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Tag: night flying

Update on southern California fires

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,
Wally Skalij photo. August 27, 2009.

Here is an update on the four major fires currently burning in southern California. (Some of the key numbers and facts for the Cottonwood and Station fire were updated at 3:43 p.m. and 7:20 p.m. August 28.)

  1. The Station fire started on the Angeles Crest Highway, above La Canada Flintridge in the Angeles National Forest. It has burned 1,200 5,000 5,500 acres, is very active, and is 0% 5% contained. The fire jumped Highway 2 and into the Arroyo Seco area overnight. It is threatening Mount Wilson, which has major communications facilities. It is burning south and west towards the city of La Canada-Flintridge, West towards Mt. Lukens, North towards Grizzly Flat Road, East toward Arroyo Seco, and Dark Canyon. Some voluntary evacuations are in effect for the northern portions of La Canada-Flintridge. Dietrich’s Type 1 Incident Management Team has been mobilized for this fire.
  2. The Morris fire near Azusa has burned about 2,000 2,168 acres and is 60% 85% contained. Ron Woychak’s Incident Management Team is assigned.
  3. The RPV (or PV) Portuguese fire in the Rancho Palos Verdes area started Thursday night and has burned about 100 125 230 acres and damaged two outbuildings. It is 35% 70% 90% contained. The fire will be more accurately mapped this morning and the acreage and containment will change. This fire burned very intensely in an urban setting and the fact that only two outbuildings were damaged is due to good fire clearance around the homes, night-flying helicopters, and great efforts by firefighters.
  4. The Cottonwood fire east of Hemet has burned 1,000 1,200 2,200acres and is 5% 10% contained. Forella’s Wakoski’s Incident Management Team has been ordered assumed command of the fire at noon today. Los Angeles live television this morning showed firefighters conducting some very effective burnouts in the relatively flat terrain, aided by gentle winds. The Martin Mars air tanker is making drops this morning.

The LA Times has an unofficial map showing all four fires (if you zoom out).

Station fire. Photo: InciWeb

Night-flying helicopters were very effective Thursday night on the Portuguese fire in Rancho Palos Verdes. They were using two from LA County and three from the LA Fire Department. As far as we know these are the only two agencies in the United States that use helicopters at night for fighting fire. San Diego County was considering night flying for their helicopters; we’re not sure if they got that program running.

Homeowners attend forum about Montecito's Tea fire

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

The November 13 Tea fire, in Montecito, California near Santa Barbara destroyed 210 homes and burned about 2,000 acres. Here are some excerpts from a report in noozhawk about a recent forum concerning the fire attended by local residents:

According to Montecito Fire Chief Kevin Wallace, a perfect storm of conditions led to the blaze. Fuel, aridity, steep terrain, limited access and near hurricane-strength winds all played into the combustible mix.

“This fire, once it started, was going to happen,” Wallace said.

So fierce and fast moving was the blaze that for the first few hours, the fire department’s only hope was to evacuate residents with the help of law enforcement and Santa Barbara County Search & Rescue volunteers while trying to make a stand against the flames. Attempts to box in the fire were thwarted by embers hurled by gale-force gusts. Late that Thursday, with the help of many out-of town strike teams, firefighters finally were able to adopt a more offensive stance against the blaze.

Montecito Fire Chief Kevin Wallace said perilous night-time flights by water-dropping helicopters helped firefighters gain the upper hand in his community.

A critical element, said Wallace, was the deployment of night-flying firefighting helicopters at the peak of the fire. Although it was extremely dangerous, with weather conditions, darkness, treacherous topography and power lines, the aircraft made more than 800 sorties from a staging area at Santa Barbara Junior High.

While ultimately grateful to the firefighters and law enforcement for their heroism, many residents remained frustrated by things they thought could have been handled better, as well as unforeseen difficulties presented by the disaster.

Some reported getting reverse 9-1-1 calls at 10 p.m., hours after the Tea Fire had eaten through their neighborhood. Others claimed they did not see any fire engines in their neighborhoods during their evacuations. Traffic was another concern for the semi-rural community, as neighbors reported difficulties getting away in the general confusion, smoke and ash.

For the Montecito Fire Department, there were several lessons learned, as well: better staging in the brush-heavy, mountainous terrain, better communication.

“We don’t have a common radio frequency for the front country,” Wallace said of an element on which the department is currently working.

As for the too-late reverse 9-1-1 calls, tied-up or damaged phone lines were to blame: too many calls from concerned family and friends created a digital traffic jam for cell-phone users while downed communication lines made it impossible for other calls to reach homes.

Wildfire news, October 15, 2008

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,

California: Power company criticized for fire danger related power shut-off plan

San Diego Gas and Electric announced earlier that they planned to shut off power to large areas of San Diego County during periods of strong winds and high fire danger. It turns out that not everyone is crazy about the concept. From CBS8:

SDG&E is under fire for its proposal to shut off power during high winds in wildfire-prone areas.

At a meeting Tuesday night in front of the State Public Utility Commission, San Diegans voiced their concerns about the idea.

Also present at the meeting, county officials asked the commission for a full investigation into the matter.

“To convince the commission to do the right thing and hold SDG&E’s feet to the fire to do what they should’ve done years ago, changing the poles from wood to steel, more spacing between the lines and better tree-trimming vegetation management,” said County Supervisor Dianne Jacob.

A SDG&E representative at the meeting said the company is committed to doing whatever is possible to make its system safer.

HERE is a link to a video news report on the subject.

Night flying helicopters in San Diego County

Some politicians in the San Diego area continue to be obsessed with night flying firefighting helicopters. Some of them still think that a few water drops when the 2003 Cedar fire began as the sun was setting could have prevented it from growing to 270,000 acres. The fact is, the strong Santa Ana winds at the time would have made any helicopter drops ineffective.

Here is an excerpt from a story in the North County Times:

Five years after local officials were infuriated by a decision to ground aircraft at sunset rather than attack California’s largest wildfire in its infancy, the region is moving —- albeit slowly —- to battle blazes from the air after dark.

State fire officials said helicopters did not fly at night during this week’s San Diego County wildfires, largely because pilots were able to knock down flames with water and fire retardant during the day.

But the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire, has opened the door to making drops at night over the backcountry areas it is responsible for protecting, including 1 million acres in San Diego County.

And the state agency gave the city of San Diego the green light in September to fly its two twin-engine firefighting helicopters over those areas, in the event another inferno like those of 2003 and 2007 breaks out.

“CalFire has agreed to allow night flying in state responsibility areas if they determine that the equipment is safe,” said county Supervisor Dianne Jacob, who represents much of the backcountry, including Ramona. “This is a historic change in policy.”

While it is disappointing the state did not give a green light to the county because it does not consider its helicopters to be safe, Jacob said a future aircraft purchase, possibly with money from a November ballot measure, could put the county in the night firefighting business.

For now, said sheriff’s Lt. Phil Brust, county helicopters will focus on flames during daylight hours.

“During the day, we can do any mission that is asked of us,” Brust said. “But once the sun goes down, they (CalFire officials) are not comfortable flying in those helicopters.”

The county sheriff helicopters are both single-engine Bell 205 models.

Division Chief Tom Humann, aviation safety officer for CalFire in Sacramento, said the state agency doesn’t consider single-engine helicopters safe because, if the engine goes out, the pilot has no choice but to bring the aircraft down.

In daylight, a pilot has a 180-degree range of view to rely on for spotting an emergency landing spot, he said. But at night, even with night-vision goggles, a pilot’s range is 40 degrees.

“It’s kind of like looking through a couple of toilet paper rolls,” Humann said.

And a pilot is much more likely to crash at night in a single-engine aircraft, he said.

Washington, D.C wildland fire presentation

The folks at the Department of Interior in D.C. apparently think that the residents of their fair city need wildland “fire-proofing tips for homeowners”.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of the Interior will host a multi-media presentation on wildland fire prevention and containment, featuring fire-proofing tips for homeowners and first-hand experiences of Interior firefighters, on Saturday, October 18, 2008, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. in the Yates Auditorium of the Main Interior Building. The public is invited to attend this free family event, entitled “Smokejumpers, Groundpounders and Shots – Tales from Wildland Fire” at 1849 C Street NW, Washington, DC 20240.

Wildfire news, September 22, 2008

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , , , ,

San Diego helicopters cleared for night flying

From the La Jolla Light:

Cal Fire and the city of San Diego inked an agreement today clearing the city’s two emergency-services helicopters to fight fires at night in the 1.1 million local acres served by the state agency.

The agreement, signed by Cal Fire Chief Howard Windsor and San Diego Fire Chief Tracy Jarman at Gillespie Field in El Cajon, exempts the SDFRD aircraft – Copter 1 and Copter 2 – from a regulation that had prohibited their use in firefighting operations on land under state jurisdiction.

City air crews have been taking part for years in fire-suppression and search-and-rescue efforts across the county, often after dark. Under the new agreement, they will be available to do the same in Cal Fire’s service areas, which encompass much of eastern San Diego County, from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Riverside County line, according to Cal Fire Capt. Nick Schuler.

The locales in question include such wildfire-vulnerable communities as Julian, Ramona, Santa Ysabel, Warner Springs and Valley Center. The vast expanses of Cleveland National Forest, however, remain off-limits for the municipal helicopters, Schuler said.

The city air crews are able to fight fires at night through the use of state-of-the-art night-vision equipment that requires special training and certification, SDFRD spokesman Maurice Luque said. The same kind of technology allows military pilots to fly sorties after dark in war zones, he said.

The new city-state arrangement is “just another option, another tool to be used in the event of fires breaking or night or at dusk,” Luque said.

HERE is a link to a video about night flying.

Mobile dip tanks for helicopters and engines

A company in California has developed mobile water tanks that can be used to refill helicopters buckets or helicopters with snorkle-filled tanks. Large dip tanks have been around for a while, but most of them use plastic or fabric to hold the water, and they can take a while to set up, take down, or transport. These tanks are mounted on wheels and can be operational in minutes.
The 7,500 gallon “mobile reservoir” can be elevated about 20 feet with the push of a button so that it can gravity-flow water into engines. The “heli-troff” can hold 6,400 gallons and has a swimming pool light inside to make it more convenient for night flying helicopters.

The tanks have been on contract with Cal Fire since 2005, but oddly have not been used at all this year, in spite of the Siege of ’08. The company’s web site is HERE, but be warned, you’ll need eye protection to view it. It’s a little overwhelming and cluttered.

Ikhana Resumes Fire Mission Flights

NASA’s Autonomous Modular Scanner mounted on the Ikhana remotely piloted aircraft captured this thermal-infrared imagery during two passes over the Hidden wildfire during a flight over the southern Sierras about 30 miles northeast of Visalia in Central California on Sept. 19, 2008. This false-color, three-dimensional image shows unburned vegetation in green, smoke and bare areas in bluish-white and fire hot spots in yellow and red, overlaid on a Google Earth Digital Globe terrain image.

Click on the photo above to see a larger version.

From NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center
Wildfire Today covered the Ikhana previously HERE.
Wireless sensor network to use electricity from trees to detect fires
 
Researchers at MIT will soon test a network of sensors in a forest that will detect temperature, humidity, and the presence of a fire. Ultimately four sensors per acre would be installed. These sensor networks have been proposed before, including one that involves mobile firefighting robots, but the difficult part is replacing batteries in remote locations. The MIT researchers claim they have developed a method for harvesting electricity from trees, yes, from trees, enough to keep batteries charged.

The system produces enough electricity to allow the temperature and humidity sensors to wirelessly transmit signals four times a day, or immediately if there’s a fire. Each signal hops from one sensor to another, until it reaches an existing weather station that beams the data by satellite to a forestry command center in Boise, Idaho.

Colorado: lawmakers consider requiring counties to have wildfire preparedness plans

A committee of state legislators studying the wildfire threat in Colorado is proposing a requirement that all counties have wildfire preparedness plans and is looking to put $50 million over five years into wildfire mitigation efforts.
The money would be used to reduce forest fire risk not only on state and private land but also on federal land, an arrangement that state Sen. Mike Kopp, R-Littleton, called “unprecedented.”
“We will really be able to make significant dents into the problem that exists and the public safety challenges that exist,” Kopp said.
The committee, which wrapped up its work this month, also is proposing bills providing incentives for people to become volunteer firefighters and for businesses to harvest trees killed by bark beetles. The panel plans to introduce the bills early next year when the legislature starts its work again.
However, the committee declined to give its support to a proposal that would have created special building code requirements for homes and subdivisions being built in the “wildland-urban interface” zone, the area most at risk for a catastrophic wildfire and where more than 300,000 homes already exist in Colorado.
A number of mountain communities already
have wildfire plans, said
Andy Karsian, a legislative liaison with Colorado Counties Inc. The bill that the committee is proposing not only would provide standards and guidelines for those plans, but it also would ensure those local plans are coordinated.
“This is a good opportunity to solidify all those plans under one umbrella on the county level,” Karsian said.
Terry McCann, a regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, said the agency also supports the committee’s efforts.
Demonstration of fire clearance, using matches
Demonstration fire slope clearanceEverybody at some point has played with matches. Mike Dannenberg of the Bureau of Land Management, a fire suppression supervisor in Montana and the Dakotas, puts on a presentation about residential fire preparedness that involves hundreds of them. The article at wvmetronews.com has more details as well as a series of photos. Here is an excerpt.
“I liken it to building in a flood plane,” said Dannenberg. “If you thin around your house, if you reduce the fuel load, if you build out of materials that are not combustible a lot of times it will protect your home.”
[…]
Dannenberg has created a demonstration model to show the intensity of a canopy fire. He loads a pegboard with hundreds of match sticks. Each match represents a highly combustible evergreen tree. A road snakes through the middle of the model forest. The upper corner of the board features a homestead with a house, garage, and various outbuildings. The scene is created to the specs recommended by the BLM. Each building is covered with a metal roof and the yard space has only sparse and wide spaced trees.
Dannenberg tilts the board to replicate the speed of a fire moving up the slope of a hill or mountain. He lights a single match at the far end of the pegboard and at the foot of the simulated hill. The fire spreads rapidly, but stops short of the home–leaving it untouched. It’s an effective demonstration that Dannenberg says plays itself out every summer in the western United States.
Professor Awarded NSF Grant to Study Global Warming Effects
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $378,616 to Eastern Kentucky University to examine the potential impact of climate change on fires and the ecology of forests in northwestern Asia and compare that to recent research suggesting climate change has altered fire regimes in the western U.S.
“Collaborative Research: Fire, Climate and Forest History in Mongolia,” is directed by Dr. Neil Pederson, assistant professor in EKU’s Department of Biological Sciences, in collaboration with Dr. Amy Hessl of West Virginia University, Dr. Peter Brown of Rocky Mountain Tree Ring Research in Fort Collins, Colo., and Dr. Baatarbileg Nachin, head of the Department of Forestry at the National University of Mongolia. An additional $191,138 was awarded to WVU on behalf of Hessl, bringing the NSF grant total for the project to $569,754.
“This project will examine relationships between wildfire and climate over the past four-plus centuries, from the steppes of the Gobi to the taiga forests of northern Mongolia,” said Pederson. “Mongolia’s landscape, land-use history and recent history of rapid climate change make it an ideal test case for an examination of the relationship between wildfire and climate.”
The study will increase understanding of how wildfires affect forests within the context of climate change, past, present and future. It will also complement a growing global-scale database on fire, climate, and forest histories that will assess the potential impacts of climate change on wildfires.

Night air ops in San Diego County?

Author BillPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags

Some politicians still believe that if there had been another hour or two of daylight left when the 2003 Cedar Fire started, which burned 273,000 acres in San Diego county, it could have been stopped with a few bucket drops from the medium helicopter that was in the area. The truth is, that fire was pushed by very strong Santa Ana winds and it was off to the races in minutes. No aircraft could have stopped that fire in those conditions. No aircraft.

Air drops are worthless if there are no ground forces nearby to take advantage of them and put in hose lays or hand line. When the Cedar fire started it was much too dangerous for ground forces to directly attack the fire under the extreme conditions created by the strong winds, the vegetation, and the terrain. And if the wind is blowing the water or retardant sideways, it’s a waste of time and money, as well as being dangerous for the pilots.

But these facts have not stopped the San Diego County Board of Supervisors from pushing for night flying capability for firefighting aircraft. Supervisor Pam Slater-Price called night flying by water-dropping aircraft

“…a must-have” for the county. “We can’t afford to have out-of-date bureaucratic rules compromise public safety,” Slater-Price said. “I’m tired of excuses as to why it can’t be done.”

The Board of Supervisors is sending a letter to the State of California and the U.S. Forest Service asking them to begin negotiating rules that will allow for nighttime aerial firefighting in their jurisdictions.