Fire Safety for Hunting Season

This week a special guest blogger will be posting on our page. Lana Limbeck is a 2010 graduate of Forest Grove High School and volunteers in our Fire and Life Safety Division. Lana will be starting her college fire science studies soon, and to get her started we gave her a "homework assignment" to create a fire safety blog post related to the start of hunting season. Good job Lana, hope our readers enjoy it.

Summer is already coming to a close to the disappointment of many, but for some Oregon hunters it only brings excitement. Fall ushers in an exciting time for those preparing their plates for a little extra protein and their guns for this year's hunting season. Bow hunters kicked it off already this month and rifle hunting is due to begin later in the fall in October. Although August has blessed Forest Grove area residents with much cooler weather this year, it is important to remember that while summer may seem to be cooling off, the fire danger is still very high. This is especially true for hunters who will be spending a lot of time in the national forests in the next few months. When preparing your packing lists for this year’s hunting season, be aware of the dangers, restrictions, and laws regarding fire safety during the last month of summer.

According to charts provided by the Oregon Department of Forestry, wildfires are more prevalent throughout July, August, September, and even October. We may think that the danger ends in September, but depending on the weather, it can continue well into the fall. Until significant rainfall occurs, the ODF says that major restrictions will remain in place well into the fall.

This brush fire burned approximately an acre and was believed to have been started by a hunter on SW Fernhill Road last year

There are many restrictions currently in place on all Tillamook state forests and surrounding properties due to the current fire danger. Forest fires are too often caused by unattended campfires and smokers who fail to extinguish their cigarettes. To prevent this, the ODF has placed a ban on both. Absolutely no campfires are allowed on public or private land except in designated areas such as campgrounds. Smoking is prohibited unless kept inside closed vehicles on improved or well-maintained roads. ATV's and motorcycles are not permitted unless on improved roads because of the dry conditions and no non-industry use of chainsaws is allowed in any case.

The heavy restrictions may disappoint many hunters who plan on camping, but it is imperative to pack according to the current regulations. One very important thing to know when creating a packing list is this: when traveling on any unpaved county or logging roads all hunters must carry a fire extinguisher or one gallon of water and one shovel in their vehicles. It's not just a recommendation this year, it is required.

The regulations and fire dangers are different for every unit and area so it is very important to know and understand the regulations for the unit you will be hunting in. You can find information about the fire dangers in your unit by contacting the Oregon Department of Forestry, or by visiting their website at http://egov.oregon.gov/ODF/.

FGF&R wishes for everyone to have a fun, successful, and safe hunt this year. Pack according to the current fire danger and remember to stay updated on the restrictions taking place in your unit. Enjoy your hunting season, and good luck!

New GPS units help us find you.

For years when firefighters would visit with school aged children we would talk about calling 9-1-1 and how the children needed to know their address when they called. As times changed and technology progressed, if you called 9-1-1 from a phone connected directly to a wall jack, our enhanced computer aided dispatch system could tell where you were calling from based on the phone you were using. This greatly improved our ability to respond timely when we could not get the caller to tell us where they were because the computer would tell us exactly where the phone was located.

In the 1990's with cell phones becoming more prevalent this became much more difficult. People would call and were not sure of their address, dispatchers had to use landmarks to help the caller identify where they were close enough to be able to give us accurate information which took valuable time away from our response. In recent years the cell phone and dispatch technology has evolved so much that now our dispatchers can sometimes locate your place on earth by your cell phone signal. At our dispatch center in Tanasbourne a dispatcher could use their computer to determine the latitude and longitude of the callers location based on their cell phone signal. As people abandoned their traditional land line home phones for cell phones this became all the more important of a tool to be able to use.

Last week we installed Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) units in our Engine 421 and Rescue 4 that enable us to use this cell phone location information on our end and direct our crews right to the scene. This is so vitally important when you consider how much of our 85 square miles of response area is really rural. It could be a farmer in the middle of a field in Verboort having chest pains while moving his irrigation, a mountain bike rider who has crashed on one of the local trails, or a child calling for their sick mother from a home in the city, but we hope that these new GPS units will help us respond quicker when seconds really do count.

These small GPS units in our engine and rescue can have a big impact on our ability to respond to an incident quickly when the caller isn't sure of their location.

In addition to the ability that these units provide us to find people they also help others find us. We use air ambulance resources like Lifeflight quite often and with our GPS units we can tell the pilots exactly where the landing zone is located. Don't worry however, we aren't abandoning the more traditional methods like paper maps that are still carried on our engines, and our firefighters will still train on basic road and area familiarization, but these electronic tools are just one of the many ways that we are looking towards technology to become more efficient improve our service to the community.

It may be "cooling off" but our fire season is just now starting to heat up

All over Forest Grove air conditioners are running non stop, kids are playing in sprinklers, and fresh cool Hermiston water melons are being enjoyed for dessert. At the same time we are already getting that feeling that fall is coming - Monday Night Football was on last night, Pacific University students are starting to return to campus, and parents are buying school clothes and supplies and getting their kids to bed a bit earlier each night in anticipation of the arrival of school and the unofficial end of summer. It's important to remember however that in Oregon our wild fire season is really just getting started, and may still be more severe then we've seen in years.

In July the 15 acre fire on the slopes of David Hill was not only easily visible from anywhere in Forest Grove as the smoke drifted over our neighborhoods, but it was also one of the largest fires in our community in recent history. This weekend almost 80 acres burned just a few miles south of us in the northern part of Yamhill County. Just weeks ago the Rooster Rock Fire near Sisters threatened homes, and 800 acres currently burning near Grants Pass is in danger of doing the same. All over the northwest crews are working the fire lines waiting for the fall rains to arrive that will end fire season 2010.

This cell phone photo shows the smoke column from the David Hill Fire in July

Now is the time to remember the old phrase "It's always darkest just before the dawn". We all remember the long winter that stretched into the spring; this has allowed fuels such as brush and grass to be more abundant then normal years and the recent dry weather has made for tinder box like conditions around us. We hear every year about fires in southern and central Oregon, but northwest Oregon has not experienced a large fire in decades leaving us extra vulnerable and complacent when it comes to fire danger. But we are at risk and history proves it, until Southern Oregon's 2002 Biscuit Fire our very own 1933 Tillamook Burn was the largest fire in our state in generations, and it started on August 14th of that year. The 1933 Tillamook Burn destroyed over 240,000 acres of the very same timbered hillsides that we all see when we look west to watch the sunset or drive over the hill to visit the coast.

So what can we do? Even if it does cool down into the 70's this week and stays that way until the October rains arrive we cannot let our guard down. September can be one of the busiest months for brush fires, and just a few years ago we fought a stubborn October brush fire all night long with frost on the ground when we were done. Now is the time for caution and attention to everything we do outside. Carry a fire extinguisher in your car, make sure your lawn mower or tractor is in good working condition, put a little extra water on that old burn pile or campfire or pig roast pit and make sure it's out, and if the signs in your camp site say no camp fires please don't start one. If you see smoke call 9-1-1 immediately, fires can spread rapidly and we would rather check on a small fire then have to try and control one that is growing by the acre instead of the inch. If we work together we can make sure that the summer 2010 is rememberd for fun family activities instead of tragic wild fires.