Of Fire Tower & Volunteers
I wasn’t planning on another fire tower post today, then I stumbled on this press release today:
The Angeles National Forest Fire Lookout Association is currently seeking individuals for its volunteer Fire Lookout Program. The group works to restore, maintain and staff historic fire lookout towers in the San Gabriel Mountains. Volunteers interpret the natural and cultural history of fire lookouts and the surrounding Forest lands for visitors and help disseminate information on current fire conditions.
Fire lookout towers, one of the primary means by which forest fires were reported in the early 1900s, were closed on the Angeles National Forest in the 1980s. However, Vetter Mountain Lookout, off Highway 2, was reopened by the U.S. Forest Service and Fire Lookout Association in 1998, as part of a historical preservation project. Slide Mountain Lookout, located above Pyramid Lake off Interstate 5, was reopened in 2003.
Despite newer technologies being used by the U.S. Forest Service to detect fires, volunteers at these lookouts continue to practice vigilance and provide a valuable contribution to the conservation of National Forest lands.
- USFS Volunteer Fire Lookout Charles White at the Osborne Fire Finder taken June 15, 2003 while on duty at Vetter Mountain Lookout in the Angeles National Forest.
(c) Photo by: Charles White
Do you have to take a second thought I’d be all over that if (God forbid) I lived in L.A.?
Linking this back to New England, there is an active volunteer fire tower program in southern Maine, operating the towers at Mount Agamenticus, Mount Hope and Ossipee Hill. Here’s an article from the Press Herald (archive). Maine closed their state fire tower network in 1991, deciding aircraft were more cost effective. This year, as covered in this post, they further reduced their aircraft coverage replacing the contractors with the Civil Air Patrol.
New Hampshire was vigorously defending their still state staffed towers in the 2004 Concord Monitor article (archive), but in 2009 they reduced the staffing by laying off the full time fire tower staff and offering them part-time positions to manage the towers on high danger days as detailed here (archive).
In addition to the 16 state towers in New Hampshire, a 17th is municipally manned by a career firefighter from Moultonborough, which in 1987 re-opened a tower the state had closed in 1981. Ironically, in 1988 Moultonborough had a 316 acre forest fire, the largest in New Hampshire since a 1952 fire in Moultonborough covered 2,500 acres.
Massachusetts has, by far, the largest and most active fire tower system in use in New England. You can see a nice video here on the Ludlow fire tower (archive). Although the Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control does not staff all their towers all the time, they have some 43 towers available to staff as local fire conditions dictate.
Rhode Island doesn’t currently use their towers, although at least one is opened up from time to time for open houses (archive). The others, from a casual observation driving by, are slowly rusting away. Connecticut has removed all their purpose built forest fire towers, although some facilities (such as the observatory on top of the UConn water tower) that weren’t fire specific remain. While I don’t believe any Vermont towers remain in service, many still stand and unlike those in southern New England are open to the public to climb:
(I do have that archived as VT_Fire_Tower_Hike_WCAX_200806261758015082_3647538.flv in case the video disappears).
