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Hotshots — the board game

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

One of our readers sent us information about a board game called “Hotshots”. This is the first I have heard of it and can’t make a recommendation one way or the other, but here is how it is described on the game’s website:

Crews of 1 to 4 players take on the roles of wildfire fighters (Crew Boss, Spotter, Swamper, and Sawyer) with special abilities and roll dice on burning terrain tiles to match the combinations shown on the tiles. The more faces you roll, the better you fight the fire. Choose to cut Firebreaks, which prevent fires from being spread by wind gusts, or push your luck to reduce Flames and possibly even generate Reward Tokens. If you bust and fail to match at least 3 of the 6 symbols on the tile, the fire grows. Another option is to maneuver Vehicles (Air Tanker, Helicopter, and Brush Rig) to save the forest.


Flame tokens are added at the end of each player’s turn by the draw of a Fire card, which can bring about light or strong wind gusts, increase the strength of the flames on certain tiles, and start fires. Too many Flame tokens will cause a tile to Scorch and be lost. Losing a terrain tile could also affect the game play. Some tiles are tied to crewmembers’ special abilities, while others help the firefighters and still others cause the fire to spread in unique ways. If 8 tiles or the Fire Camp Scorches, the game is over and the forest is lost. But if your intrepid crew can extinguish the fire, your team wins together.


The press-your-luck mechanic with ratcheting rewards creates a lot of great tension, and the variety of ways to fight the fire makes for interesting choices. The modular tile layout and Fire cards bring high replayability to the game, and the beautiful acrylic Flame tokens provide an enticing table presence.

Hotshots board game

Interestingly, the name of the company is Fireside Games. They list a dozen or so games on the website, and this is the only one that seems to be related to firefighting. They have a search function to find where it can be purchased locally, or you can get it online for $35. The shipping fee for my state was about $8.

The video below is a brief introduction to the game.

If you are familiar with this board game, tell us about it.

Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Jim. Typos or errors, report them HERE.

California woman arrested who claimed fake firefighter husband to solicit donations

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 1 Comment on California woman arrested who claimed fake firefighter husband to solicit donations

She is accused of defrauding individuals who believed they were donating to benefit firefighters working on the Holy Fire

Above: An S-2T air tanker comes past the smoke to drop retardant near the communication towers on Santiago Peak August 8, 2018 as the Holy Fire approaches. HPWREN image.

While the Holy Fire was burning last August in Orange and Riverside Counties in Southern California, a woman posted requests for donations on several social media sites. Ashley Bemis was arrested this week on multiple felony counts for collecting thousands of dollars worth of cash, food, and equipment that she said was going to be used to help firefighters working on the fire.

Ms. Bemis, 28, of San Juan Capistrano, posted pictures of herself and her fictitious firefighter husband asking for donations. She asked for items she claimed would benefit the firefighters working alongside her husband battling the blaze that ultimately burned more than 23,000 acres in the Cleveland National Forest and destroyed 18 structures.

Ashley Bemis. Orange Co. Sheriff’s Office

After the social media posts, multiple individuals and companies in San Clemente and the surrounding area contacted Ms. Bemis to donate. She is suspected of collecting more than $2,000 in donations, both cash and items like socks, sports drinks, water, and camping equipment, from individuals, stores and companies.

A captain with a local fire agency became suspicious of the requests and contacted the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to investigate. Investigators interviewed victims and obtained search warrants for Ms. Bemis’ vehicle, residence and garages.

San Clemente Police Services investigators also became aware, through additional social media posts from members of the community, of past fraudulent activity by Ms. Bemis, including multiple prior faked pregnancies in an attempt to illegally obtain money from unsuspecting victims.

She is being held on $50,000 bail.

Prosecutors looking at a dozen fire investigations that could implicate PG&E

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , 3 Comments on Prosecutors looking at a dozen fire investigations that could implicate PG&E

camp fire smoke column
The Camp Fire, Friday morning November 9, 2018. SJSU FireWeatherLab.

Already on probation after the 2010 San Bruno gas line explosion that killed eight, injured 58, and destroyed 38 homes, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company could be responsible for causing November’s Camp Fire at Paradise, California and 12 other Northern California blazes that burned thousands of houses in 2017.

CAL FIRE investigators are looking at two possible PG&E power line failures that may have ignited the Camp Fire resulting in the deaths of 86 people. The agency has already prepared investigation reports on 12 fires from last year for which they believe PG&E likely violated state laws. It is now up to the seven county prosecutors and the state Attorney General to determine if they are going to file criminal charges.

PG&E’s actions before and after the gas line explosion in 2010 could be noted in combination with the recent fires likely caused by the electrical equipment, leading to additional probation controls imposed by the court.

Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia about the federal charges related to the gas line explosion:

“On April 1, 2014, PG&E was indicted by a federal grand jury in U.S. District Court, San Francisco, for multiple violations of the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act of 1968 relating to its record keeping and pipeline “integrity management” practices. An additional indictment was issued by the grand jury on July 29, 2014, charging the company with obstruction of justice for lying to the NTSB regarding its pipeline testing policy, bringing the total number of counts in the indictment to 28. Under the new indictment, the company could be fined as much as $1.3 billion, based on profit associated with the alleged misconduct, in addition to $2.5 billion for state regulatory violations.

“On January 21, 2017, PG&E was fined $3 million and ordered to perform 10,000 hours of community service for criminal actions of violating the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act and for obstruction of justice. In addition, it must institute a compliance and ethics monitoring program and spend up to $3 million to “publicize its criminal conduct”. These actions were imposed after the company was found guilty by a federal jury in August, 2016 of six of the twelve charges against the company in US District Court.”

National Science Foundation studied 21 wildfire plumes this year

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

Their instrument-laden C-130 conducted 16 research flights out of Boise

NSF smoke wildfire study 2018
National Science Foundation C-130 used for studying wildfire smoke in 2018. NSF photo.

A C-130 outfitted with research equipment was based at Boise last summer in order to study smoke produced by wildfires. The missions were conducted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research which is a unit within the National Science Foundation. The name of the project is a mouthful: Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) Field Campaign.

The organization provided this overview of the work they did over fires this year:

Western wildfire smoke has a significant impact on air quality, nutrient cycles, weather and climate. The chemistry inside a smoke plume during the first 24 hours after emission affects reactive nitrogen partitioning, cloud chemistry and nucleation, and aerosol scattering and absorption, all of which can impact air quality and climate.

The NSF-funded WE-CAN ground-based and airborne field campaign aimed to systematically characterize the emissions and first 24 hours of smoke plume evolution from western U.S. wildfires. The project, led by Dr. Emily Fischer at Colorado State University, focused on three science questions related to better quantifying processes associated with fixed nitrogen, absorbing aerosols, and cloud activation and chemistry in wildfire plumes. WE-CAN deployed a large suite of measurement instruments run by both university and NCAR teams on the NSF/NCAR C-130 and also involved a ground-based mobile component.

The C-130 was based in Boise, Idaho from 20 July – 31 August 2018 to maximize the opportunities to sample smoke plumes from northwestern wildfires in California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado during the peak of the 2018 fire season. All three sampling goals of WE-CAN were achieved. In all, during the 16 research flights based out of Boise, 21 different wildfire plumes were sampled, each with a detailed fuel assessment provided by the local regional Fire Service. Following the research science portion of the field campaign, a subset of the instruments were run during an educational component, involving three flights based out of Broomfield, Colorado over a two-week period in early September 2018. During these flights, the C-130 sampled smoke plumes from two more fires, including a prescribed fire in Colorado.

Several ACOM teams deployed measurement instruments on the C-130 for WE-CAN, including the Trace Organic Gas Analyzer (TOGA; PI Eric Apel, Rebecca Hornbrook, Alan Hills), the HIAPER Airborne Radiation Package (HARP) actinic flux measurement (PI Sam Hall, Kirk Ullmann), the PAN Chemical Ionization Mass Spectrometer (PAN-CIMS; PI Frank Flocke), a Picarro CO-CO2-CH4 instrument and an Aerodyne Research Inc. CO-N2O-H2O instrument (PI Teresa Campos), and the NO-NO2-O3 (PI Andy Weinheimer, Denise Montzka, Geoff Tyndall). Preliminary data submissions for most data sets are due by 15 November 2018, and final quality controlled data are due 15 March 2019. Preliminary analyses will be presented by many teams at a targeted session at the 21st Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry at the AMS Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona in January 2019.

NSF smoke wildfire study
Aerial view of the Rabbit Foot Fire in Idaho on 13 Aug 2018. Smoke from the Rabbit Foot Fire was sampled by the NSF/NCAR C-130 during three separate WE-CAN research flights and several times for longer durations by ground-based mobile labs. (Photo credit: Rebecca Hornbrook)

Revised National Fire Danger Rating System beginning to slowly roll out

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 2 Comments on Revised National Fire Danger Rating System beginning to slowly roll out

This updated system that calculates wildfire danger has been in development for 18 years

The system that most federal and state land managers rely on to quantify wildfire danger in the United States was first developed in 1972. Updated in 1978 and 1988, the work is now complete on the third revision that began in 2000. Expected to be introduced two years ago, the latest edition is named “National Fire Danger Rating System 2016”.

National Fire Danger Rating System 2016The NFDRS tracks the effect of previous weather events through their effect on live and dead fuels and adjusts them accordingly based on future or predicted weather conditions. It is a numeric scaling of the potential over a large area for fires to ignite, spread, and require fire suppression action. It is derived by applying local observations of current or predicted conditions of fuel, weather, and topographic factors to a set of complex science-based equations.

“The [updated] system is being rolled out now”, Jon Wallace told us. Mr. Wallace is the Deputy Fire Management Coordinator for the Southeast Region of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. He said, “An interagency group led by the USFS is hosting Fire Danger Operating Plan/NFDRS2016 workshops around the country to introduce the new system as well as to help people update or develop fire danger operating plans.  The final replacement of the current system is scheduled for May of 2020.  We wanted to have a pretty good transition period so that people would have time to compare the old system with the new system.”

Another approach for predicting wildfire danger

A group of meteorologists and others in Chile and the U.K. have developed what they describe as “a novel probabilistic wildfire prediction system”, a daily wildfire warning system designed to be used by land managers in Chile. It predicts one thing the NFDRS does not address, the severity of a fire that may occur (low, moderate, or high). It also specifically addresses probability of fire occurrence, for example, 25% to 50%. The product they settled on for communicating the forecast appears to be a little complex at first, with 16 “risk levels” which are grouped into four “risk colors”, green, yellow, amber, and red.

wildfire risk probability levels weather
Table from the paper described above. Click to enlarge.

Click here to see all articles on Wildfire Today tagged “NFDRS”.

The wildland and prescribed fire programs in Mississippi

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 1 Comment on The wildland and prescribed fire programs in Mississippi