With this season's fires burning within miles of Silicon Valley, home to the world's tech giants and some of their billionaire leaders , Kent and others are calling for more money, and ideas, to stop the trend. They should be donating more to the local fire services. There is no place on the planet where there is a greater disconnect between high tech and climate change than where the titans of Silicon Valley live.
It's scary," Kent said. Google is now integrating easily misunderstood satellite data into Maps, giving users a quick way to view fire perimeters , stats and road closures. It should come as no surprise that we now see rising rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, depression and suicide in the wildland firefighting community. To reduce these stresses, federal and state agencies must hire more firefighters and provide them the resources they need — not just equipment, but also sufficient time-off and expanded professional counseling services — to do the job they are trained for and take such pride in.
At a time of unprecedented ecological change and an increasingly unstable climate, the costs associated with taking these actions and creating more resilient ecosystems, communities and firefighters are an investment in our future. Follow her on Twitter: EnviroWonk. View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. A must-read political newsletter that breaks news and catches you up on what is happening.
Most Popular - Easy to read, daily digest of the news from The Hill and around the world. The amount of land in which housing and fire-prone vegetation exist in close proximity -- termed the Wildland Urban Interface WUI -- has increased exponentially throughout the midth century, primarily in the western United States.
With the growth of the WUI has come more frequent and destructive wildfires , as there are more people to both precipitate and fall victim to such disasters. Though the policies and attitudes towards managing wildfires have evolved over the last century, the destructive power of fire remains constant.
Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America. Her work helped lay the foundation for modern codebreaking today. I n the summer of , hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies.
By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead. The Suppression Program funds our wildfire response: firefighters in yellow shirts digging line, an airplane dropping retardant, emergency work to prevent erosion or landslides, as well as all the equipment and supplies needed to support these efforts. Scenes of suppression: a single-engine tanker drops water on a wildfire in central Washington while engine crews work to contain the fire on the ground.
A "work year" is roughly 2, hours. Reporting personnel in this way enables a common view of the workforce across government agencies. Datasource: National Interagency Coordination Center. Suppression operations include the things we do to extinguish a wildfire, prevent or modify the movement of unwanted fire, or manage a fire when it provides benefits like fuel reduction or improved wildlife habitat.
Firefighters control a fire's spread or put it out by removing one of the three ingredients fire needs to burn: heat, oxygen, or fuel. They remove fuel by cutting and digging to remove burnable vegetation with hand tools, by using heavy equipment like bulldozers to clear large areas of brush and trees, and by deliberately setting fires to rob an approaching wildfire of fuel fighting fire with fire.
Wildfire growth is based on weather, topography, and fuel i. Fire managers must react quickly to changing conditions and may use different strategies and tactics to control different areas of the same fire.
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