Lessons Reinforced: Myrtle Beach fire
This is a good story for an officer to open a training meeting or a kitchen table session with:
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C.—South Carolina’s forest fire chief said Friday that local firefighters thought they’d extinguished a yard blaze last weekend that rekindled days later, destroying some 70 homes and charring 31 square miles near Myrtle Beach. Officials said homes were still being threatened by the flames.
Forestry Commission Forest Protection Chief Darryl Jones said he did not know which local agency responded to the yard fire last weekend. He said firefighters doused the blaze with water and thought it was out, and that the person who is being fined for burning the debris is to blame.
He said it’s common for brush fires to appear to be out but then smolder underground and rekindle.
“The fire department didn’t start the fire.” Jones said. “Someone lit it and somebody let it escape and that’s where this all started.”
Since I first wrote this post, there has been some mild counter-charging going on between the homeowner, SC Forestry, and Horry County Fire:
SC woman: Don’t blame husband for wildfire
Posted: Apr 24, 2009 3:22 PM EDT Updated: Apr 26, 2009 8:48 PM EDT
CONWAY, SC (WMBF) – The wife of a man who started a South Carolina trash fire that is blamed for igniting a raging wildfire that has destroyed more than 20,000 acres of land says her family did everything they could to put out the weekend blaze.
Megan Brogan, whose husband Mark Torchi has been ticketed in connection to the Horry County wildfire, says he called 911 when the trash he was burning got out of control. She says Horry County firefighters responded, but did nothing to fight the fire and her family doused it with a hose.
“They told us ‘Don’t worry about it. The fire is extintuished,’” Brogan told WMBF News on Sunday afternoon. “There was no fire, no smoke, no smoldering for four days.”
Horry County Fire Rescue spokesman Todd Cartner, however, is defending the actions of his company’s firefighters Friday night.
Cartner says according to 911 records, responders were dispatched to the Torchi home, located on Woodlawn Drive, twice last Saturday. Upon arrival to the first call, scanner traffic archives for Horry County show the residents called back to emergency dispatch, cancelling the call.
Horry County Fire Rescue policy shows that despite a residence cancelling a call, fire engines still respond. After arriving, responders deemed the fire Torchi was burning was under control.
An hour later, fire fighters responded to the residence a second time, and that time doused the blaze with water. Responders were on scene for an hour and a half, Cartner noted.
According to Horry County Fire Rescue records, the fire was completely extinguished by the fire department on the second visit to the Woodlawn Drive residence. Cartner says no other calls were placed from that address regarding a fire until Wednesday at 12:01 p.m.
When I first joined the Chiefs really emphasized raking a good line around any brush / woods fire. Grass not really, but anywhere leaves were present that could keep embers sheltered from water.
With Class A & CAFS we got away from that being an ironclad rule, and I don’t think that’s unreasonable in most situations. Put 20′ of white, wet stuff down around the perimeter it’s going to seriously complicate any re-kindle. Gotta be white, wet alone is not good enough as it could run off too easily and leave dry patches under the leaves.
But you should always consider, based on your local fire behavior, whether you should make a line.
There’s times even that CAFS and even making a line is simply not good enough. In my area that’s middle of the summer fires. Those are the ones that don’t cover much surface area, but will smoulder deep along roots and re-emerge.
A foam line doesn’t mean much, ’cause the fire may remerge a day or two later and take off on the surface that’s dried out again. So then you need to pick a and rake a line say 50′ out from the existing perimeter and hope no fire pops up outside of that. But you can’t call it quits with just that.
Return the next morning and afternoon, and maybe the next, at least to check the area for contiuing signs of fire. I know we’ve had some summer fires where we just left the hoses to the road in place for most of a week so each afternoon the crews could return and wet down and grub up some more whatever had started smouldering overnight.
