These dangerous devices are banned in many areas and have started many fires in the United States
Above: Firefighters suppress a fire started by a person shooting at an exploding target southeast of Eagle, Colorado June 9, 2018. Photo by Eagle River Fire Protection District.
A man has been charged with 4th Degree Arson and Reckless Endangerment for allegedly starting a fire at an unofficial shooting range near Minturn southeast of Eagle, Colorado on June 9.
According to the Eagle County Sheriff’s office the fire was started by the use of an exploding target.
Thanks to green vegetation at the scene and the efforts of firefighters, the fire was suppressed while it was still fairly small. Most of the state of Colorado was under a Red Flag Warning Saturday. On the same day the Boco Fire burned about 400 acres a few miles away.
Exploding targets consist of two ingredients that when mixed by the end user create an explosion if shot by a high-velocity projectile. They have been banned in some areas, and in June, 2013 a man attending a bachelor-bachelorette party in Minnesota was killed after shrapnel from the device struck him in the abdomen causing his death. The Missoulian reported that several years ago a woman in Ohio had her hand nearly blown off while taking a cellphone video of a man firing at an exploding target placed in a refrigerator about 150 feet away.
After the ingredients are combined, the compound is illegal to transport and is classified as an explosive by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and is subject to the regulatory requirements in 27 CFR, Part 555.
Friday afternoon a new fire broke out 22 miles northwest of Durango, and northwest of the 416 fire.
Above: An MD87 air tanker drops on the 416 Fire June 7, 2018. Photo by Dan Bender, La Plata County Sheriff’s Office.
The 416 Fire that started June 1 just north of Hermosa, Colorado 10 miles north of Durango has been consistently active every day since then. So far firefighters have been able to keep it west of Highway 550, and until Friday it was east of Hermosa Creek. But at about 5:45 p.m. MDT Friday the San Juan National Forest reported the fire had crossed the creek just west of Lower Hermosa Campground.
A mandatory evacuation order was issued Friday for 304 residences on the east and west sides of U.S. Highway 550 from Electra Lake Drive to Hermosa Cliffs Road and the north end of Two Dogs Trail. More information about evacuations is available at the La Plata County Government Facebook page.
3-D map of the 416 Fire at 1:21 a.m. MDT June 8, 2018.
Officials closed U.S. Highway 550 Friday afternoon due to fire activity.
Satellite photo taken at 5:47 p.m. MDT June 8, 2018 showing smoke from the 416 Fire and the Burro Mountain Fire.
Friday afternoon at 4 p.m. a new fire broke out northwest of the 416 Fire near mile marker 34 on HWY 145 . It is named the Burro Mountain Fire and at 5:47 p.m. MDT smoke from the fire was visible on a satellite photo. At 7 p.m. the San Juan National Forest was in the process of issuing closure orders for this fire.
Todd Pechota’s Type 1 Incident Management Team will assume command of the 416 Fire at 6 a.m. Saturday.
Map of the 416 Fire at 9:15 p.m. MDT June 7, 2018.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Bean. Typos or errors, report them HERE.
Throwback Thursday: the origin of the model for predicting the spread of wildland fires
Today we may take it for granted that tools are available that can estimate how a fire, unplanned or prescribed, will spread across a landscape. It is not an exact science because there are far too many variables than can realistically be accounted for, at least with the technology available today. But in 1972 when Dick Rothermel and others developed the Forest Service’s first quantitative, systematic tool for predicting the spread and intensity of forest fires, it introduced a new era in fire management. And surprisingly, it is still the main tool being used today. Many researchers have produced alternative models, but none have made it into the hands of firefighters on a widespread basis.
For his research and contributions to understanding how fires spread, Dick Rothermel was given the Ember Award at caonference in Missoula in 2014. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
After Mr. Rothermel developed the mathematical model, others used the information to make the concept more user-friendly and to analyze complex scenarios. Behave, software burned onto a custom made chip in a hand-held Texas Instruments 51 calculator, and later BehavePlus for personal computers, became must-have tools for fire behavior analysts. FARSITE added the ability to predict spread across variable terrain, vegetation, and weather. Rare Event Risk Assessment Process (RERAP) estimates the risk that a fire will reach a particular place before it dies. FireStem estimates tree mortality based on fire behavior and intensity. And there are many others.
When Mr. Rothermel began researching the behavior of wildland fires, he had just been downsized from a shuttered Department of Defense program that had been attempting to develop a nuclear-powered airplane.
[Jack] Barrows, [the first director of the fire laboratory in Missoula when it opened in 1960], went looking for researchers. He learned that General Electric was closing a laboratory in Idaho Falls where engineers had been working on a defense project to develop a nuclear-powered airplane. The government scrapped the program in 1961, and a handful of highly trained engineers and scientists were suddenly up for grabs.
“GE wanted to see that we got as good a placement as we could,” Rothermel recalls. “So we all wrote resumes, and Jack got hold of these, and he said it was like a Sears and Roebuck catalog of people.” Barrows hired four of the GE scientists: Hal Anderson, a physicist; Stan Hirsh, an electrical engineer; Eric Breuer, a technician; and Dick Rothermel.
Their hiring represented a departure from Forest Service custom. Up until that time, fire research had been pretty much the domain of foresters, who are used to looking at their work through the lenses of biology and silviculture. Gisborne was a forester; Barrows was a forester. But Barrows recognized that fire is a physical process, and that physical scientists and engineers could contribute much to the emerging science of fire behavior.
Rothermel, then barely into his 30s, was glad to join Barrows’s staff. He had a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Washington. During the 8 years since he’d graduated, he had worked in the engineering of nuclear systems in Albuquerque and then in Idaho. (Rothermel later went on for a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Colorado State University.)
“I had the option of staying on [at GE] and working on a lot of programs, but with the cancellation of the atomic-powered airplane, nothing sounded that appealing,” he says. “And then I heard about this laboratory, and they said they had two wind tunnels and a combustion lab where you could control the atmosphere, temperature, and humidity. I thought, “Wow, that’s an opportunity!” Rothermel worked with Hal Anderson to get the new lab’s equipment calibrated and running smoothly. Then they began a set of experiments in the wind tunnel and combustion chamber, testing the effects of wind and moisture on various fuels and determining how fast a fire would spread under different conditions.
[…]
Given their training, it made sense to Rothermel and Anderson to approach the task as an engineering problem. Says Rothermel: “The idea was, if we could develop a way of describing the fuels, the weather, the topography, and something about the fire, and be able to put that into what we call a mathematical model, and if we described all these things properly, the model would integrate it and produce answers. It would tell you the resulting fire intensity, rate of spread, flame length, these sorts of things.”
Rothermel, Anderson, and Bill Frandsen, another physicist on the project, adapted an approach developed by an early Forest Service fire researcher, Wally Fons, which turned on the concept of conservation of energy. A fire spreads by igniting a series of little fires in the fuel ahead of it. The ignitions are driven by convection, radiation, and conduction. Even if it’s unknown which mode is operating in a given instance, the rate of heat transfer can be measured. The researchers reasoned that if they knew how much fuel was ahead of a fire, how big and how densely packed the fuel particles were, and how much moisture the fuel contained, then they could figure out how much energy would be needed to transfer enough heat to bring the fuel up to the ignition point. They could then calculate the rate of ignition that would carry the fire as it spread. The model would also have to account for the critical variables of wind speed and slope of the ground.
Because of the limitations of wind tunnels and combustion chambers, the model is forced to make certain assumptions that don’t hold in real life. For example, it assumes that the fuel is continuous and evenly distributed and burns uniformly. It further assumes that the fire is carried primarily by dead plant material and that only moisture will stop it.
The Rothermel model “describes very well a fire burning in a field of wheat,” says Bret Butler, a mechanical engineer at the Fire Sciences Lab whom Rothermel hired in 1992. “As you get further away from that uniformity, the less accurate it becomes.”
More significantly, the researchers had no basis for modeling the endless spatial variability that actually exists in a forest. So there was no way to simulate a fire’s movement through clumpy, discontinuous trees and shrubs. There was also no way to model a crown fire, one that leaves the surface and moves up into the crowns of trees. These were significant and universally acknowledged shortcomings.
Fire research scientists throughout the world are working on developing more accurate surface-fire spread models, but at this point all of them are too complicated to be used in an operational system. The beauty of Rothermel’s model, says Butler, “is that it’s simple—it can be run quickly with a low-capability computer.”
(end of excerpt)
What made me think of Mr. Rothermel was a graphic distributed on Twitter today by the National Weather Service. It is a fancy, colorized version of the figure in his 1972 paper that depicts how heat is transferred in a fire.
Graphic distributed by @NWS that is based on Dick Rothermel’s 1972 paper.
But of course Mr. Rothermel’s contributions are far more complex than this graphic.
Below is a screenshot from his paper where he describes Propagating Flux, just one of many elements of his mathematical fire spread model.
And here is his summary of equations for the model:
Scenic Loop Complex of Fires, by SEAT pilot Marc Mullis. Uploaded to Inciweb June 6, 2018.
A thunderstorm on June 3 that pelted the Davis Mountains in west Texas with lightning started 18 wildfires. Rain that followed may have put some of them out and others could have burned together, but remaining are at least 7 fires ranging between 11 and 3,541 acres, for a total burned area of approximately 8,134 acres.
The fires are spreading through rough terrain and currently are not a threat to any subdivisions. They are 14 miles west of Fort Davis, 6 miles west of the McDonald Observatory, and as close as half a mile north of the McDannald Fire that burned 19,000 acres north of Highway 166 in the first part of May.
Map of the fires in the Scenic Loop Complex. Current at 2:21 a.m. CDT June 6, 2018.
The Lone Star State Type 2 Incident Management Team is in unified command with the County of Jeff Davis to manage the fires. A Type 1 Incident Management Team has been ordered.
Currently firefighters are being supported by helicopters, as well as Very Large, Large, and Single Engine Air Tankers. Multiple hand crews are en route.
The Legion Lake Fire burned 54,000 acres of Custer State Park in South Dakota in December, 2017.
Image from the trail camera.
A trail camera was activated on April 4 in Custer State Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the area that burned in the 54,000-acre Legion Lake Fire that started on December 11, 2017. The device was activated by movement, so wildlife wandering by triggered the shooting of several still images, giving us a time-lapse of green-up following the fire.
It’s amazing to see how fast the prairie turned green after the fire! Park staff left this trail cam in place from April 4th until today.
— Custer State Park (@CusterStatePark) June 1, 2018
Below are photos we shot of the fire in December.
Legion Lake Fire on December 11, 2017, the day it started in Custer State Park in South Dakota.Legion Lake Fire, December 12, 2017.Legion Lake Fire, December 14, 2017.
Above: 3-D map of the Ute Park Fire, looking west. The red line on the map shows the perimeter at 10:30 p.m. June 2, 2018.
Increased fire activity near the community of Ute Park prompted the Colfax Emergency Manager and Colfax Sheriff’s Office to issue a mandatory evacuation for the community Saturday afternoon. Winds from the southeast caused the fire to grow to the northwest south of the town. Overnight it kept spreading to the west and a satellite overflight at 1:40 a.m. detected heat on the north side of Highway 64 west of the community. Firefighters are conducting point protection around structures and planned a burnout operation Saturday night to help protect the community which is now encircled by a dozer line.
Saturday’s burning operations to help protect the Cimarron area were successful on the fire’s eastern and southern flanks.
The fire has burned 31,910 acres in northeast New Mexico between Eagles Nest and Cimarron 26 air miles northeast of Taos.
The red line on the map shows the perimeter of the Ute Park Fire at 10:30 p.m. MDT June 2, 2018. The yellow line was the perimeter the previous night. The red dots on the northwest side indicate heat detected by a satellite at 1:40 a.m. MDT June 3.
