This very impressive fire whirl was captured on video March 14 at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver, Colorado during a prescribed fire. The swirling wind swept up tumbleweeds, some of them burning, and created a problem for firefighters. It was posted on YouTube by Bellevue Wildfire.
Thanks and a hat tip go out to Jim, Steve, Tristan, and Andrew.
In November, 2012 we wrote about some of the research that was conducted to study and document what can only be described as a fire tornado in Australia, a tornado-like event that can be generated by a wildfire. In recent years a new term has been coined — firenado — which seems appropriate.
It occurred near Chapman in the Australian Capitol Territories during the McIntyres Hut Fire January 18, 2003. After studying the event, Rick McRae of the ACT and others discovered that it traveled across 25 kilometers at 30 kph (19 mph), had horizontal winds of 250 kph (149 mph), and vertical winds of 150 kph (93 mph). Damage that occurred to trees and structures is much like what you would see after a tornado in Oklahoma.
Australia’s ABC TV produced an excellent video that goes surprisingly deeply into some of the scientific principles of this phenomenon, including fire behavior when a strong wind pushes a fire up a slope. This can result in spot fires at the bottom of the slope on the other side, the lee slope, which can be pushed rapidly up the lee slope by a wind eddy in the opposite direction of the prevailing wind (see the screen grab above from the video). They also documented how a fire at the top of the ridge can travel across the ridge at 90 degrees to the direction of the prevailing wind.
Knowledge about this kind of fire behavior is something that wildland firefighters should retain in their “slide file”, in the unfortunate event that they find themselves in danger of being entrapped and are considering using the lee side of a ridge as an escape route or a sheltering location.
Check out our November, 2012 article for more information about this 2003 event. The video below illustrates some of the findings developed by the fire researchers.
The information in the video can be even more interesting when considered along with the winds at the site of the Yarnell Hill Fire entrapment, as modeled by WindWizard. The image below is from page 79 of the Yarnell Hill Fire SAIT report. Click the image to see a slightly larger version.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recently completed a 670-acre prescribed fire at the Oxford Slough Waterfowl Production Area (WPA) in Idaho.
The photo above shows a fire whirl on the prescribed fire. These have also been called “fire tornadoes”, but recently someone coined the term “firenado”, which we have taken a liking to. In August we posted a video of a massive firenado on a fire in Alaska.
These photos, which were all taken by Lance Roberts, and others can be found on the USFWS Facebook page, where they described the Oxford Slough WPA:
Oxford Slough WPA is one of nearly 7,000 WPAs nationwide, and the only WPA in Region 1. The 1,878-acre WPA is located 10 miles north of Preston, Idaho, abutting the small town of Oxford, where it provides valuable foraging habitat for species such as cranes, geese, Franklin’s gulls, and white-faced ibis, and nesting habitat not only for waterfowl, but white-faced ibis, Franklin’s gulls, and other waterbirds.
Douglas Burts, who posted this video shot at the Tetlin Juction Fire August 16, 2013, called it Alaska Firenado. While I’m not sure that there is an official definition of the term, there is definitely rotation in this smoke column, and it appears to be more than just horizontal roll vortices. Whatever we call it, this fire behavior is very impressive.
Firefighter deaths resulting in changes
Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman has written an interesting article about how the death of 20-year old Anne Veseth of Moscow, Idaho a year ago this week has changed procedures in some wildfire organizations. She was killed on the Steep Corner Fire, 56 miles northeast of Orofino, Idaho August 12, 2012. The fire was on private property and was being managed by the Clearwater‐Potlatch Timber Protective Association (CPTPA). Ms. Veseth, in her second season working as a firefighter for the USFS, was killed when she was struck by a falling 150-foot tall fire-weakened green cedar tree. The tree fell on its own and was 13 inches in diameter where it struck her. The official report about the fire found no fault, and included this statement:
This tragedy resulted from the chance alignment of certain conditions: an emergency response to control a wildland fire, which required the presence of firefighters in an area where fire‐weakened trees could fall on their own with little or no warning.
The day before the fatality, a Hotshot crew and an engine crew refused to work on the fire after they observed serious safety issues.
Plane crash starts small fire
The crash of a small plane in northern California killed the two people on board and started a vegetation fire that burned 15 acres before firefighters stopped the spread. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor says the plane crashed at about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday about five miles east of Chico in Butte County.
Large firewhirl photographed
A large fire whirl, sometimes called a fire tornado, was photographed on the Summit (name changed to Rockport) Fire north of Park City Utah on August 13. A new term has been introduced. Some people are calling this a “firenado”, which could be a takeoff from the “Sharknado” movie.
Firenado #summitfire pic.twitter.com/aCVKJ8pNCe
— Alan Neves (@alanneves777) August 13, 2013
We have written a number of times about fire whirls and fire tornadoes observed in wildfires. They can be very impressive and very dangerous…. except when they are created in a laboratory as in the video below. A tip for viewers… after about a minute and a half, there is very little change in the images until the fire dies out near the end.
The University of Maryland’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering created this fire whirl using heptane as the fuel in a compartment with four specially-located openings which induced a “whirl” when the exhaust hood was turned on. It was photographed at 300 frames per second. The University’s web site has more information, including a photo of people roasting marshmallows in the flames.
Thanks go out to Daniel
We have previously written about events described as “fire tornadoes”, but research led by Rick McRae in Australia has us convinced that those should be more accurately called fire whirls, not tornadoes. We were never very comfortable using the term “fire tornado” for those events, but it has become common and we were not aware, until now, that a phenomenon many times more powerful existed.
Mr. McRae documented what was unquestionably a real fire tornado that occurred near Chapman, ACT, Australia during the McIntyres Hut Fire January 18, 2003.
Researchers had speculated about the ability of a fire to produce a tornado, but this is the first documentation of the creation of a true tornado by the convection column of a large fire.
In a video interview (scroll down and view the second video) and in a paper published October, 2012 in the journal Natural Hazards, he described a fire tornado as occurring over a vegetation fire, a process now known as the phenomenon of “pyro-tornadogenesis”. Under certain conditions, a fire can cause a pyro-cumulus cloud to form, which is not in itself unusual over a large fire. If the cloud continues to build, it can generate lightning, rain, and hail, much like a conventional large thunderstorm. And large thunderstorms can sometimes propagate a tornado, which is what happened over the McIntyrres Hut Fire.
Mr. McRae’s research determined that the fire tornado was moving across the ground at 30 kph (19 mph), had horizontal winds of 250 kph (149 mph), and vertical winds of 150 kph (93 mph).
Dr. Jason Sharples, also associated with the research, described the differences between a fire tornado and a fire whirl:
Tornadoes are associated with thunderstorms and as such they are anchored to a thundercloud above, and are able to sporadically lift off the ground. Fire whirls, on the other hand, are anchored to the ground and do not require the presence of a thunderstorm.
Rick McRae is a Special Risks Analyst at the ACT Emergency Services Agency.
Thanks go out to Chris
Loyal readers of Wildfire Today will remember back to September 18 when we posted a video of a fire tornado shot by Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television while he was scouting locations near Curtin Springs station in Australia. Mr. Tangey contacted us to let us know that the Channel 7 video was removed from YouTube due to copyright issues, but a better version of the video, provided by Mr. Tangey, is now available at Vimeo.
We are embedding it below. If you want the very impressive video to fill your screen, hover your mouse pointer over the video then click on the arrows at the bottom-right between “HD” and “vimeo”.
Outback fire tornadoes-Australia from chris tangey on Vimeo.
Below is a description of the video:
****
“THERE’S something mean and magical about Australia’s Outback. An Alice Springs filmmaker captured both when a whirlwind of fire erupted before his eyes.
Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television was scouting locations near Curtin Springs station, about 80km from Ularu, last week when confronted by a fiery phenomenon. He had just finished his tour of the station when workers encountered difficulties with a grader. So he went to help them.
A small fire was burning in nearby bushland, so Mr Tangey decided to start filming. He caught the sight of his life. A twister touched down on the spot fire, fanning it into a furious tower of flame.
“It sounded like a jet fighter going by, yet there wasn’t a breath of wind where we were,” he told the Northern Territory News.
“You would have paid $1000 a head if you knew it was about to happen.”
The column of fire danced about the landscape for about 40 minutes, he said, as he and the station workers stood transfixed. There was talk of making a quick getaway, Mr Tangey said. But everyone was too hypnotised to feel scared – and he continued furiously filming.
“The bizarre thing was that it rarely moved,” he said.
“These things just stood there because there was no wind to move them … but it was flickering incredibly fast.”
Darwin weather forecaster David Matthews said small twisters were common in isolated areas. But the fiery vortex was highly unusual.
“The flames would have assisted by trying to suck in air and that could have helped generate those circular winds,” Mr Matthews said.”
The video below shows something that I didn’t think was possible — fighting a brush fire with flappers. I have used them on grass and leaf litter fires, but never imagined that they could be an effective tool on a brush fire. However in this video which shows firefighters in Spain, they have the assistance of water drops from a helicopter.
It is an interesting video that features a helicopter-based wildland firefighting crew. Here is the description that is on YouTube, translated from Spanish by Google Translate:
Diary of a firefighter
A brief tour of the work of the fire fighters of BRIF (reinforcement Brigades forest fire) from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment.
MAGRAMA currently has ten BRIF service during summer campaigns, distributed all over the country, and five smaller BRIF during the winter-spring season, in the north and west of the peninsula during the winter also BRIF perform preventive tasks ranging from cleaning up tracks controlled burning. Their bases are located in areas of high fire risk or high forest wealth that must be protected. At the same time, seeking to achieve strategic locations by helicopter anywhere in the State within a reasonable time.
The video also has some footage of a fire whirl or fire tornado, however it is much smaller than some of the others we have reported on. But still, I would not want to be standing next to it.
Thanks go out to Juan
Outback fire tornadoes-Australia from chris tangey on Vimeo.
Check out the strong indrafts going toward the fire vortices in this video. Very impressive.
We have written quite a few articles about fire tornadoes, sometimes called fire whirls. The more scientific name for them is fire vortices. Our posts about them can be found under the tag “fire tornado“.
Here is the description of the above video on YouTube:
==============================================================
THERE’S something mean and magical about Australia’s Outback. An Alice Springs filmmaker captured both when a whirlwind of fire erupted before his eyes.
Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television was scouting locations near Curtin Springs station, about 80km from Ularu, last week when confronted by a fiery phenomenon.
He had just finished his tour of the station when workers encountered difficulties with a grader. So he went to help them.
A small fire was burning in nearby bushland, so Mr Tangey decided to start filming.
He caught the sight of his life.
A twister touched down on the spot fire, fanning it into a furious tower of flame.
“It sounded like a jet fighter going by, yet there wasn’t a breath of wind where we were,” he told the Northern Territory News.
“You would have paid $1000 a head if you knew it was about to happen.”
The column of fire danced about the landscape for about 40 minutes, he said, as he and the station workers stood transfixed.
There was talk of making a quick getaway, Mr Tangey said. But everyone was too hypnotised to feel scared – and he continued furiously filming.
“The bizarre thing was that it rarely moved,” he said.
“These things just stood there because there was no wind to move them … but it was flickering incredibly fast.”
Darwin weather forecaster David Matthews said small twisters were common in isolated areas. But the fiery vortex was highly unusual.
“The flames would have assisted by trying to suck in air and that could have helped generate those circular winds,” Mr Matthews said.