Pre-Season Warm Up

I have been thinking about global warming a lot lately. I have recently been attending several conferences on the wildland fire problem is the United States, paticularly in the wild west, where I reside and fight fire. I sometimes find these conferences and meetings a little tedious just because they require me to be away from home more, but the last few I have attended have actually been great. Here is a picture of me working at the fire and a few things that I have learned over the last few weeks:

• The "wildland fire season" has grown by 79 days in the last 20 years


• Global temperatures are rising


• Most forests in the US are overgrown and unhealthy


• There are forests in my region with fuel loads up to 8000 btu/ft2

Those are some scary statistics. There were much more. It seems like scary things are becoming more and more common these days.

On that note, I went on my first large wildland fire of the season the last week of March. The last large fire I went on last season was just before Thanksgiving. I missed a big one in January due to me having to also be a paramedic. Doing the math, I only got about 4 months off from wildfire this season. Pretty amazing.

This fire I went on was pretty large for March, about 4000 acres total. That number includes the four other fires in the complex, the particular one I was on was about 2000 acres. As sad as the whole wildland fire and mismanaged forest situation is, it was nice to get out and put some red stuff on the red stuff.

As much as I enjoy firefighting, I fear it may be a long summer. Apparently La Nina is coming. Over the last two decades, La Nina weather patterns have been responsible for some of the most catastrophic wildland fires in history. Yikes.