There Aren’t Enough Firefighters to Stop America’s West From Burning

[marmar]

There Aren’t Enough Firefighters to Stop America’s West From Burning
An unprecedented 32,000 men and women are fighting blazes in what could be the most destructive fire season in history

By Kyle Dickman | August 26, 2015


(Bloomberg) “This thing’s going to burn until the snow flies,” Joe Flores, a Forest Service firefighter from Vernal, Utah, says to his partner, Todd Gregory, as they race ahead of yet another out-of-control wildfire. Flores, who’s fought fires for 21 years and is an expert on fire behavior, has never seen anything like this year, with so many superhot, superfast fires burning at once. He’s riding shotgun in Gregory’s pickup on U.S. Route 97, and they’re speeding along the Columbia River, trying to reach homes outside Chelan (population 4,000), a tourist and farm village four hours east of Seattle, before one head of the sprawling Reach Fire does. The two can only do so much to protect homes without an engine or a full crew, but they can try to make sure everybody has evacuated.

Embers lifted on 40-mile-per-hour gusts of wind clear the mile-wide Columbia and ignite parched grass on the opposite shore. There, beneath Wells Dam, the fire climbs the bank and lights another 8 square miles of dry grasslands. A second head of flame continues a run northwest toward the Cascade Mountains.

Gregory pulls up to a ranch house tucked in an orchard. There’s a well-watered lawn out front and a small wood shed next to it that’s already burning. A wave of 6-foot flames is advancing at about 7 miles per hour from Chelan and toward Pateros, a 600-person town that lost 300 homes to wildfire last year. Engine running, Flores gets out of the truck just as a tank explodes in the garage. A bolt of flame vents above the roof. The smell of sulfur wafts over them.

[font size="4"][font color="red"]“100 million people in the West can no longer expect to just pick up the phone, dial 911, and have a Hotshot come and save them.”[/font][/font]

“We got to get out of here. I’ve no idea what we’re breathing in,” Gregory says. A panicked Labrador-mix rushes out from behind the garage and leaps on Flores.




“Do you mind?” Flores asks. Gregory shoots him a look: Dude, what kind of question is that?

Flores lifts the Lab into the truck’s cab. With flames now working through the garage roof, they pull out and head back to fire camp, a sprawling tent city that’s sprung up to house firefighters on break from the fire lines. Although the house survives, the garage is toast, one of 38 structures incinerated in the Chelan area over the next 10 hours. A fruit storage warehouse will get reduced to neat squares of ash and charcoal. Fresh apples in crates melt into globs of sticky black sludge. Parked cars become metal skeletons. Some 1,600 residents, who began the morning believing they were protected by almost 1,000 firefighters, leave in a hurry. Some escape through areas that have already burned, passing smoking telephone poles and downed power lines whipping the ground. ....................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-wildfires-in-the-american-west/

[Politicalboi]

1. We need a fire army

We need to train troops to be firefighters, and use military equipment to fight these fires. It's only going to get worse as time goes on, so it can't hurt to have a branch of service that just puts fires out, and protects the land from fire to begin with.

[Warpy]

2. We need that this year. Most years, not so much

Tribes here in NM depend on the Floresta to hire them every spring through the fall to fight wildfires. They're damned good at what they do and the income feeds their kids for a whole year. I imagine it's the same for tribes in other areas.

Most years, the seasonal force is adequate. This is a record breaking drought year across most of the far west, though. I agree that they should have started training people in February, when it was clear the snow pack wasn't showing up again. However, this country has always been reactive, not proactive.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. But the most ominous thing about these fires is that they are not merely an effect of climate change

They are a cause.
The burning of the forests and tundra is releasing astounding quantities of carbon, stored for centuries in the wood and the permanently frozen subsoil. Melting permafrost releases methane, a greenhouse gas many times more destructive of the world’s climate than carbon dioxide. The fires are in fact a feedback mechanism, accelerating climate change as climate change accelerates them.

In one of Ray Bradbury’s searing, never-to-be-unread short stories, an astronaut in a space suit is floating languidly in space, musing on his existence and the wonderful perspective he has on the blue planet Earth below him. Shortly we learn that these are the musings of a doomed man, as he is in fact hurtling toward that earth and will die a fiery death when he hits the atmosphere. Just before that happens, we leave him, and join a mother and small child taking an evening walk as the child looks up in wonder and says, “Look, Mom! A shooting star!”

Somewhere in the northern hemisphere tonight, a small child will look up in wonder and say, “Look, Mom! What a pretty sunset!”

http://www.dailyimpact.net/2015/07/22/the-fires-this-time/#more-2993

[world wide wally]

4. But at least a few people are making big bucks off fossil fuels!

Too bad about the rest of us