Firefighter Blog

The 81,000 acre Indians Fire and the 78,000 acre Basin Complex fire have met. The combined acreage will soon exceed the total consumed by the Marble Cone Fire in 1977. the Marble-Cone fire claimed 178,000 acres.

I'm trusting the GeoMAC software on this one. Basin Fire command has been planning on this for some time. I posted on the possibility here last month.

Labels: 2008 Fire Season, Basin Complex, Big Sur, California Firestorm 2008, Indians Fire, Marble Cone

Big Sur locals including Big Sur Fire Brigade Chief Frank Penny and Los Padres National Forest "fuel chief" Steve Davis expressed prophetic concerns in an interview with a local reporter in October 2006;
Chief Penny saw this coming;

"“The area is screaming for more proactive prevention,” he says. “It’s very easy to do it, it’s just the will. There is a need for supplemental funding because of sudden oak {death}.
“It’s a crisis now. It just hasn’t become a political crisis because nobody’s been killed, nobody’s house has burned up, no roads have washed out.”

In 1977 90% of the Ventana Wilderness was scorched by the 178,000 acre Marble-Cone Fire.

Marble Cone was fed by dead limbs from unusual snow fall seasons before. The Basin Complex Fire is fed by "sudden oak death", a plague decimating tan oaks in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. An example of sudden oak death can be seen in a webcam photo capture from the Big Sur webcam at Nepenthe Restaurant. Notice the dead tree in the center of the image.

The Marble-Cone Fire may have been fueled by dead limbs but the fire was actually surrounded by responding state and federal crews in the initial stages. My cousin was one of those firefighters who had the fire in check when they were ordered to put down their chain saws. An approaching bulldozer was stopped in its tracks. The fire was in a "Wilderness" and no mechanical equipment is allowed in a designated wilderness.

I'll never forget my cousin shaking his head when he first told me this story. They had it stopped at 100 acres.

I'm not sure if an exemption was asked for or granted for this incident but you have to hope it was. As it stands tonight the fire is at 26,000 acres, 97% of which is uncontained fire line with multiple heads. The Ventana Wilderness is a precious resource.

The prophetic words of Chief Penny are coming back to haunt. The Angora Fire at Lake Tahoe last summer was fed by downed and dead trees. A debate continues who was at fault for not allowing clearing the deadwood. Two hundred fifty homes were lost there. Sixteen homes have been lost so far in Big Sur. One resident was told by a fire official the "big box" estimate for the Basin Complex is 250,000 acres.



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Labels: 2008 Fire Season, Basin Complex, Big Sur, California Firestorm 2008, Marble Cone