Wildfire briefing, November 19, 2012

Firefighters discover dog fighting operation

Hawkins Co Fire in Tn, Photo by Hawkins Co EMA
Fire in Hawkins County, Tennessee. Photo by Hawkins County Emergency Management Agency

Firefighters working to put out a wildfire near Rogersville, Tennessee had to suspend their suppression operations after they discovered a facility threatened by the fire that housed dogs and roosters used for dog and cock fighting. Firefighters rescued about 40 of the animals. Here is an excerpt from an article in the Times News:

Hawkins County Sheriff Ronnie Lawson told the Times-News Sunday the suspected operation is now the subject of a criminal investigation, and although no arrests had been made he hoped to be able to release more information about that on Monday.

Murrell added, “It put a damper on the firefighting efforts last (Saturday) night because everybody had to pull off until we found out what it was. Then it took most available law enforcement and fire (personnel) to try to get all the dogs out.”

As of Sunday night the fire, which started on Thursday, had burned about 1,800 acres.

Petition to hire the DC-10 air tankers

The managers of the Facebook page for the DC-10 air tankers have organized a petition drive designed to convince the US Forest Service to award a long-term contract for the DC-10s. More information is at our Fire Aviation web site.

Coal seam fire burns 1,000 acres

A wildfire that started from a mostly underground fire in a coal seam has burned 1,000 acres of land in Boone County, West Virginia. Firefighters are suppressing the fire using leaf blowers, rakes, and dozers. Trees that were down as a result of a summer wind storm and then Hurricane Sandy have added fuel to the fire and complicated access to the area. We have reported on numerous other coal seam fires over the years.

Pole Creek Fire affected the economy of Sisters, Oregon

Some wildfires may enhance the economy of a rural area by spending money at local businesses. But too often tourists stay away in droves or in the case of the Pole Creek Fire near Sisters, Oregon, population 2,000, the dense smoke in the community forced some residents to temporarily leave the area. An article in a Firewise publication reported that even though 800 firefighters were housed at an incident base a few miles down the road, in September restaurants had their revenue decrease by 40 to 50 percent. Stores saw less business and motels experienced reservation cancellations up to five weeks out.

In September we reported on a study about the economic effects of large wildfires which showed that on average, the US Forest Service spent six percent of wildfire suppression funding in the county where the fires occurred. Amounts of local spending varied from zero to 25 percent.

The Pole Cree Fire started from lightning on September 9 and burned 26,795 acres before it was contained October 20.

Fire management decisions affect local communities

When land management agencies make decisions about using less than aggressive initial attack strategies, attempt to manage fires “on the cheap”,  or allow a fire to burn naturally for weeks or months, they may not accurately realize the long term economic and health effects those decisions can have on the local population. These may or may not have been issues in the management of the Pole Creek Fire, but they are too often mentioned as factors that have crept into fire management over the last decade.

World Bank says temperatures may rise 7.2 degrees

The World Bank reported that the planet may see temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius, or about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, resulting in more wildfires, extreme heat waves, a decline in food supplies and a ‘life-threatening’ rise in sea level.

 

Thanks go out to Dick

Firefighters treated after being exposed to gasses from burning coal

Firefighters working on the Taylor Creek Fire in southeast Montana on Friday the 13th were treated at the Ashland Clinic after mopping up a hot spot that turned out to be a surface seam of coal. The seven firefighters suffered from nausea caused by sulfur dioxide. They all returned to duty later that day.

 
Thanks go out to Dick

Coal mine fire, dormant since 1954, to be suppressed, again

The Slagle/Bright Diamond coal mine northeast of Ridgway, Colorado (map) has been burning since the mine was abandoned in the 1930s. In 1954 an eight-foot thick earthen cap was spread over it in an attempt to suffocate it, and until recently there was little evidence that it was still burning. Now vents have opened, air has gotten into the mine, and smoke is coming out of some of the vents.

The Slagle/Bright Diamond mine is one of 34 active coal mine fires in Colorado. We have written before about coal fires (7 articles), and specifically about fires in Colorado and Montana. Montana recently began putting out nine coal mine fires.

The Watch has an interesting article written by Peter Shelton about the effort by the Inactive Mines Program of the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety to suppress these fires. Here is an excerpt from the article, in which Steve Renner from that agency is leading a group of heavy equipment contractors in a site visit prior to awarding a contract for capping the burning Slagle/Bright Diamond mine.

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“This one looks underwhelming when you’re standing around kicking the dirt,” Renner said of the unassuming, 1.5-acre site. “But those big circular collapses? Those subsidences where the earth has caved in can provide oxygen to a fire. And then they can get very, very hot. Which leads to more hollowing out, more collapsing.”

And then you have a public health and safety issue. “Someone could fall through into the fire. Or it could start a wildfire,” he told me later. “And the hazard there is just infinite: in terms of dollars, firefighters, watershed damage, etc.”

Renner is Project Manager for the Inactive Mines Program of the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety. He’s a geologist by training. “But mine fires are kind of my specialty.”

There are 34 active coal mine fires in Colorado, he said on the drive up County Road 4. Most are within an hour or two of his office in Grand Junction. Many more have been capped and have stopped burning. Or gone dormant. The Slagle was given an eight-foot thick earthen cap in 1954, in an effort to suffocate it. But now it was back, the vents opening up, the fire breathing with new life.

The contractors were there for a pre-bid meeting, to research what they thought it would take in equipment and man-hours to suppress the fire. Again.

Renner, who is tall and boyish, with surprising white hair, led the way up, away from the pickups onto the hillside. The only remnants of the mining were a dilapidated “load-out” and off to the side a chinked log cabin with the glass still in its wooden window frames.

The first vents could have been big badger holes. But Christy Hulsman, with the federal Office of Surface Mining, warned me to stay back. “We don’t want a journalist falling through,” she said in a soft Kentucky accent. She’d only recently been transferred out West, to the Denver office, from her home state, where coal mines and mine fires are facts of life. “It’s got that smell,” she said, sniffing, unable to come up with a comparison for the sour stink. “It just smells like coal.”

Renner told the contractors that step one in the suppression job would be to fill the vents with dirt, by hand, “to try to choke them off, rather than just spread material over the top with a dozer.” Step two is to backfill the subsidence and vent features with big machines. Then they’ll need to construct a drainage ditch around the whole site and recontour and revegetate the surface.

How do you know a mine is burning without visiting every one of the hundreds of inactive mines around the state? Renner, of course, knows where all the old workings are. He flies around in a small airplane, in late fall or early spring when the snow cover is thin, and looks for “hot spots.” “Sometimes you see smoke,” said Ridgway’s Jeff Litteral, the project manager for the Slagle job. More often it’s just anomalous bare ground (warm earth) surrounded by white.

Peat Fires 101

Peat fires can burn up to 15 feet deep and are extremely difficult to extinguish. Russia, which has been plagued by peat fires this summer, constructed a 30-mile-long water pipeline from the Oka River to an area with peat fires east of Moscow.

The excerpt below is from a New York times article and is a quote from Guillermo Rein, an expert on smoldering subterranean fires and an assistant professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Smoldering fires, the slow, low-temperature, flameless form of combustion, are an important phenomena in the Earth system, and the most persistent type of combustion. The most important fuels involved in smoldering fires are coal and peat. Once ignited, these fires are particularly difficult to extinguish despite extensive rains, weather changes or firefighting attempts, and can persist for long periods of time (months, years), spreading deep (5 meters) and over extensive areas of forest subsurface. Indeed, smoldering fires are the longest continuously burning fires on Earth. The Burning Mountain, a coal deposit in New South Wales, Australia, has been smoldering since 4,000 B.C.

The characteristic temperature, spread rate and heat released during smoldering are low compared to flaming fires. Smoldering peat fires creep at a speed of 1 meter per day. Whereas flaming fires result in superficial heating of the soil, smoldering leads to sterilization and loss of mass above 90 percent (a layer of 5 meters is reduced to 30 centimeters). Moreover, these fires are difficult to detect with current remote sensing methods because the chemistry is significantly different, their thermal signature is much smaller, and the smoke plume is much less buoyant than the emissions from flaming fires.

Smoldering fires can be ignited by natural causes such as wildfires, lightning strikes, self-heating or anthropogenic factors, e.g., slash and burn, arson, mining activities or waste incineration. The most typical scenario for peat fires is when a fast flaming wildfire sweeps over a region burning the surface vegetation and igniting the peat if this is dry enough. The peat then smolders for a much longer time. This is what happens in Indonesia and probably what has occurred in Russia this summer.

Water content of the peat governs smoldering ignition. The depth and the area affected in case of fire are also be dictated by the water content of the peat layers. The maximum water content for boreal peat to ignite has been measured to be 55 percent by weight. Any water content bellow this means the peat can smolder.

Montana puts out 9 underground coal fires

excavating coal fire
MT DEQ

As Wildfire Today reported in March of 2009, the state of Montana began at that time writing Environmental Assessments so that they could begin suppressing some underground coal fires. Usually putting out one of these fires involves moving a great deal of dirt, much like surface coal mining, so there can be a lot of paperwork involved. One of the fires in Musselshell County had been smoldering since 1984 and last year started a wildfire that burned 1,700 acres.

MT DEQ

They have made a lot of progress since March of 2009. Here is an excerpt from a news release from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality:

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality has extinguished nine underground coal fires in Eastern Montana since last fall with one more to go in the next two months.

The DEQ’s Abandoned Mine Program conducted the coal mine and coal seam mitigation project in Custer, Yellowstone and Musselshell Counties. Three fires were in the Shepherd area north of Billings; another six were in the Miles City area. The remaining fire is also near Miles City.

“Some of these underground fires may be out of sight but they’re not out of mind,” said DEQ Director Richard Opper. “The smoldering coal seams threaten wildlife, destroy ranchland and risk starting wild land fires. They also emit polluting noxious gases and carbon-dioxide. So it was important to douse these coal fires and eliminate the safety and environmental risks they pose.”

To mitigate the fires, crews excavate the burning coal seam, spread the hot material into a “quench” pit and mix it with soil and water to cool. The area is then reclaimed by backfilling the seam and revegetating the disturbed area.

Federal abandoned mine reclamation grant money paid for the project at a cost of about $805,000.

Coal seam fires are started primarily by lightening strikes. In addition, while coal fires can trigger wild land fires, grass fires can also ignite coal seams.

Here is a 23-second video showing a large quantity of water being applied to one of the Montana coal fires.

Underground coal fire in Colorado

An underground coal fire recently discovered near the western Colorado town of Silt is venting smoke and fumes through two holes in the ground. No damage has been reported and the temperature near the surface is not high enough to start a vegetation fire yet, but state reclamation workers began filling the holes with dirt this week.

In 2002 an underground coal seam fire started a fire near Glenwood Springs, Colorado which destroyed some structures about 15 miles east of Silt.