Wildfire Today

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Wildfire Today

Tag: Moonlight Fire

Wildfire briefing, July 31, 2013

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , ,

Two reports released about air tankers

The U.S. Forest Service recently released two reports about firefighting aircraft, the products of contracts issued by the agency. The details are over at Fire Aviation, but here is a summary:

  1.  AVID, a Virginia-based company that employed a crew of retired and current aviation professionals, produced a report “…to build analytical data that can be used to estimate the requirement for airtankers in the future.” The Fire Aviation article about the report can be found here.
  2. The U.S. Forest Service has released a study on how the C-27J could be used by the agency if the Air Force gives them seven of the aircraft as expected.

Summary of fire stats

The National Park Service’s Morning Report written by Bill Halainen has a table that tracks some of the statistics about fires over the last five days. Here is an example from today’s report:

Fire summary, July 31, 2013

Judge rejects California’s lawsuit over 2007 fire

A judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the state of California against the state’s largest timber company over liability for the 2007 Moonlight Fire which burned more than 65,000 acres in Northern California. The state was hoping to recoup some of the $22.5 million spent fighting the fire.

Last year the company, Sierra Pacific, agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to settle a federal government lawsuit over the Moonlight fire.

Congressional Task Force Links Worsening Wildfires to Climate Change

On Tuesday the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change convened a panel of experts on climate and wildland fire to discuss the impacts of climate change on wildfires. Below is an excerpt from an article at the National Journal:

…Panelists cited a number of reasons for wildfire flare-ups, including land-use patterns and insect activity. But the discussion kept circling back to climate change.

“Scientists tell us these changes are not just random variability,” Waxman said. “Bigger and more-intense fires are one of the red flags of climate change.”

Climate-change expert William Sommers, a researcher at George Mason University’s EastFIRE Laboratory, agreed. Sommers cautioned that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will only worsen wildfires in decades to come. “If current greenhouse-gas emission trends are not sharply reversed in the immediate future, we will see observed trends in wildfire risk accelerate,” he warned.

Waxman and Whitehouse asked firefighting and forestry experts for policy recommendations to help mitigate the situation.

Panelists, including Santa Fe, N.M., Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg and Rick Swan, director of supervisory personnel and health and safety for the California Department of Forestry Firefighters, cited budget cuts as a major stumbling block in efforts to combat wildfires, and called for increased funding for park services and firefighters.

“We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of fires, especially in California,” Swan said. “But we are not seeing the same increase in staffing levels and funding.”

CAL FIRE kept $3.6 million in off-the-books account

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , 1 Comment on CAL FIRE kept $3.6 million in off-the-books account

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection kept $3.6 million in a non-standard account without the approval of the state Department of Finance. Articles in the LA Times and Wall Street Journal spell out the details of the account that received settlement funds from companies responsible for wildfires. CAL FIRE’s regulations require that settlement money be deposited into the state’s general fund where it would be available to other state agencies in the regular budget appropriation process.

The account, “Wildland Fire Investigation Training and Equipment Fund”, sometimes referred to as “WiFiter”, was held by the California District Attorneys Association, a non-profit organization. Below is an excerpt from the LA Times article:

The department established the fund with the district attorney’s association in 2005. The association charged a fee to hold the money. The amount of that fee changed over the years. When it began, the prosecutors received 3% of the money when it came in and 15% when Cal Fire pulled money out for training or equipment.

The department used the fund to purchase equipment, such as 600 digital cameras and 26 evidence sheds for $600,000. According to the audits and emails, Cal Fire insisted that the equipment belonged to the association. That led [CALFIRE auditor Anthony] Favro to send an email to [former CALFIRE Director Del] Walters and Janet Barentson, the department’s current deputy chief director, asking, “Isn’t this a gift of public funds?”

The 18% interest taken out of taxpayer funds sounds almost like loan shark rates.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The account came to light as a result of lawsuits filed by Cal Fire and the federal government against Sierra Pacific Industries Inc., a Redding, Calif., lumber company. The suits claimed the massive 2007 “Moonlight Fire” was started by a bulldozer driver at a company hired by Sierra Pacific, which denies any involvement with the blaze.

In 2009, a Cal Fire investigator wrote to Sierra Pacific seeking reimbursement for the cost of fighting the fire, which consumed 65,000 acres of public and private lands in northeast California, according to Cal Fire. The letter asked for payment in two separate checks: one for $7.7 million to the state, and one for $400,000 to a nonprofit that administered WiFiter, according to Cal Fire.

Sierra Pacific refused to pay either bill. The federal government and California proceeded to sue Sierra Pacific in federal and state court, respectively. In the midst of discovery in the suits, the company uncovered the WiFiter account, according to lawyers and Cal Fire.

The account itself was not exactly secret, however it was not public knowledge it was an off-the-books account not subject to the standard state regulations for managing and spending money. We found a memo from former CAL FIRE Director Walters, apparently written in 2009, summarizing the year’s fire season in which he mentioned the account:

Office of Program Accountability (OPA) finalized three audits (Volcan Incident, Wildland Fire Investigation Training and Equipment Fund, and Indirect Cost PCA 99200)…

The current Director of CAL FIRE, Ken Pemlott signed a new agreement with the association in 2011 but froze the fund in August, 2012 after, according to the LA Times, “receiving a briefing from his staff, said Janet Upton, a Cal Fire spokeswoman”.

California timber company to pay $50 million for starting fire

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,

Sierra Pacific, a timber company in California, has agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to settle a federal government lawsuit over the Moonlight fire that burned about 65,000 acres in 2007, including 46,000 acres in the Plumas and Lassen National Forests in the northern part of the state.

U.S. Attorney Benjamin Wagner said the fire was caused by two dozer operators working on a red flag warning day.

Here is an excerpt from an Associated Press article:

Wagner’s office claimed employee negligence led to the growth of the fire. The person who was designated to watch for fires left the work area and drove 30 minutes to get a soda, and when he returned more than an hour later, there was a 100-foot wall of smoke, he said.

In addition, there was no access to fire suppression equipment at the site, Wagner said.

He estimated firefighting costs at $22.5 million.

The settlement includes a cash payment of $47 million from Sierra Pacific, a $7 million payment from private landowners and managers of the property where the fire started, and $1 million from the logging contractor.

Wagner estimated the value of the land at $67.5 million, but Sierra Pacific challenged that number, noting the U.S. Forest Service has not yet selected the land to be donated.

 

Thanks go out to Dick

Study: 4 large fires = 7 million cars for 1 year

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

A non-profit organization called The Forest Foundation has released a study that claims the greenhouse gases released by the 4 large wildland fires that they studied is similar to the gases released by 7 million cars on the road for 1 year.

The Foundation says they studied these 4 California fires:

  • The Angora Fire, which burned more than 3,100 acres near South Lake Tahoe in June and July of 2007.
  • The Fountain Fire, which destroyed nearly 60,000 acres east of Redding in August 1992.
  • The Star Fire, which burned more than 16,000 acres in September 2001 in the Tahoe and Eldorado National Forests.
  • The Moonlight Fire, which burned more than 65,000 acres in September 2007 in and around the Plumas National Forest in the northern Sierra Nevada.

I have never heard of this organization, and have no idea of the credibility of them or the study. But it is certain that information like this, credible or not, is going to have an increasing effect on the management of public and private land.

So, should land management agencies redouble their efforts at preventing and suppressing wildland fires? Or, should there be a greater emphasis on prescribed fire or fuel reduction? Of course, prescribed fire will put greenhouse gases into the air, but will it be less than when the vegetation burns in an unplanned ignition? You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Fire Management Plans and Prescribed Fire Plans are going to become more complex, time consuming, and expensive to develop.

Update, March 21, 2008:

I have found out more about the origin this “study”. According to an article written by Thomas M. Bonnicksen in the Sacramento Union published yesterday March 20, Bonnicksen claims that he “authored (it) for the Forest Foundation”.

Bonnicksen is a “Professor Emeritus” at Texas A&M University. And, according to a Greenpeace web site called Exxon Secrets, he is associated with National Center for Public Policy Research.

In August of 2000 an article he wrote called “The Lesson of Los Alamos” was published on the Heartland Institute web site in which he was extremely critical of the National Park Service (NPS) and prescribed burning in general. In the article, Bonnicksen is not encumbered by facts in reaching his conclusions.

It is true that mistakes were made by the NPS on the prescribed fire at Bandelier National Monument that led to the Cerro Grande fire, and also in 1988 in Yellowstone National Park, but Bonnicksen is only correct in some of his analysis. For example, many of the fires that burned into Yellowstone in 1988 were human-caused and started outside the park.

According to Wikipedia:

Almost 250 different fires started in Yellowstone and the surrounding National Forests between June and August. Seven of them were responsible for 95% of the total burned area.

Yet Bonnicksen said:

Park staff did the same thing in Yellowstone in 1988, when they allowed a natural fire to burn until it became impossible to control. When it was over, the fire had charred nearly one-half of our oldest national park.

The Chapparal Institute has an exhaustive analysis and critique of some of Bonnicksen’s attention-grabbing writings. An excerpt:

When someone spends so much effort to promote an idea, especially with such inflammatory language, it is often helpful to consider their motivation and connections. Due to his economic and political interests, it is difficult to view Dr. Bonnicksen as the objective observer and expert that he portrays himself.Dr. Bonnicksen is on the advisory board for the following organizations:

The Forest Foundation, a non-profit organization supported by the California Forest Products Commission. “The Forest Foundation strives to foster public understanding of the role forests play in the environmental and economic health of the state and the necessity of managing a portion of California’s private and public forests to provide wood products for a growing population” (from their website).

According to public documents, Dr. Bonnicksen has been paid by the Forest Foundation to write opinion pieces in newspapers and to give presentations to promote land use policies favored by the logging industry. He also offers consulting services regarding timber and vegetation management. Nothing wrong with any of this of course, but it should be taken into consideration when measuring an individual’s objectivity.