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Report released on Colorado’s Fourmile Canyon fire

Bill GabbertOctober 14, 2011August 25, 2019UncategorizedColorado, Fourmile Canyon Fire5 Comments

A draft report has been released about the the Fourmile Canyon fire. The fire started on September 6 and burned 6,200 acres and 168 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that a firefighter’s burn pile escaped and started the fire, the homes of 12 firefighters burned, and one fire station and an engine inside it burned. Wildfire Today covered the fire extensively.

Fourmile fire_map_MODIS_0418_9-8-2010 — Map of the Fourmile fire near Boulder, showing heat detected by the MODIS satellite at 4:18 a.m. Sept. 8.

One of the interesting findings was that some fuel treatments done before the fire came through actually increased the intensity of the fire, compared with untreated areas. This was primarily due to the more open stands allowing wind to push the surface fires, and the treatment prescriptions’ emphasis on thinning to a target basal area (density of trees) rather than designing a prescription that accounted for fire behavior during dry and windy conditions. In addition, a significant amount of surface fuels remained, including slash piles in some areas that had not been burned after the treatments.

Another finding was that 83% of the homes that burned were ignited by surface fire, rather than a crown fire, which is typical.

The report includes some statistics on the use of aircraft on the fire. I broke out a calculator and did some analysis, arriving at these numbers:

$343,082, total cost of the retardant dropped by air tankers (just the retardant).
$1.97, cost per gallon of retardant (just the retardant).
174,149, gallons of retardant dropped by air tankers.
86, loads of retardant dropped by air tankers.
47.09, total flight hours by air tankers.
3,698, gallons of retardant dropped per flight hour by air tankers.
$3.55, total cost per gallon for the delivery of retardant by air tankers.
$619,483, Total cost of the air tankers, including retardant and flight costs.
0.55 hour, the average time for each air tanker drop. (This is extremely low and is due to the fact that the air tankers were reloading at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Boulder, Jeffco air tanker base, about 15 air miles from the fire. This helped keep the cost per gallon of delivered retardant lower than on your typical fire, which is normally much more than 15 miles away from the reload base.)

As a comparison, on September 9 there were three large Type 1 helicopters dropping water:

$99,284, Total cost for the three Type 1 helicopters on September 9.
71,950, gallons of water dropped by the three helicopters.
12.9, hours flown by the three helicopters.
5,577, gallons of water dropped per flight hour by three Type 1 helicopters on September 9.
$1.38, cost per gallon of water delivered.
(?) the number of loads of water delivered was not specified.

A decision about using helicopters vs. air tankers should be based on more than just the above numbers. Retardant, sometimes known as “long-term retardant”, slows the spread of a fire more effectively and for a longer period of time than plain water. And helicopters cruise at a much slower speed than an air tanker, so depending on their location at the time of initial dispatch, it can take much longer to arrive at the fire.

Scroll down to see a map showing the location of every drop by a large air tanker on the fire.

Moving on to the rest of the report, here are some excerpts:

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Fuel Treatments

Thinning trees to a specified density (residual basal area) or spacing was the prescription often negotiated with land owners. In addition, the treatments were often focused on improving the health of the forest (removing diseased and malformed trees, i.e., dwarf mistletoe) rather than modifying fire behavior.
Pervasive spotting observed during the Fourmile Canyon Fire easily breached the narrow fuel treatment units and rendered them of limited value to containment efforts.
The abundance of grasses, forbs, shrubs, and often branches and twigs that could have been removed through judicious surface treatments (e.g., prescribed fire) occurring within the areas where the fuels had been treated contributed to the high fire intensities and fire spread rate observed.
Post-fire satellite imagery clearly shows the absence of changes in stand condition inside treated areas compared to neighboring untreated stands. In some cases, treated stands appeared to burn more intensely than adjacent untreated stands, perhaps because of additional surface fuels present as a result of the thinning. One clear example of this comes from near Gold Hill where the piles of slash were scattered in the understory of a thinned stand but had not been burned.

Smoke from Fourmile fire provides bonanza for researchers, bad news for firefighters and the public

Bill GabbertMay 17, 2011August 25, 2019UncategorizedColorado, Fourmile Canyon Fire, research, smoke & health

smoke in Moscow — A woman wears a mask in central Moscow to "protect" herself from smoke from fires outside the city. August, 2010. Photograph: Mikhail Voskresensky/Reuters

When the Fourmile Canyon fire was burning west of Boulder, Colorado in September, 2010, Jim Roberts, a chemist with NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, was surrounded by something he had previously studied at the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Science Laboratory in Montana — smoke, and lots of it. In Missoula he used a new instrument they had built, a custom mass spectrometer, to examine the levels of isocyanic acid in the atmosphere and in smoke. Isocyanic acid has been difficult to detect with conventional measurement techniques. At Missoula, he measured the levels of the chemical in smoke generated when the researchers burned vegetation in the lab and in cigarette smoke.

When the Fourmile Canyon fire started, Roberts had the mass spectrometer at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Here is an excerpt from the Daily Camera:

Isocyanic acid easily dissolves in water, which makes it possible for the acid to also dissolve into moist tissues in the body, including the lungs. The full health effects of exposure to isocyanic acid in the air aren’t fully understood, but the chemical has been linked to cataracts, cardiovascular disease and rheumatoid arthritis.

Last September, the researchers had the opportunity to measure the presence of the acid in a real wildfire. On Labor Day, the Fourmile Fire began burning in the foothills west of Boulder, just a few miles upwind of the state-of-the-art atmospheric instruments housed at NOAA’s campus on Broadway.

“Boulder has a world-class atmospheric chemistry building and only once in its lifetime is it going to have a full-on hit from a wildfire,” said Joost de Gouw, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Science. “So just everyone in that building turned on their instruments.”

CIRES is a joint institute of the University of Colorado and NOAA.

The sensitive new spectrometer used in Missoula also picked up the isocyanic acid in the plume of smoke from the Fourmile Fire.

More information

Fourmile fire near Boulder — Smoke from the Fourmile fire as imaged by the MODIS satellite on September 6, 2010.

Colorado did not apply for FEMA financial assistance for the Fourmile fire

Bill GabbertMarch 18, 2011January 4, 2018UncategorizedColorado, Fourmile Canyon Fire1 Comment

Fourmile fire air tanker — Air tanker making a drop on the Fourmile fire, Sept. 6, 2010. Photo: InciWeb

The Fourmile fire, which burned 169 homes and 6,200 acres west of Boulder, Colorado, in September, 2010, was ranked as the 4th most significant wildland fire story of 2010 in a poll on Wildfire Today. In spite of the devastation, the state of Colorado did not apply for disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide help for the property owners that were affected by the fire. If a disaster declaration had been approved by the President, assistance for individuals from FEMA may have included: temporary housing, disaster losses not covered by insurance, related medical costs, replacement of vehicles and clothing, moving costs, and disaster unemployment insurance.

Here is an excerpt from an article in New West:

The Fourmile Fire was Colorado’s largest wildfire disaster in history. But in terms of becoming a declared federal disaster with assistance for individual homeowners who lost their property –- 169 homes lost to the tune of an estimated $214 million in insured loss -– last September’s fire never made it past the starting blocks.

County officials are still shaking their heads at the fact the state of Colorado never even submitted the fire to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for consideration. As reports of underinsured homeowners have surfaced, local authorities now nervously wait to see how many homeowners can afford to rebuild, all while watching for potentially disastrous spring flooding in the foothills west of Boulder.

“Whatever the rules are, I think they should be applied evenly across the country,” Boulder County Commissioner Ben Pearlman said. “My goal was just to be treated like any other community across the country … and we saw that other fires in other locations across the country may have gotten different treatment.”

At a glance, that would appear to be true. Many smaller and similarly sized disasters—measured by the only yardstick available, estimated insured homeowner loss—have received FEMA emergency grants for individuals. According to FEMA records, that includes the 2008 Windsor, Colorado, tornado ($193.5 million); the 2002 Colorado fire season as a whole ($82 million, adjusted for inflation); and the 2009 Oklahoma wildfires ($30 million).

Ultimately, Colorado Division of Emergency Management Director Hans Kallam said he made the decision not to recommend that then-Gov. Bill Ritter request a disaster declaration from President Barack Obama. Kallam said he did so on the advice from FEMA Region VIII officials that the high percentage of insured homes in the 7,000-acre fire area, together with the emergency resources already in place, made such a declaration unnecessary, perhaps illegitimate.

Thanks Dick

Top wildland fire stories of 2010 – with poll

Bill GabbertDecember 27, 2010August 25, 2019Uncategorizedair tanker, Australia, Colorado, escaped prescribed fire, firefighter health, Montana, poll, prescribed fire, Rehberg, Russia, Utah, Victoria3 Comments

Vote on the most significant wildland fire stories of 2010

As we documented earlier this month, the 2010 wildland fire season, when measured by the acres burned in the 49 states outside Alaska, was the slowest since 2004. But in spite of that, there has been significant news about wildland fire. In fact, we posted over 670 articles this year.

In 2009 we listed some of the top stories and invited you to vote on the ones that you considered to be the most significant.

Continuing that tradition, below we have listed the top stories of 2010. The line of duty fatalities are not listed unless there was an unusual spin-off story associated with the fatality. Below the list, there is a poll where YOU can let us know which stories you feel are the most significant of 2010.

Top wildfire stories of 2010

Jan. 8: The National Park Service released the report on the August, 2009 Big Meadow escaped prescribed fire in Yosemite National Park. The fire blackened 7,425 acres before being controlled by 1,300 firefighters at a cost over $15 million. It became the eighth largest fire in California in 2009.

Jan. 11: One of the five Type 1 Incident Management Teams in California was disbanded. Bill Molumby, who had been the team’s Incident Commander for several years, retired in November, 2009 and apparently they were not able to replace him.

Jan. 21: Federal wildland firefighter bill introduced in Congress. The “National Infrastructure Improvement and Cost Containment Act” would affect the pay, retirement age, and fireline liability of federal wildland firefighters.

Feb. 1: Fire contractor sentenced to 10 months in prison for forging wildfire training certificates and task books.

Apr. 23: NIOSH to study long-term health effects of working as structural firefighter, but not as a wildland firefighter. In a follow-up a few days later, Brian Sharkey of the USFS’ Missoula Technology and Development Center downplays lung cancer risks for firefighters. NWCG later responds to our article.

Apr. 30: The International Association of Fire Chiefs, an organization that concentrates on structural fire, received at least $13.2 million from the U.S. Forest Service and DHS-FEMA over a seven-year period, reportedly for wildfire-related purposes. The IAFC became furious at Wildfire Today for exposing the information.

Jul. 5: Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, sues the Billings Fire Department over the loss of “trees and ground cover” on his property during an 1,100-acre fire in 2008.

Aug. 2: Hundreds of wildfires in Russia claimed more than 50 lives, left more than 3,500 people homeless, and caused massive air quality issues in Moscow and other areas.

Aug. 2: A BAe-146 jet airliner was converted to an air tanker and was tested in Missoula. The Interagency Air Tanker Board failed to certify it due to inadequate ground coverage of retardant.

Aug. 24: The 100th anniversary of the fires of 1910 and Ranger Pulaski’s incident are commemorated at several events in Washington, Idaho, and Montana.

Aug. 26: In spite of weather forecasts that would have alarmed most fire managers, the Helena National Forest in Montana ignited the Davis prescribed fire during a near record heat wave. The fire escaped and burned 2,800 acres. The report was released in November. The Forest Supervisor said the report did not point out “something clearly that we did wrong, done incorrectly or that we’re going to make big changes on”.

Sep. 6: The Fourmile Canyon fire burned 6,200 acres and 169 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that a firefighter’s burn pile escaped and started the fire, the homes of 12 firefighters burned, and one fire station and an engine inside it burned.

Sep. 21: The Commander of the Utah Army National Guard assumed responsibility and apologized for the Machine Gun fire that burned 4,346 acres and three homes near Herriman, Utah. The fire started during target practice with a machine gun at a National Guard base.

Sep. 24: The Australian state of Victoria tested the U.S.-built DC-10 very large air tanker and concluded that it did not perform adequately and would not be suitable for use in their wildland-urban interface areas.

Oct. 13: The US Forest Service’s response to the 2009 Station fire is criticized, and Congress holds hearing in Pasadena, CA about the management of the fire, which burned 160,000 acres near Los Angeles.

Oct. 26: “Dirty Jobs” TV show features prescribed burning in a Florida wildlife refuge. Video footage captures some activities that are criticized by some viewers.

Dec. 2: A fire in Israel kills 43 prison guards and firefighters. Air tankers from the United States respond.

Dec. 7: NTSB holds a meeting about the helicopter crash on the Iron Complex fire in northern California in which nine firefighters and crew members died. Much of the blame was attributed to falsified helicopter performance documents supplied by Carson Helicopters when they applied for a contract with the U.S. Forest Service. Carson and the surviving co-pilot dispute that conclusion.

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Honorable mention stories (not exactly top stories, but interesting; they are not part of the poll).

Feb. 24: Wood piles were burned on frozen Lake Pactola in South Dakota.

Mar. 29: Washington D.C. Metro train drives through wildfire, and stops in the middle of it. And on July 25 we posted a very impressive video that was shot from a Greyhound bus that drove past a large bushfire during the night in Queensland, Australia.

May 11: NWCG outlaws the use of some terms, including “appropriate management response” and “wildland fire use”.

Jun. 20: It was not a wildland fire, but every firefighter can relate to some of the problems encountered when a kinked fire hose and improper procedures delayed the rescue of IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro from her burning race car which crashed at Texas Motor Speedway.

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POLL

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Feel free to leave a comment (or “response”) explaining your choices, or to discuss other news items that did not make the list.

Video describes effects of Fourmile Canyon fire on fire departments

Bill GabbertDecember 26, 2010October 18, 2020UncategorizedColorado, Fourmile Canyon Fire1 Comment

An eight-minute video appeared on YouTube a few days ago that describes some of the impacts of last September’s Fourmile Canyon fire on the fire departments. The video is a little mysterious in that it appears to be professionally produced and there is no description, other than “©2010 Thia Martin”. It was posted by “thiadena” and the credits say “Production By Thiadena”. A search for that name yields a web site for Thiadena Studio in Boulder, Colorado, and a Linkedin page for Thia Martin “President at Thiadena Studio”.

The fire started on September 6, 2010 and burned 6,200 acres and 169 homes a few miles west of Boulder, Colorado. The fire was devastating to local fire districts within the burned perimeter in several ways, including the facts that the homes of 12 firefighters burned, one fire station and an engine inside burned, and the fire districts will be facing a major reduction in revenues due to the lost homes which will reduce the tax base.

A December 22 article at New West provides more details about the effects of the fire on the local fire districts. Here is an excerpt:

…But for many of those volunteers, the Fourmile Fire continues to be daunting months after the embers have cooled, leaving an aftermath that firefighters continue to battle on many fronts.

“The fire continues every day for everyone involved in the department. It permeates everything you do,” said Brett Haberstick, chief of the Sunshine Fire District, the hardest hit agency in the blaze. “You can’t escape it. There are times when it’s just too much, and you have to take a break, but it’s a job you never leave.”

Haberstick faces severe revenue loss, manpower shortages, and wide-scale rehabilitation and erosion-control needs amid the loss of the departmental records. He and the other chiefs from the affected districts work daily on a complex set of needs from constituents, who individually face a baffling array of insurance, erosion, forest rehabilitation, disposal and building issues complicated by the predictable entry of a few charlatans and thieves.

“It’s been hard, but the district remains strong and continues to provide coverage for our constituents,” Haberstick said. “Sunshine took a big blow, but it wasn’t a knockout punch.”

At least 12 firefighters lost homes in districts that typically have 30 to 40 active members. One of those was veteran firefighter Rod Moraga, an expert in wildfire fuels, mitigation, management and pre-attack planning who founded a nationally prominent wildland fire consulting company, the Anchor Point Group. Now building a new home in Boulder, Moraga said he, and that expertise, will not likely return to the Four Mile Fire District.

“I don’t know how many of us are still really active,” he said, “because even the people who didn’t lose their homes are extremely busy – cutting trees around their home, dealing with insurance claims for smoke damage. …

“I had to completely remove myself from that (the volunteer department),” Moraga said. “Every single day I am dealing with e-mail or phone calls from the insurance people, the county, getting debris removed, getting my house (remains) scraped. There just isn’t enough time.”

And for the fire chiefs for the affected districts – Sunshine, Four Mile and Gold Hill took the brunt of home loss, though Sugarloaf was involved to a lesser extent – it will be some time before they are out of the woods, perhaps even another two years, said Allen Owen, the Boulder District…

More information about the Fourmile Canyon fire:

Wildfire Today coverage of the Fourmile Canyon fire.

Map of the Fourmile Canyon fire (after the second day of the fire).

Cartoon: insurance company engines protect policy holders’ houses

Bill GabbertOctober 1, 2010January 2, 2019UncategorizedChubb insurance, Colorado, Fourmile Canyon Fire, Insurance, wildfire cartoons5 Comments

Sam Wallace has created another cartoon about wildland fire. This one refers to the Chubb insurance company sending fire engines to protect the homes of their policy holders during the Fourmile fire last month near Boulder, Colorado. At his web site, Mr. Wallace wrote this about the cartoon:

This is not a jab at firemen or the fire department. They do a great job. This is for the private fire fighters hired by insurance companies. (Extra special coverage, as long as you have paid for it.) Why would they help, if you were not a policy holder. Some how it does not seem right to me.

Earlier we showed you some of Mr. Wallace’s other cartoons about wildfire. His work appears at the Longmont, Colorado Times Call and at his own web site. The cartoon is published here with his permission.

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