#wildfire suppression

[nocternalrandomness]

CAL FIRE Bell UH-1H "Super Huey" from the Bear Valley Helitack base headed into Salinas Municipal Airport

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Manitoba lifts provincewide state of emergency as wildfire conditions improve | CBC News

Manitoba's provincewide state of emergency is no longer in effect because of improving wildfire conditions, though the premier says risks re

A provincewide state of emergency is no longer in effect due to improving wildfire conditions, though risks remain for over a dozen communities that still aren't clear of wildfire threats. Premier Wab Kinew announced the end to the Manitoba emergency order during a Monday news conference. It was originally issued May 28 amid a spate of wildfires that forced thousands to evacuate rural and northern communities. Kinew credited the end of the state of emergency to ongoing wildfire suppression efforts, favourable recent weather conditions and the "good nature and hard work" of Manitobans, particularly in the north and east, where people have been able to start returning home.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[rjzimmerman]

At Yosemite, a Preservation Plan That Calls for Chain Saws

With treasured forests perennially threatened by fierce wildfires, many experts say it’s time to cut and burn protectively. A lawsuit is standing in the way.

Excerpt from this story from the New York Times:

The towering trees of Yosemite National Park have long held a treasured place in the American psyche, whether the ancient and majestic sequoias, the Ponderosa pines with their snake-patterned bark, or the acorn-laden black oaks, the lifeblood of many Native American cultures.

It was with this legacy in mind that two top Yosemite park officials walked last week through a collection of tree stumps and explained to a visitor why they ordered chain-saw-wielding crews to fell hundreds of trees.

As she trudged past the remnant of a felled incense cedar, Cicely Muldoon, the superintendent of the park, acknowledged that the notion of cutting trees in Yosemite could be hard to explain to the public. “It hurts people’s hearts,” she said. “But we have to use every tool at our disposal to save the forests and to save the park and to restore a healthy ecosystem and to keep people safe.”

With more than 140 million trees killed in California by drought and plagues of beetles over the past decade — 2.4 million of them in Yosemite alone — forestry experts describe the state’s forests as wounded and extremely vulnerable. Now, as the state suffers another severe drought, Yosemite seems perennially under siege by fire and smoke.

In just the past month, the Oak fire and the Washburn fire have raged near and in the park, prompting evacuations, closing entrances and threatening the largest stands of sequoias, including the prized Mariposa Grove.

Ms. Muldoon says that more aggressive steps need to be taken than before to make the forests of Yosemite more resilient. But she and the park’s management will first have to prevail in court.

A judge this month temporarily halted the park’s biomass removal efforts, as the tree cutting was euphemistically known, in response to a lawsuit filed by an environmental group based in Berkeley, Calif., that argues that the park did not properly review the impacts. The thinning project covers less than 1 percent of Yosemite’s forests.

Whether or not the lawsuit proves successful, it is resonating well outside of the park’s boundaries by raising larger questions about how to manage forests in the age of climate change.

Increasingly, leading forestry experts are propounding a view dissonant to a public accustomed to the idea of preserving the country’s wild lands: Sometimes you have to cut trees to save trees. And burn forests to save forests, they say.

[rjzimmerman]

How to Fight Canada’s Wildfires in the Era of Climate Change

Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season shows the need to shift from suppressing fires to preventing them as fires become more difficult to

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Wildfires in Canada have so far scorched forests totaling the size of the state of Virginia. The province of Quebec recorded its biggest blaze ever this month as it advanced across an area 13 times as large as New York City. Mega fires, so vast and ferocious that they simply cannot be fought, have erupted across the country.

Even as thousands of Canadians and firefighters from abroad continued to battle more than 900 fires, Canada’s record-shattering wildfire season has made it clear that traditional firefighting methods are no longer enough, experts in wildfires and forests say.

Instead of focusing on putting out flames, wildfire agencies, provincial governments and the logging industry must carry out fundamental changes to prevent fires from igniting and spreading in the first place, they say.

They include steps like closing forests to people when conditions are ripe for fires and increasing patrols to spot smaller fires earlier, when there is still a chance to contain them.

New strategies are crucial because wildfires, in the vastness of Canada, are expected to become increasingly difficult to combat as they grow more frequent and bigger in the hotter and drier conditions resulting from climate change.

“We can add billions and billions and billions of dollars, and even then we wouldn’t be able to extinguish all the wildfires,’’ said Yves Bergeron, an expert on forest ecology and management at the University of Quebec. “We need a paradigm shift from viewing the role of wildfire agencies as putting out fires to protecting human society.’’

[bigdantheweatherman]

Ira Hanson milled around an evacuation center near tiny Swall Meadows on Sunday afternoon, not quite sure what to do after learning that the dream home he and his late wife had built 30 years earlier was damaged in a wildfire that consumed 40 homes and buildings.

[wpbradley-blog]

S100

Today my life long dream of being a fire fighter can be somewhat fulfilled.