This image of the Varney family — Braden and Jessica with children Maleah and Nolan — was seen around the world with news stories about Braden’s death. Photo courtesy Cal Fire
The San Francisco Chronicle has a story you have to read, about a CAL FIRE firefighter, his wife, and two small children. Braden Varney died July 14, 2018 while building fireline with his dozer at the Ferguson Fire on the west edge of Yosemite National Park in California. No one else was around when the 21-ton machine with Braden inside rolled 300 feet down a steep slope. Removing his remains proved to be very challenging, and progress came to a halt at one point when the fire burned through the recovery site.
The article is HERE. Be sure and view the six-minute video.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Tom. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Screenshot from video of the Ranch Fire shot by 564 Fire in 2018.
A photographer who specializes fires shot some incredible video of firefighters dealing with what must have been hundreds of spot fires in a meadow of dead grass. In the dry, windy weather they spread immediately after burning embers blown by the wind fell into the abundant fuel. There were far more rapidly spreading spot fires than the resources on scene could pick up, so they had to withdraw and come up with another plan.
It was shot by 564 Fire at the Ranch Fire, part of the Mendocino Complex of Fires that burned near Clear Lake in northern California in July and August of 2018. The total size of the complex, which included the River and Ranch Fires, was 459,123 acres. The video was uploaded to YouTube June 18, 2019.
The red line on the map was the perimeter of the Ranch Fire at 9:15 p.m. PDT August 26, 2018. The white line was the perimeter on August 14. The red and yellow dots represent heat detected by a satellite in the 24 hour period ending at 2:31 a.m. PDT August 27, 2018.
Wednesday morning the fire was under a layer of low clouds, but the forecast calls for a return to warmer and drier conditions, with strong winds on Saturday
Above: The Walker Fire was beneath a layer of clouds at 7:46 Wednesday morning. Two photos stitched together, Dyer Mountain camera, Nevada Seismo Lab.
(Originally published at 8:45 a.m. PDT Sept. 11, 2019)
The growth of the Walker Fire 17 miles south of Susanville, California slowed Tuesday due to cooler weather. The temperature reached a high of only 54 degrees while it plummeted to 38 degrees by 6:15 Wednesday morning at the Pierce weather station 5 miles north of the fire. The relative humidity after midnight was in the 80s, which can slow fire behavior, giving firefighters a chance to gain more containment.
As you can see in the photo above, the fire was under a layer of clouds at 7:46 a.m. Wednesday. Two new cameras at Dyer Mountain occasionally are pointed southeast toward the fire.
Much of the growth of the fire Tuesday was on the east and south portions, with the largest area of activity being around Papoose Peak. The perimeter grew by 981 acres to bring the total up to 48,321 acres
The weather forecast for the fire area calls for a return to warmer and drier conditions, with strong winds on Saturday. No rain is in the forecast until Monday, September 16.
Today we are thinking about the 2,977 victims killed in the September 11 attacks. Of those, 412 were emergency workers in New York City who responded to the World Trade Center. This included:
343 firefighters (including a chaplain and two paramedics) of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY);
37 police officers of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police Department (PAPD);
23 police officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD);
8 emergency medical technicians and paramedics from private emergency medical services; and,
After 2017 Thomas Fire destroys longstanding tribute to crew members Thomas Klepperich, Leonard Mineau, Delbert DeLoach and Richard Cumor, firefighters and neighbors pitch in to replace it
A crew of firefighters gathers for a moment of silence after completing the restoration of the 1971 Romero Fire Memorial site above Summerland. (Ray Ford / Noozhawk photo)
This article by guest author Ray Ford was first published in Noozhawk, and is used here with permission.
[Noozhawk’s note: The first part of this story is taken from the author’s book, Santa Barbara Wildfires, published in 1990. The author participated in the building of the new memorial site.]
On Oct. 6, 1971, Pat Russ was driving to San Jose to visit his estranged wife when the urge to start another fire overwhelmed him.
Near Goleta he turned off Highway 101 and began driving along Cathedral Oaks, Foothill and other back roads looking for just the right spot — one that was isolated enough, with thick brush and a steep enough slope for the flames to take off.
He found the spot at about 3:30 p.m. near Bella Vista Drive between Romero Canyon and Ladera Lane in Montecito. Patrols had driven by at 9 and 10:30 a.m. and again at 2 p.m., just 90 minutes earlier.
But there was no one there to see Russ at that moment.
Turning around, carefully looking around to make sure that no one was watching, he lit the fuse on a small homemade firebomb, tossed it out the window and drove off slowly so as not to attract any attention.
He then continued on his long drive north, unaware of what he had left behind.
The fire was discovered at 3:57 p.m. by a neighbor who reported it immediately to the Carpinteria-Summerland Fire Department.
Fire Blows Up
Within five minutes after the report of the fire, the smoke column had risen to 1,500 feet. Photos taken about that time indicated that the Romero Fire had already blackened 30-40 acres. During the initial attack period, lasting from 4:08 to 5 p.m., firefighting forces poured in to the area from all over the South Coast.
Stone markers are now in place at the north, east, west and south spots in the Romero Fire Memorial circle. (Ray Ford / Noozhawk photo)
But by 6 p.m. the wildfire had already spread to the crest of East Camino Cielo, burning rapidly through the grass-covered fuel break. Thankfully, because the break was wide, and the grass was burning at a low intensity, the pumpers were able to douse the flames there.
Shortly after dark, a sundowner developed, and as in the 1964 Coyote Fire, the fire line turned and began to make a downhill run, burning on a hot, wide front that swept across Bella Vista and Ladera Lane, destroying four homes.
By daylight Thursday, the fire had burned through all of Toro Canyon, from its base at Highway 192/East Valley Road to the top of the Santa Ynez Mountains, an eastward spread of about 2 miles during the night. As of 6 a.m., 3,600 acres had burned.
Weather Forecast
The plan for Thursday was to hold the fire at the fuel break on the top and construct a line along the bottom flank to keep the fire from spreading down into Summerland and the Carpinteria foothills.
In the world of wildland fire the Thirtymile Fire established a turning point and a cascade of unintended consequences.
On July 10, 2001 the fire in the Chewuch River Valley in Washington took the lives of four U.S. Forest Service firefighters and triggered a series of events and knee-jerk reactions that have been affecting firefighters ever since.
Killed that day were:
Tom L. Craven, 30, Ellensburg, WA
Karen L. Fitzpatrick, 18, Yakima, WA
Devin A. Weaver, 21, Yakima, WA
Jessica L. Johnson, 19, Yakima, WA
The tragic event set a precedent for charging a wildland firefighter with felonies for making mistakes during an emergency fire response. After the fire politicians passed a federal law making it mandatory for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which had no experience in wildland fire, to investigate fatalities of U.S. Forest Service personnel that occurred on a fire to decide if any federal laws were broken by firefighters during the suppression of the fire. In order to avoid being swept up in lawsuits or criminal charges, some firefighters started refusing to participate in fire investigations, purchased professional liability insurance, and at times felt the need to lawyer up. Overnight it became more difficult to unearth lessons to be learned after close calls, injuries, or fatalities on wildland fires.
But it might have been even worse.
The website The Smokey Wire: National Forest News and Views, has an article by Sharon T. Friedman and Jim Furnish that describes how the lead investigator for the Forest Service had to fight off political pressure when the team was preparing to unveil the findings of the investigation.
The piece covers in general how government agencies have to deal with interference from political appointees, then has examples from Former Deputy Chief for National Forest Systems, Jim Furnish.
This subject is especially relevant now, days after leadership in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration failed to resist pressure from politicians, and threw National Weather Service employees under the bus for providing a forecast for a hurricane.
The article from The Smokey Wire is below, used here with permission.
Political Appointees, The Good and the Bad: Guest Post by Jim Furnish. 1. Mt Wilson and Thirtymile Fire
August 29, 2019 by Sharon T. Friedman, Ph.D.
I think it’s important for folks who haven’t worked in the agencies, or with politicals, to hear what the interface between politicals and career civil servants can be like, in terms of the day-to-day management of the agency. For the Forest Service, anyway, pressure by politicals can be less like an assembly line of policy from DC to Ranger District, and more like the Administration punching a pillow, where the pressure dissipates through time and space.
To open the discussion, I asked Jim Furnish, former Deputy Chief of the National Forest System, to share the good and the bad of his experiences with politicals. For those of you who are not Forest Service folks, the chain of command goes like this: the Secretary of Agriculture (now Sonny Perdue) is over the Undersecretary over the Forest Service (now Jim Hubbard, formerly State Forester of Colorado). Those are political folks, and under that is the Chief of the Forest Service (not technically political, that’s a historic discussion in and of itself, but new Administrations of a different color tend to get rid of the old ones, in more or less dramatic ways), and the Deputy Chief for the National Forest System is the next layer down. There are other Deputy Chiefs, e.g. State and Private, that are over state and private programs and Fire, and Research and Development, Administration and International Programs, but the main issues that concern us here (other than fire) are all within the purview of the Deputy Chief for NFS. For example, the Director of Ecosystem Management Coordination (EMC) where litigation, NEPA and Planning are housed, works for that person in DC.
