http://www.kcra.com/california-wildfires/valley-fire-grows-despite-rain-butte-fire-acreage-decreases/35321460
2 civilians dead in Butte Fire - and now 2 civilians dead in Valley Fire ---------------------------------- you can ignore the rant that follows - I just typed it up for my own amusement apparently lets think about this One month ago there were major fires in the same areas - Lake County and Madera County I did not hear any calls to double the number of fire resoruces after those fires. Did anyone else? So - here we are - 1 month later - with 2 huge fires that have been much more destructive. The wind was too high - the trees were too dry - the smoke was too thick - the computer programs were too dumb - the climate change made my ankles sweat - the hilly ground was too hilly - etc etc. But are any of those really valid reasons? How short is everyones short term memory? Is one month ancient history? Did it not occur to anyone that the first two fires were very close near misses? Was not the writing on the wall? Didnt anyone say - if the wind is up 5 MPH or if the fire starts 2 miles closer to a town - its all over? (Has anyone seen any news reports on response times? Any report anywhere on the Internet? Has anyone anywhere raised this issue?) If it only takes 3 hours to drive from San Francisco or Sacramento to Middletown CA - could not 500 Type 1 pumpers been put in Middletown within 3 hours? That would have been 1 pumper per home lost. That would have saved 500 homes. (In fact - how many reserve pumpers are in the San Fran area? - 100 at least right? - 1 per every 5 stations maybe - therefore 100 pumpers could have been pulled out of the Bay Area without even affecting your first line day to day response levels). And many of the stations have both a Ty1 engine and a Ty3 engine. (But I am starting to rob Peter to pay Paul here - but they have "draw down" levels - every dispatcher knows that you cannot strip the home area when sending mutual aid units out of town). I have talked about this before. Pumpers are cheap compared to staffing. Each fire house in California probably has room to store 1 or 2 more pumpers. Driving from South Calif to North Calif is a long ride actually. Very expensive also. 4 guys on OT on each rig. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "massfire" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/massfire. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
