100 Fires Project Treasure Hunt
17 April 2025 – Western Fire Resources is excited to announce the beginning of the 100 Fires Project Treasure Hunt. This nationwide contest, hosted by Western Fire Resources, the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, and the 100 Fires Project, is open to any wildland firefighting unit (crew, engine, department, company, etc.). The treasure hunt will continue until there is a winner.
TASK: Create a fun, yet difficult, quest that will encourage study of our wildfire history.
PURPOSE: Learning the lessons that our history teaches us will make us all better and safer firefighters.
END STATE: If successful, wildfire units (crews, engines, departments, companies, etc.) will spend time researching, debating, and learning from the most influential fires in our history, strengthening their learning cultures and crew cohesiveness along the way, and perhaps building the slides necessary to recognize impending danger before it is too late to mitigate the hazard.
Our hope is that this will also bring awareness to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, who hosts the 100 Fires Project timeline, and whose mission is to help the families of firefighters killed in the line of duty and to assist injured firefighters and their families. The rules are simple. Work together within your local unit to figure out the clues in the poem found here. From there, you will have to complete 2 more challenges to come up with a final question, the answer to which wins the treasure hunt. Any unit from any agency, department or contract company may compete for the bragging rights for being the first to find the answer. Additionally, the winning unit will receive an award to display, containing a chrome-plated Pulaski and a personalized plaque. Intermediate recognition will be given on the Wildland Firefighter Foundation website for any unit completing first or second challenges. Good luck!
Prisoners of Fire – Now in Select Theaters
14 March 2025 – Prisoners of Fire, a new feature-length documentary about the 1990 Dude Fire, is currently in select theaters across Arizona. This film by Scott Briggs is the second major film that Western Fire Resources has contributed to as an Executive Director, the first being Compassion Spreads Like Wildfire – The Vicki Minor Story. Prisoners of Fire is being heralded as a must-watch film if you have anything to do with wildland fire. The trailer can be seen on the Into the Black Productions website (Prisoners of Fire: The Dude Fire Story | Official Film Site), and there are plans for the entire film to be available for streaming, possibly by early summer 2025. Please get out and support this film if it is playing in a theater nearby.
Western Fire Resources Now Offers Health Insurance
28 January 2025 – 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
23 August 2024 – 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 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
15 September 2023 – 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.
