Tag Archives: Wildfire

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National Wildfire Preparedness Upped to Highest Level

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Fires burning across central Idaho (Photo credit: NASA)

United States wildfire managers today raised the National Preparedness Level to its highest point, Level 5, for the first time since the summer of 2008. (See news release below). The designation signals a high level of wildfire activity that is putting a strain on the nation’s fire-fighting capabilities.

Large fires are burning throughout the West, in Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, issues daily updates on all major (and many minor) wildfires.

 

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Arizona legislator: State benefits should go to all fallen firefighters

From today’s Prescott Daily Courier:

Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin is drafting bills to help the families of the 19 fallen Granite Mountain Hotshots.

One draft bill would provide full-time employee benefits to the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew members from the Prescott Fire Department who died battling the Yarnell Hill wildfire about 20 miles south of Prescott on June 30. Thirteen of the deceased hotshots were seasonal workers so their families don’t get any benefits such as health care.

The draft bill grants full-time state employee benefits to any first responder who dies on state lands. The Granite Mountain Hotshots died on state trust lands. The bill is retroactive to June 30.

“I think this was a wake-up call to a lot of folks,” said Tobin, whose district includes Prescott. Part-time employees are more and more common.

via Tobin seeks to provide state benefits for fallen firefighters - The Prescott Daily Courier - Prescott, Arizona.

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The Great Burning: The New Reality of Wildfires in America

The Great Burning

I heard the awful news about the deaths of 19 Hotshot firefighters a few hours after arriving home from Montana. There were 18 of us, journalists from a variety of media, traveling by bus around the magnificent and sprawling Crown of the Continent region for an intensive five-day institute on environmental issues vital to the area, to the West, and in many cases, to North America. The trip was run by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources, which, since 1995, has conducted expedition-style institutes across the nation for journalists.

Ron Wakimoto, University of Montana, talking to journalists at the 2013 Crown of the Continent Institute.

Fire expert, Ron Wakimoto, University of Montana, talking to journalists at the 2013 Crown of the Continent Institute. (Copyright 2013, Osha Gray Davidson)

Parts of two days were devoted to learning about the history and ecological role of wildfires from University of Montana fire expert Ron Wakimoto, who stood by the side of the road next to the National Bison Range, south of Flathead Lake, pointing out how fire had shaped the landscape over millenia.

“You can see how the stands were quite open,” Ron told us, pointing to an area where fire had been restored, allowing the understory to burn and clearing some sections of any trees at all. But such areas are rare in the West, today, where even small fires are still frequently suppressed. The result, said Ron: “There’s no place to go to save yourself if the fire blows up.”

I spent part of a long ride north talking with Ron. He’s a fascinating and easy-going guy, full of stories and expert knowledge of fire. So his words were still fresh in my mind when I heard on the evening of June 30, that 19 firefighters had just died, trapped when a fire blew up in Yarnell, Arizona, an hour’s drive north of my home in Phoenix.

Yarnell Hill Fire, July 1, 2013.

Yarnell Hill Fire, July 1. (Copyright 2013, Osha Gray Davidson.)

The next morning I headed up to Yarnell, or as close as I could get to it since the fire was still burning and there was a road block. I spent the next several weeks traveling back and forth between Yarnell and Phoenix, talking with Ron Wakimoto by phone and via email several times, and interviewing other fire experts, a former Hotshot crew member who worked the Yarnell Hill Fire, residents of the mountain village, officials in the United States Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and anyone else I could get to help me understand not just what happened to the 19 young men of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Crew, but why it happened.

The resulting article is in the current issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands and posted online. I hope you’ll read the piece, and come away, as I did, realizing that there’s a lot we can do to prevent tragedies, like the one on Yarnell Hill, from happening again.