How about borate bombers ??
That is a picture of the 2016 Soberanes fire the video maker took straight off of Wikipedia. I think if your going to make most of the video from historical photographs, you should caption something like that, or lose credibility.
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Breaking The Free Ride <-> Entrapment Cycle
When determining strategy and tactics, avoid situations where firefighters may become entrapped. Consider the following discussion points related to escape routes and safety zones.
- Discuss the three types of safety zones and describe examples.
- The burn/black
- Natural features
- Constructed sites
- Discuss the guidelines for size and distance separation to avoid radiant heat injury.
- Four times the maximum flame height (20 foot-flame height x 4 = 80 foot-radius from firefighters)
- Size based on amount of resources and equipment
- Discuss heat impact factors that will affect the guidelines for distance separation.
- Convection heat from wind and terrain features
- Location relative to fire spread
- Reburn potential of fuel in safety zone
- Discuss how firefighters have a right to know the location of their escape routes and safety zones at all times.
- Discuss how firefighters have a right to ask for clarification when faced with unclear instructions or fear of the unknown.
- Describe a basic procedure for identification of effective escape routes and safety zones.
- Observe
- Visualize
- Identify
- Time
- Inform
- Evaluate
NWCG Six Minutes For Safety: Entrapment Avoidance
Entrapment Avoidance | NWCG
NWCG Devils Creek Fire Entrapment - July 22, 2021
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Today, I Learned: Markdown Preview Links
Copying a URL from the browser address bar and pasting to the Markdown editor gets you this;
[Watch: Bushfire sweeps through Beerwah area of Queensland, Australia | Euronews](https://www.euronews.com/video/2023/09/18/watch-bushfire-sweeps-through-beerwah-area-of-queensland-australia)
which renders as an ordinary HTML style link with an attached click count:
Watch: Bushfire sweeps through Beerwah area of Queensland, Australia | Euronews
To get a preview, clean the cruft off;
https://www.euronews.com/video/2023/09/18/watch-bushfire-sweeps-through-beerwah-area-of-queensland-australia
and it renders the preview:
The Markdown editor appears to assume that when you post a YouTube link, you’re probably going to want the preview, so it omits the cruft when you paste YouTube URLs from the address bar.
If the source site does not include detail tags on the link (most news sites do) then it will render the preview box in the editor with a message indicating that the editor did not find the detail it was looking for in the source link. This Markdown host simply renders the raw URL on Save Edit.
Raw cut and paste;
[NWCG Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG) | NWCG](https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/461)
NWCG Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG) | NWCG
decrufted:
https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/461
https://www.nwcg.gov/publications/461
One should probably not expect that a utility site would have the sort of sharing detail that a news site considers essential.
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Light at the end of the tunnel.
While the political knockdown drag out in the US House and infirmity in the Senate is stalling out the economy, and may drag on to the bitter ends of this election cycle, people looking to fight fire in Region 5 might feel some despair against their personal motivations to come and do this thing, anyways. There is hope.
When things in the Federal departments look iffy, the California Conservation Corps powers on.
For California residents, it’s as simple as making a call, showing up at the recruiter’s office, and passing some basic qualifications. No experience required. If you can show up your first day for residential assignment with the clothes on your back*, your good to go. If you feel you are not in good enough physical condition, the Cs will help you get there by the time Crew Certification rolls around.
For non-California residents, the bar is just a little higher, but passable. As establishing residency first, for people who live out of State, is more difficult, the CCC has open doors, namely, Backcountry and Watersheds, which have a specific application process. After a Backcountry or Watersheds ‘tour’, you can transfer to a Fire Crew. In fact, I might expect that a Backcountry on your resume would look good on applications for some of the more exotic Federal jobs, like Hotshots, and other deep Wilderness assignments you might like to look at for DOI USFS and BLM.
There are a high number of jobs, out in ‘the world’, that require at least 2 years of school, AA degree or trade cert, and the CCC can provide you with a minimum of 1, but even to 3 years, dorm housing (or better, depending on assignment) that establishes residency, transportation, training and education tailored for jobs in Fire, Forestry and Natural Resources.
Give 'em a call.
CCC Frequently Asked Questions (residents and non-residents):
Frequently Asked Questions | California Conservation Corps
*virtually, recruiters will give you a packing list with your paperwork. For a WUI Residential Center, it isn’t much, easily covered by your first payday if you have to borrow. For Backcountry, here is a list:
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Unhorsed.
Because this is a stiffly competitive job and labor market, there are two additional factors, of a morale nature, I’ll mention. The sense that the Cs are strictly a ‘second chance’ program, and military veterans.
In the Cs, you encounter both cases; ‘second chancers’ who struggle with reputation, and veterans who come into the Cs with a full head of steam. Firstly, these extra-ordinary people are not the majority of Corpsmembers, and while the unique experiences, in both cases, may provide them some advantages and disadvantages, with regard to institutional behavior, you will probably not find that relating with each other is an insurmountable problem. In fact, you might find, as I did, that your own personal experiences in the world, and a positive mental attitude, are aces up your sleeve that you can play to stay competitive and prevail in situations of competitive promotion.
The Cs, and particularly the CCC Supervisors that run the crews, are old pros at this business, some with military backgrounds, some without, that are quite good at preempting and resolving conflicts that may arise due to the wide variety of situations and backgrounds that Corpsmembers come from. While not quite a complete meritocracy, as time-in and seniority are major factors, your pace of advancement is largely on you and your willingness to learn, work, understand and cooperate with the institution and your place within it. No golden tickets. Your experience in the Cs is what you make it.
Thanks for reading.
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…and, as if on cue, here’s a new Cal Fire video featuring Tahoe Center. If I’m not mistaken, 402 is one of the rebuilt “Battle Born” Hueys with an AH-1 Cobra engine.
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Sometimes, one just needs 5 minutes with the hydra…
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The Year Of Never Before
Indecision can be a killer. We’ve all suffered it at times. Sometimes, its because we are mean; we spare a token of decisiveness only after the most stubborn resistance, and even then, we are prone to outburst. Sometimes, it is because we are simply exhausted; at our wit’s end, so to speak, and would gladly spend a token of decisiveness, if only we had gotten enough sleep.
I’ve found comfort in Bayes’ Theorem at times like this. It’s not exactly a physical law, but it sorta is, and it’s not exactly psychology, but it sorta is that, too. Meteorologists, ecologists, economists, just about anybody who had to take a statistics class in school has probably studied it. This isn’t really about school, though. This is about responsibility.
“Trust your instincts, and when that fails, trust your training.”
Good advice. Unless, you doubt your training. But, there’s the rub: trust. Painfully little of it, these days. More’s the pity, but trust is also a verb.
Naturally, scholars may correct this interpretation, but Bayes’ Theorem, in a nutshell, states that what might happen is a product of: your experience (judgement), multiplied by what just happened, divided by evidence. It doesn’t exactly sound like math, but I dunno, I’m not a mathematician.
Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. We speculate that our scientific laws run forwards and backwards in time, without prejudice, but, in fact, no one can really prove it. You need a proven time machine to test a theoretical time machine. There’s no evidence from the future, but reasonable assumptions that there will be a future, whatever it is.
Nobody knows. We hazard a guess. We roll the dice. Flip a coin. Do what we’ve always done. Try something new. Do nothing. They are all odds. We play the odds. How much are the sunglasses? Raincoats? How much for both?
When someone entrusts you with life, they are playing odds that you know the odds better than they do. Odds upon odds. Decision making responsibility over life and death is not for the faint of heart. Or, not for long.
Posterior = Likelihood × Prior ÷ Evidence
Anyways, this Wikipedia article might not be the best place for a read about Bayes. It might even contradict something you were taught or told at academy, college or university. But it might help. I came at Bayes through a book on algorithms, so you probably already have a head start on it. Good luck.
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‘Forward, the poor’.
Lots of words, significant nouns. The term “fiscal responsibility” is only used once, that I could see from a first reading. This is a nominalization of dubious pedigree.
‘Everything takes too long’.
This reminds me, somewhat, of the laments about prescribed fire. ‘Nobody wants to do it’, because there are not enough Forest Service employees. Period. End of sentence.
Not to get too far out in front of it, but if this is not a major factor on your proposed road map, then that’s out of your hands, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
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Mod Note
Respectfully, this thread was initiated for the Atmospheric Rivers in early 2023. If there are pertinent posts regarding the original intent of this thread, great. However, it seems to have substantially digressed from the original intent and information.
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Yeah. I didn’t mean to turn it into a column, but its sorta happened, once or twice. I’m ready to move on. Putnam’s comments were the real gem. I think the other most valuable part is onboarding Corpmembers.
The flood fighting so many firefighters are inevitably confronted with, fire in the riparian and onboarding Corpsmembers to assist Forest Service are the three things I would like to conserve, sir. What do we do?
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If it is directly pertinent to the thread topic, not just this one, but any thread topic, all relevant posts are welcomed and encouraged. What is not acceptable to turn any thread into a personal topic of the day discussion. If you have pertinent and meaningful input, by all means post. This thread is not currently that. If we need to close it because it cannot remain on track, we can and will do that
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Why don’t we do that? It’s easy enough to sort things to more specific and focused topics. I’d just like to think it was a successful rodeo and now it’s time to break out into more useful and organized posting for Wildfire Intel.
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