This is a reminder that on Saturday and Sunday, October 2 and 3, Wildfire Today will carry live streaming video of the two services honoring the 80 firefighters that died in the line of duty in the United States in 2009. Their names will be added to a plaque at the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial at the National Fire Academy campus at Emmitsburg, Maryland.
The schedule for the two live services:
Candlelight Service: Saturday, October 2, 6:45 p.m. ET, 3:45 p.m. PT
Memorial Service: Sunday, October 3, 9:30 a.m. ET, 6:30 a.m. PT
Sam Wallace has created another cartoon about wildland fire. This one refers to the Chubb insurance company sending fire engines to protect the homes of their policy holders during the Fourmile fire last month near Boulder, Colorado. At his web site, Mr. Wallace wrote this about the cartoon:
This is not a jab at firemen or the fire department. They do a great job. This is for the private fire fighters hired by insurance companies. (Extra special coverage, as long as you have paid for it.) Why would they help, if you were not a policy holder. Some how it does not seem right to me.
Earlier we showed you some of Mr. Wallace’s other cartoons about wildfire. His work appears at the Longmont, Colorado Times Call and at his own web site. The cartoon is published here with his permission.
The National Interagency Fire Center has released their outlook for significant wildfire potential through January, 2011. If it turns out to be correct, firefighters in the southern states and southern California are going to be busy. Click on the images to see larger versions.
An instructor was giving a student flight lessons near Tulsa, OK when the Cessna 172 caught fire. They made an emergency landing in a field, starting a grass fire. Here’s more from AVweb:
An instructor and student flying a Spartan School of Aeronautics 1980 Cessna 172RG survived an onboard fire and off-airport emergency landing in Oklahoma, Tuesday, if somewhat worse for the wear. Instructor Jade Schiewe, 28, and student Zachary Pfaff, 26, were confronted with smoke and flames coming up from the floorboard area while on a training flight. Schiewe got on the radio and reported fire in the cockpit along with a mayday call before setting the aircraft down in a field a few miles west of Jones River Airport. Both Schiewe and Pfaff escaped the aircraft, but Schiewe suffered burns. After landing, the aircraft and the area surrounding it, were soon fully engulfed in flames.
According to local news, Schiewe suffered second- and third-degree burns to the lower part of his right leg, while Pfaff appeared to be uninjured. The fire quickly spread, igniting dry grass surrounding the aircraft. Tulsa Fire was called to the scene and the brush fire was extinguished, but the aircraft was consumed by fire.
Antelope fire after crossing the Yellowstone River. NPS photo at 4:40 p.m., Sept. 28, 2010 from the Mt. Washburn web cam.
As Wildfire Today reported yesterday, the Antelope fire in Yellowstone National Park has jumped the Yellowstone River, a major drainage on the east side of the fire. Here is a link to the latest map on Yellowstone’s web site, dated September 21. The web cam on Mt. Washburn has an excellent view of the fire.
The MODIS satellite map below shows heat detected (below the Highway 212 marker) at 4:27 a.m. MT on September 29. The fire appears to be well established across the Yellowstone River. Click on the map to see a larger version.
The weather forecast for the fire area through October 3 calls for lots of sun with high temperatures in the low 70′s, RH around 20%, and moderate breezes out of the west and south. There’s no chance of rain until October 4 when the forecast predicts a 35% chance. Winds 0n the 4th will be 16 mph out of the southwest, with gusts up to 24.
Here is an excerpt from news release by the National Park Service, at 10 a.m. on September 29 in which they said the estimated size is 3,200 acres:
Wednesday’s Strategies:
A Type 2 helicopter and additional firefighting resources are being called in to augment the Type 3 helicopter, 5 engines, and 30 firefighters currently assigned to the Antelope Fire. They will focus their efforts Wednesday on assessing the fire’s growth potential, and on structure protection needs at Canyon Village, Tower/Roosevelt, and the Buffalo Ranch.
Park Impacts:
The Antelope Fire poses no threat to park visitors or area residents. No roads, lodging, campgrounds, or other visitor services are closed due to the fire. Many visitor facilities have closed for the season, or are scheduled to close for the season in the next few days. All park entrances remain open. The Specimen Ridge Trail, the Agate Creek Trail, and backcountry campsite 2Y1 are temporarily closed due to the fire.
Usually when the Cherokee Hot Shots leave their base at Unicoi, Tennessee on the Cherokee National Forest, they are on the way to a fire. But this week they are in New York City cleaning up debris from two tornadoes that swept through Queens and Brooklyn leaving toppled trees and broken branches in city parks. The Hot Shots are using their chain saws to buck the trees so the debris can be hauled away or fed into chippers.
The Hot Shots are staying at the Fire Department center at Fort Totten.
Here is an excerpt from a September 27, 2010 New York Times article:
“We were pretty excited when we heard we were coming to New York,” said Matthew Gilbert, 30, the crew’s superintendent. “This is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” It was the first time the crew had been assigned a job in a city setting.
Workers started about 9:30 Monday morning, clearing brush and downed trees from pedestrian pathways. Men wielded chain saws with 32-inch bars to dismember trees as old as 75 years, as long as 80 feet and as wide as 40 inches. Some fed smaller tree trunks into a wood chipper; others used axes to drive wedges into trunks before using the chain saws to complete the separation of the trunks into rounds.
They wore protective chaps lined with Kevlar, fire-retardant long-sleeved shirts, leather gloves, white hard hats with full brims — “bigger than construction hats,” one crew member noted — and were equipped with earplugs, radios, “bug eye” protective gear and boots with Vibram soles to provide traction.
In fact, the presence of people in ordinary clothes seemed somewhat disquieting to them.
“We’re used to seeing 10 extra people in a day,” said Brent Foltz, 25, a senior firefighter. “Here, we are seeing 10 extra people in a minute.”
Smoke jumpers in Central Park
This is not the first time that U. S. Forest Service firefighters have been assigned to New York City. Other than the incident management teams that responded to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, smoke jumpers from the McCall, Idaho and Redding, California bases spent weeks in Central Park in 2005 climbing trees, looking for infestations of the Asian long-horned beetle. Climbing the trees is the only practical way to inspect the upper reaches of the mature trees in the park, and the smoke jumpers are trained and skilled at tree climbing so that they can retrieve their parachutes from trees if necessary.
And instead of sleeping on the ground at a fire, the smoke jumpers stayed two blocks from Times Square.
David Johnson, of Redding, Calif., in a Central Park tree. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/ New York Times
Here is an excerpt from an article that was in the New York Times on April 29, 2005:
“A police officer said, ‘Now you’re just part of the Central Park freak show,’ ” said one of the smoke jumpers, Adam Lauber, 34. On a recent afternoon, he carried an oversize slingshot to launch a throw line into the canopy of a 75-foot London plane at the south side of the Sheep Meadow. “You get some people upset because we’re in the trees,” he said.
One smoke jumper, Dylan Reeves, 31, has found that some New Yorkers have a paranoid side. “Sometimes, people think we’re installing cameras in the trees,” he said.
And it does not take much to push some New Yorkers’ emotional buttons. Mr. Graham said he was screamed at by a man who accused him of killing a tree he was climbing. “He said, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ” Mr. Graham said.
When lunchtime rolled around, the smoke jumpers unloaded their gear in a park shed and cut across Broadway to the Time Warner Center. They took the escalator down to the Whole Foods market, fanning out among the multitude of salad bars and returning to the dining area with sushi and pizza. All five of them, who are staying at a Courtyard Marriott in Midtown, have visited New York at least once before.
“A lot of us are adventurous, and that applies to the city as well,” said Mr. Casey, who is 35 and married to a personnel clerk in Redding. “We look for adventure and finding different things that we aren’t exposed to back home.”
Mr. Lauber, who is single, makes it clear that he would like some of that experience to include more women. He said he did meet Cameron Diaz at Whole Foods while buying a few slices of pizza.
Even though scaling trees looking for bugs might not seem as dangerous as parachuting close to a raging fire, the men still take safety precautions. For this job, those measures reflect the urban setting.
They place bright-orange safety cones so passers-by will know something is happening above and will steer a safe distance. They have gotten to know every species of dog in the park and know to grab their ground gear when the dogs come sniffing around. “The dogs occasionally like to mark their territory on our cones,” Mr. Casey said.
