Fire

On the Move

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 23:09:39 +0000

On the Move Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/26/2018 - 16:09

Christie Sounart

For acrobat Marisa Kellogg (IntlAf’10), adventure is a continuous call.

Take, for instance, the time she was part of Boulder’s AscenDance Project, a group of dancers who perform a choreographed routine on a rock wall — without ropes.

Circus filled a void gymnastics left.

Or the period in 2016 she spent in the jungles of Colombia teaching acrobatics in Spanish. Or last year, when she helped lead a three-week children’s circus camp in the tiny town of Talkeetna, Alaska, population 876.

“Movement is a lifestyle for me,” said Kellogg, 28, who started gymnastics when she was four. “To me it’s a form of play — using and challenging my body in different ways for optimal physical and mental well-being.”

Originally from Washington, D.C., Kellogg is manager of the Fractal Tribe, a professional circus arts troupe based at the Boulder Circus Center. The group combines theatrics with dance, fire, acrobatics, aerial arts and music for audiences at festivals, theaters and conventions.

“We are made up of scientists, programmers, healers, teachers and activists,” said Kellogg, who lives full-time at the center, located on Boulder’s 26th Street, near Jay Road.

Kellogg’s competitive gymnastics career was sidelined by a back injury when she was 16 years old. But she still craved active performance and found an outlet in Boulder.

“Circus filled a void that gymnastics left,” said Kellogg. In performances, she does everything from partner acrobatics — including counter balances and adagios — to hand balancing. At Colorado’s Arise music festival in August 2017, she performed a fire dancing set on stage.

“I’ve performed with fire fans, palm torches, double staffs and a fire hoop,” she said. “I’ve gotten used to the smell of burnt hair.”

Off stage, Kellogg teaches adult gymnastics and circus classes. She helps her students develop better spatial and body awareness through activities like handstands, strength development and partner moves.

“Marisa brings her passion for community, play and collaboration into everything that she does,” said Fractal Tribe producer Lani Gordon. “Her movement and performance are a direct representation of her personality: Focused, committed, connected and skillful.”

For Kellogg, part of the job is to be ready for the unexpected. “Once, we performed outdoors for a fire festival in below freezing temperatures, and it was snowing so hard the stage turned into an ice rink,” she said. “The obstacles that come up are part of the process. Unless someone’s safety is at risk, the show must go on!”

Photo courtesy Steve Stoytchev Photography

For acrobat Marisa Kellogg, adventure is a continuous call.

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Megafire

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 20:00:00 +0000

Megafire Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 13:00

Michael Kodas

I didn’t intend to go to prison or to get overrun at a wildfire. I also didn’t plan to spend years of my life chasing “megafires.”

I was just excited to see my first wildfire.

It was 1986 and I was a young photojournalist in Connecticut trying to document a blaze reported over the police scanner in my car.

When I saw the smoke, I climbed over a couple barbed-wire fences to photograph a handful of men digging a line of dirt around a small grassfire. But as I focused my camera, I heard angry shouts and saw a bulldozer-sized man with a badge running at me. I’d strayed onto the grounds of a state prison. The firefighters were all inmates. The guard tackled me.

“You can’t just walk in,” he screamed. “And they can’t just walk out.”

Then the blaze blew up, threatening to overtake a firefighting inmate. I tried to photograph him running for his life, fully expecting the guard to grab the camera or handcuff me. Instead, he picked me up, pointed me at the action and stepped back. I photographed as the conflagration bore down on the prisoner.

Forest Service scientists predict that annual acres burned could reach 20 million in the decades ahead.

Suddenly, the wind shifted and the flames subsided. Spared, he went back to work and the guard led me away. I still have the photograph.

While that fire was tiny, the incident sparked my enduring curiosity about the phenomenon of wildfire, which has since grown much worse — especially in the American West, where I live today.

With as many as 30,000 people joining the battle against wildfires during busy fire seasons — by October, more land had burned in 2017 than in all but two years since national recordkeeping began — the U.S. must get firefighters wherever it can: Correctional facilities, the National Guard, the Air Force Reserve, battalions of the U.S. Army and even Australia and New Zealand.

The growing demand for firefighters reflects a new reality. In the 1970s around 3 million acres of U.S. land burned in an average year. During the first decade of this century, that figure topped 7 million. Prior to 1995, the U.S. annually averaged less than one fire exceeding 100,000 acres in size — the U.S. Forest Service’s criteria for a “megafire.” Between 2005 and 2014, the nation averaged 9.8 fires of that size yearly.

It’s not just trees burning. Seven times more homes burn in wildfires today than did in the 1970s. Budgets are going up in smoke, too. In 1995 the U.S. Forest Service spent 16 percent of its funding on wildfires. In 2015 it was 52 percent.

And some 85 percent of firefighting costs are related to less than 2 percent of the fires — the epic conflagrations known as megafires.

But what exactly is a megafire? As a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ in 2009, I started trying to figure that out by pursuing the biggest, most destructive fires on Earth.

I visited the scene of the Black Saturday fires in Australia that killed 173 people with an explosive force equivalent, by some measures, to 1,500 of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. The story there was the climate, which drove temperatures and drought so severe that the fire risk was literally off the nation’s fire danger scale.

In Israel, I attended memorial services for the Mount Carmel fires that killed 44 people, including a police commissioner, the police chief of Haifa, 36 prison guards and a 16-year-old volunteer firefighter whose mother drove him to the fire because he didn’t have a driver’s license yet. In that nation, where nearly 70 percent of the forests were planted in the last century, the new abundance of trees has resulted in thousands of wildfires in a landscape with no history of natural fire.

In Indonesia I witnessed fires so vast that, for 40 days in 2015, they released more greenhouse gases than the entire U.S. economy. Smoke from those fires sent half a million people to the hospital. Those huge fires grew out of small blazes set by farmers and multinational corporations to clear land for fields producing goods consumed around the world, most notably palm oil, which can be found in about half the items in any U.S. grocery store.

Statistics

1995

16%

of U.S. Forest Service’s funding spent on wildfires

2015

52%

of U.S. Forest Service's funding spent on wildfires

1970

acres of U.S. land burned in an average year

2050

20M

acres could burn

1997-2017

84%

of wildfires are started by humans

In June 2013, just a day after I returned to Colorado from overseas, a tweet from a Boulder firefighter led me to reconsider how we’ve been defining megafire.

“19 Firefighters Dead While Battling Arizona Wildfire,” it read.

That led to a dozen reporting trips to Prescott, Ariz., home of the Granite Mountain Hotshots before all but one member of that elite firefighting crew was killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire. Afterward, I came to measure megafires more by their effects than their size.

By Arizona standards, the Yarnell Hill Fire was tiny. Yet it destroyed more than 100 homes and killed 19 of the nation’s best wildland firefighters, the greatest loss of firefighter lives since 9/11. Each of the drivers of the huge fires I’d seen overseas — the warming and drying climate, forestry practices that made woodlands more prone to intense burns, human development that introduced new fuels and sparks to vegetated wildlands — challenged the doomed hotshots.

I saw small but unusually volatile fires take lives, destroy homes and damage infrastructure and resources. Those, I realized, were far more “mega” than blazes of 100,000 acres burning in remote wildernesses, as they always have.

Colorado, for instance, broke its “most destructive” fire record four times in four years, beginning with the Fourmile Canyon Fire that exploded outside Boulder on Labor Day, 2010. None of those devastating fires, including the Waldo Canyon Fire that burned into the city of Colorado Springs, met the Forest Service’s megafire criterion.

My original definition of megafire was the first of many misconceptions I abandoned during a seven-year-long wildfire reporting project, often with the help of CU researchers.

When I started researching megafires, I believed that the decades during which the U.S. was extinguishing every natural wildfire had left the nation’s forests overgrown with too much woody fuel, driving the increase in wildfire. But research by Tom Veblen, who runs ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Biogeography Lab, and Rosemary Sherriff (PhDGeog’04) showed that just 16 percent of the ponderosa pine forests on Colorado’s Front Range showed increased fire severity due to fuels building up after past fires were extinguished. Most of the rest of those forests have always been prone to severe fires. That’s something to consider before we build houses in there.

It's now hard to see wildfires as purely natural disasters.

I thought the vast swaths of dead lodgepole pines left behind by beetle infestations couldn’t help but make wildfires worse. But studies by Veblen and Tania Schoennagel, a researcher with CU’s geography department and INSTARR, showed that beetle-killed trees weren’t changing the behavior of fires much.

And it was hard to continue thinking of wildfires as purely natural disasters after research by Jennifer Balch of CU’s Earth Lab showed that over two decades, humans started 84 percent of them.

With Forest Service scientists predicting that the amount of land burning in the United States will double in coming decades — to 20 million acres a year — it’s important that the nation sort through the myths about wildfires, regardless of whether they meet an arbitrary definition of megafire.

For the inmate firefighter I photographed decades ago, I’m sure the tiny grassfire that nearly burned him alive was “mega” enough.

The 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire near Prescott, Ariz., killed 19 of the nation's most elite wildland firefighters.

Michael Kodas is associate director of ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Center for Environmental Journalism. This story is adapted from his most recent book, Megafire.

Photos courtesy Michael Kodas

Wildfire is getting worse. A report from the front lines.

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Infographic: Wildfire

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Infographic: Wildfire Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 10:00

Getting Worse

Wildfires are growing more destructive in the United States, especially but not only in the American West. In 2015, a record 10 million U.S. acres burned, including tens of thousands in Colorado. Tennessee experienced one of its worst wildfires in 2016.

The blazes will likely become more costly in the U.S. and abroad, according to Michael Kodas, associate director of ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s Center for Environmental Journalism and author of the new book Megafire. In one recent year, 75 million acres burned in Russia alone.

Wildfire Facts

$3 billion
average annual amount U.S. governement spent on wildfires in decade before 2013, up from $1 billion in 1990s.
19 firefighters
killed in Yarnell Hill Fire, southwest of Prescott, Ariz., June 30, 2013
78 days longer
annual wilfire season in western U.S., 2015 vs. 1970
44 million
U.S. homes located near "fire-prone open space"

“The biggest and baddest of them are still to come.” — Michael Kodas

Major Factors Contributing to Wildfires:

Counterproductive political and economic decisions about wildfire
Global warming
Too much vegetaion — fuel for fires — due to forest management practices
Increased human development in or near wildfire-prone areas

Sources: Megafire, Michael Kodas, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

Wildfires are growing more destructive in the United States, especially but not only in the American West.

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Wildfire's Human Touch

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 06:00:00 +0000

Wildfire's Human Touch Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/01/2017 - 00:00

Trent Knoss

Wildfires can happen naturally — but in the U.S., humans start most of them

Jennifer Balch thinks a lot about a millennia-old question: How can humans coexist with fire’s devastating power?

The U.S. has experienced some of its largest wildfires in recent years, and her research shows that humans bear much of the blame.

In a 2017 study, the ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ geographer found that humans ignited 84 percent of American wildfires from 1992 to 2012, making fire season a year-round phenomenon and increasing annual firefighting costs to $2 billion.

The comprehensive study underscored the extent that humans can — and do —affect the landscape with fire.

“Fire is an integral part of human existence,” said Balch, who directs the campus’ Earth Lab. “But we are also vulnerable to it.”

Americans raised on Smokey the Bear’s warnings might assume all wildfires should be eliminated. But Balch said some burns can be helpful.

“There’s a misconception that fire is unnatural in the ecosystem, but it’s more complex than that,” she said.

Balch began researching wildfire in southern Venezuela in 2002. There the indigenous Pemón tribe deliberately burns overgrowth to keep it from fueling large wildfires. The U.S. may need to intensify its use of proactive, managed burns to curb wildfire destruction, she said.

Balch next plans to use satellite technology and terrestrial mapping to identify areas where humans and wildfires are likely to overlap.

Illustration by Richard Mia Collection

Wildfires can happen naturally — but in the U.S., humans start most of them

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Arson Investigator

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 23:56:00 +0000

Arson Investigator Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/01/2016 - 16:56

Ken McConnellogue

George Codding has looked at fire from many angles — as firefighter, prosecutor and now as head of a global group of fire investigators.

“There is science involved in the investigation, even if you find someone running from the scene with gas cans wearing black clothing,” he said. “Sometimes things get clearly criminal, but you’ve got to be rigorous in how you approach it.”

There are tens of thousands of suspected arsons in the United States every year. As president of the 9,000-member International Association of Arson Investigators (IAAI), Codding (IntlAf, PolSci’84; Law’89) is leading the charge to further professionalize examination of a crime that has been around since shortly after man discovered fire.

A top goal is ensuring that investigations are as scientific as can be.

Like all good scientists, fire investigators form a hypothesis about how a fire started and then test it, Codding said. They follow patterns and examine chemical traces, considering everything from the properties of flammable liquids to how polyester clothes burn.

“Fires leave a lot of patterns and evidence, but these have to be evaluated cautiously,” said Codding, a volunteer investigator with the Louisville, Colo., Fire Department whose day job is senior assistant attorney general for the State of Colorado. “As a fire develops, early patterns are often obscured or overwhelmed by later ones.”

It’s essential, he said, that “the science is good.”

Codding (whose father, George Codding Jr., directed ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ’s International Affairs program from 1965 to 1993) took an early interest in fire, joining Boulder’s Cherryvale (now Rocky Mountain) Volunteer Fire Department just after high school. He kept up with firefighting as an undergraduate and law student at CU, and long afterward.

“I remember doing response calls when I was taking classes at the Fleming Law Building,” he said.

After Codding joined the Boulder district attorney’s office in 1996, then-DA Alex Hunter encouraged his interest in arson investigations. This led to his involvement with IAAI.

The group joins fire departments, police, scientists, engineers, private investigators and insurance companies, all with the common goal of finding answers to a crime typically driven by revenge, mischief or monetary gain. The organization focuses on training and outreach through 79 chapters worldwide.

Codding, who became president this year, has traveled widely giving talks about fire investigation — including one in Brazil for which he learned enough Portuguese to present for nearly an hour. (He also speaks French and Spanish.)

As fire science has improved, it has generated concerns that some arson convictions rest on shaky evidence; the IAAI serves as an expert resource when old cases are revisited.

Among the most notorious was that of Todd Willingham, a Texan convicted of murder in a 1991 fire that killed his three young children. After Willingham was executed, key evidence was called into question.

That case underscored the high stakes of fire investigators’ work, Codding said.

“Fairness and justice require that criminal arson convictions have a strong basis in fact and science,” he said.

Photo courtesy George Codding

George Codding has looked at fire from many angles — as firefighter, prosecutor and now as head of a global group of fire investigators.

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Now – March 2017

Anonymous — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 20:51:00 +0000

Now – March 2017 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/01/2016 - 14:51

Wildfires burned about 2 million acres in the United States in the early months of 2017. Here a slurry bomber drops retardant on the Sunshine Canyon fire west of downtown Boulder on Sunday, March 19.

No one was injured and no buildings were destroyed. Firefighters fully contained the 74-acre fire by the next afternoon. But residents of more than 400 homes were forced to evacuate temporarily.

The wildfire likely began as a campfire, investigators said.

Indeed, humans start most U.S. wildfires — 84 percent of them from 1992 to 2012, according to recent research by ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ scientists. See page 7.

Photo by Paul Aiken/Daily Camera

Wildfires burned about 2 million acres in the United States in the early months of 2017.

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