Wildfire Updates Available On-Line
Worried those pesky forest fires are going to ruin that one last camping trip of the summer?
Smokey Bear is here to help with an assist from some friends in cyberspace.
The U.S. Forest Service on Thursday began posting regularly updated reports on fires burning at national forests, national parks and other federal lands on its World Wide Web home page accessible through home computers on the Internet.
The report provides a daily morning update on the size and location of the fires. It estimates how much of the fire is contained and projects the date it will be fully contained.
Threats to residences, power lines, roads and other structures are noted, broken down by state and forest. The report also lists scheduled arrival of additional firefighters.
“Originally we designed this thing to disseminate information to the media but we feel the public will also benefit when planning travel and recreation activities,” Forest Service spokesman Alan Polk said Thursday.
“Up to this point, people have had to get most of their information through local and regional media,” he said.
During a typical fire season, the agency fields hundreds of calls on a daily basis from media outlets seeking updates on the conditions, Polk said.
Other parts of the “fire” section of the Forest Service home page have been available for some time, including color-coded maps of weather conditions, fire dangers, moisture and even lightning strikes.
The information comes from the National Inter-Agency Fire Center in Boise and should be available daily at about 6 a.m. PDT, Polk said.
The estimated containment date may be the most valuable for travelers.
For example, the agency estimates an 800-acre fire in the Frank Church River-of-No Return Wilderness on Idaho’s Salmon-Challis National Forest won’t be fully contained until Sept. 15. It was only 15 percent contained on Thursday and was threatening an outfitter camp, the report said.
Travelers planning a visit to the Shoshone National Forest bordering Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming would be glad to learn that low temperatures and high humidity slowed the 1,000 fire there on Wednesday, but that it remained only 10 percent contained and an estimated date of full containment was unknown.
The biggest fire reported on Thursday was at the Mendocino National Forest in California, where 73,600 acres were burning around Clear Lake, a popular vacation spot 100 miles north of San Francisco.
The agency reported that the threat to the park headquarters had diminished at Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado on Thursday, where a 4,700-acre fire was fully contained.
xxxx 1. ON THE WEB The Forest Service home page is at http://www.fs.fed.us
2. FIREFIGHTERS GETTING HANDLE ON WILDFIRES Firefighters were monitoring several fires in southern Idaho on Thursday, most of which burned thousands of acres in remote areas. However, crews were trying to suppress the east side of the 26,000-acre Swet-Warrior Complex in No Return Wilderness because it was growing and moving out of the wilderness. In Oregon, a wildfire was contained after burning nearly 11,800 acres on eastern Oregon’s Umatilla National Forest. A 3,100-acre blaze in Umpqua National Forest was 70 percent contained. Also contained was the 109,094-acre Simnasho fire on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation that burned 11 houses. - Associated Press