 |
Rodeo-Chediski Fire that burned 467,000 acres during late
June and early July, 2002. |
Description: In the last week, large fires roared to life
in east-central Arizona on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation
northeast of Phoenix. This image from the Moderate Resolution
Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite
was captured on Friday, June 21, 2002, and shows the massive
smoke plumes created by the fires. The Rodeo Fire (east) began
on June 18, and has engulfed at least 85,000 acres. Only a few
days later, a second fire began less than 10 miles away. The
Chediski Fire (west) began on Thursday, June 20, and by Friday
morning had already grown to 7,000 acres. Thousands of people
have been evacuated and at least a hundred structures have
been lost. In the false-color image, vegetation is green and
burned areas are red or reddish brown. Bright red dots mark
the detection of active fires. http://www.wilderness.org/Library/Documents/WildfireSummary_RodeoChediski.cfm |
| Rodeo/Chediski
Fire |
Don
Bertolette |
| Jun
24, 2002 22:48 PDT |
Bob/Will/Bruce-
The posts below reminded me of my first exposure to firefighting
in the
Southeast. As degreed forester for the Daniel Boone National
Forest, I had
been selected for a training detail as a hotshot firefighting
crew foreman
(the Asheville Hotshots - Region 8's first interagency hotshot
crew). We'd
done a few local training projects (some hazard tree removal in
the Cradle
of Forestry, the placement of many cubic yards of woodchips
along the trail
to the Joyce Kilmer Woods, etc.), and then sent off to the
Okefenokee Swamp
(the north end, along the Georgia/Florida border). We arrived in
our little
20 passenger converted school bus, at mid-afternoon. They
directed us to
run a fireline south from a point on the road, as far as we
could before
dark. In retrospect, it was a make-busy assignment, as much as a
test of
our 'mettle'.
We proceeded south taking the vegetation down to mineral earth,
and cutting
the overhead veg as high as we could saw and chop...briars grew
up into the
shrubs and trees that grew over our heads, making difficult to
impossible to
fully clear. After 1000 yards, it had turned dark, and we turned
on our
headlamps and began hiking out our fireline...interestingly
enough, our down
to mineral earth fireline had become a canal, with the water
level
apparently just inches below the surface.
Upon return to the fire camp, as we remarked on how unusual it
seemed to us
that there could be a problem with wildfire, with the water
level nearly at
the surface. Imagine our surprise when they then told us that
the wildfire
we were starting a fireline for, had "escaped from an
island"...it seemed
that the wind was strong enough at the time of escape that it
was able to
ignite the saw grass (lots of extractives) and carry the fire
across the
water body, to droughty mainland vegetation.
As an aside, I am about a two hour drive from the Rodeo/Chediski
Fire. My
wife's father lives in a summer home he started building 40
years ago in
Forest Lake, about 10 miles from the active fire line, and has
been
evacuated. The two fires have just merged, totaling 325,000
acres. 325,000
acres of ponderosa pines (second growth for the most part) that
hasn't been
sufficiently funded to have been treated with prescribed
fire/fire
surrogates (thinning of small trees, to remove the fuel ladders
that have
enabled these fires to more than double in size each day for the
last 5 days
(325,000 from 120,000 from 60,000, from 25,000, from 600)...we
were
initially astounded that the fire could go from 600 acres
Wednesday morning
to 25,000 acres by Thursday morning (turns out, most of that occurred
in a
few hours...sufficient heat built up that it sent a column of
mixed gases,
flames, loose debris to nearly 30,000 feet then to drop in a
downburst that
sent the flames several miles through our forests in 20-30
minutes).
Tonight's Forest Service briefing indicates that while we have
0%
containment, progress is being made. By this time tomorrow,
there should be
5000 firefighters. We've got all the air tankers currently
available (some
have had to be taken out of service due to a recent crash in
Yosemite) and
the seven have dropped thousands of gallons of fire retardant.
Numerous
helicopters, and crop dusters dropped water for local 'crises'. More
than a
hundred homes have been burned, but more than a thousand have
been saved by
the heroic (can't say enough about firefighters these days!) efforts
of
firefighters, who would come in just as soon as the wall of
flames would
pass (sometimes one to two hundred feet), and immediately lay
what water
they could to homes not already consumed.
The issue of thinning small trees, alone or in combination with
prescribed
fire, is not an academic one here.
-DonB
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