- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The catastrophic Rim Fire, which has burned about 343 square miles in and around Yosemite, will provide abundant information for fire scientists to study the effects of forest management techniques, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
The key question, the story said, is what happened on Aug. 22 and 23, when a 200-foot wall of flames burned almost 90,000 acres.
"Almost half of this very, very large fire happened in just two days," said Max Moritz, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety announced last week that Stephen Quarles will join the IBHS research team as senior scientist - hurricane/high-wind building durability and fire protection.
He will also occupy the South Carolina Wind and Hail Underwriting Association Hazard Resilience Chair at the IBHS Research Center.
Quarles has been a wood durability advisor for UC Cooperative Extension since 2000.
“Although my years with UC Cooperative Extension were very...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Creating defensible space around woodland homes is a legal requirement and common-sense habit. UC Cooperative Extension has developed extensive information that will help homeowners maximize safety while maintaining the greenery that makes rural living desirable, according to an article in the Redding Record Searchlight.
Defensible space, yes, but UC Cooperative Extension forestry advisor Gary Nakamura told reporter Laura Christman, "It doesn't mean you need to nuke the site and clear it."
Bare dirt would be the ultimate in fire defense, but such a landscape...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
It may seem like a wildfire would be easy to detect, but vast, rugged wilderness can permit a small blaze to develop into a firestorm before firefighters are deployed.
Reeling from the enormous losses sustained by last year's devastating Station Fire in Los Angeles County -- which took two firefighters' lives, destroyed dozens of structures and cost more than $95 million to fight -- Supervisor Mike Antonovich is asking the county to allocate money to study a high-tech early detection system.
"The Station fire graphically spotlights the need to study and identify solutions for establishing an automated early detection system," Antonovich said in his motion to allocate the funding, according to the
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Long before Europeans first set foot in the New World, Native Americans were altering the California landscape by setting fires, UC Berkeley researchers believe. A multidisciplinary team of scientists is looking at a variety of evidence to better understand the nature of Native American prescribed burns. The team includes ANR fire science professor Scott Stephens.
The study was described in the UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science newsletter ScienceMatters@Berkeley. The article said burning could have helped indigenous Californians in many ways.
"If you're a...
