Intro to fire

I was born into the Forest Service and was exposed to fire early on. My dad was a Hotshot and eventually a division chief in California. As a kid he would occasionally lets me in my brothers join in on some of the training sessions and even let us help put out hot spots after a fire on a family friend's homestead.

My first professional fire experience was over this last summer in the Deschutes National Forest on the Crescent Ranger District. I was a reserve (worked as a Wildlife Tech) and we got called out for a small lightning strike fire in the mountains. We had to hike in about 1.5 miles, where we found the fire. It was less than a tenth of an acre in size, mostly creeping with small flare ups in the denser brush piles. The terrain had a very shallow duff layer and covered with small fuels (twigs and pine needles) and since we arrived in time and there was no breeze to help the fire grow we were able to dig a line around the fire before it could start catching on larger fuels.

Carpenter Road Complex

Sorry if this is not great but I have never done anything with a "blog" before, so here goes.


I had my first experience with a "Wildland Fire" this past summer when I was sent up to help with at the Carpenter Road Complex in Fruitland Washington.  We, there were four of us, were sent up to be drivers but when we got there they sent us out to help run a Spike Camp instead.  Never being at a Base camp or a Spike camp before they both were interesting. Base camp housed around 1000 people and the Spike camp had 150 to 200 people.  We took over the community fire house and property with tents and equipment.  The town of 200 people were very grateful that we were there, we had visitors almost every day and all of the kids in school wrote us thank-you cards.
I enjoyed being able to give all of the firefighters a hot breakfast and dinner.

p.s. I also was able to meet three of the Australian firefighters who came over to help us out.

Fire History

I have had no experience working with fire in a professional field or internship setting. I am taking this class to learn about the science behind fire in our Northwest environment as well as other ecosystems. As a Natural Resource major with a Landscape Analysis option I can learn a lot from this class about how fire can be used to clear out areas and how it can be used as a tool in other ways. I have become more familiar with the fire combustion triangle and the attributes that are associated with it which are fuel, ignition or heat, and oxygen. Although I have little experience studying or working in a fire ecology field, I look forward to beginning to learn about how fire is used as an industrial tool. Because I don't have any previous graphics or data related to fire ecology, I found an excerpt from a book related to fire ecology in the pacific northwest to learn more about fire in this area. There were some insightful things from a small portion I read related to how fire "can be integrated into land management planning through an understanding of hoe fire affects the site and the landscape" ( Agee, J.K., 1996). I look forward to learning more about the science and ecology of fire.


Agee, J.K., 1996. Fire ecology of Pacific Northwest forests. Island Press.

49er Fire

In August 2009 two arson-initiated fires combined to form a fire in small-town Auburn California worthy of a state of emergency by Governor Schwarzenegger. The conditions were perfect for fire spread: 90 degrees, winds 14 mph with gusts at 22 mph, low relative humidity and all after a dry spell. By the end of it there were over 700 personnel, 55 engines, 10 air tankers, a Boeing 747, and 4 helicopters trying to control the burn which consumed 343 acres, 62 homes and 2 businesses.

What I remember of it most though is the aftermath. There were shelters set up for families and their pets across the county, benefit concerts, food and clothing drives, and fundraisers for the whole year. Friends of my family came home to find their house, cars and all belongings non-existent. There were $40 million in damages and control efforts cost $1.3 million. At this point I had lived in California my whole life, but this was the first fire that hit close to home, both literally a mile from my house and by seeing so many people I knew involved.

Once it's in Your Blood...

While spending a summer working at the Region 6 interagency Fire Cache, I was given the opportunity to interact with several members of the Redmond Hot Shot and Smoke Jumper crews. Hearing their enthusiasm for their job and as well their stories of their fire experiences, I found myself eager to learn more about fire in general. The following summer, through a student job posting, I was hired on as an FFT2 with Lava Beds National Monument. My crew was called out to several smaller fires in our local, and 2 large fires- to include the 2007 Zaca fire in the Santa Barbara area, where we spent several weeks.

     My first seasons work included digging miles and miles of hand line- removing fuels to prevent fire spread, laying hose lines- to combat heat near the fire line, and lighting back burns- as fire tends to draw towards itself and burning fuels ahead of the main fire removes fuel for the main fire to spread. Due to the steep terrain in southern California it was common to use helitorches for back burning; monitoring line while the torches dropped was my first experience with this practice. During off time at Lava Beds when we weren’t on fire, we spent our work days preparing several areas of the monument for fall burning. My crew worked with the park's fire ecologist sampling fuels and mapping projected Rx burns.

   I spent the next four seasons working on different hand crews throughout Oregon, to include USFS Diamond Lake, and three seasons with private contract company GFP. I as well spent 2 off seasons working on the USFS SAFAR project, thinning forested areas of the Deschutes National Forest to reduce fuels in the area, thereby lessening the chances of large, uncontrolled burning; and also worked on prescription burns in the Central Oregon area.

Zaca Fire 2007* see engine (mid-left photo) for size comparison.

Very steep terrain, Chaparral, very active fire behavior.

(oh- and yours truly, located foreground)

News Article on California Wildfire in 2009

Growing up in the state of Missouri has not given me the exposure to wildfires as some might have and I have no personal experience with them but I have always been interested in fire behavior and wanted to understand the characteristics and effects of fire. My grandfather was a firefighter and eventually became the fire chief here in the Saint Louis area of Missouri so that might have something to do with my interest in the topic. I researched and found a news article however from 2009 on a California wildfire that did quite a bit of damage to homes and properties in the Santa Barbara area. This particular wildfire was worsened by increased winds, low humidity, and high temperatures which made me think about the fire behavior triangle and how each area relates and interacts with the other. Even though I have no direct experience with wildfire it hasn't stopped my increased interest in the subject and the possibility of making a career out of fighting them.





 Residents of Montecito watched a wildfire burn in the foothills above Santa Barbara, Calif. on Thursday. Credit Michal Czerwonka/European Pressphoto Agency

A Different World

     I have grown up in the fire world, and this will by my fifth year fighting fire for the Forest Service in Prineville, Oregon.  I have had the opportunity to travel all over the country to fight fire and see many amazing things, and every year I am even more blown away by the forces involved in wildfires.  Over the past several years I have had the opportunity to witness quite a bit of extreme fire behavior in many different areas, but to me the most interesting fire behavior occurred in Alaska.
     I have been to Alaska twice now and am still amazed at the differences in fuel characteristics and fire behavior up there.  It is completely different than what I am used to.  It seemed as if half of the time we were fighting fire while standing in 6 inches of water, yet fire behavior was still extreme.  Other times we would get rained on for 3 days straight, and then within a matter of several hours fuels would dry out and the fire would be off to the races again.  This is something that is definitely not common in Central Oregon.
     Another thing that interested me was the type of fuels present.  The ground fuels typically consisted of a one to two foot thick mat of organic material that could burn for weeks to months, even years.  Fires up there have been known to keep smoldering in this tundra mat over winter and restart the following summer.  Once you finally were able to dig through this organic layer, you would typically find a solid layer of permafrost.
     Going to Alaska has definitely opened my mind to the capacity of fire to burn in a variety of settings, and was easily one of my most memorable fire experiences.  I would love to go back.

Lightning Strikes Back

I grew up on the Oregon Coast where constant rain made it close to impossible to have outbreaks of wildfire and it would help contain any major fires that started. I moved to Bend almost four years ago ad never really experienced wildfire that directly impacted my life. I was driving back one dry summer night from Coos Bay when a beautiful day turned into a stormy crazy night. As I went down the highway, I was stopped because of a wildlife that was caused by a nearby lightning strike, which spread too close to the road. Luckily, there was another route that avoided the fire and I was able to return back to Bend without any major problems.

The best job I've ever had

I did not grow up in a place that is normally threatened by wildfire so before I started working in wildland fire fighting I did not have much knowledge about it.  Before this job I spent my summers working on a farm so to me this is the best job I've ever had and it really helped me confidentially declare my major as forestry management.    For the past 3 summers I have worked on an engine for the Oregon Department of Forestry in Molalla.  I have gained a lot of experience in my first years, especially on my 18 day out of district assignment to the John Day area.  This picture is of the 36 pit fire.  Our engine was called to initial attack a spot fire on the opposite side of the river than the main fire that started a day beforehand.  Getting to the fire was hard enough as visibility was very low in the smoke and we had to drive through roads with falling rocks.  By the time we arrived it was several hundred acres and making runs uphill through the crown and there was nothing that we could do to contain it.

36 Pit spot fire on the  south side of the Clackamas River

The danger of fire when logging

I have not had many experiences with wildfire in my career and in my time at Oregon State. My first exposure to wildfire was this past summer when I worked on the OSU student logging crew.  As loggers we had to undergo basic wildland firefighting training, and were responsible for the initial attack in the event of a wildfire starting in our area. The equipment that we used in our logging operation posed a high risk to starting a wildfire, it seemed that everyone was constantly talking about the risk of starting a fire.
This summer conditions were especially bad and the fear of starting a fire was extremely high. The only piece of the fire triangle missing was the ignition source and a logging operation is full of potential ignitions. All chainsaw operators had to carry a fire extinguisher and a shovel in case of a fire. We also had inspections from ODFW to ensure we were compliant with all fire regulations. In addition to all this, there was also a change in the mindset of every logger on the crew. All the activity’s taking place in the logging operation were now viewed from the risk of causing a fire. Everyone was constantly monitoring there co-workers to ensure that we reduced the risk of a fire to an absolute minimum. I learned a lot from all this and gained a new respect for all the efforts that are made by forestry workers to prevent a wildfire from happening.
The following image is an example of how a fire can be started in a logging operation through cable friction.
Source: Jeff Wimer, Oregon State University

New to the Flames

Growing up on the Oregon coast I was never really around wild fires because it pretty much rains all year long. I now live in central Oregon where there is fire every year and I am still getting used to the fires that pretty much occur every year. Last summer was my first summer here and it was the first time that I have had to change my plans around fires. My trip I planned was to Crater Lake and there was obviously a pretty big fire there that forced me to cancel my trip because the smoke was so bad. I am interested to learn more about wild land fires in this class because my previous knowledge is pretty much next to nothing because I grew up where the biggest disturbance is the opposite of fire, rain.

Crater Lake fire

Oregon coast rain

Lifer for Fire

The fire world is where I belong, being a wildland fire fighter for going on eight seasons now, it is safe to say that I am addicted to fire. I have done everything from being on a short hand crew to running a Type-4 engine along with my most previous position as a crewboss for a helitack crew out of John Day, Oregon. The Canyon Creek Complex Fire took place on my home unit during the 2015 fire season, I was a part of the massive force that fought this fire. It was a warm morning at the airbase the first big blow up took place, the Rh's where low and there was a slight breeze pushing from the south west which is very typical. The fire that caused the first blow that lead to the creation of the Canyon Creek Complex, was actually two fires that eventually burned together, there was personnel on both fires. When the wind finally decided to make its presence known, it caused a chain reaction of disaster, with the dry fuel conditions and heavy fuels that where available the wind moved the flames like a wave on the ocean. My crew was dispatched as a triage module at 1:00 pm, the fire was moving so fast that when I finally revived the crew’s orders, the original house to start on had been burned over within ten minutes. The dense fuels around homes made for difficult triage, the wind was then howling and pushing the head straight towards John Day, the fire was about two miles from the main street of John Day when it decided to die down and evening changed the fires attitude. That evening I pushed a dozer miles in the dark, but due to mine shaft hazards we pulled off around 1:00 am. That was just the beginning, but i will never forget the day the sky turned black over the town.
        
The images below are photos taken on my iPhone, picture on the left is the time the crew was dispatched for triage and the picture on the right is once I pulled off the line.   

My Summer Road-Trip through the Smoke

My previous experiences with fire are limited, however last summer I came into contact with it more than I ever had before.  My girlfriend and I were on a road trip this past summer up through Washington state and into Montana.  We first noticed it right before we got to Spokane.  The air was beginning to get hazy with smoke, and we started to notice that it was smelling more and more like a campfire.  When we got to Spokane the haze was all around us.  I remember being in a Fred Meyer parking lot and not being able to see past the parking lot due to the haze.  At that point the smell was also very apparent.  It smelled as if we were standing right next to a bonfire.  This got me to thinking about many of the different issues surrounding fire.  The first thing that came to mind was climate change and how this was going to affect the fire seasons going forward.  In my atmospheric science class we learned that our planet is warming at an alarming rate, and in my natural resources class this term we were talking about how fire suppression has been a very common management technique over the past fifty years.  Fire suppression has led to there being plenty of available fuel for fire to consume and the warming of our climate is going to create a situation where fires are going to become more common and severe.  These issues will have an enormous impact on humans and our livelihoods going forward.  What I am most excited to learn about in this class is how the leading experts think fire regimes around the world are going to change.  It was clear to me from my road trip last summer that this was a critical issue due to the evidence of ongoing fires throughout my time in Washington and Montana.  Climate change is only going to make fire events more intense and severe moving forward, so management practices that we will learn about in this class are going to be hugely important going forward.

Jonas Norkunas
Elk Lake 2006

        It was mid August 2006 and My girlfriend and I set off for a day at Cultus lake. It was a very wet winter with record rains in Bend Oregon on January 1. These rains were all snow in the hills above and Mt. Bachelor almost hit 200 inches of base in late March which was well above average. Total snowfall in the high cascades approached 600 inches but the spring was very warm! Average temperatures were well above average over the spring and summer. This melted the exceptional snow pack very quickly and accompanied by no snow or rain, fire fuels got to a dangerous level and the fire season was very active for such a snowy winter. As we made the turn heading to Elk lake, the trees on the butte above were burning with the crowns of trees lighting up with flames 20 feet above the trees! It was amazing and the police had to close the road as the fire was progressing downhill towards the lake. I hung out for a few minutes and watched a helicopter drop water on the northeast side of the butte less than a mile from the highway. We turned around and headed back to Mt. Bachelor and down the Sunriver exit the back way to Cultus lake. It took awhile but we enjoyed the water and some micro brews on the patio at the restaurant. That afternoon two more fires ignited on the west side of Cultus lake and we watched helicopters put out the fires. As for the Elk lake fire, there was nothing they could of done with the westerly winds pushing the fire across Cascades Lake highway and finally burning out when the flames hit the lake. Several vacation homes were burnt down and the damage is still visible today. The houses were rebuilt and now the area is thriving today but who knows what the future holds.

My history of fire

It was my first summer interning at starker forests in philomat. It was the middle of July and we had just got done with our long day of work and we're heading back to the office.  We had been out of service all day and as soon as we got back into service we got calls from our office saying there was a fire and to get back to the office  as soon as possible. I was nervous because it was my first time that I would fight a real fire but I knew I was prepared because I had been educated in the fire school I had taken in late June. We arrived to the location of the fire and it was down a steep hill and the location of the fire was right next to the railroad tracks. We had to walk down with all of our gear and hoses down this hill and about a quarter mile down the tracks to the fire. Although it wasn't big I was still in amazement to see a real natural fire. As soon as we got there we got at it and started building a fire line to contain the fire. We worked fast and hard and got the line completed in an hour or so  but that wasn't the end. After this was done we then got hoses lined up and running and started to put out and mop up the fire which took about three hours alone. In total we go to the fire around 5 and didn't get back to the office until 11 but we all knew we would take the time it needed to get this fire taken care of. Although ODF had to investigate the fire, we all knew what it was. It was one of the hotter days of the summer and it also had been hot and dry all summer long. Any small fine fuels were just perfect to start a fire  the train had ran its normal route and as it came around the corner sparks came off the tracks and landed in a pile of dead, dry needles and dry grass. This started the fire and allowed it to creep up the hill into the bigger fuels. If there were no fuels that were next to the tracks, there would have been no fire and that's why ta always true that with the combustion triangle, if one component isn't there then there is no fire.

The Bucket Drop

This summer I worked o the OHV trails crew on the North Fork of the John day Ranger district in the Umatilla National Forest. Working on a shared base with the fire crews meant that if the fires started burning regularly they could take people from other departments like mine and we would fight fire along with them as part of their crew. The fuel in the area is large ponderosa pine stands with mixed Douglas fir for the over story and grassy pine needle understory. We got called in all the way from an assignment we were on in Walla Walla to come back to what they were calling the turner basin fire that ended up being on of our biggest on district fires on district. The fire was in a heavily wooded area and the relative humidity had been low along with long periods of high temperatures they were worried about this fire taking off and becoming a major complex. So they called in all the aircraft that was available and just blasted it with retardant and water for a couple days until we were sure it wasn’t going to travel far. If they hadn’t been so proactive with those conditions things could have gotten a lot worse before they got better.

Figure 1. This is a picture I took this summer of a 

helicopter carrying a water bucket.

Restoration at Shaw

The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis first bought the land at Shaw Nature Reserve in the 1920s.  It became an arboretum to which they would relocate trees in danger from all the pollution at the garden in St. Louis.  Today there is well over 2,000 acres in the reserve.  Its an area where the Ozark Oak-Hickory forests mingle with the glaciated prairies of the north.  The much loved Meramec river passes through there, and a few miles north is the wide Missouri. I’ve been there countless times for research, for hiking, for a contra-dance in their overnight cabins, and native plant festivals.  It’s a much loved place, for which the Garden folks are very proud. 

I hadn’t told Dr. Trager, but I was fresh off crutches the day before and was limping my way along these hiking trails with my can of water and rake and a bit worried about escaping.

Dr. James Trager, Restoration Biologist

Since the 1980s there has been ecological restoration happening there, especially under the expertise of Dr. James Trager, an entomologist and naturalist.  Dr. Trager put me on the email alert for assistance in prescribed burns years ago, and I’ve been there to douse the fires twice.  A low-level position with a water tank and a rake, sure, but to hear the roar of the walls of fire as they close in on each other is what I look forward to. 

The area is comprised of pretty low undulating hills with gradual slopes.  The prescribed burns I’ve participated in were all on the excellent restored tallgrass prairies.  At Shaw, their policy is to never burn more than ½ of the total acreage they have in fire management each fire year, and after the first pass of fire during a burn, if patches are left unburned to then leave them so, as refuge for fire-sensitive species.  So the fuels there are obviously low vegetation and some widely distributed shrub fuels, and also ground fuels litter fuels are considered. 

I don’t know what the specific weather statistics were on that day, but ideal wind speed would have been between 3 and 7 mph.  They were concerned about wind direction as well, and ideal relative humidity would have been between 50-70% and the temperature was around 50F.

I believe they were using a flank fire technique such that the workers ignite the sides of the burn site parallel to the wind direction and then lit a backfire soon afterwards.  They were on the two-way radios constantly.   I’ll admit I wasn’t feeling the need to pay attention to all the science, I was there to let others boss me around as I monitored the edge of the burn so the fire does not escape.    

I remember at one point near the end I was asked to douse a tree snag that was ignited, I tried to get close enough but the fire was so close along that trail and I couldn’t get close enough to spray it. They wanted to save the snag for wildlife so a bunch of guys went back after me to douse and rake around it.

From the Outside Looking In

Air quality in Hood River was the largest problem impacting tourism and the economy. Above is a photo taken outside of Hood River borderline days after the ignition of Cougar Creek.

 Last summer, Hood River County became the sink of all the smoke coming from Cougar Creek fire across the river, which resulted in a 53,500 acre burn, and the Warm Springs fire, which resulted in over 65,000 acres burned. This was the first time I began to personally experience some of the minor economic impacts that large forest fires create. Smoke bogged down the city, you could not see across the river, go kiteboarding, trail running, or mountain biking. Tourism, which is what fuels the town for many, slowed down to a minimum during one of the busiest times of year. I remember watching the Cougar Creek fire develop while at work, you could smell the smoke from the little brewpub and it looked like Mt Adams had blown up. The few customers we got that day were either retreating campers from Mt Adams or simply trying to get out of the little smoke haze. Throughout the rest of the month we went from backed up waitlists and a jam packed restaurant to the awkward silence of a few tables, mine and many others hours were cut in half. As Cougar Creek became contained, conferences were held in White Salmon across the river to cover the economic loss. 45% of Cougar Creek was lost commercial timber, Yakima nation spent 3 million on stabilization, and overall 25 million was spent on suppression. 

Perfect storm

       This past summer I worked on the Warm Springs Reservation with the Natural Resources Department. I helped the biologists compile some of the current data regarding the Big horn sheep populations there on the reservation.  Every part of the experience was new to me, from equipment to dealing with the extreme conditions.  This was the first time I had had the opportunity to be in an area that was excessively fire prone even in the early spring.  The possibility of fire was always on the  minds of everyone when we needed to get to a site with limited access and fine fuels everywhere.   I don't think anyone was surprised when the massive fire was ignited by a motorist crossing the reservation.  All of the sides of the "fire triangle" were lined up and just waiting to lock in by this time in the season.  The fine fuel of the cheat grasses were everywhere due in part to the overgrazing of the wild horse populations.  The winds in the area seem to always pick up in the afternoon which took acre of the oxygen side of the triangle.  I think in this case the breeze/draft cause by the cars on the highway had a good deal to do with feeding the extra oxygen to the ignition area.  After two and a half weeks the area I was working in was opened back up and   I was surprised the way it moved across the landscape.  The fire didn't move straight across, it jumped from area to area.  Some of the burned areas you could see were ignited by the firefighters to back burn and some of the others in the timber  were the highly televised crown fires. Driving across the reservation after the fire gave me a peak in to the life of the fire and even more respect for those managing it.

                   This was a picture I took driving across the reservation 2 week into the fire.

Silhouettes of Smoke and Flame

           

 I was raised as a city girl, smack dab in the suburbs of Los Angeles, so my first-hand experience with wildfire is embarrassingly (fortunately?) limited. However, given the drought and the desert-like climate in the Los Angeles Basin, wildfire is not completely unfamiliar to Southern California residents. The closest experience to wildfire that I had was in October of 2005, when the Verdugo Hills, hardly two miles from my house, were ablaze for several days, leaving the San Bernadino Valley, where my family lived, engulfed in smoke for 2 weeks. It's not hard to understand likelihood of a wildfire in this part of the state, given the flammability of the grassy foliage from the lack of rain, particularly after a long, hot, and absolutely dry summer. Summer heat lasts well into and sometimes past the month of September, and the topography ans slope of the Verdugo Hills made conditions for quickly spreading fire even more ripe for. The most vivid memory I have regarding this event was sitting on the street corner outside my house and seeing the flames silhouetting the side of the hills while the smoke funneled out in a swirly current down to our homes. Below is a shot of the fire, likely taken from or near the Griffith Park Observatory, one of the highest lookout points over Hollywood and the city of Los Angeles.