And So It Starts

The rains of winter are long gone and now the heat of the summer is looming on the horizon. Rain spread out over several months have given us a heavier than usual crop of annual grasses, a warm spell this spring has turned the grass brown already.

As a result, there have already been a few vegetation fires that have spread a little farther than usual for this time of year.

We stumbled across this one while down south a few days ago.

I heard that this one went to 500 plus acres. We saw engines from several agencies responding to this and were kind of surprised that this went down in early May.

It seemed to me that this fire was more like a June fire than a May fire. You can never really tell what a fire season will end up like by what it starts like. It is always dependent upon the weather over the season. As far as major wind-driven fires go, it usually boils down to what happens in October and what comes first, the winds or the rains.

This fire looked like it burned pretty dirty, leaving some heavier fuels unburned. I'll bet the pilots were glad to get some work in and fine tune some skills that will be needed later on. I saw at least two helicopters on this and later saw a couple of fixed-wing aircraft flying toward this fire.

Sorry for the crappy pics, they were shot one-handed through the side window while traveling down the road. It's not illegal to photograph while driving is it? I mean if you don't use your cell phone.

As I have an obsession with aircraft, look for a few posts this summer on aerial firefighting. Fire and aircraft, you can't go wrong with that.

Thanks for reading,
Schmoe