The weather forecast for the western United States is complicated today. Portions of western Colorado are under both Red Flag Warnings AND Winter Storm Warnings. The southwest and west central part of the state should experience strong southwest winds this afternoon with gusts of 30 to 40 mph with low humidities and isolated thunderstorms. Then after 6 p.m. all that changes, with some areas expecting to receive 10 to 20 inches of snow accompanied by 20 to 30 mph winds with gusts close to 50 mph.
Spring season prescribed fires in the Black Hills of South Dakota are on hold since a Winter Storm Warning is in effect through Wednesday morning. The forecast calls for snow accumulations of 9 to 16 inches with a 100 percent probability of precipitation through Tuesday night. The last time I remember it being 100 percent was a couple of months ago when we got zero precipitation in the southern Black Hills.
The National Weather Service prediction for Tuesday is for up to half an inch to one inch of precipitation in some areas of Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, and Texas, while other Red Flag Warnings are in effect for portions of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Waldo Canyon Fire, June 26, 2012, the day most of the homes burned in Colorado Springs. Credit: Keystoneridin
(Originally published at 2:07 p.m. MT, April 5, 2013; updated at 4:30 p.m. MT, April 5, 2013)
The City of Colorado Springs has released a second report about the disastrous Waldo Canyon fire that in June, 2012 killed two people, destroyed 347 homes, and burned 18,247 acres. The first report can be found HERE, and was called an “Initial After Action Report” considered preliminary. Wildfire Today covered that report on October 23, 2012. This new report on the City’s web site is described as the “Final After Action Report”. Unlike the first version, this one provides more information about what went well and what didn’t, and includes many recommendations along with the reasons for each one.
As a firefighter who worked on the 1975 Pacoima Fire where the Incident Command System was used for the first time, it is difficult to understand why 37 years later a large city with an extensive wildland/urban interface in a wildfire-prone area had not fully adopted the ICS by 2012. In reviewing these two reports, and an excellent exposé written for the Colorado Independent by Pam Zubeck, which in my mind deserves a Pulitzer Prize, roughly 75 percent of the problems identified could have been avoided if Colorado Springs had fully implemented the ICS.
The City’s reports claim ICS training has been conducted for some of their employees, but it is clear from the problems encountered during the Waldo Canyon Fire that it was poorly, if at all, implemented.
Even if extensive ICS training is given within the City, that is not enough. The system needs to be used daily. No one can receive the training and then instantly be qualified as a Logistics Section Chief, for example. Under the best of circumstances, it takes years, sometimes decades of experience and training to advance from an entry level ICS position to the highest ranks, so Colorado Springs needs to develop an aggressive mentoring program. Trainees need to be assigned on large incidents outside the City to shadow someone who can show them the ropes. Their freshly trained employees may not qualify for a Trainee position at the Unit Leader or Section Chief level, but I doubt if the City will worry much about qualifications for ICS positions, or how to move up the chain of command from position to position. The 310-1 Wildland Fire Qualification System Guide might only be a pipe dream for Colorado Springs.
This in no way should be considered as criticism of the Colorado Springs firefighters. Many of them are highly trained and some have had multiple assignments with Type 1 incident management teams on large wildfires. The organizational and policy problems rest with the city administrators and the leaders within the fire department.
The Colorado Springs Gazette published an article about the report on April 3, pulling no punches. Here is an excerpt:
“Obviously, going forward we need to learn from this. If this fire had started on Cheyenne Mountain we would have lost thousands of homes and probably many more people,” [Mayor Steve Bach] said Wednesday. “This is going to happen again.”
The report focused largely on the afternoon and night of June 26, when the fire destroyed 347 homes and killed two residents.
Colorado Springs firefighters raced into Mountain Shadows without plans to ensure they had food, water or rest breaks, the report said.
Capt. Steve Riker, the department’s incident commander on June 26, said he initially had his firefighters “well under control.” However, he said that control began to slip as units from neighboring fire departments rushed to help.
Supervisors operated under organizational charts that weren’t fully developed, the report said, and emergency plans were “underutilized.”
Communication lagged between city officials and first responders in the field — leading firefighters and police officers to work without full situational awareness.
The Colorado Springs city administration has been sensitive to criticism about they way they managed the fire. In a video that was shot at a press conference, Chief Rich Brown said:
The hypercritical view by some at times just gets a little old. Because of the fact that they weren’t there. They didn’t see what the decision maker at the time saw. Any public safety professional worth anything is always going to come back and say I would have done this differently if I had the same thing to do over again.
Joe Philpott, a smokejumper who worked out of Boise, Idaho, was killed in an avalanche on Cameron Pass near Fort Collins March 2, 2013. That of course is a tragedy, but his skiing buddy was buried in the same avalanche for three hours and survived. The Denver Post produced the video above, and published a gripping story about the rescue. Here is a very brief excerpt about the survivor, Alex White.
…His body temperature was 72 degrees. He had been buried in snow for three hours. He arrived at the emergency room nearly six hours after his burial and five hours after he had surrendered to a darkness that never came.
In spite of suffering some serious injuries and spending two days in critical care and two in post-trauma recovery, Mr. White was back in school a week after the accident.
According to the Latin American Herald Tribune, about 25,000 acres burned last week in the Huasteca Potosina region in the north-central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi. Two people were identified as suspects for starting a fire near the town of Lagunillas. One person died in one of the fires, which have been fought by 600 firefighters.
USFS says naturally occurring asbestos was not a problem on the Chips Fire
The U.S. Forest Service conducted extensive tests of naturally occurring asbestos on the Chips Fire that burned over 75,000 acres on the Plumas/Lassen National Forest last August. The results indicated that firefighters were not exposed to dangerous levels of asbestos particles and confirmed that there is no need to wear high-efficiency particulate air respirators in the area. During suppression activities a Safety Officer, worried that dust might contain asbestos, had raised the issue of firefighter safety in areas where fireline was being constructed by crews and dozers.
Victims of Colorado’s Lower North Fork Fire have filed 95 claims against the government
At least 95 claims have been filed against government agencies in Colorado following the Lower North Fork Fire, a state-run prescribed fire that escaped March 26, 2012, killed three local residents at their homes and burned 27 structures. An article in the Denver Post quotes a local resident who said two previous prescribed fires in the area also escaped or reignited before the state ignited the Lower North Fork project.
Volunteer firefighter charged with arson
Nathaniel Ridgway Schmidt, a former volunteer firefighter with the Timber Cove Fire Protection District in Sonoma County, California, has been charged with setting five fires in Sonoma and San Mateo Counties.
One of the cases occurred on a prescribed fire when Mr. Schmidt was tasked with patrolling a section of fireline. Here is an excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle:
…A half-hour later, Schmidt yelled that the fire was out of control, but investigators determined he had set a new quarter-acre blaze, [District Attorney Steve] Wagstaffe said. He said authorities believe Schmidt, who has no prior criminal record, set the fires “for excitement.”
The San Mateo County fire happened eight days after the first two of four fires allegedly set by Schmidt in Sonoma County. Prosecutors there charged Schmidt with four felony counts of arson and five misdemeanor counts of falsely reporting emergencies, including a car going over a cliff.
Melinda Kontz, a mail carrier in Fort Collins, Colorado evacuated 92-year old Ingebord Steiner as the Galena Fire burned near Ms. Steiner’s house Friday. The two had known each other for a while and had developed a friendship. But Ms. Kontz’s actions that day went beyond what is normally expected of a U.S. Postal Service employee.
Here is an excerpt from an article at TheDenverChannel:
Back in her home on Galena Court Monday and sitting in a blue rocking chair, Steiner recalled looking out her window just before noon Friday. Where there is now just a blackened field, she saw fire creeping through the meadow.
“I was absolutely flabbergasted,” Steiner said. “I couldn’t understand how something…How can it go so fast?”
Before she knew it, however, Kontz arrived to help.
Kontz said she had also spotted the fire, and skipped past many of the mailboxes on her route to get to Steiner’s house. There, she took the woman’s lunch out of the microwave and grabbed her coat.
“In the commotion of that a sheriff came to give her the evacuation orders, so that lady was able to help me get [Steiner] into my mail van,” Kontz said.
“She put me in a mail truck and took me to the pastor’s house,” Steiner said.
Lessons Learned from Waldo Canyon Fire, cover. Click to enlarge
The Fire Adapted Communities Coalition has prepared an excellent report titled “Lessons Learned from Waldo Canyon”. Written by representatives from the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, U.S. Forest Service, International Association of Fire Chiefs, and the NFPA, it documents factors that affected the destruction or survival of structures during the Waldo Canyon Fire, a fire that destroyed 346 Colorado Springs homes in June of 2012. This document, along with the Texas report, “Common Denominators of Home Destruction”, could be very useful resources for communities and home owners that desire to mitigate potential damage before wildfires threaten their wildland-urban interface.
Often you will see media reports using words like “random” or “miracle” to describe how some homes are burned while others survive a wildfire that burns into a community. It is neither — it is science — and fuel reduction, building materials, screening off vents, plugging holes between roof tiles, a lack of combustible decks, the actions your neighbor takes or does not take, and many other factors. And did I mention fuel reduction?
While the city of Colorado Springs and their fire department has received criticism for their lack of operational preparedness and training for wildfires, as well as their actions during the Waldo Canyon Fire, this report indicates the city had a program that resulted in some positive outcomes related to fuel mitigation and home owner education about how to reduce the chances of structures burning during a wildfire event.
Here is a sample of some of the conclusions identified in the report:
Observations on building design and materials improvements and maintenance could have reduced losses:
Ember ignition via ignition of combustible materials on, in or near the home was confirmed by the surveys. This reaffirms the serious risk posed by ember ignitions to properties during wildfires. This reinforces the importance of maintaining an effective defensible space and regularly removing debris from areas on and near the home.
Home-to-home fire spread was again a major issue, as with prior post-fire field investigations. When it occurred, it was dependent on at least one wildland fire-to-home ignition and then home spacing and slope / terrain. Home-to-home fire spread was attributed to a relatively large number of home losses in this survey.
Wildland fire-to-home ignition was influenced by location of home on slope and fuels treatment(s) or lack of on the slope leading to the home.
A building can be hardened with noncombustible materials, for example, but it is also necessary to incorporate appropriate construction details, which will help ensure that the protections offered by those materials is not by-passed.
Individual homeowners must take responsibility for fortifying their property against wildfire damage by taking appropriate measures to incorporate noncombustible building materials and construction details.
Observations on the role of fuels management and landscape vegetation and features:
Past fuel treatments by mastication in heavy, continuous, mature Gambel oak retained multi-season effectiveness for reducing wildfire spread. Two- and three-year-old oak treatments did not carry fire. Oak leaves were scorched, but did not typically burn.
Hardened landscape barriers such as noncombustible retaining walls, paths and gravel borders were effective in stopping fire in lighter fuel types.
Pruning and thinning of ladder fuels in Gambel oak clumps, as a Firewise practice by homeowners, appeared to be effective in keeping fire on the ground and reducing crown fire potential.
Firewise landscape plants, primarily deciduous trees and shrubs, were scorched but did not burn when exposed to heat from adjacent crowning fuels.
Landscaping fencing contributed to fire spread from adjacent native areas to structures. Split rail and cedar privacy fencing both led fire to structures.
