Map showing location of the Calvert Fire March 1, 2021
The spread of an escaped prescribed fire 11 miles south of Big Pine, California was stopped Monday on the east side of Hwy. 395 by firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The plan by the CAL FIRE San Bernardino Unit was to ignite the project at 8 a.m. Monday but a change in wind direction surprised the crews and caused the blaze to escape the project boundary and was declared an escape at 11 a.m.
The new fire named Calvert was mapped at 262 acres by the Fire Integrated Real-Time Intelligence System (FIRIS) operated in a fixed wing aircraft by Orange County Fire Authority. FIRIS has proven to be an incredibly valuable resource for providing real time video intelligence, fire spread projections, and situational awareness during wildfire suppression.
We need about a dozen more FIRIS units.
OCFA FIRIS Intel 24 on the Calvert Fire, BDU, 13 miles south of Big Pines Ca. Cal-Fire Air Attack 120 from Hemet and 4 Cal-Fire S-2 Airtankers from Hemet and Ramona providing aggressive perimeter control. pic.twitter.com/zaHSJ0xaxx
Photo of the Calvert Fire, by AA120, March 1, 2021.
Still another escaped prescribed fire in Southern California:
There is a report that another prescribed fire escaped in California, this time it was Tuesday near Clear Creek Station in the Angeles National Forest. The escape was named Clear Fire.
Two firefighters were severely burned October 26, 2020 on the Southern California wildfire
Dylan Van Iwaarden was released from hospital after being burned on the Silverado Fire. Screengrab from CBS Los Angeles video.
One of the two firefighters that were burned on the Silverado Fire in Orange County, California was released from the hospital Wednesday after spending 114 days in the Burn Center at Orange County Global Medical Center. Dylan Van Iwaarden was severely burned October 26 while working on an Orange County Fire Authority hand crew suppressing the blaze.
Since then he has battled for his life, had 17 surgeries, was in a medically induced coma, intubated, and endured endless procedures. Dylan is now headed to his next phase of recovery at the rehabilitation unit of UC Irvine Medical Center.
Another firefighter on the crew, Phi Le, was also burned during the incident. Both firefighters suffered severe second and third degree burns. The Orange County Register reports that Le spent time in a burn center but has been discharged and is continuing his rehabilitation from home as of Wednesday.
The report on the incident said the crew was firing out when a spot fire ignited below the crew. They escaped downhill to a dozer line but five crew members were impacted by radiant and convective heat, reporting singed hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes while stumbling out of the way of the spot fire’s path. Three others, the report said, “were impacted significantly”.
The fire killed two people and destroyed 74 structures in Riverside County in 2019
San Bernardino Sheriff Department search dogs assisted Riverside County in searching the structures after the Sandalwood Fire. Photo courtesy of Lt. James Mahan
Two passing motorists told Antonio Ornelas-Velazquez on October 10, 2019 that it was too dangerous to dump the burning contents of his garbage truck on the side of the road during a strong wind advisory. But according to the arrest warrant, that is what he did, near Calimesa Boulevard and Sandalwood Drive in Riverside County, California. The burning trash ignited what became the 1,011-acre Sandalwood Fire.
The wind pushed the fast-moving fire into the Villa Calimesa Mobile Home Park where it killed Hannah Labelle, 61, and Lois Arvickson, 89, and burned 74 structures.
Riverside County Fire Department photo.
It did not take fire investigators long to determine the cause of the fire but Mr. Ornelas-Velazquez was not arrested until Saturday, when he was charged with involuntary manslaughter and unlawfully causing a fire resulting in great bodily injury, according to a spokesperson with the Riverside County district attorney’s office. He was released the next day after posting $75,000 bond.
The truck was owned by CR&R Recycling.
The ABC7 video shows video of the smoking truck as it pulled off the road, and also has an interview with one of the motorists who said he advised the driver to dump it “anywhere but here.”
#SandalwoodFire in Calimesa is now 77% contained after the deadly blaze ripped through a mobile park, scorching over 1,000 acres and destroying dozens of homes https://t.co/MBSvXSJL0L
A firefighter battles flames at the Camp Fire. Photo by FirePhotoGirl used with permission.
On a brisk November morning in 2018, a fire sparked in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, California, a region nestled against the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Fueled by a sea of tinder created by drought, and propelled by powerful gusts, the flames grew and traveled rapidly. In less than 24 hours, the fire had swept through the town of Paradise and other communities, leaving a charred ruin in its wake.
The Camp Fire was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018 and, having caused 85 deaths and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, it became both the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history, two records the fire still holds today.
What made the Camp Fire so devastating? And what lessons can we learn to prevent another disaster of this scale? Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have begun to answer these questions by investigating the conditions leading up to the fire and meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events describing the first 24 hours of its progression. A new report containing the timeline identifies areas where more research is needed to improve life safety and reduce structural losses. It also offers a detailed look at how a large and deadly fire advances — information that will become increasingly valuable as fire seasons continue to intensify.
“Going forward, there’s no reason to believe that fire activity and severity is going to lessen anytime soon. We’re never going to get rid of wildfires, natural or human-caused. But we can learn how to live with and work together to mitigate them.” —Steven Hawks, CAL FIRE chief and report co-author
“The information we collected on the timeline is extremely powerful by itself, not only for Paradise but for other similar communities, to help them understand what they may encounter and better prepare, whether it is at a community or at the first responder level,” said NIST fire protection engineer Alexander Maranghides, who led the timeline reconstruction.
To piece together the puzzle of the Camp Fire, the team carried out discussions with 157 first responders, local officials and utilities personnel who were present during the fire. The team documented sightings of fire or smoke and efforts to fight the fire or evacuate, as well as insights into community preparedness and weather conditions.
NIST researcher and fire protection engineer Alexander Maranghides views a landscape marred by the Camp Fire during a field data collection deployment. Credit: NIST.
The researchers sought to back up observations made during the fire with additional data sources before adding new puzzle pieces to the timeline. With the help of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), Paradise Police Department and others, the team gained access to and reviewed large data sets, including radio logs, 911 calls, dashboard and body camera recordings, and drone and satellite images. They also looked to images in social and news media to corroborate the sightings of discussion participants.
By the end of the painstaking process, the authors of the report incorporated more than 2,200 observations into the timeline, which is broken up into 15 separate segments to capture concurrent events throughout different sections of Butte County. Continue reading “Researchers conduct detailed case study of the Camp Fire”
SDG&E, PG&E, and SCE release their plans for 2021 and 2022
File photo of powerline routed through trees.
Three of the largest power companies in California expect to spend a total of $15 billion over a two-year period, 2021 through 2022, to prevent wildfire ignitions. In state-required updates to their annual wildfire mitigation plans filed with California’s Public Utilities Commission, San Diego Gas and Electric states they will spend $1.3 billion, Pacific Gas and Electric $10.2 billion, and Southern California Edison $3.5 billion.
The power equipment of the three utilities have been responsible for numerous large, disastrous wildfires.
PG&E, for example, expects to make the following improvements to their systems in 2021:
Implement a new Wildfire Risk Model that can comprehensively assess and prioritize its safety work, including system hardening and enhanced vegetation management. This builds upon the previous model and uses advanced software and machine learning for predicting fire ignitions and improving fire spread simulations for determining the potential impacts of a wildfire.
Install 300 additional weather stations to more precisely forecast the weather that could lead to public safety power shutoff events, to complete the long-term goal of 1,300 total stations.
Install more than 260 devices that limit the size of outages;
Install and deploy microgrids that use generators to keep the electricity on;
Deploy more crews for inspection and restoration efforts;
Convert 23 line-miles of overhead powerlines to underground in Butte County;
“Harden” 180 miles of high risk lines;
Conduct “enhanced vegetation management” on 1,800 miles of high risk lines.
The goal of PG&E’s Meteorology and Fire Science team is to advance operational meteorology and operational decision making to reduce wildfire risk. It is comprised of 15 scientists, most with advanced degrees in scientific fields with diverse backgrounds in operational meteorology, utility meteorology, outage prediction, fire science, data science, cloud computing, atmospheric modeling, application development and data systems development. The team is comprised of alumni from the San Jose State University Fire Weather Research Laboratory (https://www.fireweather.org/), former wildland firefighters, former National Weather Service forecasters, and Veterans of the Marine Corps and United States Air Force.
They observe fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape
2010-2020
For the past few decades, scientists have been using satellite- and airplane-based radar instruments to detect damage caused by wildfires and human-caused blazes. Radar instruments can observe by day or night and can see land through clouds and smoke, so they are helpful for observing fire fronts and burn scars during and shortly after fire moves across a landscape.
Landscape ecologist Naiara Pinto and colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are now taking a longer view. They are trying to decipher where and how well forests and scrublands are recovering in the years after a fire.
Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) instruments send out pulses of microwaves that bounce off of Earth’s surfaces. The reflected waves are detected and recorded by the instrument and can help map the shape of the land surface (topography) and the land cover—from cities to ice to forests. By comparing changes in the signals between two separate satellite or airplane overpasses, scientists can observe surface changes like land deformation after earthquakes, the extent of flooding, or the exposure of denuded or bare ground after large fires.
One of the aircraft NASA equips with synthetic aperture radar or other sensors. This is a medium-sized UAV-NASA SIERRA. SIERRA medium UAV at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. (Photograph: NASA.) NASA SIERRA Pilot and Range Safety Officer Mark Sumitch shown for scale.
SAR instruments are carried on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites, while NASA currently deploys its Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) via research aircraft. NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization are planning to launch the NISAR satellite in 2022.
2010-2020
Mounted on the bottom of NASA research planes, UAVSAR has been flown over the same portions of Southern California several times since 2009. Pinto and JPL colleagues Latha Baskaran, Yunling Lou, and David Schimel analyzed that data and developed a mapping technique to show the different stages of removal and regrowth of vegetation (chapparal and forest).
The maps above are essentially mosaics of the observations across a decade. Radar signals bounce off burned, barren terrain differently than they reflect from unburned, brush-covered hillsides or from fresh growth. The colors indicate the relative amount of vegetation observed by different UAVSAR flights at different times. Yellow lines on the maps indicate the extent of several major fires: Station, Colby, San Gabriel (SG) Complex, La Tuna, and Bobcat.
“Overall, the colors are telling us that the Angeles National Forest contains a patchwork of plant communities at different stages of regeneration,” said Pinto, who is a science coordinator for UAVSAR. For instance, areas with more red had more vegetation in 2010 than they do now. Areas with more blue and green shading had more vegetation (regrowth) in recent years. Yellow indicates areas burned in 2020 that had a higher volume of vegetation in 2010 and 2017 (red+green) but lower volume in 2020 (blue).
2010-2020
The image above illustrates how those maps were assembled. Radar data were collected during UAVSAR flights in 2010, 2017, and 2020 over Angeles National Forest and other areas northeast of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.
The project has been supported by NASA’s Earth Applied Sciences Disasters program, which generates maps and other data products for institutional partners as they work to mitigate and recover from natural hazards and disasters. The SAR technique is still being tested and validated, but the intent is to monitor forest regrowth and fire scar change over time, which are important information for forest and fire managers working to manage risks.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using UAVSAR data and imagery courtesy of Anne Marie Peacock, Naiara Pinto, and Yunling Lou and NASA/Caltech UAVSAR. Story by Michael Carlowicz.
