Multiple agencies practice wildfire drills

10 April 2015

published by http://dcourier.com

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USA — Firefighters and law enforcement agencies throughout Yavapai County gained priceless experience working together at the annual Prescott Basin wildfire drill this week.

While each agency conducts its own refresher courses, this is one of the few chances they have to practice working together before the annual wildfire season begins. Then when multiple agencies are needed on large wildfires, they are more prepared to work side by side.

“This is the only time of the year that we have the chance to bring all of the resources in the area to work together and test the system to ensure that everyone is trained and tested on the basics,” said drill Incident Commander Todd Bentley, who also is the IC for the local interagency Type III team and the Groom Creek Fire District chief.

They worked on everything from structure protection strategies to laying hose lines to radio communications at the Pine Summit Bible Camp off Wolf Creek Road.

“It’s been a few years since we really did hands-on drills,” Bentley said, and firefighters at the after-action review said they appreciated the format. The last few years focused on a wildfire scenario with a tabletop exercise.

The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office Jeep Posse practiced evacuation procedures by going door to door in Groom Creek, offering residents information about what to do in case they really need to evacuate in the face of a wildfire, YCSO Search and Rescue Supervisor Scott Joy said.

New to the drill this year was the appearance of an Arizona Army National Guard Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, which landed on an open field at the camp. Firefighters were able to ask the copter crew plenty of questions about the Blackhawk’s capabilities on wildfires.

“It really meant a lot to our guys that you were here today,” Yavapai County Emergency Management Coordinator Denny Foulk told Blackhawk pilots Tim Graves and Calob Bowman and crewmember Shane Arnold.

Foulk worked with the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs (DEMA) to get the helicopter up to Groom Creek during regular training flights Tuesday and Wednesday. DEMA Emergency Response Branch Manager Billy Ross also came up from Phoenix for the drill.

Wildfire incident commanders or county emergency management officials can ask DEMA to order National Guard helicopters when enough regular wildfire contract aircraft are not available.

Graves flew a Blackhawk on the 2013 French Gulch fire east of Yarnell, shortly after the devastating Yarnell Hill wildfire torched 127 Yarnell homes and killed 19 of Prescott’s hotshots. Yarnell residents were understandably skittish about seeing smoke from French Gulch even though it was not directly threatening the community.

Graves and other National Guard Blackhawk pilots ferried as many as 400 firefighters for a couple days to the remote French Gulch wildfire and dropped water on it. They can carry 11 people behind the two pilots.

“We love helping out the state whenever we can,” Arnold said.

Along with ferrying firefighters and equipment, the Blackhawks can attach portable “Bambi” buckets that scoop up as much as 4,500 pounds of water at a time from lakes or portable inflatable water tanks.

They also can help with rescues, but their medics currently have some restrictions against treating civilians unless life, limb or eyesight is in danger, Graves explained.

Nine Blackhawks fly out of the Papago Park Military Reservation in Phoenix. It takes them at least four to six hours to arrive on wildfires after they are ordered, since they have to add orange markings to their camouflage color, gather equipment and brief their crew before takeoff, Graves said.
 

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Positive start for federal wildfire-reduction program

22 April 2015

published by www.yakimaherald.com

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USA — Six years ago, Congress selected Central Washington as one of 10 places nationwide to test a three-pronged program to restore ecological balance to forests, protect rural economies and reduce wildfires.

Now a newly released federal report praises the national Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act as successful so far. It’s credited with reducing fires on nearly 1.5 million acres, harvesting millions of dollars in timber and supporting more than 4,000 jobs annually.

While the program got off to a somewhat slow start locally, supporters say its collaborative strategy is paying off and interest is growing nationally.

“So often, it seems that conversations about forestry get stuck in extremes — the people who don’t want any trees cut or people who are more focused on what you take off the forest than what you leave behind,” said Chris Topik, who works with The Nature Conservancy on forest issues across the country.

“I think the lesson is that by investing upfront time in community collaboration, you can get more work done and not get derailed by those outliers who are going to litigate.”

Locally, the effort known as the Tapash Collaborative so far shown modest results, but is now poised to make significant progress.

“I think the idea was to build over 10 years,” said James Schroeder, the director of the Eastern Washington Forests Program with The Nature Conservancy, a member of the collaborative group. “In the Tapash landscape, what we are seeing now is bigger projects with shorter planning and more support. I think over the next five years we’ll see even more.”

The Tapash group is made up of the region’s major landowners, the Naches and Cle Elum Ranger districts, the Yakama Nation, the state departments of Natural Resources and Fish and Wildlife, and community groups, including recreation, timber industry and conservation interests.

Named after the Yakama word for Ponderosa pine, the collaborative was formed in 2008 to help the region’s major landowners learn from each other and start working together. In 2010, it won the federal grant of about $10.8 million to fund 10 years of work on 1.6 million acres of forest in need.

That federal funding can only be spent on physical work in federal forests, not on lengthy and sometimes contentious planning processes, said Jodi Leingang, coordinator for the Naches Ranger District.

But the collaborative pulls in funding from the other landowners and outside groups as well, so that they can all try to find ways to do more work across the region with the available funds, she said.

Since 2010, the local program has reduced wildfire risks on 16,800 acres out of a 10-year goal of 50,000 acres, and harvested 90 million cubic feet of timber out of a 10-year goal of 326,000 million cubic feet.

One example of the work is the thinning, controlled burning and creek restoration conducted last year in the Oak Creek Wildlife Area, west of Naches, which is a patchwork of state and federal lands. Similar projects are in development for the Little Naches Creek area, north of State Route 410, and the Manastash Creek area, west of Ellensburg, Leingang said.

The collaborative aspects of the program can come from public participation in planning or on the ground work, such as when crews from the Yakama Nation have lent their skills to help the Forest Service plan timber sales. State programs that help private forest landowners pay to do thinning work to protect their homes and the adjacent public lands, Leingang said.

She says she also counts the established partnerships and community work group as results that are just as important as the acres thinned or timber harvested.

“Bringing the public into the planning process slows things down at the beginning so it can go faster later,” she said. “Those relationships have a huge value and I’m more excited about the next five years.”

But challenges remain.

The collaborative had planned to use controlled burns to reduce brush and fuel in large parts of the forest, but that has been difficult because of air-quality concerns over smoke.

“One of the barriers Tapash has really struggled with has been the burn bans. That’s limited some of the outcomes we hoped to achieve when we wrote the plan,” Schroeder said. “But we can’t do it all mechanically. We really have to use fire as a tool in the forest. The flip side is that if and when a wildfire comes, that will certainly put tons and tons of smoke in the air and reduce what we value in the forest.”

Another stumbling block, Leingang said, is that the region doesn’t have as many sawmills and forest products businesses as it used to. In fact, the only sawmill in the region is the Yakama Nation’s in White Swan.

That means there’s less demand for the wood coming off of the forest and fewer trained people to do the needed work, she said. The collaborative also aims to support the Yakama mill and encourage development of more local businesses doing restoration work or using the small diameter trees being thinned out of the forests.

Lastly, the partnerships have also given the Naches Ranger District the confidence to look at more large-scale and controversial restoration projects, Leingang said, such as working in beloved recreation areas. That means there’s lots still to debate, from where to harvest timber to which roads to close.

“It’s not all singing ‘Kumbaya,’ that’s for sure. But at least people understand the challenges and trade-offs we face,” she said.
 

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Forest fires heading for Chernobyl nuclear plant – Ukraine Interior Ministry

28 April 2015

published by http://rt.com

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Ukraine — The Ukrainian National Guard has been put on high alert due to worsening forest fires around the crippled Chernobyl nuclear power plant, according to Ukraine Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

“The forest fire situation around the Chernobyl power plant has worsened,” a statement on Avakov’s Facebook page says.

“The forest fire is heading in the direction of Chernobyl’s installations. Treetop flames and strong gusts of wind have created a real danger of the fire spreading to an area within 20 kilometers of the power plant. There are about 400 hectares [988 acres] of forests in the endangered area.”

 Police and National Guard units are on high alert. Ukraine’s Prime Minister personally went to the affected area to oversee the firefighting. He says the situation is under control, “but this is the biggest fire since 1992.”

However, in comments to Russia’s Moscow Speaks radio, a representative of Greenpeace Russia said that the situation is much worse: “A very large, catastrophic forest fire is taking place in a 30-km zone around the Chernobyl power plant. We estimate the real area of the fire to be 10,000 hectares; this is based on satellite images. This hasn’t been officially acknowledged yet.”

he potential danger in this fire comes from the radioactive contaminants the burning plants have absorbed, ecologist Dmitry Shevchenko told RT. “A lot of radionuclides have accumulated in the soil, the trees and other plants. And of course when something like a fire happens, together with the smoke, the radionuclides can travel great distances.” Shevchenko is the deputy coordinator for the ecology protection organization Environmental Watch on North Caucasus.

It is difficult to predict where exactly the contaminants will go, Shevchenko told RT. “We don’t have a real-time monitoring system for the Chernobyl area. We can hypothesize whether the radionuclides will go here or there, but there is no-one who can reliably predict the situation.”

Ukrainian emergency services say 182 people and 34 vehicles have been dispatched to fight the fire. A Mi-8 helicopter and three An-32 water dropping airplanes are also working at the scene. The efforts are being coordinated from a mobile emergency headquarters.

According to the head of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone management department, radiation levels in the area remain normal. “The area on fire is relatively clean,” Vasily Zolotoverkh told the newspaper kp.ua. He said the fire started at lunchtime, when emergency workers had finished putting out an earlier blaze which started during the night. The emergency services have stated that it could have been caused by a lit cigarette.

Ukraine’s acting head of emergency services said earlier the forest fires were not a threat to the sarcophagus sealing off Chernobyl’s crippled Reactor 4.

Chernobyl and the surrounding area have been abandoned and remain off-limits following the April 1986 disaster, when an explosion and fire released massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. Increased radiation levels were detected throughout Europe.

Chernobyl became the worst nuclear disaster in world history in terms of casualties and clean-up costs. Reactor 4, where the blast took place, was sealed off in a giant reinforced concrete sarcophagus to prevent further leaks.

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Forest Service chief makes collaboration the agency’s business model

24 April 2015

published by www.idahostatesman.com

 USA —  Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell has an answer when he hears state leaders call on the U.S. Forest Service to do more logging and other forest treatments to reduce the size of wildfires.

“We are doing more and we’re doing it for less money,” Tidwell said in an interview with the Idaho Statesman on Thursday.

The Forest Service has reduced its nonfirefighting staff by 39 percent since 2000. But its Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program alone has treated 1.45 million acres over the past five years and harvested 1.2 billion board feet of timber from national forests.

The program funnels money to projects that were developed with local residents, the timber industry, conservation groups, sportsmen and Indian tribes. These groups, such as the Clearwater Basin Collaborative and the Payette Forest Coalition, make the projects easier to complete because they have broad community support, Tidwell said.

“Without this we wouldn’t have been able to take on the scale of these projects,” he said.

He’s asking Congress for $20 million more annually so he can expand beyond the 23 existing projects to other forests and groups seeking to work together. Eventually Tidwell said he envisions the collaborative model approved by Congress in 2009 used to manage the Forest Service’s entire 193 million acres of forests and grasslands. That includes about 20 million acres in Idaho.

“We’ve built enough trust so we can move forward and make this the norm,” Tidwell said.

In Idaho, the Weiser-Little Salmon project has resulted in four timber contracts since 2012, which has allowed the Evergreen lumber mill near New Meadows to add a second shift and create 15 new jobs.

One contract that’s halfway completed generated 3.4 million board feet of timber, enough to build 5,000 homes. The $690,000 that Evergreen paid for the timber goes back into restoration, road closings and wildlife habitat improvement.

The Selway-Middle Fork forest restoration project in the Clearwater Basin received $16 million, which has been augmented by $13 million in matching funds. It is generating $14 million in labor income, reducing fire risk on 16,000 acres, treating weeds on 16,800 acres more and improving 16,000 acres of wildlife habitat.

“Forest restoration efforts are now demonstrating a track record of creating jobs, reducing the threat of wildfires and improving forest health on our public lands,” said U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, who helped advance the Clearwater Basin Collaborative. “Collaborative efforts like these get us back to work in our forests and are one step, among others, we need to take to restore the economies of our rural counties.”

That doesn’t mean the states can’t help. A “good neighbor” policy expanded by Congress in the last farm bill allows states to work with the Forest Service to get projects done. Oregon is paying millions to crews who mark trees for sales. Montana is paying for the environmental reviews on some sales to get them moving. In Washington’s Colville National Forest, a large landscape restoration project is going out to bid, with the buyer paying for the environmental review in exchange for the wood products from the project.

The Idaho Legislature approved a Senate resolution calling for Idaho’s congressional delegation to help increase funding and develop agreements whereby the state could carry out restoration efforts on some federal lands.

Tidwell, who attended Capital High School, was in Boise to address a conference on wildland fire safety. Safety will be especially important this year, with warm temperatures across the West melting the snowpack early.

Tidwell expects another long fire season, and that’s why he hopes Congress approves a bill that will stop him from having to take money from other programs to fight fires. That will improve the agency’s efficiency, he said. “It’s past time for us to treat these large fires as a national disaster,” Tidwell said.

He hears critics saying he and other decision-makers should return to the levels of timber harvests that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. The Forest Service needs to get “more work done,” Tidwell said, but can’t go back to those levels.

“I think we’re doing a better job than we ever did,” he said.
 

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Wildfires emit more greenhouse gases than assumed in state climate targets

15 April 2015

published by www.military-technologies.net

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USA — A new study quantifying the amount of carbon stored and released through California forests and wildlands finds that wildfires and deforestation are contributing more than expected to the state’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The findings, published online today (Wednesday, April 15), in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, came from a collaborative project led by the National Park Service and UC Berkeley. The results could have implications for California’s efforts to meet goals mandated by the state Global Warming Solutions Act, or AB 32, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The bill, which passed in 2006, assumed no net emissions for wildland ecosystems by 2020.

The researchers noted that the information available at the time the bill was passed may have underestimated the release of carbon through landmass conversions and wildfires, which are projected to increase in intensity in the western United States due to climate change. The authors pointed out that California is one of the few jurisdictions in the world to set mandatory greenhouse gas emissions targets.

“Determining the balance between carbon storage and emissions is essential for tracking the role of ecosystems in climate change. Growing vegetation naturally removes carbon from the atmosphere, reducing the magnitude of climate change,” said study lead author Patrick Gonzalez, the National Park Service climate change scientist. “Conversely, burned or dead vegetation releases carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating climate change.”

Gonzalez worked with forest ecologist John Battles, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the principal investigator on the project to quantify carbon storage and emissions in the state’s wildlands.

The study, funded by the California Air Resources Board, used 2001-2010 data from multiple public sources, including plot-level carbon stocks from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Inventory and Assessment Program and U.S. Landfire remote sensing data of vegetation at a 30-meter spatial resolution.

The analysis confirmed that California’s forests are huge carbon reservoirs for the state. Previous research has found that redwood forests near Redwood National Park contain the most carbon per hectare on the ground of any ecosystem in the world. One hectare of redwood forest can store an amount of carbon equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated by more than 500 Americans. The giant sequoia forests of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National parks come in second.

Altogether, the forests and vegetation of state wildlands stored an estimated 850 million tons of carbon in 2010. However, those areas also accounted for approximately 69 million tons of carbon emitted between 2001 and 2010. Two-thirds of the carbon loss came from fires that burned just 6 percent of the area of wildlands in nine years. Annual carbon losses from forests and wildlands in California represent as much as 5 to 7 percent of state carbon emissions from all sectors between 2001 and 2010, according to the study.

“National parks and other protected areas clearly provide an important function in removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it,” said Battles. “But we also know from previous research that a century of fire suppression has contributed to a potentially unsustainable buildup of vegetation. This buildup provides abundant fuel for fires that contribute to carbon emissions. Projections of more wildfires in the West mean that we need to account for this source of carbon emissions. Meeting the state greenhouse gas targets for 2020 might require a reconsideration of wildland management policies.”

This research is among the latest examples of the long, productive partnership between UC Berkeley and the National Park Service, highlighted in the recent “Science for Parks, Parks for Science” summit commemorating the centennial of the National Park Service.

Other co-authors of the study include researchers from the U.S. Forest Service, the Spatial Informatics Group in Pleasanton, California, and the University of San Francisco.

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