June 30th marks the three year anniversary of what is perhaps the most tragic single loss of firefighters in US history, when 19 of 20 ‘Granite Mountain Hotshots’ were killed at Yarnell Hill, Arizona.
Wildland fire management has been an indispensable element of natural resource management. But, in today’s changing environment, it has become firmly intertwined in the mix of social, ecological, and management requirements and needs.
While most homeowners are aware of planning for fire prevention when building or purchasing a home, there is another important aspect that should be considered. This is the outside landscaping.
Monday evening the Montana Disaster & Emergency Services Coordinators Association voted to support the FireSafe Montana movement directed at firefighter safety.
Reducing fire intensity near homes and designated roadside evacuation routes during a wildfire gives firefighters a better chance at putting the fire out in a prompt and safe manner. It also provides citizens and firefighters with safe escape routes.
Here is the latest article on the discussion of the County Resolution passed by Lewis and Clark County published in the Helena Independent. Please check it out
FireSafe Montana’s Enough is Enough campaign is an effort to provoke discussion around the issues surrounding wildland fire and the urban interface.
As winter’s snowflakes start falling on the scorched hillsides above Lolo Creek, researchers around the nation are pondering how they might prevent the kinds of disaster that burned five homes there last August.
Not since the turn of the last century have wildfires been worse in much of the West. In an era when firefighting budgets cannot seem to keep up, it is incomprehensible and contradictory that wildfires of this magnitude are occurring with such frequency.
We surveyed a diverse array of several hundred forests and found that about 90 percent of them showed clear evidence of burning in the distant past, before the policy of fire suppression was implemented in the early 1900s.