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Previous1 of 3NextBaby koala Lotus gets close up and caring as mum Melaleuca has her dressings changed at Healesville Sanctuary. The sanctuary will donate today's takings to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal. Picture: David Caird

Angry survivors blame council 'green' policy Andrea Petrie, Arthurs Creek February 11, 2009 Page 1 of 2 | Single Page View ANGRY residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk. During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne's northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze — criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council's help...

jihadist group responsible for nearly 50 attacks on American soil is operating 35 training camps across the nation, but its name cannot be found on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Exposing Jamaat ul-Fuqra's threat to the U.S., putting it on the terror list and shutting it down is the aim of a documentary film premiering tomorrow night at the Landmark Theater in Washington, D.C., at 7:30 p.m. The film's producer, the Christian Action Network, or CAN, says there's no charge to attend the showing of "Homegrown Jihad: The Terrorist Camps Around the U.S.," and DVDs are available...

AUSTRALIA has been singled out as a target for “forest jihad” by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror. US intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to “start forest fires”, claiming “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands”. The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law under the “eye...

Our view:It’s criminally negligent when politicians can’t set aside differences long enough to talk for a morning about an urgent public safety hazard The organizers of a wildfire forum in Sacramento on Wednesday brought together three members of the U.S. Congress and half a dozen state lawmakers. They drew the California fire marshal, the head of the state Fire Safe Council, Forest Service researchers and officials, and county supervisors from around the region. STORY TOOLS E-mail story Comments iPod friendly Printer friendly News alerts Subscribe to the paper Submit a news tip More Editorials Delta overhaul can't undercut northern rights...

High-Tech Firefighting Tools Headed for the Front Lines 1. ATV-Mounted Power TorchSometimes, the best way to stop fires is to start them. Since the 1970s, fire managers have used so-called prescribed fires to burn up dry, flammable fuel before it accumulates into something that could start a much more dangerous conflagration. Determining when and how to set a prescribed fire is a complicated science. "A lot of the grassland areas have lots of acreage that's got to be burned by a certain deadline. You can't just do it any old day," says smoke jumper Brandyn Harvey, who worked for...

Enlarge ImageModest blaze. Firefighters may be contributing to global warming by fighting small fires.Credit: Katrina Tepper/AP Scientists have long believed that preventing or dousing forest fires helps combat global warming by saving trees and thus allowing forests to take up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But surprising new data on hundreds of California forest sites suggest the opposite. The work could help quantify the role of forests in the global carbon cycle and shape U.S. federal fire policy. Lightning-caused fires serve a natural mechanism within forests. They destroy small trees and underbrush while often allowing large trees to...

A case study: Analysis of the Portuguese forest fires. Chemical Engineering Department, IST — Instituto Superior Técnico, Torre Sul, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal; Chemical Engineering Department, ISEL — Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa, R. Conselheiro Emídio Navarro, 1, 1949-014 Lisboa, Portugal. Fires of large dimension destroy forests, harvests and housing objects. Apart from that combustion products and burned surfaces become large ecological problems. Very often fires emerge simultaneously on different locations of a region so a question could be asked if they always have been a consequence of negligence, pyromania, high temperatures or maybe there has...

What's Behind the California Wildfires? By Bill Steigerwald FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, October 31, 2007 As several of Southern California's wind-whipped wildfires still burned on Thursday, we called conservation biologist and forest researcher Dr. Reese Halter to learn more about the 20 fires that had destroyed 2,000 homes, forced the evacuation of more than 500,000 people and left at least eight dead. Halter, the author of "Wild Weather: The Truth Behind Global Warming," is the founder and president of Global Forest Science (globalforestscience.org), a forest conservation and research institute that helps private landholders, governments and corporations around the world "make better...

Tree-cutters have removed dead and dying trees from 30,000 acres near Idyllwild, but plenty of fuel remains on the 70,000 acres that haven't been cleared, officials said. Limited resources for tree cutting have been concentrated on clearing hazards near highways and in populated areas and on building firebreaks. "We've tried to do everything we can with the money we have to protect the towns of Idyllwild and Pine Cove," said Bob Sommer, a vegetation management specialist with the Forest Service. Since Thursday, the Esperanza Fire has consumed more than 40,000 acres of dry vegetation in the San Jacinto Mountains. Three...

The U.S. Forest Service has not developed national guidelines to assess the risks communities face from wildfires and is unable to ensure that the most important fire prevention projects are funded first, an independent government audit has found. And while the majority of catastrophic wildfires occur in the West, nearly 58 percent of the total acres treated in fiscal year 2004 were in the southeastern states, the report said. "The Forest Service cannot clearly identify the level of risk to communities from wildfire," it said. "It cannot demonstrate to stakeholders its accomplishments in reducing those risks with the funds provided."...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

While working this summer for the Federal Government on some communication issues on a ridgeline at about 7,000 feet in the mountains of Idaho, I was witness to the true, Great Smoky Mountains, not the mist and fog shrouded variety back east. Here's a picture I took. The Great Smoky Mountains of Idaho - 2006 The wind had come up that day out of the south very strong and allowed us to get to this particular spot without fear of the fire. We passed through a National Guard check point and as Federal Employees, with a comm job to do,...

Federal officials on Friday were tracking 60 large, active fires that were burning more than 1 million acres, or more than 1,500 square miles, across the West. The states in the region with the most number of fires included Idaho, Nevada, and Montana, according to the Web site of the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center, composed of various federal agencies that coordinate to battle wildfires. In Idaho, fires had burned more than 231,000 acres, or 360 square miles, the center reported. State officials toured fire camps to survey the damage -- as well as to tell federal firefighting crews here,...

Experts and emergency management officials in Grand County worry that a large stretch of forest devastated by pine beetles may be waiting to burn in a massive wildfire. At least a quarter million acres of lodge pole pines are either dead or dying because of the mountain pine beetle. They've turned once green forests into large areas of dead, red colored trees. "Some of these county roads are very thin," Billy Sumerlin, director of Grand County's Natural Resources department said. "It makes it very difficult for fire apparatus to get in, especially if we're in the process of trying to...

A Spanish police unit specialising in organised crime has been investigating the spate of forest fires which have ravaged northwestern Spain in recent days, amid claims that many were deliberately set. Teams made up of firefighters and more than 3,500 forest workers, backed up by 30 aircraft, were battling 56 blazes Tuesday in the worst hit northwestern region of Galicia while a further 40 were regarded as being under control. Also affected, though to a far lesser degree, was the eastern region of Catalonia. After Galician regional president Emilio Perez Tourino asserted Monday that "the majority (of the fires) are...

Experts paint grim picture for local trees, eye future forest.. It seems there’s just not much good news for trees these days... Pine beetles decimating lodgepole pines across the West ...foresters are already looking ahead to what the landscape will look like in the future. “This mature pine forest is a goner,” said Cal Wettstein, district ranger for the Holy Cross and Eagle ranger districts. “We’re focusing on the next forest.” Asked what the future holds...Wettstein said simply “large fires.” Over the next two decades, the beetle-killed trees will shed their needles and their branches, then fall down and contribute...

High wind hampered fire crews again Sunday as they fought a wildfire that had dashed across nearly 300 square miles of remote rangeland in northern Nevada. The brush fire 50 miles northeast of Winnemucca had exploded from less than 30 square miles to 292 square miles since Thursday, making it one of the nation's biggest wildfires of the season, fire information officer Susan Marzec said. "The fire is continuing to make its move because of gusty winds and dryness," Marzec said. "Every time we make headway we're back where we started." The fire was just 5 percent contained, and no...

Wildfire triage helps districts decide which properties to protect... Increasingly wary of powerful forest fires..mountain fire districts are mapping out which vulnerable homes might be sacrificed to avoid putting firefighters in harm's way and make best use of limited resources... Since [ the ] disastrous fire season of 2002, fire districts and departments...are rapidly assembling data to assist in hard decisions about what neighborhoods are defensible and which ones may be left to burn. But should a fast-rising fire force districts with too few resources to make deployment decisions fast, new maps and software give firefighters instant access to the...

Arabs resumed using arson as a weapon against Israel Friday morning and destroyed more than 10,000 pine trees in Israel's largest planted forest. Shortly after noon, firefighters overcame the fire at the Yatir Forest but still were trying to prevent it from rekindling the trees as afternoon winds become stronger. The forest is on the edge of the Negev and Judean deserts, about seven miles (12 kilometers) northwest of Arad and 15 miles (25 kilometers) northeast of Be'er Sheva. "This is the largest and worst arson in the forest," said Abu Abukyan, Yatir Forest superintendent. He said there were no...

SEATTLE -- Since first taking off in 1969, Boeing 747s have carried 3.6 billion people and flown the equivalent of 74,000 round trips to the moon. (A) consideration is whether the large planes could fly low and slow enough to be used effectively against the kinds of fires that have raged across the West in recent years -- charring 60 million acres in the past decade, or an area the size of Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, based in Boise, Idaho.

SANTA FE— Authorities say possible elements of al-Qaida might be operating in New Mexico and that efforts by law enforcement agents forced terrorists to "postpone" a May attack in New Mexico or California. "The attack was, I guess you could say, quashed because of increased security measures that law enforcement and other agencies had taken," FBI special agent Bill Elwell said Thursday. "It became too much of a risk for them to continue." Elwell said intelligence about the attack "was very nonspecific in scope, in times, dates or location." He said federal agents found out about the attack after May...

WASHINGTON - The FBI (news - web sites) warned police in California and New Mexico that it received information about possible terrorist activity in their states. However, the warning wasn't specific about particular targets or a method of attack, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday.

Jumbo Boeing 747 Reworked to Fight Fires ASSOCIATED PRESS McMINNVILLE, Ore. (AP) - The first jumbo jet converted for use as a tanker in fighting forest fires could be ready for service by July, an aviation company said. The Boeing 747 could carry 20,000 gallons of water or fire retardant, 10 times as much as a conventional propeller tanker, Evergreen International Aviation said Thursday. The jet was converted over the past year and has made about 50 test flights in Arizona, the McMinnville, Ore.-based company said. The jet still needs approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. "It represents one of...

Drought Still Ravages Western U.S. Sun Apr 11,12:50 PM ET By SCOTT SONNER, Associated Press Writer RENO, Nev. - From the brittle hillsides of Southern California to the drying fields of Idaho, from Montana to New Mexico, a relentless drought is worsening across most of the West, water supplies are dwindling and the threat of wildfires is rising. "Most of the West is headed into six years of drought and some areas are looking at seven years of drought," said Rick Ochoa, weather program manager at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Arizona is facing its worst drought...

GLOBAL JIHAD New al-Qaida plot to burn U.S. forests Arab message board posts 'plan of economic attack' Posted: April 8, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com An Arabic-language jihadi website posted a message purporting to be "al-Qaida’s plan of economic attack" on the U.S. that included setting forest fires, according to the Northeast Intellgence Network. The six-point plan appeared Saturday and called for: attacks on the assets of large American companies all over the world; attacks on U.S. oil refineries; attacks on civilian airports with the goal of financially devastating U.S. airlines; deliberate pollution of food system; setting of...

PRESCOTT — Two new methods of reducing erosion are being tried on land burned in the Indian fire south of Prescott. The land, burned in May 2002, is being used to test wood chips and new straw pellets. The pellets, developed by an Illinois company, expand fourfold when wet and stick to the ground, so the soil is less likely to wash away in monsoon rains. Wood chips are also being tried. Shortly after the fire, researchers cut down some of the dead trees, chipped the smaller logs and spread them on the burned area. To compare the effectiveness, researchers...

Subj: Fwd: [EF!] "Healthy Forest" legislation passes U.S. Senate! Date: 11/6/2003 11:05:22 AM US Mountain Standard Time BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE! FOLLOWING IS AN ALERT FROM RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISTS! THEY ARE PREPARING TO ATTEMPT TO BLOCK THE FOREST HEALTH BILL! PLEASE CALL YOUR SENATORS AND OPPOSE THEIR CRAZY IDEAS BEFORE WE LOSE MORE FORESTS TO UNNATURAL FOREST FIRES! Senator Wyden (D-OR) is slated for attack by the enviro-stalinists!!! Please consider calling and leaving messages of support and thanks for his heroic efforts on this bill!!!! He's going to need to hear from us in droves!!!!!!!!!!! Phone: (202) 224-5244 or (503) 326-7525 Fax:...

A massive Russian jet capable of releasing more than 10,000 gallons of water in a single dump could help solve California's wildfire crisis, but the federal government continues to resist it, asserts two U.S. congressmen. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said at a news conference yesterday the Russian government repeatedly has offered the Ilyushin-76 'Waterbomber' – reportedly capable of dousing a fire the size of 10 football fields – to the U.S. Forest Service for its use but has been rebuffed each time. Rohrabacher spokesman Aaron Lewis told WorldNetDaily the federal government's response amid wildfires that have...

RUIDOSO, N.M. - Nearly 40 summer homes and cabins were voluntarily evacuated as a forest fire burned through at least 350 acres of steep terrain north of here. Forest officials were waiting Tuesday for more air support to help battle the blaze, which started Monday night near N.M. 532 and burned mainly in the Lincoln National Forest. "The key is getting those resources that have been ordered," said Bill Duemling, a fire information officer. An air tanker, designed to drop fire retardant, along with three water-dropping helicopters were called in to help. The fire was being mapped from the air...

<p>PHOENIX (AP) — The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States.</p> <p>Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.</p>

<p>Lawmakers from both parties are calling for fast action on President Bush´s forestry initiative, as wildfires that have killed at least 15 persons and destroyed more than 1,100 homes race through Southern California.</p> <p>Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, asked the Senate last night to start moving the Healthy Forests Restoration Act that has stalled over issues of debate time and amendments.</p>

PHOENIX (AP) — The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States. Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it...

<p>PHOENIX (AP) — The FBI alerted law enforcement agencies last month that an al-Qaeda terrorist now in detention had talked of masterminding a plot to set a series of devastating forest fires around the western United States. Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, told The Associated Press that officials there took note of the warning but didn't see a need to act further on it.</p>

Afterburn: How Oregon’s Winter Fire charred the land and burned tempers. By Judy Blais Flames raced across Dutchman’s Flat and plunged down into the Punch Bowl, a rugged area near the center of Oregon’s Summer Lake Valley. It was clogged with an accumulation of fuel from decades of neglect and the firestorm exploded into a maelstrom of such raw power that even seasoned firefighters were awed. Self-generated winds fanned the frenzy, culminating in a fire tornado that raged crazily up and down forests of pine, juniper and mountain mahogany, demolishing everything in its path. Starved for oxygen, the tornado reared...

When fires turn eastern Washington and Oregon forests into wastelands, valuable wildlife habitat is lost and it costs between $1,300 and $2,100 per acre in fire-fighting costs, lost buildings, economic suffering by nearby communities and degraded waterways, say University of Washington researchers in a recently published report. The report attempts for the first time to tally the cost per acre of letting the worst wildfires - the crown fires - burn. It's a needed perspective when considering thinning overly dense stands - work that could cost nearly $600 an acre in some places. So say UW researchers who are offering...

A friend of mine from Montana said to me recently, "the State's on fire again", referring to the catastrophic loss of vast areas of its forests this year. The same can be said of New Mexico, Colorado, and other States for whom these forest fires have become an annual event. Everyone knows that our national parks and forests are not being managed correctly. Because of "environmental" policies and restrictions, they are tinderboxes waiting to explode from a lightning strike or a careless camper. Why then do we give a tax exemption to one of the most active pressure groups opposing...

VICTORIA (CP) - Residents of a Kelowna, B.C., neighbourhood whose homes were levelled by a raging forest fire may try to take the B.C. government to court, a lawyer said Wednesday. Denis Berntsen, a lawyer in the Vancouver Island community of Sidney, said he has been approached by one family and talked to several others. There could be grounds for a class-action lawsuit against the government, he said. "The allegation is that the fire could have been prevented or at least the severity of it could have been prevented had the government followed the expert reports it had available to...

<p>Our nation faces a severe forest health crisis. Whether it is raging fires, ravaging insects, or mysterious, disease-carrying agents that threaten to wipe out entire species, not a single region of the country is being spared the devastating economic and environmental consequences of this monumental crisis.</p>

SALEM, Ore. (AP) - As they fought a raging wildfire last year in southern Oregon, a fire crew got word that the blaze was approaching rapidly and all workers needed to evacuate. They yelled the directions to a Hispanic crew digging a fire line, but none of them understood English. They stood, confused. Members of the English-speaking crew ran toward the workers, waving their arms in an attempt to communicate. Eventually, someone who could translate was found and no one was hurt. "That's a dangerous situation," said Ed Daniels, training manager for the Oregon Department of Forestry, who investigated...

CAMP SHERMAN -- The trees with the blue ribbons will be cut. Everything decked in pink stays. Of the 50 or so ponderosa pines in a quarter-acre patch of the Deschutes National Forest, as few as 13 could be spared the chain saw. "There's going to be a huge difference. And I'm going to get hammered by some people," says Tim Lillebo, Eastern Oregon field representative for the Portland-based Oregon Natural Resources Council. When President Bush travels to Oregon this week, he is expected to call national attention to this sort of effort to thin the overgrown forests of the...

Fire Map (most are in our area of Idaho) http://firemapper.sc.egov.usda.gov/modisrr/lg_fire2.php

<p>His face has been splashed on the covers of Time and Newsweek this month.</p> <p>And his cyberstumping - the use of the Internet to raise big bucks and organize supporters - has turned Howard Dean into a political phenomenon. The former Vermont governor whose iconoclastic ways remind some of Arizona Sen. John McCain stops by Tucson on Monday.</p>

SEELEY LAKE, Montana — When members of the Western Governors Association and federal officials toured a series of federal forest projects near this western Montana community in mid-June, they said they found ample justification to accelerate forest thinning to prevent wildfires. (Related story: Milder fire season may still turn hot) ... But if the governors had gone instead to the scene of Colorado's worst wildfire, the Hayman fire of 2002, they might have had a bit more skepticism about the beneficial effects of forest thinning. "Thinning," concludes Greg Aplet, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society, "can change fire behavior...

<p>SUMMERHAVEN, Ariz. (AP) &#8212; During a visit to a charred mountain-resort community yesterday, President Bush called on Congress to pass legislation to allow for prompt thinning of overgrown forests.</p> <p>"Forest-thinning projects make a significant difference about whether or not wildfires will destroy a lot of property," Mr. Bush said after touring charred areas of the Santa Catalina Mountains in southeastern Arizona. "We need to thin our forests in America."</p>

<p>He's come to the wrong place with the wrong plan.</p> <p>"We're all scratching our heads over why the president would attempt to use the 'Aspen' fire as a political stage for his Healthy Forests Initiative," said Brian Segee of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity.</p>

The Color of Money "Green" It is appalling that we face yet another year of substantial fire destruction of critical habitat for endangered species and the destruction of natural resources on public lands solely because so called “environmental groups” still have a financial incentive to litigate against beneficial public forest restoration projects. Under the Federal Equal Access to Justice Act, if an “environmental attorney” files suit and is successful in simply delaying a forest restoration project, we the taxpayers are required to send them a check for their excessive legal fees and “expenses.” This is an unintentional flaw in the...

Lightning created by the smoke from one Washington state wilderness blaze sparked a small fire that burned near the Canadian border Thursday. The spot fire near Bald Mountain in the Pasayten Wilderness was burning about three miles south of the border, and about two miles north of the main Farewell Creek fire, spokeswoman Christy Covington said Thursday. It was believed to be only about an acre, but fire officials were monitoring it as well as two similar spot fires south of the main blaze. Meanwhile, the Farewell Creek fire, which had blackened 73,640 acres since lightning started it June 29,...

How a forest stopped a fire in its tracks The New York Times SUSANVILLE, Calif. -- Where the fire came through Blacks Mountain Experimental Forest last September, the ground is ash and the trees are charcoal. Black and gray are the colors, lightened only by small mounds of red dust at the base of some of the charred trunks -- the leavings of bark beetles -- and flecks of green where new growth pokes above the ash. Through the tall, ravaged columns, however, a living pine forest is visible. And as visitors inspecting the fire damage walk toward the living...

Western National Forests Could Be Targets For Terrorism By Starlyn Klein BOISE - The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise is on alert after threats from Al-Qaida that western national forests could be targets for terrorism. A senior Al-Qaida detainee told federal investigators he had developed a plan to set midsummer forest fires in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah. Although Idaho is not included officials at NIFC are taking the threat seriously. "We at NIFC when we understand there are some threats they can be from anywhere and anybody," said NIFC Spokesperson Rose Davis. Just recently they learned that...