WHEN DO YOU ORDER RESIDENTS TO IMMEDIATELY EVACUATE?Įmergency managers consider fire behavior, predicted weather and the amount of time it will take to evacuate, when making the decision to order people to leave, Lane said. An operations section chief then devises the strategy for the operational firefighting effort. The commander creates a set of objectives, which guides the command and general staff. Larger fires, like the ones the Washington state Department of Natural Resources responds to, are assigned an incident commander, said Janet Pearce, agency spokeswoman. More than 95% of all fires are smaller Type 4 or 5 wildfires and are quickly put out by local firefighters. Wildfires get one of five ratings, with Type 5 the least dangerous and Type 1 the most dangerous. WHO LEADS A PARTICULAR FIREFIGHTING EFFORT? “Separating fuel from fire is what stops them,” he said.

“That’s to separate the fuel from the fire.”įirefighters also get help when the flames burn toward a river, a rocky area or a road. “Every fire has to have a dirt trail around it,” Lane said. WHY DO FIREFIGHTERS SPEND SO MUCH TIME DIGGING LINES? Most of the time the name reflects a nearby geographic feature, such as a creek or valley.Ĭalifornia’s massive Dixie Fire, for instance, was named after the road where it started on July 14.

Usually a fire is named by the first unit of firefighters on the scene. If the homeowner keeps brush well away from a home prior to a fire that is a big help, Lane said. Sometimes they will burn out the vegetation around a house to starve an approaching wildfire. Usually a fire crew will spray water around a house to protect it. Houses with wooden roofs and lots of flammable vegetation around them are hardest to save. Lane said the building material used on a house, and the nearby vegetation, are big factors in determining if a house can be saved when fire approaches. “With grass, a little rain and it goes out,” Lane said. Fires in timberlands don’t grow as fast, but they are more difficult to extinguish. Wildfires in grassland tend to grow more quickly, and are more susceptible to expanding when there are high winds, Lane said. “We are pretty successful in the morning, late evening or overnight,” Lane said.ĪRE WILDFIRES HARDER TO BATTLE IN TIMBER OR GRASSLANDS?ĭry lightning puts dozens of fires on the landscape, Lane said, and weather is a major factor in their spread. Generally the heat of a summer day is not the best time to fight wildfires. WHAT IS THE BEST TIME OF DAY TO ATTACK A BLAZE? They can use satellite imagery to plot the course of smoke and ash. There are 800 such cameras scattered across California, Nevada and Oregon.įire managers also routinely summon military drones to fly over fires at night, using heat imaging to map their boundaries and hot spots. When it comes to early detection, one innovation is replacing fire lookout towers staffed by humans with cameras in remote areas, many of them in high-definition and armed with artificial intelligence to discern a smoke plume from morning fog. “It takes boots on the ground.”Īircraft also can face numerous visibility limitations when trying to make water drops on a wildfire. Cal Fire, California’s firefighting agency, keeps an average of 95% of blazes to 10 acres (4 hectares) or less.īut Lane said aircraft alone are usually not enough to extinguish a fire. The goal is to keep them from erupting into megafires.

“You want to hit a fire quick so it stays small,” Lane said. Planes or helicopters are used if a wildfire is burning too intensely to send in ground forces, or if aircraft are the best way to deliver water or retardant, Lane said. He joined Washington’s natural resources agency in 2019.Īlso, wildfires sometimes burn in areas where it is unsafe to put firefighters. Sometimes fires fit a beneficial land management goal, like when they burn in a wilderness area or national park.įires are part of the natural forest cycle, and “at times that’s the right approach,” said Lane, who is in his 35th season as a firefighter, much of that spent in western Oregon. WHY DO FIRE MANAGERS LET SOME WILDFIRES BURN? Russ Lane, fire operations chief for the Washington state Department of Natural Resources, explains how some key firefighting decisions are made:

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