On the morning of June 30th, twenty elite forest fire fighters known as Hot Shots prepared for a tough day of work. Their job ... try to control a wildfire that was raging over thousands of acres near the town of Yarnell, Arizona ... an area gripped by drought and heat.The blaze was sparked a few days earlier when tinder-dry grass was set aflame by a bolt of lightning.
By the end of the day ... nineteen of the men were dead. The lone survivor of the crew was acting as a look-out and watched as wind abruptly changed and the fire bore down on his crewmates.?
The nineteen men deployed their emergency fire shelters ... a last ditch effort to save their lives ... but the shelters proved useless against the oncoming inferno. The deaths of the nineteen fire fighters made this the deadliest forest fire in the U.S. since 1933.
Canadians have been more focused on floods than on wildfires this summer. But little more than two years before a flood devastated the Alberta town of High River, large swaths of another Alberta community - Slave Lake - were destroyed by wildfire. That, and other destructive forest fires ... like the 2003 fire that consumed hundreds of homes in Kelowna, British Columbia ... highlighted the need to manage forest fire risk and better understand fire behaviors and patterns.?
Laura Lynch talks to?Mike Flannigan?and?Brian Stocks, about why it is becoming so difficult to ensure the safety of the people who fight forests fires and the communities and ecosystems they work so close to.?
Mike Flannigan is a professor with the Department of Renewable Resources and the Director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta. Dr. Flannigan also leads the US National Assessment on Global Change.?
? ? ? ? ? ??
And Brian Stocks has spent thirty years researching forest fire behavior. He's worked as a senior researcher for the Canadian Forest Service, and his work contributed directly to the development of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System.?
Source: http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2013/07/28/forest-fire-management/
Misty May And Kerri Walsh Jake Dalton London 2012 field hockey Missy Franklin Hunter Pence
No comments:
Post a Comment