Fire

[madhatte]

The mind reels!

 

[Ted Jenkins]

At a recent meeting I had with some USFS personnel recently I made a suggestion as to some good areas for some prescribed burns. I was told that those suggestions were flatly turned down for Air Quality Management issues. I could not help myself and say you have got to be kidding. So I guess it is OK for houses to burn with all the paint and insulation then to allow a few days of a little haze. Did I mention that many lives were lost also as a result in poor management. Thanks

 

[madhatte]

Even if and when a RX burn is approved, the locals still tend to hate the very sight of fire. I was on one awhile back and got a call from Dispatch saying that there was a report via 911 call that the fire was running right toward a neighborhood. Yeah, well, I was a few hundred yards across the field from the caller and was looking them in the eye when I told Dispatch that "I can see your caller speaking to you right now and can assure you that this is not the case. This burn is well within prescription". Air quality is not the only hurdle we have to overcome in order to restore functional fire regimes on our landscapes.

 

[Ted Jenkins]

I am one of those who believe that many or most agencies do not do a perfect job of management or suppression. However the immense job of running and managing a gigantic work force is also a huge challenge. In my area I have seen improvements with some of the forces that should prove very beneficial in the future. In this climate of the public and home owners are trying to interfere with sound judgement time and time again which is also unproductive. Thanks

 

[catbuster]

Rx burns on this fire would have made an immense difference.

Looking for 45% control tomorrow and half Saturday. Hell yeah. I like this group we have running the show, but this is a mean bastard fire.

 

[madhatte]

One foot in the black and all the usual. Wish I was there. DoD is supposed to start playing nicer with other agencies very soon but not soon enough.

 

[catbuster]

One foot in the black and all the usual. Wish I was there. DoD is supposed to start playing nicer with other agencies very soon but not soon enough.

Being in the ICS tent a lot leaves me in the black a lot these days. It seems like as soon as I completed the work for ICT3 with my P.E I got stuck doing stuff like water supply and access roads a lot. No big deal, but some days I miss hands on field work.

The Camp Fire has weighed pretty heavy on me. I’m sick of hearing large numbers of the postmortem come in every day... Kinda makes it hard to get up some days.

 

[RandyMac]

141,000 acres burned
40 percent contained
63 fatalities confirmed
11,862 structures destroyed (including 900 homes)
600 reported missing

 

[madhatte]

Still waiting on the call, still knowing it's not gonna come because DoD isn't fully onboard with NWCG even now.

 

[catbuster]

Nate, given the rate this one is getting under control I think there are enoigh resources alotted currently. It looks like Camp could be at 100% shortly after turkey day.

I wish more interagency interactions were agreeable. We could have used more resources early on.

 

[madhatte]

Heard that. Next year, maybe?

 

[atpchas]

Interesting piece on RECOVER
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144265/looking-to-recover-after-the-fire

More on Camp Fire foul air
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144261/camp-fire-spreads-foul-air-in-california

 

[RandyMac]

The smoke got shoved north, we had 40 watt sunlight starting about noon, it is clearing ahead of the systems coming in.
The rain will help most places, wouldn't want to live below a fresh burn scar.
We have our first Pacific storm forecast for Thursday into Fryday, they are expecting lots of rocks on the roads.

 

[madhatte]

Ooh, that RECOVER project is neat. I gotta talk to my LiDAR guy about how to apply it on our landscape. Black oughta be near-zero reflectance, so it should be super easy to bin out of the raw data.

We have our first Pacific storm forecast for Thursday into Fryday, they are expecting lots of rocks on the roads.

My ramble down the WA coast today showed a mess of slides I've not seen before, and our hills are way more stable than yours because they're sedimentary rather than metamorphic in origin. I imagine all of the usual suspects will be in action soon.

 

[atpchas]

Ooh, that RECOVER project is neat.

I had a pretty good idea that would appeal to you. Wonder what the technology will be able to do for us in 10-20 years....

Today is the first time the AQI has gone below 100 since the Camp Fire started.

 

[madhatte]

I had a pretty good idea that would appeal to you. Wonder what the technology will be able to do for us in 10-20 years...

It's like you know me!

For real though, the only real impediments now are flight costs, manpower and training. In the same way as they are about basic stuff such as thinning and fuels management, the powers-that-be are notoriously close-fisted about data collection for GIS, and the know-how to brute-force gigabytes of raw data into clean map layers is still scarce. I suspect that spending on LiDAR and fuels management in tandem will yield big positive results. We will almost certainly soon be using GIS to plan where, specifically, to remove fuels proactively, instead of just being overwhelmed by how huge the problem is and giving up before even trying to tackle it. Now to convince the purse-holders to allow it. I am cautiously optimistic, mainly because I've seen and used the raw data, and have an idea how to make it more useful. There are younger and sharper guys than me coming up from Academia just raring to tackle this problem.

 

[Blue Oaks]

Sounds like good technology there. We could use that in our volunteer fire assoc. Right now it's pretty much on homeowners, but we did do a cleanup day where we cut a bunch of dead pines down next to fire lines up on the ridge.

I just stare at the abandoned lot next door and can see all the fuel management problems I can handle. The first two years I lived here I just sprayed round up all over the property line on their side, but this year I'm going to start thinning trees and bushes. Surrounding that lot is open space Santa Cruz Mtns at 700-1000 feet of elevation. Due to the narrow width of my lot compared to depth, the property line is about ten feet from my carport next to my garage. In addition, there's red tagged broken concrete and asphalt continuously tumbling into my property as it erodes...

In the satellite pic, my house is the furthest lower left mostly rectangle lot with a larger house and a smaller cottage on it. The Loma Fire two years ago burned 12 homes and was stopped about a mile and a half away. http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_details_info?incident_id=1457

The other pic shows two red tagged areas, though I will admit that road made from broken concrete has held up well, and the overall brush that is over most of the property next door. No one will buy that property since it's 150 feet wide and 1100 feet deep and very, very steep.

 

[atpchas]

We will almost certainly soon be using GIS to plan where, specifically, to remove fuels proactively, instead of just being overwhelmed by how huge the problem is and giving up before even trying to tackle it.

Selectivity is, as I see it, the key. If we can make significant progress in that area, there is a chance to get back on top of this situation. There is certainly not the will or $ to "treat" 100% of of the over-fueled outdoors.

 

[madhatte]

You hit the nail on the head.

 

[Drptrch]

The Rain’th is Falling [emoji106]


Erik