Gradually gaining recognition

It is heartening to see that more and more we are being advised of planned light-ups of permitted burns.  And not just by individual landowners - corporate and government landowners are beginning to give us advanced warning of light-ups.

This is an important development for a voluntary group like ours, where each smoke sighting can consume the time of lots of people.  For an "easy" fire, from the time a Coordinator receives the first notification with a bearing on the smoke to the point of filing it away as one of the following: a permitted controlled burn; a known wildfire; an unreported wildfire; or outside our area of interest, at least three Smokespotters will have been involved for varying periods, and it will have taken around 40 minutes of the Coordinator's time.

A fire that is more difficult to locate (perhaps due to strong winds, smoke haze, or other atmospheric conditions) may have involved both Coordinators for more than two hours, maybe seven or eight Smokespotters, and one or two government agencies.

Obviously, where we have advice of the lighting up of a planned burn, the time and number of people involved is likely to be much less.  The more we can achieve this situation, the longer we are likely to keep Coordinators and Smokespotters motivated to be involved in the group.  And, equally important, the more accurate we can be in our identification of the source of smoke, which translates into fewer "false alarms" to FireComm and Rural Fire Brigades.  Our credibility is the key to obtaining a quick response from the relevant agencies to our identification of unplanned fires.

So, please, encourage your friends, neighbours and employers to give one of the Smokespotter Coordinators a call when they are about to light up a permitted burn.  It's not that difficult to give us a call at the same time as they call FireComm to report they are lighting up (which is a condition of the permit).

New look to the daily Fire Danger Rating clip

I've finally found a way to put the boundary of the Lockyer Valley Regional Council area on the clip of the daily Fire Danger Rating.

The boundary is actually in the large, state-wide pdf of the Fire Danger Rating, but only appears when the image is enlarged then manipulated to reduce the number of Kb I have to upload. It's there, but too faint, so I manually trace it each day using Skitch (finally found a use for that program) which is the reason it will look slightly different from day to day.

Before I get emails about the location of Gatton, that's how it is on the original.  If you need to locate Gatton accurately, it is actually on the same east-west line, but directly below the "w" shape in the northern boundary of the LVRC area.  However the Fire Danger Rating maps are not so fine grained that the small error matters in terms of knowing your local FDR.

Thanks to the Rural Fire Service IT section for confirming that the faint lines in the FDR pdf correspond to the LVRC area boundary.

The Fire Season is Here

Looks like the fire season in the Helidon Hills has arrived.

I have started up the daily Fire Danger Rating map (in the box to the right) which is clipped from the official state-wide map released daily - see the links to this elsewhere in this blog.

We have had three fires located by the Smokespotter group this month.  Two were controlled burns - we had been notified of the lighting up of these by Private Forestry Services Queensland (a private company contracted to carry out the controlled burns), and they assisted us in confirming that the smoke sightings were in fact their burns. The third was outside of our area of interest, and was around 8km north of the turnoff to the Spring Creek Prison.

The practice of Fire Wardens in our area of adding a note to Fire Permits that the Helidon Hills Smokespotters should be advised at the time of lighting up (when FireComm also needs to be notified) is very much appreciated.

Locating these fires provided a good refresher for the Coordinators (me and KP - see details under the Coordinators above) and a few members of the Smokespotter group.

We are starting the season with a new Smokespotter on a high point in the Iredale area from where he has a good view of a significant part of the Helidon Hills.  I delivered his compass last week, as well as another to one of our group on the edge of the Toowoomba range (he had been using a hiking compass till now).  These compasses were part of a set of ten new Silva bearing compasses given to the Smokespotters by the Lockyer Valley Regional Council.