Scientists expect fire risk in the U.S. to escalate by the end of the century
Hot and dry conditions lead to more fires. Those were the findings presented in 2012 by a team of researchers that used NASA satellite data and climate models to predict fire activity in the United States. Now, a new animation shows how dry conditions will cause different parts of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to experience an increased risk of fire by the end of the century. By mapping projected values for a measure of dryness known as the potential evaporation—a calculation that’s based on temperature, rainfall and wind speed estimates—scientists are able to interpret how fire activity will be influenced by future climates. Changes in dryness relative to 1980 levels are shown in the animation using colors, where reds represent an increase in dryness and blues represent a decrease. Watch the video to see how dry conditions are expected to spread across North America by the year 2100.
Five military Modular Airborne FireFighting System C-130 air tankers were released from fire suppression duty yesterday. Since the year’s initial activation June 11, MAFFS crews have flown 572 missions and made 535 drops using 1,375,981 gallons of fire retardant. That works out to 2,406 gallons per mission.
Granite Mountain Hotshots memorial items to be removed
Soon after 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, mourners began placing memorial items on the fence surrounding their compound at the Prescott Fire Department. Now over two months later the city decided they have to do something with the hundreds of objects which include T-shirts, photos, posters, and other items. The City announced Thursday that the Fire Department and area volunteers would begin to remove them on Sept. 10.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the Daily Courier:
Now, officials say, it is time to begin packing away the items for preservation, and possible inclusion in a more permanent memorial in the future.
“Items that are able to be preserved will be temporarily stored until plans are finalized for the future permanent memorial,” the city’s new release stated.
City officials have noted that the outdoor elements have taken a toll on many of the items. Flowers, cardboard signs, and other perishable items were earlier removed. Many of the T-shirts from fire departments around the country have faded from dark-blue to gray.
Investigators from the U.S. Forest Service and the Tuolumne County District Attorney’s Office have determined that the 237,000-acre Rim Fire in central California began when a hunter allowed an illegal fire to escape. Contrary to speculation earlier by Todd McNeal, fire chief in Twain Harte, there is no indication the hunter was involved with illegal marijuana cultivation and no marijuana cultivation sites were located near the origin of the fire.
Animation of the spread of the Rim Fire
An animation of the spread of the Rim Fire will entertain you for a few minutes. It is fascinating to watch as the fire spreads, burnouts are completed, and sections of the fire become smaller as data collected during GPS helicopter flights around the fire are later corrected by infrared mapping.
Dozer operator injured in rollover
The Idaho Statesman reported that a dozer operator was seriously injured Monday during a rollover while he was constructing a helispot on the Raft Fire, part of the Weiser Complex. Timothy Harrison, 55, was hospitalized in critical condition. The U.S. Forest Service is conducting an investigation into the accident.
Arizona Governor to appeal federal aid for Yarnell Hill Fire
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer reportedly plans to appeal the decision by FEMA which declined to provide federal aid for the Yarnell Hill Fire. FEMA’s rationale was that few of the homeowners who lost their residences in the fire did not have insurance. On June 30, 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed on the fire.
Rim Fire becomes fourth largest in California history
Yosemite Valley’s Half Dome, normally seen in this view, was obscured by smoke at 8:36 a.m. September 1, 2013
Our main article about the Rim Fire is updated daily but here are a few recent facts about the fire. On Saturday it continued to grow, adding another 3,000 acres to become at 222,77 acres the fourth largest fire in California history. Winds that shifted to come out of the west over the last two days have blown smoke into downtown Yosemite National Park, into the heavily visited Yosemite Valley. Compare these two photos of the valley; the one above was taken Sunday morning by a web cam, and the photo below we took on a day when the air was much cleaner. The fire is still eight to ten miles away from Yosemite Valley.
Yosemite Valley January, 1997, a few days after a flood caused major damage to National Park Service facilities in the valley. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
The 5,115 personnel assigned to the fire are fighting it by constructing direct fireline along the fire’s edge, and by indirect methods including burning out the fuel ahead of the fire. The smoke has limited the use of air tankers and helicopters for the last two days.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the fire may have been caused by activities at an illegal marijuana farm.
“We don’t know the exact cause,” Todd McNeal, fire chief in Twain Harte, a town that has been in the path of the flames, said on Friday. But he told a community meeting that it was “highly suspect that there might have been some sort of illicit grove, a marijuana-grow-type thing.”
“We know it’s human caused. There was no lightning in the area,” he said.
LA Times article about the Rim Fire
Julie Cart, who with Bettina Boxall wrote a series of Pulitzer Prize winning articles in 2008 about wildfires for the Los Angeles Times, has a new article about the Rim Fire. She mentions how firefighting policy differs between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, but greatly over-simplifies to the point of distortion the concept of “fire use” fires which are not aggressively and immediately suppressed.
Reuters: how budgets affect fires
Reuters has an article about how federal budgets may be contributing to the occurrence of larger fires by reducing the number of fuel treatment projects and prescribed fires. They have a quote from Jonathan B. Jarvis, the Director of the National Park Service:
Part of the problem, experts and many fire officials say, is that funding has been low for the controlled burns and forest-thinning work that makes it harder for a wildfire to spread.
“We’ve got to invest up front in terms of controlling and managing these fires,” said Jonathan Jarvis, director of the National Park Service from his smoke-filled post in Yosemite National Park. “Just waiting for the big fire and then throwing everything you’ve got at it makes no sense.”
In recent years, Jarvis said, the trend has been to shift money from fire prevention to firefighting.
Montana Supreme Court will decide case about firefighting strategy
The Montana Supreme Court will make a decision by November that could have an effect on how firefighters select a strategy for suppressing a fire. A Montana rancher who said firefighters’ backfires ruined his ranch won a suit against the state of Montana in 2012 which is being appealed to the Supreme Court. A jury awarded Fred and Joan Weaver $730,000 in a trial over the strategy and tactics that were used on the Ryan Gulch fire in 2000 – $150,000 was for the loss of timber, $200,000 for rehabilitation of pasture land, and the balance was for the mental suffering and anguish of seeing their ranch threatened by the fire. About 900 acres of the Weaver’s land burned during the fire.
The heart of the Weavers’ case was their contention that firefighters who usually fought fire in the flat, wet southeast United States used poor judgement in selecting and implementing an indirect strategy of backfiring, rather than constructing direct fireline on the edge of the fire. In the process, they argued, more land burned than was necessary, including 900 acres of their ranch.
Prescott’s Granite Mountain Hotshot crew nearly paid for itself
When the Granite Mountain Hotshots worked on federal fires the terms were established by their contract or agreement with the U.S. Forest Service. The Prescott Fire Department paid the personnel on the crew around $12 an hour according to The Daily Courier, but the department was reimbursed by the federal government at the rate of $39.50 an hour. Below is an excerpt from the article:
In fiscal year 2012, the city estimated that the crew brought in $1,375,191, and had $1,437,444 in operating expenses – for a difference of $62,253.
On June 30 of this year 19 members of the crew were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire near Prescott, Arizona. A controversy is brewing in Prescott and the state of Arizona about the differences in compensation for the survivors of the seasonal and permanent firefighters on the crew.
It is not unusual for firefighting resources that are contracted to the federal government through local fire departments to be compensated at rates far higher than those at which federal firefighters are paid.
“In single file they marched right up to heaven.”
From the song, Change in the wind.
Some artists in Prescott, Arizona got together and recorded a song that honors the memories of the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots that were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, 2013. The recording has just been released and is available as a CD or can be downloaded as an Mp3. The organization they formed, Change in the Wind, will donate the proceeds from the sales to “help fill the immediate and long-term needs of the Granite Mountain Hotshot families”.
A video of the song, Change in the Wind, is below. We helped their effort in a small way by donating a photo we took of the procession that carried the bodies of the 19 hotshots from Phoenix to Prescott.
The CD release party will be tonight, Wednesday August 28, from 5 to 7 p.m., at the El Gato Azul restaurant, 316 W. Goodwin Street, in Prescott. CDs will be for sale there.
One of the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ crew carriers leads the Honor Escort for the Granite Mountain 19, near Yarnell, Arizona, July 7, 2013. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
Transformer explodes, starts fire behind fire station
An electrical transformer on a power pole exploded and started a fire behind a fire station in Ramona, California early Saturday. Here is an excerpt from the Ramona Patch:
The incident occurred about 7:45 a.m. at Cal Fire Station 80 at 829 San Vicente Road south of H Street, Cal Fire firefighter-paramedic Brandon Morgan said.
“We were just sitting in the station and we heard an explosion outside and we went out and a power pole was on fire about 200 yards away,” Morgan said.
Prompt action by firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze before it spread.
Firewise landscaping saved homes in Utah
Removing and managing vegetation around homes saved several of them during a wildfire in Utah, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Eight homes were destroyed by the lightning-caused Rockport Fire near Rockport Reservoir last week.
Scoopers help slow wildfire in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Some Canadair CL-415s helped slow a wildfire in the Jabalnica region in Bosnia and Herzegovina on Friday, but Saturday it took off again and came within 200 to 300 meters of the Jablanica hydro-electric plant. The Croatian government made two water-scooping air tankers available to suppress the fire, at the request of the Bosnian Council of Ministers.
Granite Mountain 19 widow gives birth
One of the widows of the 19 firefighters from the Granite Mountain Hotshots gave birth Thursday to a 6 pound, 15 ounce son. Amanda Misner who was married to Sean Misner, named him after his father, giving him the name Sean Jaxon Herbert Misner.
The child’s father and 18 others from the fire crew were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, near Yarnell, Arizona.
A female firefighter was killed and nine were injured Thursday on a wildfire in Portugal near the small city of Tondela. Commander Antonio Ribeiro of the Serra de Caramulo firefighters said the crew ran from the fire but the firefighter who died fled in the wrong direction. Euronews reports that three firefighters have died this month. High temperatures and strong winds have contributed to the spread of 13 large fires in Portugal.
The national wildfire situation
Today there are 49 uncontained large fires listed on the national Situation Report in the United States, and that number does not include individual fires within complexes. There are currently 854,480 acres within the perimeters of those active fires. The national Preparedness Level has reached the highest category, PL 5, for the first time since 2008. And while it may seem like much of the west is on fire, the number of acres burned to date, 3.4 million, is much less than average, which is 5.6 million.
Competition for firefighting resources is occurring. There is only one California-based Type 1 or Type 2 incident management team available that is not assigned to a fire; 33 IMTeams are assigned nationwide. But surprisingly, there are no Area Command Teams committed.
We have 11 large and very large air tankers working right now on exclusive use contracts, and there are another 9 that the USFS has borrowed from the military, the state of Alaska, and the Canadian government. In 2002 there were 44 large air tankers on contract.
Forest Service runs out of money for firefighting
For the sixth time in the last ten years the U.S. Forest Service has run out of funds for suppressing wildfires. Even though the number of acres burned to date this year is below average, the USFS is having to divert funds from other non-fire accounts in order to cover the shortfall. This is due in part to reductions in the amount of money Congress allocates for the FLAME fund, which is supposed to fund firefighting while protecting other accounts. The Washington Post has more details.
Scott Olsen writes about a firefighter’s first day on the job
You may have seen the articles written last year by W. Scott Olsen, a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota about “the war on wildfires out west, meeting shot-callers and looking at the operation from the inside”. He has just published a new article at the Huffington Post about a wildland firefighter’s first day on the job.
Granite Mountain 19
The issues surrounding the deaths of the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots June 30 on the Yarnell Hill Fire continue to make the news. Firefighters with the New York City Fire Department have raised $30,000 so far for the families of the 19, and they are hoping to add to that total. The Prescott Daily Courier asked the candidates for Mayor and the City Council to express their positions on the discrepancy between the benefits for the seasonal and full time members of the crew. And there is a debate about whether the city’s hotshot crew should be rebuilt.
Montana residents contribute for free coffee for firefighters
Residents near Lolo, Montana are contributing to a fund to provide free, good quality coffee for firefighters working on the Lolo Creek Complex. According to an article at KZBK, Samantha Harris, a barista at Florence Coffee Company in Lolo, said customers have been donating money to give firefighters coffee.
“We have a huge tab here so all the firefighters’ coffee is paid for,” Harris said. “Which has been really fun to tell them their coffee is free.” The tab is at nearly $300, she said.
Florence Coffee Company is at 11880 HWY 93 in South Lolo, Montana.
Photos of pyrocumulus
The Alaska Dispatch has some very impressive photos of pyrocumulus smoke columns caused by wildfires.
Goat manure fire stinks up town
A burning pile of goat manure is affecting the quality of life for residents of Windsor, Vermont. The pile ignited from spontaneous combustion Wednesday at George Redick’s 800-goat dairy. Windsor Town Manager Tom Marsh said he could smell the fire at his home which is five miles from the dairy.
Hot and dry conditions lead to more fires. Those were the findings presented in 2012 by a team of researchers that used NASA satellite data and climate models to predict fire activity in the United States. Now, a new animation shows how dry conditions will cause different parts of the U.S., Canada and Mexico to experience an increased risk of fire by the end of the century. By mapping projected values for a measure of dryness known as the potential evaporation—a calculation that’s based on temperature, rainfall and wind speed estimates—scientists are able to interpret how fire activity will be influenced by future climates. Changes in dryness relative to 1980 levels are shown in the animation using colors, where reds represent an increase in dryness and blues represent a decrease. Watch the video to see how dry conditions are expected to spread across North America by the year 2100.
