I'm glad I'm not near Ft. McMurray, Alberta. They evacuated 80,000 people and there's some numbers floating around at $9,000,000,000 in damage! Unbelievable watching the video's of people trying to leave with flames along the highway. Lots of evacuee's coming to Edmonton.
Yeah, what a disaster! Is it unusually dry there? Dead trees etc. to fuel such a fire?
Local news here a thousand miles away says to expect hazy smoke this afternoon and evening. That fire is so big its making it own weather and feeding itself with high winds.
Its too bad they got rid of all but one of their Martin Mars water bombers
Good ships, but ancient. Enormously expensive to maintain, have to make parts for them at times. They had their day. Should keep them in shape, and flyable because they deserve that. We need new firefighting planes with the same or bigger capacity. There are some big jets in the game now, but I don't think they can fly as low, as slow, and into places the Mars can and get back out of. Turboprops would be the ticket. My opinion only, YMMV.
There were only two Martin Mars water bombers in recent years. The Hawaii Mars II and the Philippine Mars. The Philippine mars is the only one they shut down, as it is being sent to a museum. The Hawaii Mars II is the only potentially active one left. However, they have not been able to find work for it, so it sits. As much as it may seem like the capacity of the Mars would be an advantage, it really isn't. They are slow, and need a massive body of water to land on. In fact, a group of three air tractors can out perform the Mars, and do so at a lower cost. More water on the fire per hour, and less cost to do so mean the Mars is not likely to find much work in the future.
They said the fire has now burned 101,000 hectares(250,000 acres) and could double in size by tomorrow. The fire is creating it's own weather and not much rain forecast for the area.
Thoughts with you people over there. Stay safe.
It is smokey like fog here 1/2 mile visibility. I was hearing about a MN fire up near Bemidji? A recent customer of mine was a smokejumper for 20yrs. He was chatting about how the fire creates it's own weather, lightning and all. Crazy stuff. Poor inexperienced management was going to get him killed he said.
Yep, every time we have a wet cycle and there's few fires for a few summers, they gut the whole firefighting system and cut funding. Add to that out here in the West the Feds control the land and cater to the enviro-nuts, so it's don't harvest anything, don't take out bug killed or diseased tracts, remove as many access roads as you can and let all that dry fuel build up. Then when the cycle comes around to dry summers again, it's burn baby burn. The fires are so hot, acess so limited, and so much blowdown and brush on the ground, you can't safely use smokejumpers or ground attack, all you can do is backburn where you can and air drop to try and protect structures. This is supposed to be "natural" and of course nobody mentions that these fires release millions of tons of carbon into the air which we're supposed to be reducing. None of it makes sense.