FYI: How Do Firefighters Tackle a Voracious, Out-of-Control Fire?

Containment starts with establishing an anchor point. Every fire starts out small, and usually by the time it’s big, fire crews have a base point to work from. Then crews start cutting fire lines — like breaking trail in the woods, Harvey says. Firefighters say they have one foot in black and one in green, for burned versus fresh fuel. “You put a barrier between black fuel and green fuel, and you cut a trail between the two, so the fire will stop by the time it hits that trail,” he says. Firefighters use axes and pulaskis — ax-pick hybrids invented for wildland firefighting in 1911 — to chop and dig. Once the lines are established, firefighters enter the hot zone and “mop up,” extinguishing hundreds or thousands of blazes in the burned area to prevent any embers from reigniting the blaze farther afield. “Once those are mopped up, I start to feel as an incident commander that that line is solid and secured. That’s when I start to add that line to my containment percentage,” Harvey says. The ultimate goal is to cut off the fire’s fuel supply. Fires need heat, oxygen and fuel, and on the scale of thousands of acres, fuel is the only leg of that triangle firefighters can control. In a Type 1 incident like the High Park Fire — the worst, most complicated kind — crews bring in aerial tankers, helicopters, engines and trucks, and heavy ground-moving equipment. Black Hawks and tankers will drop water and slurry to cool the fire and knock the flames down, literally shortening their height, so ground crews can safely approach. That’s a direct-line strategy, explains Greg Poncin, Type 1 incident commander in the Northern Rockies region, based in Kalispell, Mont. But sometimes, as was the case for a while Thursday, helicopters and planes can’t even take off because of the smoke. In that case, there’s another key strategy: An indirect attack. Crews set deliberate fires in the path of the monster, destroying its fuel supply before it arrives and taking advantage of its enormous convection columns, in which warm air is pushed up and cool air is drawn in. This in-draft can widen a fire line — firefighters may set a fire near a road, for instance, and use the road as a fire break. All the while, satellites, airplanes and helicopters are watching from above to help predict the fire’s potential path. The imaging spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite captures the scene, and NASA can even use unmanned aircraft to collect imagery and data that can be viewed in Google Earth. Infrared-equipped satellites and aircraft provide a heat signature, so firefighters can determine the weakest and strongest parts of the beast. Harvey says infrared mapping technology is still relatively new to wildland firefighting, and its ability to monitor the most voracious sections has been invaluable for strategists. And today’s advanced helicopters can lift more water, fly in more dangerous conditions and arrive on scene more quickly, he says...more