Alicia Devine,Tallahassee Democrat, Published Jan. 10, 2020
Wildfire season no longer exists. It is now a year-round event.
So wildfire experts from around the country met at Tallahassee's Tall Timbers Reserve Friday to promote a more robust schedule of prescribed burns in the hopes that they will help mitigate out-of-control blazes.
The members of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council were joined by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, who said given the ravaging fires in California, Tennessee and other states in the past four years, controlled burns had become a priority of the White House.
For almost 20 years this body has been coming together to serve the American people by ensuring effective cooperation in managing wildland fire – across federal, state, tribal, county and municipal jurisdictional lines.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue speaks during a meeting with members of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council at Tall Timbers on Friday, Jan.10, 2020. (Photo: Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat)
"It's just a matter of a lightning strike or a rogue arsonist somewhere and you could be the next area that has the Paradise, California, issues," Perdue said during the meeting.
He said his office was looking to increase the number of controlled burns on federal lands amid growing attention on mitigation. A White House round-table convened in 2016 to call attention to the growing wildfire issue implemented the Obama administration's Wildland-Urban Interface Federal Risk Management executive order.
"We are all in," Perdue said.
In 2016, fires ripped through the Tennessee valley, torching more than 17,000 acres and killing 14 in Gatlinburg. More than 2,400 structures were damaged or burned to a total loss. Two years later 85 people died and more than 18,800 structures were destroyed in a fire that destroyed Paradise.
The influx of ravaging wildfires led the Fire Leadership Council to develop the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, focusing on resilient landscapes, fire adapted communities, and safe and effective wildfire response. Tall Timbers CEO and Research Director Bill Palmer is a member of the council.
The members of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council were joined by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue for a meeting at Tall Timbers in Tallahassee on Friday, Jan. 10, 2020. (Photo: Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat)
The 2,800-acre property north of Tallahassee has become a national leader in research of fire-dependent ecosystems where prescribed fires, both for land management and trainings, have been conducted for hundreds of years.
Reach photojournalist Alicia Devine at adevine@tallahassee.com or on Instagram @adevinephotography.
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Important Numbers From 2019
February 4, 2020 / wildfirelessons
By Travis Dotson
Here are some numbers from 2019. That is all, just numbers.
We tally stuff up at the end of each year to inform our focus areas in the coming year.
Are the numbers useful? Well, only if they are used. (That is a super subtle nudge for you to DO something with the information below.)
9 Fatalities in 2019
We all participate in the activities listed above — have you gamed-out a plan for a bad day during normal ops?
16 Burn Injuries and 14 Hit by Tree Incidents in 2019
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Everyone Goes Home in the Wildland Introduction Session - Manchester
March 28, 2020—March 29, 2020
9:00 AM-4:00 PM
Hilton Garden Inn Manchester Downtown
101 South Commercial Street
Manchester, NH 03101
Over the last 15 years, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation’s Everyone Goes Home® program has gained traction in improving firefighter health and safety, particularly in reducing rates of line-of-duty death and injury. However, until recently, EGH and its core 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives were perceived as being relevant only to the structural firefighting community.
To broaden the program’s applicability, the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation recently performed a broad-scale needs assessment to identify specific risk factors and sources of support within the wildland fire community. From this assessment, which included surveys, gathering of input at national, regional, and state wildland fire events, and six wildland fire “listening sessions” held across the country, the NFFF built a plan to develop and expand EGH programming to include firefighters whose primary vocation is wildland fire, as well as those who respond infrequently to such events.
Now, the NFFF will be hosting four regional EGH in the Wildland Introduction Sessions. These events will be relevant to personnel that we traditionally think of as wildland firefighters – representatives of national natural resource management organizations, state, county, and local forestry departments, and contract agencies, as well as members of volunteer, combination, and career structural departments with wildland and wildland – urban interface fire responsibilities.
Each session will be open to up to 25 participants, and we especially encourage company officer/crew boss level personnel to attend. These sessions are meant to be interactive, highly participatory, and engaging. The intent is to “build bridges” as well as building understanding. Participants should expect to spend significant time interacting with other attendees. There is no charge to attend, and some funding is available to provide travel support.
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LANDFIRE Update
| What to expect from LANDFIRE in 2020 |
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LF Remap
Users have probably noticed the improvements in our LF Remap products. With that in mind, LF is building upon the momentum from 2019 to release the remaining two LF Remap Geographic Areas for CONUS, Southeastern and Northeastern (see image on the right), on or ahead of schedule. Look for these products in summer 2020.
Once CONUS has been completed, LF's plans are to: |
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- provide updated capable fuel products for all of CONUS for the 2020 effective year
- complete prototyping for OCONUS areas (Hawaii, Insular Areas, and Alaska)
- look into providing the entire LF Remap Events Geodatabase ahead of schedule, to coincide with the completion of CONUS
- continue developing plans for future Update versions
- continue to produce MoD-FIS for the Great Basin and Southwestern United States (Spring, Summer, Fall) for wet/dry vegetation conditions
See the complete January 2020 LANDFIRE Postcard
LANDFIRE Helpdesk
| The LANDFIRE Program is a cooperative agreement between the USDA Forest Service, agencies of the Department of the Interior, and The Nature Conservancy. In accordance with Federal law and U.S. Department of Agriculture policy, the Program is prohibited from discriminating on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. |
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New Fire Reporting System is Coming!
According to the InFORM website: “The Interagency Fire Occurrence Reporting Modules (InFORM) will drastically streamline the business of wildland fire reporting. New and improved reporting capabilities are being developed for state and federal wildland fire management agencies that leverage an interagency data exchange environment and spatial technologies to derive data. The InFORM suite offers applications for users both in the field and in the office. This modernization effort will eliminate redundant data entry while also improving the quality and completeness of that data and making it easier for all to access.”
InFORM consists of four applications currently: Survey 123, Collector, Inspector, and Trespass. Inspector is the primary application replacing other federal wildfire reporting applications (WFMI, Firestat, and eventually FMIS). Survey 123 allows incidents to enter the IRWIN data stream for those units that don’t use WildCAD (see agency specific guidance). Collector provides capabilities for collection of spatial incident data. In the near future, Trespass will capture data specific to human caused fires.
Information concerning InFORM can be found at: https://sites.google.com/firenet.gov/inform-project/home [see screenshot above]. For the 2020 fire season, it’s expected that all fire reports will be reported in InFORM. You will still be able to get into FIRESTAT to “cleanup and edit” current and past fire reports BUT the new database of record for fire reports will be InFORM.
Here is the video link for training as well as a wealth of other info on the InFORM project - https://sites.google.com/firenet.gov/inform-project/tips/videos.
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Meetings and Trainings
[See the NE RSC Events Calendar for more details]
REGIONAL
March 28-29, 2020: Everyone Goes Home® in the Wildland Introduction Session, Manchester, NH PLEASE REGISTER BY FEBRUARY 28, 2020
May 4-17, 2020: Minnesota Northwoods Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX)
June 16-18, 2020: NE-MW Fire Supervisors Committee Meeting, Burlington, VT
NATIONAL
March 23-26, 2020: 2020 Hazard Mitigation Partners Workshop, National Emergency Management Institute - Emmitsburg, Maryland
March 24–26, 2020: IAFC's Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Conference, Peppermill Resort | Reno, NV
April 20-24, 2020: 3rd International Smoke Symposium, Raleigh, NC
May 2, 2020: Wildfire Community Preparedness Day
October 26-30, 2020: 4th Annual National Cohesive Strategy Workshop, Asheville, North Carolina
October 26-November 6, 2020: Southern Blue Ridge TREX, Pickens, SC
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The Northeast Regional Strategy Committee (NE RSC) delivers articles and stories each month that demonstrate the collaborative efforts of agencies, organizations and communities supporting and promoting the three goals of the Cohesive Strategy: Restoring Resilient Landscapes, Creating Fire Adapted Communities and Responding to Wildfire.
This news update is our primary communication tool with our partners and the public. Looking for more Northeast Region Cohesive Strategy information or past published news update issues? Go to: http://northeasternwildfire.net
| GOT NEWS? Does your agency, organization or community have a wildland fire management project or event you'd like to see featured in the NE RSC News Update? Tell us about it! Submissions should be sent by the end of each month to appear in the next monthly issue. Just email to Larry Mastic. |
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