hey everyone welcome back to the lookout going to do a quick update on the be fire and we're going to check out some Intel for the copper field fire up in Oregon uh befire is kicking some butt today it's interesting you know we looked at it last night and it looked um like it was dying down in a lot of the areas where is Burning uh today the South flank is kind of um blowing up quite a bit and a lot of the rest of the fire hadn't moved much so I just want to kind to show you what we've got as far as seeing where the fire is going the webcams are pretty impressive today and uh so we're just going to look at what's going on and what we think is going on don't have any kind of uh worked all day on other stuff so don't have any kind of reports from the field for you but I'm just kind of looking at what Intel is available over the course of the day including the webcams so we've got the um the green lines here are what was mapped yesterday and then this outer ring here is what was mapped this afternoon and I don't I need to check and find out if it says it's 1400 2 pm which seems reasonable but I sometimes I get confused sometimes they put stuff in uh GMT so that would be 7 a.m. if it was that but either way the fire had back down it was kind of hung up on top of the hill last night had a little bit more of a Northerly push we're looking kind of um West here and the fire had slopped down and cross this drainage and when they imaged this which we're going to say was a 2 p.m. uh there were some spots out here and this is mainly Sage Brush and then these little dots here are like Conifer planted after the 94 cotton wood fire so the fires back through a bunch of plantations sparse there sparse trees so then our our heat dots from the satellites show the fire continue to spread kind of out to the East and then the cams certainly look like it's crossed this drain engine is headed up towards babit Peak so the babit peak webcam we're going to look at it's up here looking down at the fire and the winds are Westerly and their forecast to stay Westerly so good likelihood we're going to get some slow driven runs uh the rest of the day the column's kind of been L laying out this way um through the day so just to um kind of give the bigger picture view here we've got trucky down here and Stampede Reservoir and bokeh out here in the fires right now it's going to have Westerly it's going to blow up towards babit Peak and kind of the wild card is what happens over the next couple days we're supposed to get some Northerly and then easterly wind so it's really changeable there's kind of what we one thing we kind of call a watch out situation with fire weather is when you have a large scale pattern change or frontal passage and your winds shift through the course of the storm going by so we're going to look at the winds over the next few days and look at what this fire might do if it continues to kind of open a big front today pushing up babit Peak that would be a problem um or could be a problem with North winds coming in the forecast that could push the fire a little bit more south so let's look at some webcams this is a view fairly from the south is and let's look at the last three hours so I could see the cap from this from my house in Chico or from the Chico Airport today all right this is looking across Sierra Valley so we're looking like Northstar is kind of down here trucky over here here still a long ways from Chucky uh this is sierraville over here so this is where the fire started yesterday I got pushed this way and you see this side of the fire is kind of out where it burned yesterday but it's across to the South here and now it's just really uh it's charging pretty good out to the east and then this is um babit Peak babit Peak is one of those places where you're like well is this fire going to burn up the webcam um certainly could happen in the next couple days so we could take a little time to kind of triangulate where exactly it is but it looks like in here certainly looks like it's over that Ridge there and so that Ridge from babit Peak I might be seeing that it's at um just a little bit 15° north of West so so could it definitely looks like it could be out in there so if it is established in there this is kind of the fire eyes the fire eye view of babit peak which uh it's like the like the table set pretty well for the fire to Chow Down now we're inside here inside the um 1990s Cottonwood fire scar like this is all burned in ' 94 and on thing we talk a lot about here on the lookout is just that previous fire scar doesn't mean that this all burned like that it all got devastated we talk a lot on here about fire severity and patterns in Fire and how fires burn different times a day different um effects so you can see that during the um fire in 1994 it burned hot in here but it didn't kill all these trees and these trees look like they've been thinned or masticated in the um not so distant past don't know if that's going to be enough to save this stand of trees on a windy hot dry day with a headfire coming at it and so it's really difficult to generalize about fire effects when we talk about like oh if you thin this spacing then it can handle a fire it's like well what kind of fire is it going to handle a fire on a degree on a 90° day with um you know humidity in the teens the head fire um it might handle the same fire under the same conditions if the fire was up here and back down through it but not up heading up through it so got some Aspen stands in here you can see the um those those fall colors this imagery was shot in October of 2020 so anyway it looks like we're pretty well set up up right now for the fire to continue to run this drainage this afternoon up towards babit Peak it's hard to say um you know the wild card with trying to predict how fast these fires spread is like how far the spots fly fires like this are you know usually driven by spotting right so the fire ran up this hill and maybe spotted a little ways it'll back down the hill but when it makes a little run down here it might run up this little Bluff and spot out into here so often times the big fire runs we see it's not like this wall of flame gobbled from the bottom to the top it's the fire ran up here and it spotted into here and then it ran up to here and it spotted into here and then ran up into here so it's just really hard to reconstruct um sometimes when we try to figure out rates of spread and stuff like that anyway the good news is that um as far as the heat satellites and the infrared mapping goes it looks like this area that's facing Sierra brokes hasn't really spread much um overnight and this side of fire um it could be done there's still some heat out in here um but as far as what they mapped from yesterday's mapping told today it's not a huge amount of growth on this kind of leird side someone says is it arson and I say I have no idea okay so what's going to happen here with this fire if this fire does run out babit Peak today let's just say um that by the end of the day the fire has we're going to use a a random color here because I don't want people who are just jumping in to think that this is the fire okay well let's just say that the fire at the end of the day has got this footprint here which it probably won't but over the next two days the fire might run up this this train probably not going to be anywhere near that big but just want to look at kind of um forecast here tonight West Winds same as we've been having till the evening and then becoming Southeast after midnight okay so Southeast winds coming this way would push the fire back kind on itself so that's good if you're you know so if we're worried about the fire becoming really well established out here in north of stampede so okay Southeast winds tonight that's good that could give some time to get line in here but looking at how thick the fuels are and the rockiness and everything it's not like a slam dunk that they can just like doz or and crew um this if this opens a big flank today it's not like slam dunk that they'll get lineing all around it like tonight so South sou East Winds tonight um Ridgetop tomorrow East Winds 10 to 15 Southeast again Wednesday night light winds Thursday so all that looks good for as far as like not having forecasts right now that are going to blast this fire down towards Stampede or ver ey so we see that like through tonight winds are mainly coming out of South and Southeast tomorrow they push the fire back on itself a little Wednesday afternoon it's showing um more Westerly winds switching back to easterly on Thursday so what we're worried about would be North winds and there's not really any of that here in the extended like 5day forecast someone says do the winds blow back to L West at night they kind of sink down off the mountain here so if the fire runs up here then at night unless there's kind of larger scale winds coming from the West night winds they like to sink down Canyon so as we've talked about before this train out here is a really good train for um air tankers as far as if the wind's blowing from the south and uh they can get in they can paint these ridges the is pretty effective on these kind of scrubby light fuels but it just hangs the fire up it doesn't keep the fire from burning underneath the retardant and so until you can get a crew to kind of scratch a line or a dozer line around the fire and just kind of slows it down it doesn't really put the fire out in most cases except in grass and even in heavy grass it can burn underneath the retardant so back to our cams I do have to say that having uh the ability to watch a fire burn up a mountain from the top from multiple angles is pretty uh pretty novel and here you got them squirting a bunch of retardant out in front of it sometimes that works um sometimes it buys them time slows it down often times though when a fire's running up a mountain in heavy Timber um and it's like well sometimes they're just they're just dropping because they don't have any other strategy you can kind of see how the fire's kind of got two heads here there's part that's kind of moving south and then there's a part that's spotted across here that's moving up the mountain and what we see in these fuel types is the fire goes out really quick it burns through here it's mainly like really light grass and cheat grass and low brush and then it's done so where we see like this this hether column it's kind of getting into heavier fuels up here and then the other part of it burning kind of out in these heavier fuels out here and in between you just have this Gap because it burned up quickly and it's done there so you see that Gap in there Fire's moving up the mountain we got the air attack plane tanker came and made a drop this stuff's often useful for seeing where you know it looks like this is probably the tanker we just saw on the camera and so they're dropping out in here like we said dropping mids slope um above a Timber fire so often just kind of what else are we going to do so yeah so they're dropping out in here so after the fire it's all is interesting go back and look and see well did this thinning all this thinning got done out here um did it save the stand of Timber let's look at what this looked like um after the last fire historical imagery let's go back to all right so this is what it looked like in 1985 are we going to get any pixels all right so this is an image from 1993 before it burned so it was scrubby then you know this area was scrubby so let's just so this are's lost a lot of Timber from 93 until now let's go past that um all right so 99 they logged a bunch of what had been uh burned at 95 so these trees here where we're talking about this thinning those survived the last fire there wasn't a lot out here that survived that part of the fire Doug's pointed out this all burn in '94 and the Cottonwood fire that's what we're talking about we're talking about looking at how it came back after that or how it was planted one thing we look at a lot is just trees that survive a fire often times um if it under burs and it really cleans up the forest floor if you have another fire in there in a kind of reasonable amount of time you know not too long oftentimes those trees Will Survive again because fire is natural on this landscape and we used to have it every 10 to 20 years and so the problem here is that it's been um you know 30 years since this burned and there hasn't been fire but they have um looking at so this stand starting to get kind of dense here in 2009 and you see that it got thin here you can see that spacing open up so it got likely got masticated and the problem with mastication as we've talked about is just that um it leaves all the shredded wood chips on the floor forest floor from the mastication so it takes a long time in these dry environments for the mastication to break down and rot and not be just a big kindling pile and another problem with mastication in these um in these types of systems is that the masticator is as big mower that's got these giant carbide tip teeth on a giant piece of machinery and those things hit rocks and teeth are expensive and people don't like to hit rocks with their masticator and it starts fires so often times when you masticate Rocky ground you don't mulch the stuff right down into the dirt you you end up mulching it kind of high and so when you masticate a a kind of living tree like you reach up and you chop it off with this grinder and you just mash it down into the ground it's uh it's pretty wild you're shredding these trees in place but the problem is it leaves all this fuel on the ground and then um will be interesting to see we've had mixed luck I've done some prescribed burning in mastication and it like it killed every tree that was left just cuz there was so much fuel on the ground on places where there's deeper soil and less rockiness you can use different types of heads on your Mower and you can grind the stuff down into the dirt and then it rots quicker and um more likely to survive a fire anyway so from our flight deal here um got a lead plane when you see the lead plane tells you that they're bringing in the heavy tankers because the heavy tankers they need someone to show them how to um get in and out without the lead plan helps the pilot now if to think quite as much about not flying into the mountain so the big heavy tankers they can't fly without a lead so here's the the vlat jumbo jet just dropped you know 8,000 gallons retardant came in souped around it's also dropping here the same area so what we say a lot is um when you see the fires like spotting running up the might be I don't know if that's the vlat there or not that might be the Vlad there in orbit getting ready to drop down here but when you see the fires running and like spotting them mile like say it's a little late for the vat cuz doesn't it doesn't matter if you got 800 gallons retardant or 8,000 gallons of retardant if the fire is spotting a mile like you're just you're just wasting mud right so look here in the time they're doing all these drops out here there's a new spot fire out here and so it's kind of you know the airag people are really smart uh they don't want to just waste mud but often times they're just kind of working on this kind of Hail Mary like hey let's where else where can I work you know where's the column not smoking me out is this Ridge have any tactical value um is the fire going to you know so what works best with retardant often times is kind of the flanks of the fire or the fire is not pushing it's you know the flanks rarely is the fire spotting long distance cuz in this case the fire The Columns putting all energy out to the east so you don't expect to have like longrange spotting like here going back into theend you expect longrange spotting where you've got like this energy buildt up spots go where smoke goes so like we said tankers work great on the flanks because fire is usually not pushing as hard on the flanks so there's this kind of air tanker worship you know I posted air tanker videos yesterday and I felt kind of funny about it because I've never been a a tanker porn guy it's not not usually my thing uh people love tankers they love seeing the tankers fly I love helicopters flying they're impressive it's it's quite the show but uh like we said it's a little bit late when the fire spotting and running up the mountain tankers worked great on initial attack and that's when we should be using them um I I had a kind of my friend's dad was an air attack when I grew up um he worked out at Chester and his opinion was that if we took away all the tanker access for big extended attack fires like this one that it wouldn't materially change the Acres burned because uh when the fire wants to run it doesn't matter how many tankers you have and if you look at the Dixie fire and how much mud we dropped on that when it was just clear going to do whatever it wanted um we're talking tens and tens of millions of dollars um huge amount of ecological damage of retardant going in creeks and no real change in the outcome of where the fire ended up being stopped so I know that's kind of heresy uh fire news people are supposed to show you lots of pretty pictures of tankers and and drool um they're not without their impacts you know so it's getting dark here we're going to jump out a little take a little break from this fire and let's go up to um silin flying North up to clth Falls organ and um copper field fire this fire doesn't have a lot of new heat on it since the satellite went over last so we're looking here at um clamo Upper clamo Lake clth Falls at the bottom here going up Highway 97 up here by chil this fire ran started uh 3 days ago and looks like they've pulled up an Ops map they've got those are lying all the way around this thing except out here in this Meadow which uh probably isn't moving much and this fire is probably done I hate to I hate to get too predictive it looked like they're showing a couple spots here I haven't got any good Intel but um it's kind of run out of slope like fires like when they get to the top of the hill it's harder for them to run down the other side of the Hill than it is for them to keep going up so often times fires like this they run their slope you get those line around them it's done so don't quote me on that if you're evacuated don't say the lookout said it's fine don't ever do that uh we're we're not evacuators around here there was some live video here earlier on um KCRA that was showing kind of the fuel type that this fire is burning in go I want one of these I want a helicopter and a fancy camera like they've got so you can see this is um this is dead trees left over 30 years ago you know um Juniper this area burned like we said '94 and there's still dead trees standing out there this is the desert stuff lasts forever especially like hardwood stuff like Juniper so it's burning and and these are some of the trees that were planted there after um after the fire 94 out here that are burning now be interesting to see how those survive too this one do not look so hot but pine trees are tough and um never know like I think um yeah it's not looking good for that one but they can take a lot but in general um just like we kind of fetishize air tankers we fetishize reforestation and conifers um know our first reaction after fire is to go plant a bunch of pine trees and with very little um thought to how we're going to take care of them how we're going to keep them from burning in the next fire and pretending kind of that the next fire is not going to happen and like I think we we are coming kind of coming to the realization that um it's inevitable that these airs are going to burn again and so unless you have a plan of how you're going to you know so all these trees that got planted out here all these trees these all got planted in 94 looks like they've done some thinning in here it doesn't mean they're going to survive this fire but at least they thin them there's just a lot of places out in the world here where stuff got planted 30 years ago and it never got never they never got back to it and then those areas just burn and and it's just like all that waste you all that energy of planting new trees um 30 years of time that um went into growing this future Forest that is going to get smoked so I've done some work looking at just um plantations and fire history in California and find that you know talking to some of my old mentors um who worked in the forest service for whole careers there's just very few places that the forest service has established plantations following big fires in the 50s 60s 7s that haven't already gotten uh roasted by by new fires and it's just a hard chore to you know how do you plant a bunch of baby trees and then Shepherd them through uh you know the first 30 or 40 years it takes for them to be fire resilient at all Rick eard says lots of P peny plan plantations in the cotton wood fire all the way up to Verdi Peak and um I saw some of this action um it's going to go over here other side of Sierra Valley I went through um went on the lost and found bike ride little while ago and there's these plantations out in here following a fire see if we can find them DOTA Canyon there we go yeah down in here these areas are penny Pine plantations so they you know Arbor clubs and other groups raise money to plant trees after fires and it's feel good you know like you go through here and you see a sign it says Penny pin's Plantation thanks to the you know Elie gundo Garden Club but then you look at like what's going on here and you've got this basically like this brush field full of little Christmas trees that are you know 30 ft tall or something with like absolutely zero likelihood that a fire could burn through all this brush and not kill all these trees some places they've thinned and taken care of the brush but um a lot of times they don't do anything to manage the brush and so the plantations just don't survive future fires so that's one of those things we have to talk about like realistically like um maybe you shouldn't plant trees if you don't have the capacity like forest service has such little capacity to do just about anything and so before every time we have a fire they want a clear cut um Salvage log I mean Forest Service isn't getting anything done like that but the Private Industry puts a huge amount of effort into tending the lands they Salvage they plant they herbicide they thin and they still take losses but if you just plant trees and don't do anything um you're really setting up for a bad outcome so it's hard to tell you know whether these trees out here that are burning with brush all around them will survive or not you know the cameraman is looking for the biggest flame so if there's trees torching he's it's going to be a little biased keep that in mind when you watch coverage of um fires is that Flames uh the cameraman's like a moth and they're going to find the biggest flames and so you get the impression watching TV that the entire fire looks like this but no one ever takes footage of the part of the fire that um is just creeping along not doing anything like little Flames don't make very exciting TV and so just keep that in mind that like you get the kind of most um sensationalized possible view of wildfire when you watch coverage on TV and often times you'll see like there'll be a fire that's out and they'll be showing clips from like 3 days previous when there's still active flame just cuz they'll say oh it's only 50% contain and you know the fire is out uh and then you see that like they're um they're showing footage from 3 days ago so someone's asking about my take on the coffee pot fire and we can go look at it um I haven't had a lot of time to cover it it's a it's a complicated story um with firing operations and everything else and I um I probably can't do the coffee pot Justice here they're looking out to Reno from where they're at so it's not super far from um from Reno to the fire coffee pot fire all right real quick we're going to go back to B Peak see what's uh what's shaking over here oh babit there's our spot more retardant all right so let's talk about the coffee pot all right coffee pot Fire Let's see we got the perimeter here all right so coffee pot's down by Fresno so all right so velia out here Three Rivers so what they've kind of done here a coffee pot over the last little while is um big firing operation that kind of try to draw a box around this thing and contain it and so a lot of the fire that's burning out here has kind of been coaxed around around by firefighters and helicopters with Napalm and all right so the whole kind of um southern and western flanks of this fire are um all right looking pretty cold let's see if we can find a progression map for this real quick all right here we go all right so here's the progression map so what happened they the fire started here on top of the mountain it um it kind of backed its way down for days and days and days I it started here on the 12th of August so almost four weeks ago and it just backed its way off this mountain and the problem with that when that happens is this side of the fire is uncontrolled and people live out this way and so no one really wants to have just leave this fire burning but you can see that the fire just barely spread for days and days it it spread steadily out this way so all this orange here is firing operations so basically they built lines all the way around the outside this thing and they dropped fire in here and they burnt this all out um around the 31st it's all stayed within the container lines for the most part during that time I don't know what's going on out here there were some big runs from that firing operation and um people posted oh it's outside the you know the fires escaped it's bad news it was just them doing this big interior firing operation so I wonder what that looks like on it's like all this stuff out here basically got fired a lot of this is really scrubby like it's not like um they were firing necessarily a bunch of old growth so the fire started up in here and it backed down through this heavy beetle kill so we're on coffee pot here down but Central Sierra burning King's Canyon and so the fire backed and it kind of was just going out a lot of it up here in this scrub and then they um over the past week they they fired out in here they established lines they fired this out to kind of secure this whole side of the fire so where you see the fire backing like this for days and days it was likely really beneficial fire effects and it was still backing they were carrying it you can see as they've been more into firing mode they've been carrying the fire downhill so let's look for another map here all right I oh they want a password for that one all right just waiting for Ops map to load up here for the coffee pot fire CP said there's a slap over he says slap over all right yeah so they've got handline Dozer Line Road Got Hand line out here I think this might be what you're talking about here CP they slop over up here maybe you got this Ridgetop Dozer line so what I was interested in here is you've got these green areas or Groves um kind of named Groves of seoa and the fire started up here and come back down so I think it's your really likely going to hear stories later on about how there were beneficial fire effects from the fire backing so National Park and so they um their goal is to manage for the health and resilience of these forest and these forests are are relying on fire and a lot of folks kind of are impatient about fire and want to button it up and don't want to hang there it's a good it's a good good thing to you know not want a bunch of fire hanging out west of your town or east of your town during you know going into a season where we have stronger East Winds but you've got these two really kind of radically conflicting Land Management objectives when you get down into like this area of the country where you've got um kind of state responsibility area out in here and you've got National Park out here where they want to let fires burn and out here they're like hey we don't want this fire coming down to where all these people live so there's always tension between folks who want to manage fire on landscape and people whose job is to put out every fire so I'm sure there's you know for every day on this fire and um every bit of line and all this stuff there's so many stories um and we can't cover them all so I've kind of just not gone there at all with the coffee pot but uh what I want to put out there is that um we're always looking for correspondence during the um the big fires in I think 2021 inoa Kings Canyon uh had a local guy named Chuck um blank not his last name but I'll remember it who volunteered and rote us great analysis and he made his own maps and if you want to go back and read our reports on fire in the seoa in 2021 or 2022 um we're looking for that kind of stuff we are Sho string and we need volunteers and uh might be able to pay someone a little bit depending on how much um coverage we get but if you are retired fire person who does this stuff for fun um and you want to contribute to the lookout we're always welcoming submissions and U so go back and read the stuff that Chuck wrote it's great all right so back to babit Peak let's see what it's done since we went on our little Walkabout all right so I'm just going to put some of these links in the chat so you can do this yourself because probably don't need to watch me refresh webcams for next half hour I'm going to go dual parenting and I'll put these into um the feed itself after we're done with the broadcast so we're gifting you some links here if you want to hook us up in exchange um consider checking out our web page look out buy some hats mugs you can check out our sponsor qac um here in Chico you can subscribe we like that send us a little PayPal donation and and read some of our stuff cool thanks everyone