Most don’t know that our firefighting of wildlands is under federal authority. It is coordinated out of The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), located in Boise, Idaho, the nation’s support center for wildland firefighting. Eight different agencies and organizations are part of NIFC. National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) is the focal point for coordinating the mobilization of resources for wildland fire and other incidents. It is located at the NIFC.
Last Friday the National Interagency Fire Center (Boise, Idaho) issued the following update. This will be updated today, but I wanted to bring attention to patterns. NIFC also has the use of NOAA in predictive weather patterns. This clearly speaks to the winds that almost precede every catastrophic wildfire. IMHO, one of the reason we have – yearly – catastrophic wildfires is nefarious. It is a great way to flush an economy with disaster relief funds and infuse local economies is post-event buildups – preferably with no human fatalities – the only damage will be to the wildlands and wildlife, which they, categorize as renewable resources (no big deal). I know many will be aghast at even entertaining this horrible thought – but unless you follow the fires that have taken place – and the deployment of resources against the fire – it is all underscored by one thing. Their charter isn’t to extinguish. That word is not used in their vernacular. They “manage” wildfires. They don’t put them out.
Every fire starts at a reasonable size that if aerial resources were strategically situation in high-risk zones for immediate – instantaneous – deployment … I feel that none of these or maybe more realistically said – the majority of these catastrophic fires would never have been catastrophic. Those of forested lands – will never be forested lands again because they are then turned over to grazing lands. Check out the forests we have lost in the past 30 years, 40 years, 50 years. Look what happened to those wildlands.
November 2, 2018
Two new fires were reported and both were contained. Three Incident Management Teams and a National Incident Management Organization Team are supporting relief efforts after Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Florence.
Weather: The main concern of the week will be a continuance of off shore winds across Southern California and northerly winds across Northern California that should persist for the majority of the week. The most favorable periods for strong winds across southern portions of the state will be the first half of the work week when the easterly pressure gradient strengthens. Across northern California, there should be two peaks in activity, one on Tuesday and the other on Friday. Looking elsewhere, colder than average conditions are expected across the Great Plains through the week. While in the East the warmer than average, wet conditions early in the week will be replaced by a cold, breezy, but dry westerly flow by mid-week. West of the Continental Divide, temperatures will continue to be 5-10 degrees above average except in lower elevations where seasonal temperature inversions will persist in valley bottoms.
RitaGlynnSmith 