By ROMESH RATNESAR, Time Magazine, May 10, 2008 [here]
The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility of the stricken areas and the poor state of Burma’s infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 1 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll will, within days, approach that of the entire number of civilians killed in the genocide in Darfur.
So what is the world doing about it? Not much. The military regime that runs Burma initially signaled it would accept outside relief, but has imposed so many conditions on those who would actually deliver it that barely a trickle has made it through. Aid workers have been held at airports. U.N. food shipments have been seized. U.S. naval ships packed with food and medicine idle in the Gulf of Thailand, waiting for an all-clear that may never come.
Burma’s rulers have relented slightly, agreeing Friday to let in supplies and perhaps even some foreign relief workers. The government says it will allow a US C-130 transport plane to land inside Burma Monday. But it’s hard to imagine a regime this insular and paranoid accepting robust aid from the U.S. military, let alone agreeing to the presence of U.S. Marines on Burmese soil — as Thailand and Indonesia did after the tsunami. The trouble is that the Burmese haven’t shown the ability or willingness to deploy the kind of assets needed to deal with a calamity of this scale — and the longer Burma resists offers of help, the more likely it is that the disaster will devolve beyond anyone’s control. “We’re in 2008, not 1908,” says Jan Egeland, the former U.N. emergency relief coordinator. “A lot is at stake here. If we let them get away with murder we may set a very dangerous precedent.”
That’s why it’s time to consider a more serious option: invading Burma. Some observers, including former USAID director Andrew Natsios, have called on the U.S. to unilaterally begin air drops to the Burmese people regardless of what the junta says. The Bush Administration has so far rejected the idea — “I can’t imagine us going in without the permission of the Myanmar government,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday — but it’s not without precedent: as Natsios pointed out to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has facilitated the delivery of humanitarian aid without the host government’s consent in places like Bosnia and Sudan. … [more]
May 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
Ellreese Daniels, 47, of Lake Wenatchee, Chelan County, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle to two misdemeanor counts of making false statements to investigators.
In exchange, the government dropped four felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven felony counts of making false statements.
Sentencing was set for July 23 in what is believed to be the first criminal case against a wildland firefighter for the death of comrades on the line. …
Daniels, who now works for the U.S. Forest Service in a supply capacity, faced as much as six years in prison for each manslaughter count. Instead, he faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine for each misdemeanor. Hunt plans to ask for no prison time. … [more]
April 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
By Diane Fowler, Cibola County Beacon-News [here]
GRANTS - Tsoodzil, Kaweshtima, Turquoise Mountain and Mount Taylor are names that have been given over the years to the dormant volcano on the horizon. The mountain represents sacred sites and the home of gods to some Native American neighbors and a place for recreation, ranching, Land Grant communities and appreciation of nature for others. Currently there has been a growing interest in resuming uranium mining on Mount Taylor, coinciding with some designations of protection by both the U.S. Forest Service and the New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee.
These state and federal designations have produced debate in Grants and led to allegations about how the measures would limit public activity on the mountain.
Some government leaders and the mining interests have reacted with hostility and many uninformed citizens have made dramatic, if incorrect, public statements on the situation.
Read more
April 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
By JUDITH KOHLER, AP [here]
DENVER — Wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico and last week’s fires in eastern Colorado mean another busy firefighting season is likely in store, said U.S. Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell, whose agency is grappling with bigger, more expensive fires while budgets stay flat.
Kimbell, in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday, said she hopes the above-average snowpack in the Rockies and Northwest will stick around to help cut the fire danger that has plagued the region in recent years.
But the wetter winter hasn’t stopped blazes from erupting this spring.
“These fires in New Mexico and Arizona and Colorado - in April - would indicate that we’ll be very busy this summer,” said Kimbell, in Denver to present a grant to a Denver school for an outdoors program.
A 4,600-acre fire was burning Thursday in New Mexico’s Manzano Mountains. A fire scorched roughly 5,000 acres along the Arizona-Mexico border earlier this week.
Last week in Colorado, where the mountain snowpack is deeper than it’s been in more than a decade, three fires burned a total of nearly 29 square miles. One of the wildfires was in the mountains.
A pilot was killed when his plane crashed while attacking a fire on the Fort Carson Army base south of Colorado Springs. Two volunteer fighters rushing to a quick-moving fire on the eastern plains died when a damaged bridge collapsed under their vehicle.
Even before the West dries out for the summer, the Forest Service has already spent $400 million on fires, including ones driven by drought in the Southeast and Southern California.
Adding to the costs is expansion of homes into forested areas because protecting structures can be expensive, said Rick Cables, Rocky Mountain regional forester for the Forest Service.
Nearly half the agency’s roughly $4 billion budget is spent on fires, including suppression and decreasing wildfire risk by reducing vegetation.
“Our budgets have been relatively flat over the last six, seven, eight years and larger percentages of that total are being spent on fire and fire suppression,” Kimbell said.
The Forest Service’s financial struggles have to be placed in context, the chief added.
“We are a nation at war and we’re a nation with a huge budget deficit,” Kimbell said, “so these budget issues are really challenging.”
Read more
April 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
Today the Western Institute for Study of the Environment added a a new sub-site: W.I.S.E. Fire Tracking. The goal is to provide daily updates of large wildfires in the western U.S.
Any questions, suggestions, and/or especially information regarding active wildfires will be sincerely appreciated.
Thank you,
W.I.S.E. Admin
April 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
By BEN GOAD, the Riverside County Press-Enterprise Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Forest Service will be fully staffed this Southern California fire season despite the exodus of scores of agency firefighters, the nation’s top forest official said Tuesday.
But lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing on the Forest Service’s budget said they remain troubled by the high attrition rate of first-year firefighters, and one agency critic said the problem is far worse than officials admit.
Agriculture Department Undersecretary Mark Rey acknowledged that the agency has a problem retaining personnel in the region, particularly as entry-level firefighters leave in droves to take better-paying jobs with municipal fire departments or with Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting entity.
Nearly half of the Forest Service’s first-year firefighters in Southern California — 46.6 percent — left the agency’s employ in 2007. The national attrition rate is 26.6 percent, according to a Forest Service report presented to lawmakers at a hearing Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Agriculture Subcommittee.
The San Bernardino National Forest and adjacent Angeles National Forest — two of the nation’s most fire-threatened forests — had the most resignations of any of California’s 18 forests last year, according the Forest Service report.
Rey announced that the agency is working on a plan to reverse the Southern California trend. But he also said that recruitment levels nationally are sufficient to fill the vacancies created by departing firefighters.
“These positions have to be filled, and the pay scales have to be comparable,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said as she left the hearing.
Under sharp questioning from Feinstein, the subcommittee’s chairwoman, Rey vowed that the agency would indeed fill the positions funded for the region in the federal budget.
But Casey Judd, business manager for the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, a firefighter employee group, said he doubts Rey will be able to keep his word.
“For him to promise that they could staff at the funded level is just irresponsible,” said Judd, who attended the hearing but did not testify. … [more]
April 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—Conservationists want the federal government to take notice of the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse, saying climate change and unchecked livestock grazing are pushing the rare rodent closer to extinction.
The mouse once lived in nearly 100 locations along rivers and streams around New Mexico and in parts of Arizona, but recent surveys have shown that the furry rodent is now found only in about a dozens places in the two states.
The mouse, considered endangered by the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, was recently added to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s list of plants and animals that are candidates for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“We’ve argued that the Fish and Wildlife Service should emergency list this mouse and so we believe that all federal agencies should take steps now to protect the mouse in order to prevent its extinction. It is that imperiled,” said Nicole Rosmarino, director of WildEarth Guardians’ wildlife program. … [more]
March 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
DENVER (MyFOXColorado.com) – The former U.S. Forest Service worker who started the most-destructive wildfire in Colorado history has been ordered to serve 15 years of probation and perform 1,500 hours of community service on state charges.
Terry Barton, who started the 2002 Hayman Fire, was resentenced Thursday in District Court.
Her original 12-year prison sentence was thrown out by the Colorado Court of Appeals in 2004 after the panel ruled the judge who presided over Barton’s trial may have compromised due to the fact that he was evacuated during the fire.
The court also said that the maximum sentence without a jury finding aggravating circumstances was six years – the same as Barton’s federal sentence.
The two sentences were to be served concurrently, which means Barton will have completed her prison terms on June 2. She is currently incarcerated in Texas.
The 2002 Hayman fire burned 138,000 acres in the Pike National Forest, destroying 133 home and 466 outbuildings. More than 8,000 people were evacuated.
Barton pleaded guilty to felony arson. … [more]
March 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
By JOHN CRAMER of the Missoulian
An air tanker drops retardant on the Black Cat fire near Missoula last summer. Environmentalists have been using the issue of aerial fire retardant to force the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its firefighting mission.
Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian
Watch a video of an air tanker at work fighting fires
Using the northern spotted owl as a surrogate, environmentalists took eight years to win a legal victory and the public’s attention in the decade-long effort that stopped old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest’s national forests by the early 1990s.
Today, environmentalists are ahead of that pace in what they anticipate will be another decade-long forest campaign, having scored victories in the courtroom and public spotlight five years into an effort to force the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its firefighting mission and practices.
Rather than using an endangered owl as their icon, environmentalists this time are spotlighting aerial fire retardants, saying the chemical red slurry is an environmental hazard - not a critical firefighting tool, as the Forest Service maintains.
“Stopping the war on fire won’t be as sexy as saving God’s ancient forests - that’s like saving Yosemite or Grand Canyon - but everyone knows the Forest Service’s whole war on fire is ecologically and financially bankrupt,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics and a former Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund resource analyst who helped end old-growth logging in the Pacific Northwest. … [more]
March 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif.—A special panel created after last summer’s Lake Tahoe wildfire warned Friday that another catastrophic blaze is imminent and wants a disaster declaration to hasten fire-protection efforts.
Asking for the emergency status from the president and the governors of California and Nevada was among dozens of recommendations the panel approved.
The California-Nevada Tahoe Basin Fire Commission wants the state and federal governments to free up money quickly, primarily to cut thick stands of trees.
The commission gave unanimous approval to a report containing more than 70 recommendations. Many of them are intended to resolve the bureaucratic infighting among overlapping agencies that has hampered fire-prevention efforts for years.
The report also recommended imposing higher taxes on property owners, requiring home owners to replace wood shingles and upgrading the Tahoe basin’s water systems, which together could cost more than $300 million over 20 years.
California co-chairwoman Kate Dargan, the state’s fire marshal, said the short-term emergency need is much less—under $10 million a year in each of the next five years to clear overgrown forests around communities.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons established the commission after the Angora Fire destroyed 254 homes and caused $140 million in property damage last June in South Lake Tahoe. … [more]
March 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
Property-rights extremists equate McMansions to 9/11 victims
BY TED RALL, a proud New Yorker who had to laugh
NEW YORK—The United States should not build housing. Whole neighborhoods in places like Chicago and Dayton and Oakland and Newark and Memphis are dominated by abandoned houses and apartment buildings. Ten percent of our national housing stock—more than 13 million homes, enough to put roofs over the homeless three times over—are vacant year-round. So why do we let developers bulldoze fields and forests to put up soulless monstrosities?
Several “model houses” at a development bearing the typically atrocious name of “Quinn’s Crossing at Yarrowbay Communities” at the edge of Seattle’s creeping suburban sprawl went up in flames, apparently torched by radical environmentalists. I had two reactions. First, I was reminded of my wonder that such things happen so infrequently.
Then I laughed. I wasn’t alone. Time magazine bemoaned “a notable lack of sympathy for the fate of the homes” among residents of Washington state.
Quinn’s Crossing, says its Web site, was “dedicated to the ethos of putting the earth first.” In this case, putting Mother Earth “first” led the developers in “energy efficient” 4,500-square-feet McMansions. “The houses are out in the middle of nowhere, on land that used to be occupied by beaver dams and environmentally sensitive wetlands; the site sits at the headwaters of Bear Creek, where endangered chinook salmon spawn,” reported Erica C. Barnett for the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger. … [more]
March 22, 2008 | 4 Comments | Topic: Latest Fire News
By DON THOMPSON Associated Press Writer [here]
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Steps to prevent catastrophic wildfires in the Lake Tahoe basin, one of the country’s most treasured natural wonders, have been hampered for years by bureaucratic infighting among agencies that often work at cross-purposes, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
The failure of the agencies to adequately protect the basin was brought to light in June when a wildfire ripped through a thickly forested ravine and destroyed 254 homes near South Lake Tahoe.
Since then, blame has fallen on the overlapping agencies that have environmental and regulatory oversight of the Tahoe basin. A commission established after the fire was scheduled to vote Friday on a report recommending ways to heal the rifts.
The AP’s review showed just how glaring the problems have been over the years.
Using Freedom of Information laws, the AP obtained more than 4,000 pages of documents from local, regional, state and federal agencies involved in planning, environmental protection and fire prevention around Tahoe, the picturesque lake straddling the California-Nevada line.
Most of the documents covered the three years before the wildfire and reveal a tangle of agencies with competing agendas. Efforts to clear trees and brush were delayed - often for years - as agencies bickered over methods and jurisdictional disputes.
The documents also show that while the wildfire heightened the urgency to thin the forest, years of delay have left the basin ripe for a repeat calamity.
March 21, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
A six-year research project is underway in Woodson County, Kansas where Kansas State University scientists are working to determine how viable patch-burn grazing is for raising livestock.
Patch-burn grazing is a fairly new concept in rangeland management, but has been occurring naturally for hundreds of years, said Walt Fick, K-State Research and Extension range management specialist.
Historically, Native Americans purposely started prairie fires, and lightning did the same thing naturally. Bison and other native herbivores were attracted to the new growth that comes up after the land burned; consequently, these animals moved from grazing area to grazing area — searching out the most attractive areas of new growth, Fick said.
Some ranchers are mimicking that grazing pattern by sectioning a large pasture into three or more burn areas.
“Every year, one of those sections is prescribed burned, concentrating the grazing pressure in specific areas of the pasture,” he said. “The cattle are free-roaming over the entire pasture, but tend to gravitate toward the one-third area of the pasture that has been burned, because that is where the most attractive new growth has occurred.”
“When burning, producers may create burn boundaries (fire guards), but using natural breaks would be more efficient because of labor expenses,” he added.
The main purpose of patch-burn grazing is ecology-driven; it has a high potential to increase biodiversity and wildlife habitat. … [more]
March 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News
Jeff Munson, Tahoe Daily Tribune, March 18, 2008
Dozens of recommendations on how to avoid disasters such as last June’s Angora fire will come to a head this week when the California-Nevada Tahoe Basin Fire Commission meets at the South Shore.
With a looming Friday deadline imposed by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, the hand-picked, bi-state commission has met monthly and sometimes twice monthly since August to pore over thousands of documents and hundreds of public comments.
The end result of the commission’s work will be a report that provides recommendations for the protection of those in the Tahoe Basin while preserving the environment, said Todd Ferrara, spokesman for the commission.
At the heart of the matter are recommendations that could change policies or create new ones on how dead and dying trees are removed from the forest and place new responsibilities on homeowners.
The final meetings will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday and at 9 a.m. Friday in the Lake Tahoe Community College boardroom. Final recommendations will be made at Friday’s meeting.
Also at stake is how public agencies such as the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency and the U.S. Forest Service can put measures in place to remove fire fuels in the basin without causing environmental damage to Lake Tahoe.
Finally, the commission will recommend how both states should pay for these policies.
This week’s gathering represents the last set of formal meetings. After Friday, the 70 or so recommendations will go up for a 30-day public review before being sent to the governors for action. … [more]
March 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Latest Fire News, Latest Forest News
A new study has found that California wildfires emit more greenhouse gases than previously believed largely through the post-fire decay of dead wood, a finding that is raising questions about how effective the state’s forests are at storing carbon and slowing global warming.
The study by Thomas Bonnicksen, a retired forestry professor at Texas A&M University, found that four major wildfires – from the Fountain fire near Redding in 1992 to the Angora blaze at Lake Tahoe last year – are responsible for the release of 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, far more than the 2 million tons the state estimates that fires produce on average each year.
“Up until now, we have not fully appreciated the magnitude of the impact of wildfires on climate change,” Bonnicksen said. “This is a very important part of the problem.”
His study, which is not peer-reviewed and has been found lacking by some, is one of a flurry of reports that have begun to explore the critical role that forests play in regulating carbon dioxide, the principal atmospheric gas responsible for global warming. Traditionally, forests have been viewed as green reservoirs of landlocked carbon, soaking up and storing CO2 from the atmosphere in their leaves, needles, roots and soil.
Bonnicksen’s study casts that view into question. Forests today are so overcrowded with spindly, unhealthy trees – partly the result of decades of fire suppression – that as they burn and decay they are turning into an actual source of greenhouse gas pollution.
His study, for example, estimates emissions from just one blaze alone last year, the Moonlight fire in Plumas County, at more than 19.6 million tons, three-quarters of which are expected to occur over the next century as trees killed by the fire decay. That much carbon is roughly equivalent to the emissions from 3.6 million cars for a year.
Overall, California fires are producing so much CO2, he said, that they will defeat the state’s pioneering efforts to respond to climate change by reducing emissions elsewhere.
“No matter what anybody does in California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as long as these forests are burning, they are wasting their time,” Bonnicksen said. … [more]
For the full text of Dr. Bonnicksen’s reports, see W.I.S.E. Forest and Fire Science [here]
March 15, 2008 | 1 Comment | Topic: Latest Climate News, Latest Fire News, Latest Forest News
