One of the eight teams in the new Alliance of American Football calls itself “Arizona Hotshots”. In February when they begin playing games in Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium they will wear yellow helmets and jerseys with dark green pants. The team’s logo features flames and crossed *Pulaskis (although on their website they are called “cross-axe Pulaskis”).
The origin of the name definitely is inspired by firefighting Interagency Hotshot Crews (IHC). Here is an excerpt from their website:
The Hotshots draw inspiration from the more than 100 elite teams of exemplary, ferocious wildland firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service and other federal, state and county agencies, mostly located in the west. Hotshot firefighters are highly successful and an essential line of defense in battling the most serious wildfires across the country.
The Arizona Hotshots will gratefully display the firefighters’ familiar cross-axe Pulaskis in their logo. The color scheme and designs tip their helmets to the heroes who confront orange-fire disasters wearing yellow helmets and shirts with dark green pants.
(UPDATE September 30, 2018)
*A couple of people have pointed out that the firefighting tools in the logo look more like a fire axe used by structural firefighters than a Pulaski.The people that have pointed this out are correct, but the team calls them Pulaskis and the only people that will notice the difference are wildland firefighters. Maybe it is not a big deal.
Ranger Edward Pulaski invented or improved the tool for wildland firefighters soon after the fires of 1910. The Collins Tool Company sold a similar tool beginning in 1876.
Vineyard Fire at approximately 6:30 p.m. MDT August 11, 2018. Photo by Wendee Pettis.
A juvenile with a flare gun may have ignited the Vineyard Fire that burned 560 acres at Hot Springs, South Dakota.
According to a cause and origin report completed by fire investigator Jeff McBraw, a 16-year old girl “…stated that her boyfriend who is also a juvenile possibly started this fire with a flare gun,” McGraw wrote.
The Fall River County Sheriff’s Office will handle any further investigation.
The fire started August 11 near an abandoned vineyard and caused evacuations on the east side of Hot Springs.
Five firefighters were injured when their vehicle crashed on Interstate 5 near Tehama, California Wednesday September 26. Four of them with minor injuries were taken to a hospital in Red Bluff and a fifth with major injuries was transported to St. Elizabeth hospital in Paradise.
The firefighters were members of a crew operated by Firestorm Wildland Fire Suppression Inc.
According to media reports the northbound truck went off the edge of the highway to the right. As the driver tried to steer it back onto the road, he lost control, went across both northbound lanes, entered the center divider and overturned.
When Chief Royal Burnett retired in 1993 his employer’s agency was still called California Department of Forestry (CDF). At that time he was Chief of the Shingletown Battalion of the Shasta-Trinity Ranger Unit in Northern California. Still keeping his hand in the game, Chief Burnett recently spent some time analyzing how the disastrous Carr Fire spread into his town, Redding, California in July of 2018.
“I retained my interest in fire and fuel modeling after retirement”, the Chief said, “and with my fire geek friends I try to keep current.”
Chief Burnett told us that when he left the CDF he was qualified as a Type 2 Incident Commander, Type 1 Operations Section Chief, Type 1 Planning Section Chief, and Fire Behavior Analyst. He has lived Redding, California for 40 years.
The article below that the Chief wrote about his analysis of the Carr Fire is used here with his permission. A version of it has previously appeared at anewscafe.
The Carr Fire burned 229,651 acres and 1,079 residences, about 800 in the county area and the remaining number inside the city limits.
My friends Steve Iverson, Terry Stinson and I spent several days looking at the portion of the Carr Fire burn where it entered the city of Redding. This would be the Urban portion of the Wildland Urban Interface. That part of our town is newer construction, high-end subdivision homes built to California’s “SRA Fire Safe Regulations”. That is, non-flammable roofs, stucco siding, and all the rest of the State’s requirements. How did we lose almost 300 of them in one wildfire?
Royal Burnett
Many of these homes were built right on the edge of the Sacramento River canyon on finger ridges to maximize the view, or on the rim of side draws — anything to maximize the view from the property and capture the afternoon up-canyon wind flow. Most had large concrete patios and some had pools. There were no wooden decks extending over the canyon that I saw.
The Canyon is about ½ mile across where most of the houses burned, with the slope estimated at around 100 percent. The aspect where most of the homes burned is west-facing, meaning it catches the afternoon sun and preheats the forest fuels.
The canyon itself was predominantly filled with manzanita 12 to 15 feet high (75 percent) and the remainder was oak woodland, with scattered ceanothus brush and poison oak . The brush field was approximately 75 years old, having sprouted after Shasta Dam was completed in 1945. Available fuel loading ranged from 1 to 3 tons per acre in the oak woodland to 13 tons per acre in the heavy brush. All herbaceous material was cured and live fuel moisture was approximately 80 percent in manzanita — right at the critical level, which means it will burn as if its a dead fuel, not a live one.
The east side of the Carr Fire near Redding, California. Mapped August 26, 2017. Click to enlarge.
So, we’ve got a canyon filled with tons and tons of very flammable brush on an extremely steep slope with hundreds of very pricey homes perched on the rim, on a day when the temperature was 112 degrees and relative humidity was around 9 percent. To repeat a phrase from the 1960s, this was a “Design For Disaster”. (That was the title of fire training film describing the events of the Bel Air fire in Los Angeles County in 1961). [below]
We can determine how things burned by looking at burn patterns and other forensic evidence. For those who did this for a living its like reading a book. It was easy to figure out why the houses on the rim burned — they were looking right down the barrel of a blowtorch. Even though they had fire resistant construction, many had loaded their patios with flammable lawn furniture, tiki bars and flammable ornamental plants. Palm trees became flaming pillars, shredded bark became the fuse, junipers became napalm bombs.
Under current standards houses are build 6 to an acre; 10 feet to the property line and only 20 feet between houses. Once one house ignited, radiant heat could easily torch the next one.
We followed burned wood fence trails from lot to lot — wooden fences were nothing more than upright piles of kindling wood — and then into some ornamental shrubbery with an understory of shredded bark which torched and set the next house on fire. Then the fire progressed away from the canyon rim, not a wildland fire now, but a series of house fires, each contributing to the ignition of the next one.
We noted several, perhaps as many as a half dozen homes that burned from the ground up. Fire entered the building at the point where the stucco outer wall joined the slab and fire in the decorative bark was forced into the foam insulation and composition board sheeting under the stucco by the wind. Normally a fire in decorative bark is not a problem, it simply smolders. But in this case, where literally every burning ember was starting a spot fire and those spot fires were fanned by 100 mph in-draft wind, those smoldering fires were fanned into open flames which burned the homes. A simple piece of flashing could have prevented some of that loss.
We built homes to a fire resistant standard and then compromised them.
The fire hit Redding on an approximately two-mile front. It spotted across the Sacramento River in several locations and spread rapidly in the canyon, spawning numerous fire whirls. The updrafts caused the convection column to rotate, generating firestorm winds estimated at 140 mph. I’d guess most of the homes that were lost burned in the first hour after the fire crossed the river. The fire and rescue services were overwhelmed.
View from the Sacramento River in Redding north of the Sacramento River Trail Bridge. Google Street View. Click to enlarge.
The city of Redding allowed home construction on canyon rims, places that have proven to be fire traps over the years in almost every community where this construction has been allowed. Houses built in those exposed areas are similar to houses built in a flood zone. Its not a question IF they will burn, the question is When?
These subdivisions had limited egress. In one high-priced gated subdivision there is only one way in or out. Redding planners have seemingly ignored the lessons from past disasters like the Tunnel Fire in Oakland Hills in 1991 where 2,900 homes burned and 25 people died.
The city’s green belts have proven to be nothing but time bombs — fuel choked canyons that are a haven for her homeless. How many fire starts have we had in the canyon below Mercy Hospital, or in Sulfur Creek below Raley’s on Lake Boulevard? The homeless problem has exacerbated the fire problem. The fuels are there, the homeless provide the starts.
Even today, new subdivisions are being built overlooking the burned out canyons, looking across the rim at the ruins of homes burned in the Carr Fire.
The Sacramento River canyon will regrow, and it will be more flammable next time and stumps sprouting brush and noxious weeds will germinate in the burned area. The skeletons of the burned trees will become available fuel. In a couple of years the fuel bed will be more receptive to fire than it was before the Carr Fire.
If we don’t learn from our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Kelly. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Sky lantern release in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo by Takeaway.
A sky lantern is suspected of causing a power outage on a railroad in Hong Kong, causing four trains to be disrupted for 25 minutes until repairs were made.
Below is an excerpt from an article at ejinsight.com:
Passengers aboard the trains were forced to wait in the cars before services gradually resumed about 25 minutes later after repairs were carried out.
MTR personnel investigating the incident found the remains of a sky lantern on top of one of the trains, although the railway operator did not confirm whether it had triggered the power failure, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reported.
Earlier that day, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) reminded the public that it is an offense to fly sky lanterns.
Under the law, people who fly sky lanterns could face a maximum fine of HK$2,000 and up to 14 days of imprisonment.
These dangerous devices use burning material to loft a small paper or plastic hot air balloon into the air. The perpetrator has no control over where it lands. Usually the fire goes out before it hits the ground, but not always. Sometimes the envelope catches fire while in flight. Numerous fires have been started by sky lanterns. Even if they don’t ignite a fire, they leave litter on the ground. Metal parts have been picked up by hay balers causing serious problems when fed to livestock. They are banned in most U.S. states and many countries.
The fire has burned over 50,000 acres 6 miles south of Bondurant, Wyoming
Above: A helicopter drops retardant near Rim Station on the Roosevelt Fire September 25, 2018. Inciweb photo.
After a survey Tuesday by the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office of 50 of the 153 homes in the Hoback Ranches subdivision, 22 were found to have been destroyed by the Roosevelt Fire. Property owners are being notified by the Sheriff’s Office. The fire is 6 miles south of Bondurant, Wyoming.
Wednesday while firefighters were conducting a burnout operation on the east side of the fire, Highway 189/191 was fully closed between Stinking Springs and Daniel Junction. The powerline along the highway has been shut down during the burnout, which affects the Kendall Valley and Upper Green areas.
Map of the Roosevelt Fire. The red line was the perimeter at 9:30 p.m. MDT on September 25. The white line was the perimeter about 24 hours before. Click to enlarge.
On Tuesday the burnout near the highway was 2.2 miles long between Forest Road 30681 and Forest Lane.
Most of the significant growth on the fire Tuesday was on the east side within one to three miles of Highway 189/191. The rest of the fire exhibited low activity with no additional spread to the south, southeast, or west. In the area of Rolling Thunder, firefighters conducted burnout operations to further secure the fire edge. The fire did not move towards Jim Bridger Estates.
There was low fire intensity in the Upper Hoback and Kilgore Creek areas and firefighters continued to tie the open fire line into natural features to prevent fire movement east and west. In Hoback Ranches, firefighters knocked down hotspots to further secure homes in the area.
Resources assigned to the fire include 26 hand crews, 10 helicopters, 56 fire engines, 6 dozers, and 12 water tenders for a total of 982 personnel.
A Red Flag Warning is in effect in the area Wednesday for strong winds and dry fuels.
One of the eight teams in the new Alliance of American Football calls itself “Arizona Hotshots”. In February when they begin playing games in Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium they will wear yellow helmets and jerseys with dark green pants. The team’s logo features flames and crossed *Pulaskis (although on their website they are called “cross-axe Pulaskis”).
