Firefighter, policeman injured as wildfire erupts

Firefighter, policeman injured as wildfire erupts

30 August 2012

Serbia/Kosovo–– MT. TARA — A wildfire on Mt. Tara on Thursday afternoon broke through a protective barrier set up to contain it, injuring two MUP personnel: a firefighter and a Gendarme.

The Gendarme broke his leg, while the firefighter suffered eye injury.

According to the public broadcaster RTS, some 30 firefighters managed to save their lives at the last moment and escape after being trapped by the blaze that suddenly spread from a canyon near Otrelj Hill, fanned by strong winds.

MUP Emergency Situations Sector chief Predrag Marić said that on Wednesday much work had been done successfully to localize an entire area covered by wildfires, but that the stretch toward Mt. Mokra Gora was still out of control.

This location is now the focus of the efforts of firefighters, who are joined by Serbian police helicopters and a Russian airplane.

Russian Emergency Situations Ministry official Valery Shukhov said on Thursday that one more aircraft and a helicopter will be sent to Mt. Tara.

In the meantime 300 people are deployed in the field fighting to prevent the fire – which has now been contained on three sides – from spreading.

The fire on the western Serbia mountain broke out on August 23, spreading to 1,000 hectares in the next few days.

During Wednesday, 202 other wildfires were registered in Serbia. The number again increased as daily temperatures are once again rising in the country, which has also been hit by a severe drought.

Fires break out again in northern Kosovo villages

Meanwhile, a fire that was localized in the Desetak village in the northern Kosovo municipality of Leposavić late Wednesday started spreading towards the village of Joanica during the night.

Chief of the Leposavić natural disasters department Milenko Milentijević told Tanjug that about 70 hectares, mostly low-growing plants, on the path to Joanica were on fire since the night before.

He added that a forest on the way to the village of Gnjedane was also caught on fire, adding that fire crews and citizens were on the ground and that the fire should be localized during the day.

Over the past two days, the fires in the villages above Leposavić have destroyed about 150 hectares of woods and undergrowth.

Thanks to the firefighters and local people, the blaze did not reach houses in the villages of Desetak and Gnjedane.

About ten days ago, firefighters managed to put out a huge fire that destroyed more than 100 hectares of forest on Mount Rogozna in the Leposavić municipality, after fighting it for several days.

When the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-evidence-heat-trapping-effects-wildfire-particles.html#jCpWithin 24 hours, a few researchers at the David Skaggs Research Center had opened up a particle sampling port on the roof of the building and started pulling in smoky air for analysis by two custom instruments inside. They became the first scientists to directly measure and quantify some unique heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-evidence-heat-trapping-effects-wildfire-particles.html#jCpWhen the Fourmile Canyon Fire erupted west of Boulder in 2010, smoke from the wildfire poured into parts of the city including a site housing scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Within 24 hours, a few researchers at the David Skaggs Research Center had opened up a particle sampling port on the roof of the building and started pulling in smoky air for analysis by two custom instruments inside. They became the first scientists to directly measure and quantify some unique heat-trapping effects of wildfire smoke particles. “For the first time we were able to measure these warming effects minute-by-minute as the fire progressed,” said CIRES scientist Dan Lack, lead author of the study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also were able to record a phenomenon called the “lensing effect,” in which oils from the fire coat the soot particles and create a lens that focuses more light onto the particles. This can change the “radiative balance” in an area, sometimes leading to greater warming of the air and cooling of the surface. While scientists had previously predicted such an effect and demonstrated it in laboratory experiments, the Boulder researchers were one of the first to directly measure the effect during an actual wildfire. Lack and his colleagues found that lensing increased the warming effect of soot by 50 to 70 percent. “When the fire erupted on Labor Day, so many researchers came in to work to turn on instruments and start sampling that we practically had traffic jams on the road into the lab,” Lack said. “I think we all realized that although this was an unfortunate event, it might be the best opportunity to collect some unique data. It turned out to be the best dataset, perfectly suited to the new instrument we had developed.” The instrument called a spectrophotometer can capture exquisite detail about all particles in the air, including characteristics that might affect the smoke particles’ tendency to absorb sunlight and warm their surroundings. While researchers know that overall, wildfire smoke can cause this lensing effect, the details have been difficult to quantify, in part because of sparse observations of particles from real-world fires. Once the researchers began studying the data they collected during the fire, it became obvious that the soot from the wildfire was different in several key ways from soot produced by other sourcesdiesel engines, for example. “When vegetation burns, it is not as efficient as a diesel engine, and that means some of the burning vegetation ends up as oils,” Lack said. In the smoke plume, the oils coated the soot particles and that microscopic sheen acted like a magnifying glass, focusing more light onto the soot particles and magnifying the warming of the surrounding air. The researchers also discovered that the oils coating the soot were brown, and that dark coloration allowed further absorption of light, and therefore further warming the atmosphere around the smoke plume. The additional warming effects mean greater heating of the atmosphere enveloped in dark smoke from a wildfire, and understanding that heating effect is important for understanding climate change, Lack said. The extra heating also can affect cloud formation, air turbulence, winds and even rainfall. The discovery was made possible by state-of-the-art instruments developed by CIRES, NOAA and other scientists, Lack said. The instruments can capture fine-scale details about particles sent airborne by the fire, including their composition, shape, size, color and ability to absorb and reflect sunlight of various wavelengths. “With such well-directed measurements, we can look at the warming effects of soot, the magnifying coating and the brown oils and see a much clearer, yet still smoky picture of the effect of forest fires on climate,” Lack said. CIRES is a cooperative institute of CU-Boulder and NOAA.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin