concentrations from wild and prescribed fires. It connects to state-of-the-science models within the BlueSky Framework, providing access to powerful modeling tools in an easy-to-use interface. BlueSky Playground is freely available and requires no login to access the core features. BlueSky Playground has recently been expanded to provide more useful tools for prescribed burn planning and is part of the Wildland Fire Decision Support System Air Quality suite (WFDSS-AQ). We will demonstrate BlueSky Playground and show how it can be used in both wild and prescribed burn analyses.
Comments on articles here at Wildfire Today
We moderate the comments our readers leave on the articles at Wildfire Today. One of the reasons we do this is because we receive an average of 10 comments a day from spam robots and others that want to promote their nefarious web sites or get rich quick schemes. They leave a generic comment, but include their web site address in the space provided. Many of these are written by people for whom English is not their first language. Here is an example you might enjoy that apparently originated from someone wanting to promote a web site hosting company in Thailand:
What i don’t understood is in fact how you’re now not actually a lot more smartly-liked than you may be now. You are so intelligent. You realize therefore considerably on the subject of this matter, produced me individually believe it from so many varied angles. Its like men and women aren’t involved except it is something to do with Woman Gaga! Your individual stuffs excellent. At all times care for it up!
Yes, this individual from Thailand found me out! Woman Gaga is the inspiration for Wildfire Today!
The Predictive Services section at the National Interagency Fire Center has issued their National Wildland Significant Fire Potential Outlook for November, 2011 through February, 2012. According to their prediction, Texas will continue to experience “extreme to exceptional drought conditions”.
A U.S. Army laboratory in Natic, Massachusetts is testing new Meals Ready to Eat that have some surprising new ingredients, including caffeine, omega 3, and curcumin, which acts as an anti-inflammatory. A new beef jerky stick contains the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. And Maltodextrin – a complex carbohydrate that can give service men and women an extra turbo charge is being injected into an applesauce they have called Zapplesauce.
When these new recipes are finalized, there’s a good chance wildland firefighters will see them out on the fireline.
Here is an excerpt from an article at the Daily Mail:
…The MRE is notorious within the ranks for being as popular as school dinners are likely to be with children.
They have been called a variety of names such as, Meals Rejected by Everyone, Meals Refused by the Enemy, Materials Resembling Edibles. and Meals Refusing to Exit, according to the Bangor Daily News.
However, now that that the MRE dishes have been given a gourmet makeover, the meals, which have a shelf-life of three years at 80 degrees and can withstand an airdrop from thousands of feet [with a parachute, or a free-fall from 100 feet] may just prove popular for the first time.
Recent additions to the MRE range include chicken and pesto pasta, feta cheese and tomato, soldiers now can choose from ratatouille, garlic mashed potatoes, salsa verde and a strawberry-banana dairy shake.
The scientists who have doubled the number of MRE options from 12 to 24, asked soldiers at military bases across the U.S for feedback at ‘sampling sessions’.
Sometimes large fire whirls over wildfires, spinning columns of air, debris, and sometimes flames, are called “fire tornadoes”. If they are on or close to the ground the more accurate term is most likely “fire whirl”. We have reported on them before, including one in Hawaii. We even posted a picture of the tracks of dust devils, spinning air not associated with a fire, on Mars. Yes, Mars.
When Kelly Schwartz was driving home after getting gasoline in his vehicle on October 24, 2011, near Langdon, North Dakota he spotted a smoke column over a vegetation fire. Being a photographer, he pulled out his camera and started taking some pictures. The smoke, back-lit by the afternoon sun, made for some good photos. But then he saw something unusual in the smoke.
The photos are published here with Kelly’s permission.
…I start to notice this tornado looking thing in the smoke. I found an approach and snapped some more pictures. 10 minutes later I arrived at fire, but it had died down quiet a bit and wasn’t producing as much smoke and the tornado looking thing was gone.
Kelly sent the photos to the National Weather Service to get their opinion on what he had seen. Here is an excerpt from their analysis, written by Gregory Gust, NWS Warning Coordination Meteorologist:
A Fire Whirl generally forms when superheated air near the surface of a large fire zone rises rapidly in an airmass where sufficient horizontal or vertical vorticity is also present. Much like a dust devil or whirlwind, the rapidly rising air above a wildfire can accelerate and turn the local vorticity into a tight vertical vortex, now composed of fire instead of dust. Whereas the dust devil will often mix out its local temperature discontinuity and the vortex dissipate rather quickly, over a few minutes or less, the wildfire zone can help maintain a fairly long-lived fire whirl lasting for several minutes or more.
A Fire Tornado would be a much more extreme example, and involve a Fire Whirl that had stretched vertically from the ground up to the base of developing cumuliform clouds. In our case, the vortex extended nearly 3900 feet high.
What’s the Meteorology behind all of this?
A below listed article by Mike Umscheid, with the NWS office in Dodge City KS, has a great meteorological explanation and example of how this process initiates.
Our detailed analysis of the Langdon event will take some time to complete, but preliminary information suggests that similar ingredients are present as follows: 1. the fire zone heating produced the rapidly rising air, 2. the lower level winds had enough environmental shear to induce a vertical vorticity near the surface and get the fire whirl going, and then sustain it.
In addition, we suspect that at least two additional factors were in play, as follows: 3. low level moisture was sufficient to rise, cool, condense and form the pyro-cumulus cloud deck, and 4. the lifted condensation level (LCL) was close enough to the level of free convection (LFC) so that the developing pyro-cumulus quickly became a towering cumulus… which may have increased the overall up draft speed and vertical vorticity to such an extent that the near surface Fire Whirl stretched into a Fire Tornado.
The 2:55 p.m. CDT report from the Langdon Airport listed winds at 3 mph from the east, with visibilities reduced to 1.25 miles in haze, and lowest cloud heights of 3700 to 3900 feet AGL. The next published observation, at 3:15 p.m. CDT, listed winds as calm, visibilities as unrestricted (10 miles or greater), and skies as overcast at 3900 feet AGL.
According to local observers, the pyro-cumulus cloud developed quite quickly above the fire zone as the ascending smoke plume then took on its whirl.”
