Park Fire, Wednesday July 31, 2024:
Fire activity on the Park fire was less dynamic yesterday and last night. CalFire crews stopped the spread of the fire to the North, and built fireline the spot fires near Manton. The fire continued to spread East in Mill Creek canyon. The fire is 389,000 acres and 18% contained. Some reoccupation of evacuated areas is occurring on the Southern end of the fire.
Last night the fire spread only 3,000 acres … that’s insignificant compared to some of last week’s fire activity, but that’s 5 more square miles that burned. That means CalFire must build and control more than 260 miles of fireline. What an incredible task. The workforce has increased to 41 helicopters, 497 engines,170 bulldozers, 115 water tender and 100 hand crews… 5582 personnel assigned.
Laymen ask why can’t we “just send the bombers and put that fire out in the canyons?”…The purpose of air attack on forest fires is to slow the spread of the fire until ground crews can come in and establish a control line. Air Attack alone will not stop the spread. On fires burning with very high intensity in heavy fuel loads…brush, timber or slash, an air tanker drop can get blown around by the fire induced winds… tanker drops will not stop a crown fire. If they drop in advance of the fire, the retardant will get hung up on the canopy of the trees and not hit the ground. The fire will burn right under it. The same can be true in heavy grass in extreme burning conditions.
Tankers are great and make for some great TV footage but it still takes that ground pounding fireman to put out the fire.
The Park Fire is one of those fires that burned outside the computer models. We can only model forest fires to certain point…and beyond that the reaction becomes unpredictable. We can say the “conditions favor extreme fire behavior, plume dominated fire runs, long distance spotting and fire whirls”… but we can’t predict exactly where they will occur.
In the case of the Park Fire, it grew at the astonishing rate of over 100,000 acres a day for the first two days… it burned between 4,000 and 5,000 acres an hour, day and night! This fire had some wind, but not the extreme Santa Ana or North winds we usually associate with such rapid fire spread.
As a Fire Geek I am always trying to understand what happened and why. Some of the possible contributing factors that would explain the incredible spread and intensity of the Park Fire might be:
1. The Northern Sacramento Valley baked in 110 (=or-) degree temperatures for much of July , baking both live and dead fuels.
2. We had a wet winter, good grass crop. Some areas with normally sparse grass were lush…available fuel loading in the Oak Woodlands doubled due to the grass crop
3. Baking temperatures removed all soil and duff moisture…these figures are not included in the fire spread model
I will note that for almost the entire month of July the Energy Release Component which us Fire Geeks use as a measure of large fire potential was running in the 97th percentile…Danger, Danger.
The 1,000 hour fuel moistures also hovered near 8%… that’s below the critical level. One more signal of dangerous conditions.
These conditions might moderate slightly if we get summer monsoon rains, but we’ve got a lot of summer left…. and more big fires to come.
Royal Burnett is retired from the California Department of Forestry and has lived in Redding for nearly 45 years.
