i've been posting a lot of fire information on Facebook: fires in alaska, greece, spain, norther alberta, etc. doing this bit of research interesting. for example, 169 lookouts in california on the national register, the vast majority unused. a 30 year fireman argued they aren't needed everywhere. i think that remains to be seen.
of course, in 2004 the california division of forestry decided they weren't needed anywhere. one of those is still standing, still unstaffed, above the 27,000 charred homes of the campfire in paradise, california, where almost a hundred people died. it was labeled as one of the 'unnecessary lookouts'. sure the smoke showed pretty quickly a fire was afoot, but nobody was there to tell residents how fast it was burning and where.
the lookout job is not just to first see a fire, it's to confirm or deny reports from the cellphones riding the roads, to say where exactly the fire is and how fast it's growing, what the wind is doing. this monitoring is as important if not more so than the first say. this certainly would have been true in paradise. they did have a camera on the tower, the alarm turned off due to it giving too many false alarms.
one thing is: the nature of fire is changing, becoming hotter and more unpredictable. the campfire burned at 1,200 degrees, the temperature it takes to incinerate bodies. no wonder they had trouble identifying the dead. when i come to work now, driving from chico, i go above the canyon where the the campfire started. the first time it gave me a chill. thousands of acres look like the sahara. everything torched, the ground bare. i've seen a lot of fires, but never one that devastating.
and seeing one young firefighter started the ongoing conflagration in canada, i looked up the number of arson fires in california. they average about 8000 a year. al-queda has asked for fire to be used as a weapon. terror incidents in the u.s., other than 9/ll, wildcat strikes by individuals. alas, seeing what one person in alberta could do, that's not exactly re-assuring.
in 2004 the california division of forestry closed all their lookouts, all 77 of them, saying it would save lots of money. two years later they started leasing huge DC10 airplanes, 5 million dollars a season plus 5,5000 dollars an hour. ONE PLANE AT THAT PRICE WOULD HAVE RUN THEIR LOOKOUT SYSTEM FOR SIX YEARS. what a boondoggle, basically meant to impress the public and the media. these planes have very limited use in the mountains, unable to fly low in canyons.
and the latest news about what the state is doing to update their fire protection mainly includes buying more expensive planes, not a word about lookouts, despite the growth of more huge conflagrations, the biggest ever just last year, a half a million acres. we've had big fires on this forest, but they didn't affect people. three years ago a local arsonist lit 24 fires and almost burned down the town of quincy. had the winds come up, it would have been the first campfire in the news.
unfortunately, if nothing happens dramatically this year, all will be forgotten until more people get killed. even this year, on this forest, where the campfire started, the fire budget has been cut. yes, i think we're still living in a fantasy land where technology expected to save us from disaster and despite the evidence of global warming.
