The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal has a well written article about a group of nine men from Mississippi that in the early 1960s traveled west to work on the El Cariso Hotshots in southern California. Many of them still live in the area around Tupelo, Mississippi and occasionally meet to share war stories.
I like how the article ends:
…They were young and immortal once, and traveled west to put that immortality to the test. They were brave and maybe a little crazy, but don’t call them stupid.
“If you went out there for the third year, you got to be a smokejumper. They dropped you in a parachute to fight fires,” Floyd said. “We were all smart enough not to go back the third year.”
I grew up in Mississippi and unknowingly followed in their footsteps a decade or so later, applying for the El Cariso job through the Forestry School’s Summer Student Employment Program at Mississippi State University. My application didn’t have the endorsement of a politician (like one of these gentlemen), but I had a previous season of experience working on a Timber Stand Improvement Crew on the Mendocino National Forest running a chain saw all day every day. I spent three seasons on El Cariso before moving on to the newly formed Laguna Hotshots — then engines, prevention, engines again, and Fire Management Officer.
A family from the Netherlands was visiting in California when they discovered that the 101 Freeway they were on took them through the Solimar Fire burning on both sides of the highway just northwest of Ventura, California.
The fire caused havoc among motorists when some of them made U-turns on the blocked divided highway, fleeing from the fire through opposing traffic, much to the surprise of the unaware oncoming drivers.
Below is an excerpt from an article at NBC news that has more details about the tourists who filmed the above video:
…Maaike Maks, who is visiting California from the Netherlands for the holidays with her family, was driving through Ventura from Los Angeles on Christmas night when they spotted the blaze.
“We already saw the fire 30 minutes before we actually passed it, but we didn’t realize it was this big and frightening,” she told NBC News after posting a video of the massive dancing flames on Twitter.
“There was nobody stopping us as we got closer and closer. So we thought it was totally safe for us to drive past it,” Maks said. “Then all of the sudden all these sparks and a burning bush hit our car and we couldn’t see anything of what was around us because of all the smoke … We were very lucky.
More information on Wildfire Today about the Solimar Fire.
Solimar Fire Map, provided by the Ventura County Fire Department at noon, December 26, 2015 (click to enlarge)
The Solimar Fire northwest of Ventura, California as of 5:40 p.m. PST had not grown appreciably since early Saturday morning, and was mapped at 1,236 acres. Approximately 403 firefighters were on scene at that time as well as one helicopter.
The 101 Freeway, which had been closed in both directions is now open and evacuations have been lifted.
The weather has changed from strong gusty winds Friday night to a Saturday night forecast of 7 mph north winds, 37 degrees, with 30 percent humidity.
Photo of Solina Fire courtesy of Ventura County Fire Department.
****
(Originally published at 11:05 a.m. PST, December 26, 2015)
A vegetation fire has burned about 1,200 acres in southern California northwest of the city of Ventura. The Solimar Fire started at about 11 p.m. PST Christmas day and spread quickly, pushed by 50 mph winds.
The fire, burning on both sides of the 101 freeway near the Pacific coast, caused havoc among motorists when some of them made U-turns on the blocked divided highway, fleeing from the fire through opposing traffic, much to the surprise of the unaware oncoming drivers.
The 101 is closed and mandatory evacuations are still in place as this is written at 10:56 a.m. on Saturday.
The good news is that, again, the Pacific Ocean proved its value as a very adequate fuel break.
The video below was a 2 a.m. briefing by the Ventura County Fire Department.
Entrapment site of firefighters on the Valley Fire. Photo from the CAL FIRE report. (click to enlarge)
When two firefighters in California being overrun by flames on the Valley Fire in September of this year found that the plastic bag around their fire shelters had partially melted making it very difficult to deploy the life-saving device, it was not the first time this has happened.
Four firefighters on the Valley Fire suffered significant burns to their heads, faces, arms, and hands before they were able to get into the shelters. The injuries on the Beaver Fire were less serious.
The Beaver Fire report addressed the failure of the fire shelter packaging:
Two of the firefighters who deployed reported that their shelter’s PVC bag became hot, which made it soft and pliable. This affected the ability of the red tear strip to pull apart.
But there was no recommendation that the design be modified.
The report on the 2015 Valley Fire entrapment describes a similar problem:
…FF4 had difficulty opening the fire shelter case from the Chainsaw Pack; the clear plastic covering of the fire shelter was soft and melted. FF4 had to remove the gloves to tear the plastic away from the aluminum shell of the fire shelter. FF3 couldn’t get the fire shelter out of the case because the clear plastic cover was melted to the white plastic protective sleeve…
One of the first times shelters were used was in 1964 when 36 members of the El Cariso Hotshots deployed them on a fire near Cajon Pass in southern California. Two years later 12 men on the crew were killed when they were entrapped on the Loop Fire on the Angeles National Forest — they were not carrying shelters at the time. In the hours before they began their fatal downhill fireline construction assignment the fire in that area had not been very active.
The U.S. Forest Service has modified the design of fire shelters several times since they were introduced in the 1960s. After 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013 in spite of using the devices, the USFS began an effort to redesign them and has been testing numerous materials and configurations, including insulation that has been supplied by NASA.
The Press Democrat has a lengthy article about the recent deployments and the design of fire shelters.
…Firefighters across Sonoma County said they had been anxious to see the official preliminary Cal Fire “green sheet,” a summary of the incident released Oct. 3 detailing how the firefighters became injured [on the Valley Fire]. Many said they were stunned to learn about the plastic melting and the equipment failure on the survival tents they will all carry in the next wildland blaze even as the effectiveness of that equipment is under review.
Firefighters, especially those who jump into the thick of it, deal with extreme situations and the equipment must be able to withstand those situations, they said.
Ernie Loveless, who ran Cal Fire’s Sonoma-Lake-Napa unit for 20 years until he retired five years ago, said he was concerned about the durability of the bags after they were introduced in 2004.
“It seemed strange to have safety stuff like that made out of plastic that will melt in extreme heat,” said Loveless, who is now Schell-Vista fire board president. “I asked: ‘Why do we put stuff in plastic?’ The answer I received from our academy at the time is it was the best material they knew of at the time.”…
Happy Camp Complex in northern California in 2014. Photo by Kari Greer.
2014 was a busy year in California for wildland firefighters. Battles were fought over 555,044 acres of blackened ground in the state, which was the eighth largest number of acres burned in the last 28 years. So far in 2015, fires have covered 838,465 acres in California, which puts it fifth highest in 28 years. (Stats from Cal FIRE and the NIFC National Situation Report.)
However, I’m not a meteorologist or climate scientist. But some of them who are, took a stab at investigating the possible attribution of extreme weather-related events in 2014 to global climate change. In their report, Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective, 33 different research groups explored the causes of 29 different events that occurred that year.
The first event in the report is titled, Extreme Fire Season in California: A Glimpse Into the Future. It is debatable if the 2014 fire season in California was “extreme”, since like we wrote earlier, it had the eighth largest number of acres burned in the last 28 years according to data from the land management agencies. The authors, Jin-Ho Yoon, S.-Y. Simon Wang, Robert R. Gillies, Lawrence Hipps, Ben Kravitz, and Philip J. Rasch, reported “thousands more fires than the five-year average” between January 1 and September 20.
We don’t put very much stock in numbers of fires, since a small spot that can be stomped out by a couple of firefighters counts just as much as a 300,000-acre conflagration. Total burned acres is much more meaningful. The area burned data that the scientists studied was derived from satellite observations, which can underestimate wildfire extent due to its limit in the minimum detectable burned area, timing of the satellite overflights, light fuels cooling before being detected, and obscuration by cloud cover.
The report also examined the Keetch-Byram Drought index, and determined that “in terms of the KBDI and the extreme fire risk, 2014 ranks first in the entire state”, but it was not clear what time period they were referring to (it may have been since 1979).
The authors fall short of attributing the “extreme” 2014 fire season in California to global climate change:
Our result, based on the CESM1 outputs, indicates that man-made global warming is likely one of the causes that will exacerbate the areal extent and frequency of extreme fire risk, though the influence of internal climate variability on the 2014 and the future fire season is difficult to ascertain.
Location and types of events analyzed in the publication. The image is from the study.
Firefighters found the body of a 90-year-old man in a brushfire on November 3 near Bainbridge, Ohio. Preliminary indications are that Melvin B. Elliott was raking leaves during the early stages of the fire, but the cause of death has not been determined.
California city bans drones during emergencies
The city council of Poway, California passed a new ordinance this week that prohibits launching, operating or landing drones in any part of the city where an emergency has been declared. The objective is to eliminate conflicts between unmanned aerial vehicles and helicopters or fixed wing aircraft responding to the incident. Several times this year hobby drones flown near wildfires have required firefighting helicopters and air tankers to be grounded for safety reasons.
Efforts to wrest control of federal lands can’t be ignored
The movement to grab federal lands, such as national forests, BLM land, and national parks, and turn it over to states or private landowners can’t be ignored. The efforts are real and are not going away. At least 37 land transfer bills have been introduced in state legislatures with six of them passing; another four have been finalized as “study” legislation.
Below is an excerpt from an article in Wyofile written by Angus M. Thuermer Jr., in which the view is expressed that one of the tactics is to starve federal agencies by reducing their funding, then accuse them of mismanagement, and arguing that states, individuals, or large companies would be better land managers.
[The views of Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership] illuminate the seriousness with which some in the conservation community are now viewing the renewed Sagebrush Rebellion. The movement is supported by a strategy that’s decades old — starving land management agencies — transfer critics say. Launched under the guise of deficit reduction and fiscal responsibility, budget cutting is also a cynical ploy to sow dissatisfaction of federal western land management at the grassroots level, Fosburgh contends.
