A book about smokejumpers based at Missoula, Montana is due to be released April 12, 2011. Written by New York Times-best selling author Nora Roberts, “Chasing Fire” is about “the world of elite firefighters who thrive on danger and adrenaline-men and women who wouldn’t know how to live life if it wasn’t on the edge”.
Few wildland fire books are written by really good authors, and after reading several pages, this may be one to add to that list.
Here how Chasing Fire begins; a much longer excerpt can be found here:
Caught in the crosshairs of wind above the Bitterroots, the jump ship fought to find its stream. Fire boiling over the land jabbed its fists up through towers of smoke as if trying for a knockout punch.
From her seat Rowan Tripp angled to watch a seriously pissed-off Mother Nature’s big show. In minutes she’d be inside it, enclosed in the mad world of searing heat, leaping flames, choking smoke. She’d wage war with shovel and saw, grit and guile. A war she didn’t intend to lose.
Her stomach bounced along with the plane, a sensation she’d taught herself to ignore. She’d flown all of her life, and had fought wildfires every season since her eighteenth birthday. For the last half of those eight years she’d jumped fire.
She’d studied, trained, bled and burned—outwilled pain and exhaustion to become a Zulie. A Missoula smoke jumper.
She stretched out her long legs as best she could for a moment, rolled her shoulders under her pack to keep them loose.
Beside her, her jump partner watched as she did. His fingers did a fast tap dance on his thighs. “She looks mean.”
“We’re meaner.”
He shot her a fast, toothy grin. “Bet your ass.
The book can be pre-ordered at Amazon. It will be available in print and Kindle editions.
More information about the book, and the author, Nora Roberts.
James Douglas uses an ignition device on an ATV during a prescribed fire. Photo: R. Darren Price / The Item
TheItem.com has an article about prescribed fire in the state forests of South Carolina. Here is an excerpt:
…Right now, [Forest director Harvey] Belser said the foresters are in the process of burning grasslands to plant longleaf pine, a tree native to the Carolinas, to replace slash pine, a Gulf Coast species susceptible to disease, wind and ice breakage. And, according to state Department of Natural Resources, longleaf pine thrives in a fresh-burned forest floor.
The trees planted will one day be chopped down and sold – but Belser said it was an important step nonetheless. “It’s critical these plants are planted to the correct depth,” Belser said.
So, [Charlie] Scruggs and the other firefighters got to work getting things ready.
Controlled burns are more science than pyrotechnics, said [James] Douglas. After spraying an area with herbicide six weeks before the burn, the forest has to get a fire permit and wait for a day when the wind and humidity are not too high. Then the group figures out what type of fire they plan to light based on the plants and brush in a burn area, which they call “fuel.” For a grassland like the one burned Nov. 19, they light a fire at one end of the tract and let a light breeze blow the fire to the other end. For that kind of burn, Douglas said the entire area will be completely burned after just a few hours, and they can start planting as soon as the ground cools off.
“We’ll probably plant this field in the next couple of weeks,” he said of the singed grassland.
Volunteer firefighters
CBS News “Sunday Morning” had a very good segment about volunteer firefighters. The video is below, and here is a transcript. It’s worth viewing and reading.
WUI meeting in Washington, DC
The West Yellowstone News has an article about the National Wildland/Urban Interface Council’s fall meeting in DC. They interviewed Hebgen Basin Fire District Chief Scott Walron about the meeting and how their fire district west of Yellowstone National Park is dealing with the WUI.
More details about the fatal crash of the firefighters’ crew carrier
Corinna Craddock has a well-written article about the crash of the inmate crew carrier in which one firefighter, Julio Sanchez, and the driver of a second vehicle were killed. Here is an excerpt:
…The fact that [Julio] Sanchez and the rest of his crew were serving a court-ordered sentence at the time Sanchez was killed is a fact with little relevance. The reality is that when men go to camp where they are trained to fight wildfires, this is what they become. Sanchez was a firefighter.
Men who sleep on the side of a mountain in order to continue battling the blaze of a wildfire when they awake once again are men who know that there is no such thing as being an “almost firefighter” any more than it is possible for a woman to be “almost pregnant.” It is just one of the all-or-nothing things in life. This is why inmates who are trained to fight fires must undergo the same feats of endurance, strength, and perseverance that every American firefighter is trained for.
Firefighting is not for weak Americans. There is the kind of stress on a firefighter’s heart that is something akin to being in combat when a team of firefighters tackle such a threat to life. What some of these men will take away once the fire dies is the image of wild rabbits running ablaze. This is the sight that broke my own father’s heart more than once as he explained to me how he had no other choice but to hit an animal with his shovel hard enough to put it out of its misery rather than watch it suffer as it died. Anyone who knows a cat-lover, such as my dad was, might be able to imagine how a six-foot-four man could be hurt watching a tiny creature suffer.
Thank you to all our family and friends who send their love, thoughts, and prayers in our most recent loss. Fernando Julio Sanchez, youngest child of Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez, lost his life on 11-23-10 in a Tragic car accident while serving as a Firefighter for Cal Fire.
Services will be held on Wednesday (12/1) at 2200 Highland Ave in National City at California Cremation and Burial between 3pm-9pm.
Funeral will begin at 11:00 am on Thursday (12/2) at California Cremation and Burial. funeral will take place at Holy Cross Cemetary followed with a Celebration of Life at the Centro Cultural de la Raza, 2004 Park Blvd.
Donations can be mailed to: Ramon Sanchez 6367 Radio Dr, San Diego, Ca 92114.
Book about the Fourmile fire will help rebuild fire station
The proceeds from a new book about the Fourmile fire, which was near Boulder, Colorado last September, will go toward rebuilding a fire station that burned during the fire.
John N. Maclean has been working on a new book about the Esperanza fire for quite some time, but he still has a lot of work left to do on the project. The earliest it will be published is late 2011. But in the meantime, we have a preview of the still untitled book through a lengthy article he wrote for the High Country News. Here is a description of the piece:
“When a jury returns to a packed courtroom to announce the verdict in a capital murder case, every noise — even a chair scraping or a door opening — cracks like a rifle shot. That’s how it was at the trial of Raymond Lee Oyler, accused of murder for setting Southern California’s Esperanza Fire, which fatally burned five men on a U.S. Forest Service engine crew. As the jurors filed into the Riverside County Superior Court room … they had to work to keep their decision off their faces.”
With powerful scenes like that and compelling storytelling, writer John N. Maclean explores the world of wildfire arson in the cover story of the latest issue of High Country News, the nonprofit magazine that covers the American West.
Under the headline, “The Fiery Touch,” Maclean takes us into the courtroom where Oyler was tried in 2009 on arson and murder charges. He reports testimony of witnesses and kin of the dead and details of the jury’s deliberations. He reconstructs the 2006 Esperanza Fire’s fierceness and how investigators cracked the case. He also describes the history of notable wildfire arson cases and the longtime tolerance for people who start wildfires to create firefighting jobs, and talks about how, “The Oyler case stands as a warning to every would-be fire starter: Tolerance for the torch has gone the way of the Old West.”
A sidebar describes more than a dozen notable wildfire arson cases in the last half-century, including huge blazes in Southern California, Arizona and Colorado and the 1953 Rattlesnake Fire that killed 15 firefighters.
Maclean has written several books on disastrous Western wildfires and “A Fiery Touch” is adapted from a forthcoming book. For more on him, check his website: http://JohnMacleanBooks.com.
As a High Country News editor’s note for The Fiery Touch says: “Wildfire arsonists wield a devilish power over the environment and other people. Maclean focuses on a particularly terrible case and the toughest form of justice. It’s a riveting and timely read.”
At least four reviews of Timothy Egan’s book about the Big Blowup fires of 1910, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America appeared today or yesterday on various web sites. It seems like a strange coincidence for a book that came out a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe its because many book reviews appear in the Sunday editions of newspapers.
The International Association of Wildland Fire has scheduled a conference in Spokane, Washington October 25-29, 2010 that will in part commemorate the fires of the Big Blowup of 1910.
The author is going to appear in Seattle on Monday, October 19 at the Elliott Bay Book Company to discuss the book.
The Seattle Times has a review of the book HERE, Oregon Live has one HERE, and The Maui News review is HERE. The excerpt below is from a review by Time-News Magicvalley.com.
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On the evening of Saturday, Aug. 20, 1910, the Idaho Panhandle exploded.
Literally.
A cold wind out of the Palouse ignited a number of small fires burning in Idaho’s bone-dry Coeur d’Alene National Forest. Drawing energy from the flames themselves, the winds picked up speed until they reached 80 mph by the time they hit the town of Wallace.
In two days, 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana burned. That’s an area twice the size of the Great Salt Lake.
Eighty-seven people died, mostly the hard way: Pinned to the ground by fallen trees, they were still conscious while their hair burned and their skin curled up and blackened.
But it was an event that changed the course of American history – and Idaho’s, according to New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, whose book about the Great Fire of 1910, “Big Burn,” was published this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ($27). [$16.20 at Amazon.com]
Simply put, it saved the Forest Service, which nearly shriveled and died after President Theodore Roosevelt left office in 1909, and institutionalized professional management by government of public lands, Egan argues.
Idaho – 61 percent federally owned – looks as it does today because of the consequences of the Big Blowup.
“When the Rockefellers and the Weyerhaesers had pushed through these woods, it appeared that a new order was at hand,” Egan writes. “But it had not lasted.”
Heroic
Egan is a 54-year-old Seattle writer who has long covered the West for the Times. He’s best known for his 2005 book about the Dust Bowl, “The Worst Hard Time.”
But the tone of “Big Burn” is different. This is a story of heroes.
Two of them, especially. Gifford Pinchot, the son of a timber baron who devoted his life to saving trees, was a close friend of Roosevelt’s and the first chief of the Forest Service. Mostly through dogged persistence, he willed America into protecting vast tracks of its outback and kept government-managed conservation alive when the odds were against it.
Ed Pulaski was a former miner who hired on with the Forest Service as an assistant ranger in Wallace. During the Big Blowup he saved dozens of lives – at one point by pointing his revolver at panicked firefighters to keep them from running into the flames – while being maimed himself. After the fire, he spent he own meager resources caring for the injured.
Most of the handful of rangers working the Coeur d’Alene and Lolo national forests in 1910 were proteges of Pinchot and graduates of the Yale University School of Forestry, but not Pulaski. He mastered the forest by working in it and learning from it.
When the fire blew up, the Forest Service recruited every able-bodied man it could find, eventually 10,000 of them, even though it didn’t have the money to pay them. They – and the all-black 25th Infantry Regiment – saved lives, homes and, in some cases, entire communities.
The La Brea fire is burning across the highway from where the 1979 Spanish Ranch burned 30 years ago today. The August 15, 1979 wildfire claimed the lives of four California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CALFIRE) firefighters who were working on an indirect fireline 40 miles east of Santa Maria, California. Those four firefighters were Captain Ed Marty, and firefighters Scott Cox, Ron Lorant and Steve Manley.
Joe Valencia wrote, Area Ignition, which is a book about the 1979 fire. Joe also put together a document on the Lessons Learned site that gives a brief summary of the incident.
Here is the cover page from Joe’s document.
The Spanish Ranch fire is one of the in our recently revised partial list, by date of the year, of some of the more famous, or infamous, multiple fatality wildland fires around the world over the last 150 years.
Two books about wildfire have been published in the last couple of months. I have not had a chance to read either of them yet, but I’m looking forward to the opportunity.
Wildland firefighters, especially “hotshots,” are a breed alone. It is a lifestyle many will never understand. They are dispatched throughout the Nation, always ready to work in the very worst kind of disaster. They sleep wherever it’s safe and often do not shower for weeks.
So why would a young woman, reared on a Nevada cattle ranch, give up the open spaces for a life of danger? This is only one of the questions answered with humor and insight in Shawna Legarza’s memoir, No Grass.
After working her way through college as a firefighter, the author was part of the World Trade Center Recovery Efforts, where she met her husband who, like Legarza, was a firefighter. When he took his own life, the author mustered a new brand of courage and formed a non-for profit program to help the many physically and emotionally wounded firefighters, too brave to ask for help. This is a passionately told story, filled with determination and hope.
In August 1979, along a remote ridgeline near Santa Maria, four firefighters from a California Division of Forestry (CDF) engine crew, were preparing to defend the northern flank of the Spanish Ranch fire.
Captain Ed Marty, and firefighters; Scott Cox, Ron Lorant and Steve Manley responded to the fire from the Nipomo fire station. They were all from California, but were as different as the golden state’s angles, aspects and arenas. They were defined more from where they were from; Tehama, Goleta, Long Beach and La Habra.
No one predicted what would happen next—but in a page from man versus nature, the fire accelerated and then swept across the face of the slope which the four young firefighters were on.
At 4:25 PM their thin line of defense was cut-off and a retreating bulldozer operator was overrun. Minutes later, they tried to escape from the sweeping area ignition, but the fire cut-off their retreat and along with another dozer operator they were all overrun by fire.
The tragedy that occurred and the subsequent investigation would change the way the state fire agency operated on area wildfires. Area Ignition looks back 30-years to honor the men who fought and died in the Spanish Ranch Fire. It recreates the courage, emotion and human frailties that are interwoven from the initial ignition point—to the final survivors’ thoughts as they proceeded past a solitary CDF fire engine.
Although much has changed since then—young firefighters still go out every year to battle California wildfires just like their brothers of the past. We owe it to them to understand a little bit of the awesome power of wildfires and the people who fight them.
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[Mr. Valencia is also the author of From Tranquillon Ridge, a book about the Honda Canyon fire on Vandenberg Air Force Base in 1977 on which three people were killed, including the base commander. Mr. Valencia worked as a firefighter on that fire.)
