12 – Page 11

Greek court convicts 5 over negligence in huge 2007 wildfire that killed 36 people

Greek court convicts 5 over negligence in huge 2007 wildfire that killed 36 people

04 December 2012

Greece — ATHENS A Greek court has convicted an elderly villager and four local officials on charges of negligence that led to 36 deaths five years ago in one of the countrys worst-ever wildfires.

Judges gave a suspended 10-year sentence to Sofia Nikolopoulou, who was accused of starting the fire accidentally while cooking outdoors in the southern Peloponnese region.

A former local mayor, a regional governor and a fireman received the same sentence for allegedly failing to take sufficient precautions, or not reacting efficiently after the fire started. The court in the southern town of Pyrgos on Tuesday also handed down a suspended five-year sentence to a local fire brigade official.

The August 2007 wildfire ravaged more than 170,000 hectares of land, destroying scores of homes.

All five defendants appealed their convictions.
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
Two summers of unprecedented rain and unusually cool temperatures have left a large fuel load of grass and unburnt forest areas in and around Canberra.

A network of 500 fire trails and strategic burns along the north-west urban edge, heavy grazing and extra grass slashing will create a fortress for the territory which forecasters say faces a higher than average risk this summer.

After a fire-fuelled tornado in January 2003 killed four Canberrans and frightened thousands more, CSIRO fire expert Phil Cheney told the subsequent inquiry the fire’s penetration into urban areas under extreme conditions did not reflect a failure of fuel management on the urban interface.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmaXNjum
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin

Official urges collaboration on wildfire projects

12

Official urges collaboration on wildfire projects

01 December 2012

published by http://seattletimes.com

USA — As the western U.S. comes off a tough wildfire season, more collaboration is needed to guard against catastrophic fires and to restore charred forests and rangeland, a senior federal official said at a Western Governors’ Association meeting Saturday.

PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. As the western U.S. comes off a tough wildfire season, more collaboration is needed to guard against catastrophic fires and to restore charred forests and rangeland, a senior federal official said at a Western Governors’ Association meeting Saturday.

The federal government is accelerating its forest restoration projects and wants communities, utilities and others involved in similar efforts, said Harris Sherman, an undersecretary of the U.S Department of Agriculture who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

“We are seeing far larger, more intensive fires – more catastrophic fires, the type that bakes the soil,” Sherman said, painting a stark picture of how the country’s fire seasons are progressing.

Wildfires burned a near-record 9.1 million acres in the United States this year. Fourteen fires – nearly all in the West – burned more than 100,000 acres.

Conditions are worsening, too. The fire season now last about two months longer than in past decades. The snowpack is disappearing more rapidly than in the past. And the country is seeing more “red-flag days” in which winds and temperatures are high and humidity is low, Sherman said.

“We have had a really rough summer,” he said at the meeting in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley.

The amount of work and costs of battling fires also are enormous. At least a third of the 193 million acres within the Forest Service’s jurisdiction are in need of restoration. This year, the Forest Service’s fire budget was about $950 million, but the agency ended up spending $1.4 billion suppressing fires, Sherman said.

Sherman said the federal government is pursuing much larger restoration projects than in the past. Traditionally, Washington’s restoration projects were done in small increments, such as 500 acres. Today, the government is focusing on massive projects, such as restoring 750,000 acres in Arizona.

One example of collaboration cited by Sherman was between Washington and Denver splitting the costs of dredging a city reservoir that was polluted as a result of fire. The result was that 40,000 acres of land in five drainage basins are being restored. Sherman also cited a voter-approved measure in Flagstaff to protect the city’s water supply.

He also cited discussions with electric utility operators who are interested in restoration efforts as a way to protect power transmission lines from damage from fire.

Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter said he thinks collaboration from communities needs to start before disaster hits.

Otter said certain Idaho communities didn’t want to take funding for wildfire preparations, so he upped the percentage of matching funds that those communities would need to provide in such projects, Otter said.

“That has changed a lot of attitudes in Idaho,” Otter said.

The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
Two summers of unprecedented rain and unusually cool temperatures have left a large fuel load of grass and unburnt forest areas in and around Canberra.

A network of 500 fire trails and strategic burns along the north-west urban edge, heavy grazing and extra grass slashing will create a fortress for the territory which forecasters say faces a higher than average risk this summer.

After a fire-fuelled tornado in January 2003 killed four Canberrans and frightened thousands more, CSIRO fire expert Phil Cheney told the subsequent inquiry the fire’s penetration into urban areas under extreme conditions did not reflect a failure of fuel management on the urban interface.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmaXNjum
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin

NASA: Drier Climate Conditions, More Wildfires By 2050

12

NASA: Drier Climate Conditions, More Wildfires By 2050

04 December 2012

published by www.redorbit.com

USA — 2012 has been a bad year for wildfires in the US. According to data collected by NASA, some 6.17 million acres (2.5 hectares) have been consumed by wildfire this year alone. While this is just short of the record set last year of 7.90 million acres, (3.2 hectares) its larger than the amount of burned land in 12 of the last 15 years that scientists have been keeping tabs on wildfires.

If some NASA climate models hold true, scientists predict the United States will become a drier place over the next 4 decades. This means the next several years could play host to more destructive and more frequent wildfire outbreaks.

These findings were presented today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Doug Morton with NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland presented these findings about the future of wildfires in America. The analysis of future wildfire trends had been based on greenhouse gas emissions, as well as current wildfire trends.

Climate models project an increase in fire risk across the US by 2050, based on a trend toward drier conditions that favor fire activity and an increase in the frequency of extreme events, said Morton, according to a NASA statement.

Morton and his colleagues took data from climate projections as well as calculated results for years with low and high greenhouse emissions to come to this conclusion. In instances with both low and high greenhouse emission levels, these models suggested that America will see longer and stronger fire seasons for the next 30-50 years.

With more than 6 million acres of land ravaged by wildfires, 2012 is being called a high fire year. Current climate conditions suggest that America will see one of these high fire years once a decade. According to these new models, our nation could see as many as 2 to 4 of these high fire years per decade come 2050.

Fire is an inherently global phenomenon, and the only practical way to track large-scale patterns and changes in fire activity is with satellites, explained Louis Giglio with the University of Maryland at College Park and Goddard.

As more fires have swept across the United States, so too have the emission levels in our nation increased. According to Chris Williams with Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, carbon emissions have more than doubled since the 19080s as a result of these wildfires.

Using satellite images, Williams and his team were able to judge how much carbon had been released into the atmosphere as a result of fires in the western part of the country.

Williams and his team have calculated that, on average, the amount of carbon emissions from fires have grown from an average of 8.8 million tons a year during 1984 to 1995 to an average of 22 million tons a year in between the years 1996 and 2008.

With the climate change forecast for the region, this trend likely will continue as the western US gets warmer and drier on average, said Williams in a statement.

If this comes to pass, we can anticipate increased fire severity and an even greater area burned annually, causing a further rise in the release of carbon dioxide.

Wildfires arent the only cause of these increased carbon emissions, however. According to Hsiao-Wen Lin at the University of California at Irvine, nearly 70 percent of these fires are prescribed fires and important to agricultural growth. Though these fires have been used for centuries to tend the Earth, Lin suggests looking at the data to understand if this sort of technique will be helpful in the long run.

That means there is greater potential to manage fire emissions, even in a future, drier climate with more wildfires. We need to use cost-benefit analysis to assess whether reductions in agricultural fire emissions which would benefit public health would significantly impact crop yields or other ecosystem services, said Lin.
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
Two summers of unprecedented rain and unusually cool temperatures have left a large fuel load of grass and unburnt forest areas in and around Canberra.

A network of 500 fire trails and strategic burns along the north-west urban edge, heavy grazing and extra grass slashing will create a fortress for the territory which forecasters say faces a higher than average risk this summer.

After a fire-fuelled tornado in January 2003 killed four Canberrans and frightened thousands more, CSIRO fire expert Phil Cheney told the subsequent inquiry the fire’s penetration into urban areas under extreme conditions did not reflect a failure of fuel management on the urban interface.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmaXNjum
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin

Vic govt overhauls disaster management

12

Vic govt overhauls disaster management

10 December 2012

published by www.theaustralian.com.au

Australia — VICTORIA has unveiled a major overhaul of its emergency management after determining the response to recent floods and the 2009 bushfires was no longer adequate.

Premier Ted Baillieu released a white paper outlining the proposed changes on Monday, saying it’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform emergency management.

“The reforms outlined in this paper recognise that preparing for, responding to, and recovering from emergency is a shared responsibility of all Victorians,” he told reporters.

“Everybody has to be engaged and everybody has to be willing to collaborate as part of an emergency management system.”

Mr Baillieu said the state has learned from the Black Saturday bushfires and recent floods that current disaster management arrangements are “no longer adequate”.

“There are shortcomings and the intention of this white paper is to address those shortcomings,” he said.

The plan includes a new commissioner who will oversee Victorian emergencies, from floods and bushfires to disease outbreaks, and a new oversight body put in charge during major incidents.

Emergency Services Minister Peter Ryan said the plan focuses on community, collaboration and capability.

Under the proposed changes, the state government will create Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) and appoint an emergency management commissioner.

“There will be one person who is ultimately responsible,” Mr Ryan said.

“It will rid us once and for all of any uncertainty of who is actually in control.”

The emergency management plan would only apply during major disasters, not smaller bushfires, floods or other incidents, he said.

Mr Ryan stressed that there would be no amalgamations of any existing emergency services, even though some pushed for such changes during consultations.

Four new government committees will replace 44 existing committees to streamline efforts.

“It will give certainty as to who actually runs the show,” Mr Ryan said.

He said the whole idea was to create a structure that avoided the confusion that occurred on Black Saturday.

The February 2009 Victorian disaster saw 173 people lose their lives.

United Firefighters Union spokesman Mick Tisbury described the changes as superficial because the government had rejected a recommendation for the creation of a single state firefighting service.

“I don’t know why the government has decided not to go down that track – obviously there’s a lot of politics involved,” he told reporters.

“Let’s stop playing politics with people’s lives.”

Opposition emergency services spokeswoman Jacinta Allan said Labor would back the changes but said they meant little with budget cuts to the CFA and the MFB.

“No amount of changing names and changing operational systems is going to change the fact that Ted Baillieu and Peter Ryan have inflicted $66 million of budget cuts on our fire services,” she said.
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmafUgo3
Two summers of unprecedented rain and unusually cool temperatures have left a large fuel load of grass and unburnt forest areas in and around Canberra.

A network of 500 fire trails and strategic burns along the north-west urban edge, heavy grazing and extra grass slashing will create a fortress for the territory which forecasters say faces a higher than average risk this summer.

After a fire-fuelled tornado in January 2003 killed four Canberrans and frightened thousands more, CSIRO fire expert Phil Cheney told the subsequent inquiry the fire’s penetration into urban areas under extreme conditions did not reflect a failure of fuel management on the urban interface.

Read more:http://www.canberratimes.com.au/environment/red-alert-for-high-risk-of-fires-20121118-29koa.html#ixzz2CmaXNjum
The failure was in the forest areas.Advertisement

Following a 10-year strategy, ACT fire managers have created a mosaic across the landscape of different fuel levels, burning at every opportunity.

But forests have been too wet to burn this spring and the past two summers.

24. November 2017/by GFMCadmin