A New Hotlist, A New Fire, and a Tragedy
Ferguson Fire looking southeast from Greeley Hill – July 14, 2018
Tragically, a CalFire dozer operator was killed this morning in a rollover accident on the new emergent Ferguson Fire on the Sierra National Forest. The Ferguson Fire started yesterday evening near the bottom of the Merced River Canyon near the junction with the South Fork of the Merced River, and is forcing evacuations throughout the river canyon. Hot temperatures today spurred the fire growth to over 1000 acres. The Central Sierra Type 2 IMT is taking the Fire and the Incident Command Post (ICP) has been established at the Mariposa County Fairgrounds. Yours truly, will be joining the effort as Fire Behavior Analyst, briefly abandoning my own team, with the understanding I be released if NorcaL Team 1 gets assigned. The fire may burn into Yosemite National Park, and could be a threat to Yosemite West, El Portal, or even Wawona, in the days to come. The area around Cedar Lodge has been evacuated.
Ferguson Fire MODIS Imagery (Yosemite National Park boundary in green)
For those that miss the Hotlist from the now defunct wildlandfire.com website, I stumbled upon a Reddit thread that led me first to this site, and finally to https://forums.wildfireintel.org, which looks like it is going to take off with a brand new 501c3 non-profit to curate it. It has a nifty new look and workflow and is getting quite a bit more traffic than the earlier attempted replacement. Both are mostly picking up California action, but that will likely spread. The wildland fire technology company Redzone has taken the initial steps to get the site up and running, but the plan is to hand it over entirely to the non-profit once a revenue stream is secured. This looks like it will be a great resource for getting real-time posts by wildland firefighters en-route and assigned to incidents. There is also a moderated Facebook Group called National Fires R.O.C. that also seems to be acting as a Hotlist surrogate. R.O.C. stands for Report on Conditions. There will likely be some competition between these sites, but wildfireintel.org gets my vote, for now.