Western Fire Resources Now Offers Health Insurance
We are excited to announce that beginning with the 2025 Fire Season, Western Fire Resources will offer paid health insurance for its permanent seasonal call-when-needed engine crew members. This will cover all of our Captains and Crewmembers who commit for the entirety of the 2025 fire season. We will offer several plans for employees to choose from. This amounts to a great cost savings to employees who otherwise would need to use post-tax money to purchase their own policy. This is just one more way we take care of our workforce.
Smokehouse Creek Fire Simulation
In April of 2024, it was my extreme honor to be asked to give oral testimony at the Congressional Hearing investigating the Panhandle wildfires. My entire testimony may be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39Q4iigLVw0 beginning at the 18:58 mark. Many have asked me to post the simulation I ran depicting the spread of the Smokehouse Creek Fire. That simulation may be played below.
Upon simulating the burning conditions of the Smokehouse Creek Fire, I quickly realized that fuels from the publicly-available Landfire data layer would need to be altered in order to better represent the increased fine fuel loadings present in late-February 2024. Riparian grasses depicted as GR4 (Moderate Load, Dry Climate Grass) were reclassified as GR6 (Moderate Load, Humid Climate Grass). Mixed grass prairie, depicted as GR2 (Low Load, Dry Climate Grass) was reclassified as GR4 (Moderate Load, Dry Climate Grass). Shortgrass prairie, depicted as GR1 (Short, Sparse, Dry Climate Grass) was reclassified as GR2 (Low Load, Dry Climate Grass). Roads were reclassified as GR1 (Short, Sparse, Dry Climate Grass) to facilitate the type of fire spread we were witnessing across even 4-lane highways. Even after all of these changes, I still needed to accelerate all fire behavior characteristics by 30% in order to simulate the spread witnessed on 26-27 February 2024, indicating that the combination of increased fuel loading and an extreme fire weather day exceeded typical fire behavior model parameters, even in the absence of drought conditions..
The simulation clearly shows the spread on day 1, the approximate location the fire laid down at night, and the massive run it made on the second day, including the fire's split into 2 distinct fingers prior to fire impacting the City of Canadian, Texas, with the first finger passing to the north of town and the second finger actually being the first finger to impact the city limits on the southwest edge of town near the airport. The simulation also picked up the wind shift, as it occurred near sunset, and the general dimensions and shape of the final fire footprint.
Actual Smokehouse Creek Fire Footprint
Rapid Lesson Sharing of a Recent Near Miss
In August 2023, one of our firefighters discovered a missing suspension component before a negative outcome could occur. Read how it was discovered and how the lessons learned from this near miss can prevent potential negative outcomes throughout the wildland fire community.
For this and more wildland fire lessons, please visit the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center.
