Two Recent Articles by Senior FERIC Researcher Published in Fire Management Today
The spring 2004 issue of the USDA Forest Service’s journal Fire Management Today features two articles by Dr. Marty Alexander of the FERIC’s Wildland Fire Operations Research Group (Alexander 2004; St. John and Alexander 2004). This issue is available for downloading for free online at http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/fmt/fmt_pdfs/fmt64-2.pdf.
FWI System CD-ROM Based Training Course
The first article, co-authored with Paul St. John (Fire Management Instructor with ASRD Hinton Training Centre), provides an overview of the CD-ROM based wildland fire training course “Understanding the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System” released in 2002. For more information see http://www3.gov.ab.ca/srd/forests/resedu/etc/fireweather.html. This course encapsulates more than three decades of knowledge and experience with the Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System, a major subsystem or module of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System. Dr. Alexander served as the major technical advisor on the project development team.
Sample screen from “Understanding the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System” CD-ROM.
| The CD-ROM Understanding the Fire Weather Index (FWI) System received a Special Mention Award in Multimedia in the 2004 VIDEOFUEGO International Contest of Video, Photography and Multimedia Programs on Fire and Emergencies ( http://www.videofuego.com ). |
The “Brewer Fire Mystery” Discussion
The second article (Alexander 2004) constitutes a response by Dr. Alexander to a criticism of a reader (Eckert 2004) regarding a portion of an article published early on as an invited essay in the special issue of Fire Management Today on the 1999 “Dude Fire Staff Ride (see http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/fmt/fmt_pdfs/fmt62-4.pdf). The issue concerns what triggered the “blow-up” of the 1988 Brewer Fire that occurred in southwestern Montana/northwestern South Dakota (Guth and Cohen 1989, pp. 40-43) which forced a fire shelter deployment by an interagency hotshot crew. Eckert (2004) contends that severe burning conditions (i.e., low fuel moisture conditions) were responsible that “it was entirely predictable”. Dr. Alexander had previously acknowledged the critically dry fuel levels (Alexander 2002) and suggested that the “trigger” to the fire blowing up was perhaps a mesoscale weather phenomena referred to as a “heat burst”. In any event, the debate makes for some interesting reading.
References
Alexander, M.E. 2002. The staff ride approach to wildland fire behavior and firefighter safety awareness training: a commentary. Fire Management Today 62(4): 25-30.
Alexander, M.E. 2004. What triggered the Brewer Fire blowup remains the mystery. Fire Management Today 64(2): 56-57.
Eckert, S.A. 2004. “Brewer Fire mystery” not so mysterious. Fire Management Today 64(2): 56.
Guth, A.R.; Cohen, S.B. 1989. Red skies of ’88: The 1988 forest fire season in the Northern Rockies, the Northern Great Plains and the Greater Yellowstone Area. Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Missoula, Mont. 124 pp.
St. John, P.; Alexander, M.E. 2004. Canadian Forest Fire Weather Index System: training now available on CD-ROM. Fire Management Today 64(2): 54-55.