News and opinion about wildland fire
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized2 Comments on Medical student shares what she learned as a Hotshot Above: The Sawtooth Hotshots as seen in the video below.
CC Ma, a medical student applying for residency, credits her unique experience as a crew member of the Sawtooth National Forest Hotshots for teaching her toughness and resiliency. The relationships she established with crew members gave her the needed attitude to thrive and succeed when things don’t go as planned.
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized1 Comment on Under the radar fire has burned 29,000 acres Above: 3D map of the OK Bar Fire looking north, showing the perimeter at 3:06 a.m. MDT April 28, 2018.
A wildfire that is not getting much attention has burned over 29,000 acres in Southern New Mexico. The OK Bar Fire has a Type 4 Incident Commander assigned, the second lowest level for an IC, and 32 other personnel. It is in the southern panhandle of the state 21 miles south of Animas and has grown to within 9 miles of the Mexican border.
The fire is being managed by New Mexico State Forestry using a less than full suppression strategy. Fires not being suppressed do not receive the same exposure from the public agencies as conventional blazes, and this one may get even less in the next few days. After it grew by almost 5,000 acres on Friday, the national Situation Report for Saturday described the fire like this:
Extreme fire behavior. Last narrative report unless significant activity occurs.
Saturday morning the interagency fire information site for New Mexico did not include any information about the fire. It is not listed on InciWeb.
Following the expansion on the south end Friday, the situation is not likely to improve much in the near future. The area is under a Red Flag Warning Saturday. On Sunday and Monday the wind speed will increase each day, gusting out of the southwest above 30 mph.
The OK Bar Fire started April 22 and is burning on the Diamond A and Gray Ranches. It is expected to continue to move south over the Center Creek Mountains and east towards the Cowboy Rim/ Timber Lake Mountains.
The National Weather Service has issued Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota. The Watch locations in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado are for enhanced wildfire danger on Sunday.
The Red Flag Warning map was current at 7:30 a.m. MDT on Saturday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts.
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized2 Comments on Robot walks through vegetation fire With “Cassie”, the University of Michigan is testing the limits of what a robot can do.
Above: Cassie, a robot developed by the University of Michigan, is seen walking through a prescribed fire in this screen shot from the video below.
The folks at the University of Michigan’s robotics lab have shown that a small robot can walk through a slowly spreading, very low-flame-length prescribed fire.
During the next few years robots are not going to replace wildland firefighters. But as was seen as far back as 2009 they might be able to carry heavy loads. For firefighters this could include hauling fuel, hose, pumps, or drinking water to hot shot crews, or resupplying spike camps.
Below is an excerpt from an article at Wired:
You might notice the Cassie still walks a bit gingerly. But [Jessy] Grizzle and his team are constantly tweaking the biped’s algorithms, then testing it all out in the real world … that’s sometimes on fire. It still struggles with larger obstructions like fallen tree limbs, but these are the kinds of challenges that are going to push the platform forward. Theoretically, you could outfit a Cassie—which would set you back a few hundred thousand dollars, by the way—to see straight through the smoke with lidar. It could see things no human firefighter could.
“I think it is an interesting demonstration of the ability to get robots out of the lab and into the real world, with a view toward robots that are able to perform useful tasks and get humans out of harm’s way,” writes Caltech’s Aaron Ames, one of a handful of roboticists who’s using the Cassie platform to study robotic bipedal locomotion. “We are still a long ways from autonomous firefighting robots, but the robots of today—and the dynamic walking control algorithms that have been developed recently—take an important step in this direction.”
Above: Satellite photo taken August 2, 2017 showing smoke from some of the wildfires in British Columbia. The red dots represent heat detected by a sensor on the satellite.
It is not easy to measure and quantify the composition of the smoke and the amount of particulate matter that a huge wildfire produces when intense, large-scale burning forms towering pyrocumulus clouds that climb tens of thousands of feet into the sky. This launches the byproducts of combustion into the stratosphere — the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere, above the troposphere. Once introduced at that level they have been tracked while circling the planet multiple times.
Below is an excerpt from an article by Megan Gannon at Live Science, which points out similarities between large wildfire events and volcanos.
For comparison, the explosive 2008 eruption of Mount Kasatochi, an island volcano in Alaska, sent about 0.7 to 0.9 teragrams (nearly 1 million tons) of aerosols — tiny, suspended particles — into the stratosphere, Peterson said. For months afterward, people around the Northern Hemisphere documented unusually colored sunsets, thanks to the sulfate aerosols and ash the volcano injected into the atmosphere.
Peterson’s team estimated that the British Columbia pyroCb event sent about 0.1 to 0.3 teragrams (about 200,000 tons) of aerosols into the stratosphere — which is comparable to the amount seen with a moderate volcanic event, and more than the total stratospheric impact of the entire 2013 fire season in North America, he said.
It’s well known that catastrophic volcanoes can influence the global climate. The huge 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, one of the largest in living memory, lowered temperatures around the world by an average of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius).
As an example of the wildfire activity in British Columbia last year, here is an excerpt from an article posted August 9 at Wildfire Today:
The wildfire situation in British Columbia has not gotten any better in the last several days. Currently there are 128 active wildfires in the province, with four of them being larger than 50,000 hectares (123,000 acres). The largest, the Hanceville Riske Creek Fire, is getting closer to half a million acres each day.
Since April 1, approximately 591,280 hectares (1,461,082 acres) have burned in 900 fires in BC.
- Hanceville Riske Creek, 172,000 hectares (425,000 acres) approximately 60 km southwest of Williams Lake.
- Elephant Hill, 117,000 hectares (289,000 acres), near Ashcroft.
- Tautri Lake, 76,000 hectares (188,000 acres), 80 km northwest of Williams Lake.
- Baezaeko River-Quesnel West, 53,000 hectares (131,000 acres).
More than 400 additional firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the US are expected to arrive in BC this week. Other firefighters from Australia have been in the province for a couple of weeks. More than 100 firefighters arrived from Mexico since Saturday of last week…
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized1 Comment on Firefighter collapses, dies during first day of training 
An inmate firefighter collapsed and died during physical training near Jamestown, California April 21. For Anthony Colacino it was his first day as a trainee firefighter on the Sierra Conservation Center fire crew. Just before 8 a.m., about 50 minutes into a one-hour training hike, Mr. Colacino collapsed.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the LA Times:
The on-duty fire captain, along with four other inmate firefighters, took Colacino to the center’s firehouse, where they tried to save him by doing CPR in the vehicle and at the facility until an ambulance arrived, said Krissi Khokhobashvili, a corrections spokeswoman. “Those inmate firefighters, they jumped into action,” she said. “They did what they’re supposed to do.”
Colacino — who had served more than a year of a four-year, four-month sentence out of Riverside County for two counts of evading a peace officer while driving recklessly, cruelty to animals and discharging a firearm with gross negligence — was pronounced dead soon after. Officials said foul play is not suspected in his death, but the Tuolumne County coroner will determine the cause of death.
Our sincere condolences go out to Mr. Colacino’s friends, family, and coworkers.
(UPDATE Feb. 16, 2021. MyMotherLode reported: “Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, Sgt. Andrea Benson, says, ‘The official cause of death [of Mr. Colacino] is Fatal Cardiac Arrhythmia due to Cardiomyopathy with contributing factors of Intramural Coronary Artery Disease.’ ” )
At least two other very serious life-threatening injuries have occured to wildland firefighters in recent years during day one or two of physical training. They occurred in 2016 in South Dakota and the Northwest.
One was a Rhabdomyolysis (Rhabdo) injury after running for more than nine miles and doing uphill sprints on the first day.
The other was a heat stroke near the end of a seven-mile run on day two of their season. The employee was unconscious for several hours and spent four days in the hospital.
We are aware of five other California inmate line of duty fatalities in the last seven years:
