The tall “cattails” or reeds in the picture are phragmites. Phrags are an odd duck — in the last decade and a half or so they’ve become much more aggressive in colonizing habitats, growing faster and denser then in the past. There are native North American phrags, but one prominent theory is there is now an invasive but closely related species from Europe that is simply far out competing the native fauna.

As the pictures show, they can present one heck of a fire hazard. We’re also in a mild to moderate drought including the metro NYC area. Fires like these do seem to be common around cities in the northeast, where phragmites grow very well in nearby wetlands and tend to be spectacular for their heavy flames and loom up.

Those who have read this blog know I have two themes that have been developing over the years.

One is know your fuels and conditions — most of our brush fires are no big deal, but they can surprise folks with unexpected intensity if you don’t recognize critical situations. The body language is pretty clear, these guys got surprised.

Second is most of us municipal firefighters in the northeast — career and volunteer — tend to work harder and not smarter at brush fires. From the photos this looks like an ideal place to use a road flare to light a back burn. The fire was going to burn to the road anyways, you’re not going to go walking in wetlands to bring the fight to the fire, there’s no obvious exposures (people, structures, valuable plants) — just help the fire achieve what is going to happen and stand back and relax unless there are spot fires that cross the road that need a small handline to knock down. Of course, that’s not something to just wing one day — using a back burn as a tactic needs to be carefully thought about before being used, and it should be trained on as a tactic so everyone involved knows to expect it as a potential option.

It’s burning in a white pine, red pine, and jack pine area of Huron National Forest and adjacent areas. Wildland Fire Today has some good posts here, here, here, here, and here.

That may not be quite typical of southern New England in how large of areas are pine dominated, although it looks a lot more like southern Maine. But it’s burning in moderate winds and low humidity (14%) that is very common in New England, as well as flat terrain. These are conditions much more like New England then you see in fires out west.

Note the spotting that looks perhaps a mile ahead of the main fire line.

This is a good presentation on spotting, archived here.

“Close In” spotting is stuff that might go a few feet — say cross a 4′ to 6′ control line. If it’s only an occasional spot easily policed by a firefighter with a handtool or indian can, not a problem. If it’s prolific, you need a change in strategy and tactics.

Prolific is one of the big warning signs. Think the ember storms you see in some videos engulfing houses, since they can light an overwhelming number of fires.

Short range: Beyond “close in”; say tens of feet up to 600′

Medium range: 600′ to a mile.

Long range: > 1 mile

This picture shows spotting across a good 40′ of gravel and pavement…clearly this fire was going to require big burnouts from control lines well in advance of the fire to attack it at this time of day. I believe that’s Jack Pine. Jack Pine can be “scrubby” in poor soil, but it can also grow tall and straight. It is closely related too (and can hybridize with) Lodgepole Pine.

It sounds like most progress was made after night fall when they could make good progress on building fire lines as the fire left the crown and came to ground. Makes you think of the need for fairly long range planning, trying to use air resources and initial attack to protect structures and control spot fires during the day while pre-positioning resources like dozers and burn out crews to launch an all out assault once the conditions turn more favorable in the cooler, moister, and usually calmer evening.

The northeast wind on Tuesday, 5/18 that drove it turned to a northwest wind on Wednesday, 5/19. I’d imagine the focus of efforts was to make sure that southern / eastern flank was well secured, as well as being concerned if there were any unknown spot fires that could be driven by the new winds.

The forest types of Huron National Forest:

As a followup, I was the area and found the 1980 Mack Lake Fire which is documented here. It started 8 miles almost due east of this fire.

Lots of good stuff in that report. The Mack Lake fire ranks in the top for forest fire spread and BTU release rate recorded in North America. It averaged 2mph, hit 7mph peak. 27,000 BTUs/foot/second were estimated, with a theoretical maximum (for all forests) being 30,000.

It was a prescribed burn that got out of control, resulting in a LODD (Dozer Operator), 44 structures, and 20,000 acres lost in the first six hours, then it was essentially out except for mop-up.

Perhaps most interesting: This area of Michigan, per tree ring research, experiences a 10,000 acre fire an average of every 28 years.

They seem to follow a basic pattern — the weather isn’t remarkably bad (moderately warm day, moderately low humidity, moderate winds) but once they get going they run like a bat out of hell until it’s either early evening or they run out of jack pine and into hardwoods. Then the fire goes to ground and is easily contained overnight.

The last major fire before this one was Mack Lake, so it this was pretty much right on schedule.

There’s only two LODD incidents I know of in southern New England due to the fire (and not exertion / medical problems). One is this 1938 burn over on Cape Cod which killed three firefighters. The other was in Rhode Island near the Connecticut line, possibly in 1942 although I still have to hunt down official documentation, which again killed three in a burn over of their truck. I don’t know if shelters would make a difference in the circumstances of these burn overs. It may be better to emphasize the Canadian / Australian model of better awareness and avoidance for the conditions in this area.

Reminded me of the early Connecticut forest fire guides written at a time that tools and equipment were so primitive and in short supply that it directed using things like green cedar boughs to beat out fires, and that wet sacks worked well too.

Now, they clear all growth on either side of the roads and boundary lines of forests and burn the debris so that accidental fire could be prevented from spreading inside the forests. How far they are effective is anybody’s guess ! At vantage points like hill tops, tree-top machans, fire watchers on daily wages are engaged and stationed during the fire season to watch for any fire occurrence through indications of rising smoke, and to immediately communicate to the ground staff through wireless network.

Forest fires are extinguished manually by beating the fire with green leaf brooms unlike in developed countries where helicopters are used to sprinkle or shower water over burning areas, which is very expensive. Fire tenders cannot reach the spot due to steep terrain and absence of roads.

Rest here, with an archived one here.

At old ranches and on some remaining farms near the foothills, one can see old barbed-wire-fence “pitch posts.” These relics of a bygone era artistically reveal some Colorado history and provide an interesting forestry lesson.

Pitch posts were cut and split from the dense and heavy wood of live pitchy trees. Pitch is a resin found in evergreen trees and it forms when trees are injured. When the injury is caused by heat from ground-surface, low-intensity forest fires, and the fire has not killed the tree, more sap is made. This resin then concentrates in outer layers of sap-wood.

Long ago, forest fires were started from lightning and often times by indigenous people. Native Americans knew that a flush of new and tender vegetation that sprouts after fire meant well-nourished game and thus better hunting. With no human effort to suppress forest fires, they were frequent, and trees were often injured by fire.

In those conditions, a “relatively young,” 150-year-old tree may have received fire damage three, four, five or more times in its lifetime. A living tree exposed to that many fires accumulates high concentrations of pitch all the way from its heartwood center out to the bark.

…

Back then, many forest fires persisted for months. These long-lasting fires took on a variety of day-to-day behavior, depending upon weather, terrain and fuel conditions in their path. Some fires smoldered underground for a long time as root fires, only to be rekindled with a strong, dry wind. Over centuries of time, subsequent fires affected miles and miles of forest, covering a wide range of aspects and elevations.

Archived here.

It is here, archived here.

This fire was first thought extinguished by the local fire department, before taking off again and consuming seventy homes and thirty one square miles.

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.

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).

At the 8 second mark events occur quickly — you hear a comment about “getting dark,” then the camera has a partial white out (I assume from rapid fire growth), then the still photographer observes they have fire to their left.  Press reports have stated, per Nova Scotia Forestry, the fire spread hit speeds of 36 meters per minute.  That’s 107 chains per hour, 1.3 miles per hour, or 118′ per minute.  In Connecticut spread rates over 30 chains per hour are considered Very High fire danger days, and over 40 are Extreme.

The above video is  reminiscent to me of this video taken in the New Jersey pine barrens on 16 May 2007 when several New Jersey Forest Fire Service vehicles were involved in a near miss:

I have the above videos archived in case they disappear from YouTube, under videos.

Those videos help fill in the mental picture when you see photos like this one from Cape Cod, which has forests like the pine barrens of New Jersey:

Forest fire on Cape Cod, from Capecodfd.com

Or this AP photograph of an October, 1947 fire crossing Route 1 in Arundel, Maine:

October, 1947 Arundel, ME

When the fire is in the crown like this they can not be fought.  In general the tactic is to leave these to burn and concentrate on handling the fire later when it has left the crown and is just burning the surface and brush, as these boys from Bates College are headed to do in ’47:

Boys from Bates headed to fight fire

At Bates, nearly 300 male students, volunteered for firefighting duty. A state disaster committee dispatched the volunteers to help fight the fires in towns like Bowdoinham, Kennebunk, Cornish and Richmond. Meanwhile, female students conducted watches on campus and at Thorncrag, raked leaves away from residence halls, and collected clothing donations for the Red Cross.

Clicking on the Bates photo will bring you to a page which recounts the tale.  In case it disappears I’ve archived off a couple of the tales here.

Even the brush breakers of southeastern Massachusetts aren’t intended to attack these crown fires directly, but instead to allow them to rapidly access deep into the woods to control the fire while it’s still in the brush and not a crown fire.

Fire storms like those pictured above are not survivable to those caught in the open.  In parts of the U.S. the “fire shelter,” an aluminized tent carried on your belt is common.  Australians tend to use their fire apparatus as shelters, specially equipping them with blinds to keep out the radiant heat from the cab and misting systems to wet the outside of the truck. A flame front like that is also survivable in a properly prepared home, which it doesn’t look like the Halifax homes were, when the occupants are prepared after the flame front has passed to come out and extinguish spot fires around their property.

Imagine trying to keep a fire small when depending on horses to transport your equipment, and without many of the improved tools of today!

This is a New Jersey fire warden from 1911 (from the book New Jersey Forest Fire Service) equipped with shovels, milk cans (used to carry water), garden watering cans, and some sort of larger tank.

New Jersey Fire Warden Victor Bush, 1911

From Britt Crosby’s CapeCodFD.com site we have an early fire wagon in Massachusetts:

Men filling soda acid extinguishers, Southeastern Massachusetts

Soda acid extinguishers required a recharge cartridge of sulfuric acid and sodium bicarbonate; inverting the extinguisher would produce carbond dioxide which would pressurize the extinguisher.  Each extinguisher held 2-1/2 to 3 gallons of water and depending on the fire intensity, terrain, and skill of the firefighter could knock down 50′ to 200′ of surface fire.

The Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control built specialized wagons to use instead of the adapted farm wagons above that were discussed in the 1918 book, “Forestry in New England.”  While in use throughout the eastern part of the state they were most common in the southeastern section.

A two horse model, like the one below, carried 14 soda acid extinguishers, 14 water cans and sufficient to refill 2 extinguishers each, shovels, rakes, mattocks, and chemical charges, along with 8 men.

Massachusetts two horse forest fire wagon

The one horse model below was carried a smaller amount of equipment and only four men. Basic apparatus economics held true even back then.  A one horse wagon cost $300, while the two horse wagon carrying twice the equipment and manpower only raised the price to $450.

Massachusetts one horse forest fire wagon

Another early option to either watering cans or soda acid extinguishers was the one and two man bucket pumps.   A one man pump, like the one below, carried four gallons of water and was considered adequate to knock down 50′ to 150′ of fire.  It was considered a little less efficient, but considerably cheaper to purchase and recharge, then a soda acid extinguisher.

One man pump

A two man pump carried eight gallons and took two men to carry.

Halifax, NS 30 April 2009

The statistics, per this CBC article, are:

2,000 acres
8 Homes destroyed;
7 Homes damaged:
450 Homes evacuated;
58 Firefighters(1)
5 Helicopters

Fires like this are not unprecedented in the northeast, however they are much less common then the western or southern U.S. and less common regionally then they were prior to 1955 (2).

In 1947 Maine burned.  The Portland Press Herald has this good remembrance (archive) of the fires.  As part of the reaction to that, the first interstate forest fire compact was established in 1949 — the Northeast Forest Fire Protection Commission.  This Commission expanded to an international agreement in 1969 when Quebec joined New York and the New England states as members, and later expanded to include New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

While today the states in the northeast can call for national assistance through the National Interagency Fire Center, through NFFPC manpower familiar and equipment appropriate for the typical terrain, fuels, and fire conditions in the northeast are directly available.  For example, member states and provinces have access to Quebec’s fleet of CL-215 and CL-415 water bombers, which are better suited to the regional fire situation then western style aerial tankers.

In 1951 the Commission held a major drill at Great Mountain, Norfolk, Conn., that you can read about here.

While much has changed over the last 60 years to reduce the frequency and size of typical fires, we still have woodlands that will burn ferociously in the right circumstances.

Those circumstances may not even be an extended drought; an ordinary dry periods combined with a major (or series of) forest disturbances can create serious problems.  As mentioned in a number of posts including this one yesterday, much of north-central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire are under the gun starting next year due to the ice storm this past December.  It seems a similar disturbance played a role in Halifax according to a CTV report:

The fire flared up yesterday but was thought to be under control, until winds picked up Thursday afternoon, sparking 15 metre flames that jumped from treetop to treetop.

Officials have yet to pinpoint an exact cause of the fire, but some said an abundance of brush and remnants of downed trees from Hurricane Juan in 2003 gave fuel to the fire.

5-1/2 year old dead fuels!  Hurricane Juan had made landfall at Halifax, with winds clocked at 100mph and estimates upwards of 145mph.  While downed trees in direct contact with the ground I presume would have been well on the way to rotting by now, tree tops and others that where hung up against tree trunks or stacked on top of other fallen trees and thus unable to wick up moisture from the soil would still be in decent shape to burn.

This report from the local newspaper, the Chronicle and Herald,  filed this afternoon provides some more details from the authorities:

Mr. Currie [Halifax Fire & EMS] said “the leftovers from hurricane Juan have been an issue. They’ve been an issue from the start and they still are an issue. It’s very difficult moving in and around this area with all the blow-down.”

Paul Schnurr, a forestry technician with the Department of Natural Resources, said Friday’s “wind conditions are somewhat the same (as the Porters Lake fire).”

“It’s a wind-driven fire, very fast moving, very hard to contain. It certainly moves faster than a lot of people can walk and that makes it very, very difficult.”

Fires can burn big and hot here.  Just this past Wednesday I walked a fire that was of stand killing intensity over about 60 acres back in 2006, something I will write up soon.  While I’ve seen such areas as a tourist in California, I’ve never seen an extended area in New England that had seen such intensity.  It gave me a new appreciation of how bad of shape our forests were in before modern fire suppression was well established and became effective in reducing what had been a common occurrence.  Earlier this month there was the 40 cottages lost at Alton, N.H., and now the Halifax fire.  Southern New England will experience the right circumstances again, and the level of fire activity will shock many people.

Halifax, NS 30 April 2009

(1) I assume this is probably just forestry agency personnel, and more municipal firefighters would’ve been involved.

(2) For reasons left to a future post to explain, 1955 seems to be a good demarcation point to mark when “modern” forest fire protection all came together and gelled into an effective system in New England and it was clear that frequent, major fires were on the decline.  A pioneering fire warden from 1915 would be amazed to see how things had changed by 1955; a fire warden from 1955 would recognize today as essentially the same as his time in organization, strategy, tactics, and tools — albeit tweaked and improved.