Introducing to the participants of pastors training about problems in the society. People who are rejected, neglgected, alienation, even by the church itself.

Shake hands!! Ups…..it’s only a game to describe the disease transmission. Got U!!….. But, then we’ve funny time to learn.

Hopefully, everyone went home with new point of view about how important dare to talk openly about sex in the light of Bible to strengthen and educate youth and parents.

My first experience of fire was not intimate, unless one believes that the sound of the high-pitched wail of a siren in the night and watching one’s grandfather rush into the darkness to drive away in a pale blue four-door Nineteen-Fifty-Three-Ford-Sedan to fight a fire is intimate. The siren’s call to face fire came from its perch atop the wooden scaffolding set above the town bandstand in the village park behind the fire station. I would lie in my bed and listen to the siren’s mournful cry calling from a mile away as my grandfather ran through the house. Sometimes I would climb from my bed and watch him run, boot laces loose, clothing askew as he dressed while moving toward that throbbing wail. His footsteps fell hard upon the wood floor, each of his steps ringing like the biting chop of an axe into a dry tree as he raced across the living room through the kitchen and out into the night. My Grandmother would be awake too, running behind him, helping him with his clothes as he ran. Then, as the red lights on the front of his car lit up the drive leading to the main road, she would sit down in her rocking chair by the large picture window he had built for her and rock, watching as the small round red tail lights faded in the distance. She would stay next to her window, rocking in her chair until he returned, only leaving once she saw that it was his car pulling into the drive and that he was the one behind the wheel. My childhood nights were filled with such scenes, it was an era of coal and wood stoves and old houses that had been wired long before electrical codes were the rule. Fire was common.

As a boy I would go to the fire station with my grandfather and play on the engines and, while playing, hear my grandfather and his friends speak of fire. They fought as volunteers in our small mid-western farm-town. Calmly they would talk to each other of structure fires and how, as they lay patterns of water that turned instantly to mist and fog, they would see fire angels flashing out of the dark smoke as if calling to them, reaching for them. They would speak of grass fires that would run like a deer before hounds, doing its best to surround them as they did their best to contain it. They would share their stories like soldiers trying to make sense of old battles and somehow in the telling would find peace, even with those fires that won the battle and took a life or a livelihood.

In those days there was no specialized breathing apparatus, no Nomex fire proof clothing. They entered fire with only a heavy rubber coat, rubberized leather boots and a hard black leather helmet for protection as they worked their way into flaming homes looking for victims, un accounted residents or pets. In those flames they would breath black and white carcinogenic fumes into lungs long turned dark by the accumulated poisons of years of fighting fire hand to hand, face to face. Axe and pike in hand, backed up only by friends holding hoses with a life of their own, hoses that lifted and pulled to be free to dance through the air like enraged pythons, these ordinary men holding ordinary jobs as mechanics, pharmacists, farmers, clerks, sales men, would battle a creature so old that we no longer understand it as a life form.Fire is a life form, the original life form. It breaths, it eats, it reproduces and it grows. It is the life form that was present at the birth of time, the life form that fuels the stars that light up our sky, the life form from which all other life takes its existence. It is the light we call God and all hope someday to return to and the heat we all fear falling into as a consequence of our misdeeds. When loosed on the earth it is savage and cruel, consuming if it can, destroying what it can’t consume. It enchants men and it creates fear like the dragons of myth.

Some men have a love relationship with this life force. Often that love manifests itself through arson. Like a man plying a woman with drink the arsonist unleashes of the dragon with gasoline, an act of power and control, a hope that bridled passion runs free. For other men the love relationship manifests itself in taming the dragon, calming the beloved, containing the hot passion that burns and destroys. For both kinds of men the love of the beast is real and the difference between the types of men is small.

My own first face to face experience of living fire was like most people’s, the flicker of the flames of the campfire contained in its round ring of metal or stone. In this form fire seems tame, like a pet lying at your feet. But even here fire is more of a cat than a dog. Fire in this form, like the cat, tolerates. That it is there to serve is an illusion because, like the lap cat, in an instant it can take a mind of its own and go wild. Although comforting, this experience of fire has no real intimacy. In this controlled and confined ring we don’t know the real nature of fire, instead we project our own needs upon fire like the owner of a cat assumes that the cat is there to serve when in reality the cat is there to possess. Intimacy requires knowing the soul of a creature and most around a campfire do not know fire’s soul.My first real intimacy with fire was on a school play ground. In those days my school had burn barrels and it was common for teachers to take their classroom trash to these barrels to set the crumbled papers of a day’s work on fire. In the fourth grade my teacher set such a fire and I, like all budding arsonists or fire fighters, picked up a piece of paper, rolled it into a cone and held the edge to the fire. It was not until I felt the heat from underneath the paper scorching my knuckles that I realized the fire had played a trick upon me and crawled along the bottom of the paper toward my hand. It was then I first knew fire as a living thing. There was no part of the paper scorched just the lower edge was burning and the flame from that edge reaching out six inches to touch my hand. With a start I dropped the paper and received a lecture from my teacher about the dangers of playing with fire. That moment though was my moment of enchantment, I had seen the fire as a living thing, a thing with purpose. I knew that it wanted to touch me, to consume me. Yet, always a kid to listen too well to the directives of adults I never played with fire again until I was an adult.

My next encounter was not with fire itself but with the aftermath of its power. My family had made friends with another family who lived on the edge of town and ran a souvenir store. They had lived through a fire that swept through their house but in the escape fire had touched the daughter. She was my age and though I was initially repulsed by the scaring on her body we in time became friends. Fire had embraced her and in the embrace every part of her body was left with a reminder of that embrace. Skin which should have been soft and supple was hard, stiff and tight. Features which should have been beautiful were reshaped into forms more akin to a desert landscape. Even her eyes, though not blinded, were reshaped by fire’s embrace as they looked out into the world, revealing pain and sorrow behind her laughter. As so many things go, my parents’ friendship with her family faded in time and I lost track of her. I have always kept the memory of her relationship with fire in my heart.

Years later, as my step-Father and mother were driving to my step family’s home in West Virginia, I had my first encounter with the active passion of fire, alive in all its power. On our journey we stopped on the side of the West Virginia Turnpike. Below us, down the shale embankment lay a truck, an eighteen-wheeler. My step father, who had followed my grandfather into the volunteer fire service went down the hill followed by another man who had stopped his Big Rig to come to the aid of a fellow driver. As they attempted to free the driver of the crushed truck flames began to grow and race from beneath the hood. My Dad and the Samaritan driver called up the hill to a now gathered crowd of on lookers and pleaded for someone to bring a fire extinguisher. No one moved, transfixed by fear, transfixed by uncertainty, I do not know. Being twelve and thinking myself more of a man than I was at that tender age, I climbed into the tractor of the truck of the driver who was helping my dad. There I retrieved the fire extinguisher he had called for. My mother, just as transfixed as the rest of the crowd, did not see me. When she finally did see me I was moving fast toward the edge of the mountain, fire extinguisher in hand. She and another woman grabbed me, stopped me. As my dad kept calling for the fire extinguisher, the flames had grown to engulf the truck. I heard a man screaming, screaming like I would not hear again for another six years. From where I stood I could see an arm reaching out of the window of the truck. With an effort I freed myself and threw the extinguisher as far down the hill as I could, my Dad climbing to get it where it fell short. By the time he got back down the hill the screaming had stopped, the arm lay on the side of the door, flames dancing on it like a log in a campfire. The roaring of the fire sounded like laughter.

We never spoke of that fire. I buried it in my soul in the darkest place I could find, full of shame and failure, rewriting that memory into something different, not realizing that there was no shame or failure, simply a boy taking on something much too big for him, knowing too that the shame came from knowing that I was secretly glad those women grabbed me.Six years later I would hear those screams again as a medical technician when I worked the burn unit at Ohio State University Trauma Center. It was my job to tend to the burned, the wounded. Daily I would debreed the burns, donning a rubber rain coat and hat and take the victims of fire’s embrace into the showers to scrub their skin, to loosen the charred rotting flesh. It was there my intimacy with fire was consummated. I came to know the smell of it, the taste of it as its ashes rose from dead flesh. I avoided fire after that, like a man avoids an ex wife who has been too hard on him. I moved into work which, like my grandfather and step-father, was in the nature of service, but a service that kept me away from fire.

Much later, as a full grown man, I had one more passionate encounter with fire. My step father, who had left law enforcement years before, was driving tankers full of jet fuel. The story of how is unclear but one New Years Eve, while atop a tanker and filling it with a volatile oil, the tank exploded. My task that night, after I received a call from the EMTs telling me that if I wanted to see my dad alive again I should rush to the hospital, was to enter the ER and identify my father for the doctors. When I entered, I saw before me a man who was still in fire’s embrace though the obvious flames to the observing eye appeared long gone. His skin was radiating heat and bubbling. His eyes were in a panic and every breath full of pain. That night I knew that I would have to face fire again, that like it or not fire was stalking my life, demanding my attention. All the old meetings began to surface and soon I was deep in my soul looking at how my encounter with fire had shaped me, how bit by bit I had shut doors of opportunity because of a chance encounter on a West Virginia Highway. I knew that though I was calm and composed for my Dad and my family, that I was no longer an overly brave twelve-year-old boy, that I would have to walk through my fear, work through the calm numbness left by fire and face it, learn to take it on hand to hand and face to face.

Twenty years later I have finally joined a volunteer fire department, and that has even been a dance. I have fought a couple of fires and started a training program to face fire which, through no fault of my own, fell through. For a while I used this as a reason, an excuse, to pull back from an intimacy which has been calling me since I was a child. Though older now, to old to serve as a regular on a fire department or a wild land fire line, I know it is time to come to terms with a relationship which began with a hot caress on a hand when I was a child.I have decided to focus this journal for a while on that relationship and the coming to terms with the Other in this relationship. I have recommitted to my own volunteer fire service and in the coming to terms with that and seeking out the training I need to be truly useful in an encounter with fire. I hope to write about what it means to learn about the nature of fire and how men and women face it.

I hope, too, that this does not seem a romantization of fire. I hope that this journal becomes a place where not only I come to an understanding of my relationship with fire and how it has woven its way through my life and at times determined the direction of my life. In that understanding change the nature of the relationship between myself and fire, I hope it becomes a place where those who read this come to a greater and more intimate understanding of that living thing that we take for granted, a living thing which in its smallest form charges the mitochondria of each cell of us into action and gives us life.

We cooked before and after sleep. And we left the motel 2pm. The mom says that her boys do not listen to her and she has no idea whom they took after. But I know – their mom! At the motel or inn, cooking inside the suite is prohibited. But she turned on the burner and cooked. I told her that is forbidden but she again was mad at me saying anything is OK if not found.

여관 방에서 버너에 불을 켜서 요리를 했다. 자기 전에 한 번 하고, 자고 일어나서 또 요리를 해서 먹었다. 그리고 다음 날 오후 2시가 넘어서 출발을 했다.

And on the way, I stopped at a gas station on the highway. There was nothing around from horizon to horizon. And I was a little bit surprised that the gas station was running by Korean family.

도중에 고속도로 주유소에 들렀는데, 지평선부터 지평선까지 주변에 아무 것도 없었는데, 그 주유소가 한국인이 운영하는 것이라서 좀 놀랬다.

Jasper National Park 재스퍼 국립공원

After 5pm, I got to the Jasper National Park toll gate. I had to pay about $20 a day. About 20 or 30 minutes pass the toll gate, I stopped at a shoulder and relaxed a little bit at an unknown lake.

5시가 넘어서 재스퍼 국립 공원 톨 게이트에 도착했다. 거기서 하루에 20불 요금을 내야 했다. 약 20-30분 더 가서 갓길에 차를 세우고 이름 모를 호수에서 좀 놀았다.

Unknown Lake in Jasper 재스퍼의 이름 모를 호수

Unknown Lake in Jasper 재스퍼의 이름 모를 호수

I saw a wild fire while I was relaxing myself with my feet in the lake.

호수에 발 담그고 놀고 있는데 산 불난 걸 봤다.

Wild Fire 산불

In Manitoba or any prairie area in North America, the driving is quite boring because the roads are so flat and straight. But here in Rockies, it is much fun. Some of the highway has just 30km/h speed limit.

마니토바나 북미의 평원지대는 어디를 가던 길이 너무 평평하고 곧아서 운전이 지루할 수 밖에없는데… 록키 지역에선 운전이 재밌다. 일부 구간은 고속도로 제한속도가 시속 30km인 곳도 있다.

Nice Road 매끄러운 길

And we went to Jasper Town but the Information Centre was closed because it was Sunday. And I phoned to make a reservation for a camp ground but found that  the same day reservation is not possible.

Just before the Jasper town, I met another stopper of my travel – the elks.

제스퍼 타운에 들어갔는데 여행자 센터는 주일이라서 문을 닫았다. 캠핑장을 예약하기 위해 전화를 했지만, 당일 예약은 안된다는 응답을 받았다.

재스퍼 타운에 가기 직전에 내 여행의 또 다른 훼방꾼을 만났는데, 바로 엘크였다.

Elk on Jasper Road 재스퍼의 엘크

So I went to a nearest camp ground named Whistler and there I got informed that every single camp ground in Jasper area was full except one – overflow camping.

The overflow camp ground was next to Snaring River Camp Ground near the Pocahontas.

그래서  가장 가까운 휘슬러 캠핑 장에 갔는데, 거기서 재스퍼 지역의 모든 캠핑장은 꽉 찼다는 안내를 받았다. 단 하나 남는 곳이 있는데, 오버플로우였다. 일반적인 캠핑장은 나무들로 둘러쌓인 개별적인 공간을 주는데, 오버플로우는 그런 거 없이 벌판에 아무 곳에나 텐트를 치게 하는 곳으로 모든 캠핑장이 꽉 차면 열리는 곳이다.

오버플로우 캠핑장은 포카혼타스 근처에 있는 스내어링 리버 캠핑장 바로 옆에 있다.

Way to Overflow 오버플로우 가는 길

We stretched the tent on the overflow camping. My friend’s family slept in the tent and I slept in the car. That night we had quite strong wind and rain and also found that our new burner is very good – won over all the string wind and rain.

오버플로우 캠핑장에 텐트를 치고, 친구네 식구들은 텐트  속에서 자고 나는 차에서 잤다. 그날 밤엔 꽤 비바람이 셌는데 새로 산 버너가 그 모든  비바람에도 꺼지지 않고 정말 좋다는 걸 확인했다.

Overflow Camp Ground 오버플로우 캠핑장

Entwistle to Jasper 260km 엔트위슬에서 재스퍼까지

via: Gizmodo

The growing LA fires from the Nasa Terra satellite.

As many or all of you know California is on fire. Yea I know it happens every year but for some reason it just seems worse this year. Sitting her in Riverside I feel surrounded they are all around me. And because of that I have really wanted to get out there and take some pictures. But since I am not a professional, and don’t get paid for my pictures. I am forced to sit at work and just listen to the radio about the fires.

With all that said I saw this on twitter today and wanted to share it with who ever came by to see my blog. Its a great time lapse video of the fires that are going on in California. Its from brandonriza.com and well worth a look.
www.brandonriza.com/Video

Those fires are just gorgeous – it’s like having Christmas lights on the mountains. It’s like a few years ago when they put Christmas lights on the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. They decided to keep it on for the rest of the year. Is there a way to keep those gorgeous fires going all year – maybe only in the evenings?

In Mariposa County, a nearly 6.8 square mile fire burned in Yosemite National Park. The blaze was 50 percent contained Sunday, said park spokesperson Vickie Mates. Two people sustained minor injuries, she said. About 100 residents from the towns of El Portal and Foresta were under evacuation orders, said Brad Aborn, chairman of Mariposa’s Board of Supervisors.

A growing wildfire in the mountains above Los Angeles surged north Sunday, forcing more evacuations and threatening some 10,000 homes. Residents of the small town of Acton were urged to evacuate as the 4 day old fire headed into the Antelope Valley. The fire spread in all directions, leaving three people seriously burned, destroying at least three houses and forcing thousands of people to flee.

“The leading edge, the one they’re really focused on, is that northern edge. It’s moving pretty fast up there,” said U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Randi Jorgenson. “But the fire’s growing in all directions. All fronts are going to be areas of great concern.” A slight drop in temperatures and an influx of fire crews from around the state were expected to bring some much needed relief Sunday. Some 2,000 firefighters were battling the blaze so far.

“Essentially the fire burned at will, it went where it wanted to when it wanted to,” said Captain Mike Dietrich, the incident commander for the Forest Service. Dietrich said he had never seen a fire grow so quickly without powerful Santa Ana winds to push it.

Mandatory evacuations were in effect for neighborhoods in Altadena, Glendale, Pasadena, La Crescenta and Big Tujunga Canyon.
The flames crept down the slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains despite mild winds blowing predominantly in the other direction. At least three homes deep in the Angeles National Forest were destroyed, and firefighters were searching for others, Dietrich said. Evacuation centers were set up at local high schools and one elementary school in the area.

More than 55 square miles of the western edge of the Angeles National Forest was destroyed. The fire was only 5 percent contained. The cause of the fire was under investigation. The fire, which broke out Wednesday afternoon, was the largest and most dangerous of several burning around southern and central California and in Yosemite National Park. At least three people were burned in the evacuation areas, two in the Big Tujunga Canyon area and one off Highway 2 near Mount Wilson, Jorgenson said. They were airlifted to local hospitals. Jorgenson had no further information about their injuries.

A massive plume of smoke could be seen for miles and bits of ash fell onto cars as far away as downtown Los Angeles. The air quality for cities surrounding the San Gabriel Mountains was deemed unhealthful by the regional air quality agency. Air crews waged a fierce battle against the southeast corner of the fire, burning dangerously close to canyon homes. Spotter planes and tankers dove well below ridge then pulled up dramatically over neighborhoods.

A major goal is to keep the fire from spreading up Mount Wilson, where many of the region’s broadcast and communications antennas and the historic Mount Wilson Observatory are located, officials said. Flames were within 5 miles of the towers early Sunday, fire officials said. A second fire in the Angeles National Forest was burning several miles to the east in a canyon above the city of Azusa. The 3.4 square mile blaze, which started Tuesday afternoon, was 95 percent contained Sunday. No homes were threatened, and full containment was expected by Monday. Southeast of Los Angeles in Riverside County a 3.6 square mile blaze in a rural area of the San Bernardino National Forest was 30 percent contained as it burned in steep, rocky terrain in Beeb Canyon. No structures were threatened. To the north, in the state’s coastal midsection, a 9.4 square mile fire threatening Pinnacles National Monument kept 100 homes under evacuation orders near the Monterey County town of Soledad. The blaze, 60 percent contained, was started by agricultural fireworks used to scare animals away from crops. That fire destroyed one home.

Story credited to PuppyJuice.com Entertainment .

Jerry Davies
Farmers Insurance

Jerry,
I wanted to give you an update on the use of the Emergency Notification Network that you allowed us to purchase for the benefit of the Crescenta Valley.

Your commitment to the Crescenta Valley Fire Safe Council occurred in the last week in May. We promptly implemented the One Call Now notification system to invite residents in the calling area to attend our Surviving A Wild Fire Expo held on May 31st. The resulting attendance was far greater than anticipated. During our 4 hour event, we had upwards of 300 residents attend and learn about Fire Safe Practices. The following week we captured Front Page newspaper coverage of the event in the Local LA Times edition of the Valley Sun.

The resultant outreach of this event continues to snowball into a strong grass routes evolution of Neighborhood Fire Watch program, based on our basic tenant of “Neighbors Helping Neighbors”. We have two follow up meetings this coming week, one a committee meeting to create an emergency evacuation route from within Briggs Terrace (a one way in one way out community that we’ve been told is very reminiscent of Oakland Hills), the second is a Neighborhood Fire Watch meeting with a few blocks of residents with potential block captains from adjacent areas in attendance. These meetings stress taking personal responsibility to assure ones safety and protection of property. Pre – Evacuation strategies are discussed at length. Attention is also given to analyzing ones property and implementing appropriate materials to harden ones home against ember and fire attack.

On June 7 ( one week after our Fire Expo) I received a call @ 4 PM stating that the Sheriffs had been searching for the last 2 hours for an Alzheimer’s afflicted resident to no avail and wouldn’t I call the watch commander who expressed interest in the reverse calling program. They had employed several units , some from outside the area, including a helicopter.
I called the watch commander and he gave me the descriptive information and within a few minutes I made a call to our database.
Within 5 minutes of having placed that call I was called by the watch commander notifying me that our lost resident had been found and it was a direct result of our call. The person had wandered a couple blocks away and entered someone’s rear yard where he had found a chase lounge to lie on. Upon receiving our call the family looked around their house and so located our missing person. The call back from the Sheriffs’ department was so soon after placing the call that I was ready to believe it was a coincidental event… not so according to those in charge.

We had occasion to assist County Fire and Sheriffs departments in launching and Evacuation Drill carried out in the Briggs Terrace area on August 1st. That event was well attended because of the work done by all in getting the word out. Our notification system was used as well as the lynch pin to begin the evacuation. Stephanie English of County Fire recorded 2 messages that we used, one to remind residents of the coming event, and the second to kick it off at 9 AM on Saturday morning.There is a good write up of the event on the County’s following page: http://www.fire.lacounty.gov/home_story2.asp . There is a great thank you note referenced in the last line of the article which bears being read by linking to it.

What we’ve learned since committing to the One Call Now system is that it has so many potential uses to assist our community over and above its basic intended purpose. Our commitment to you to make this a one time grant, has also motivated us to use the One Call Now Notification System as a key reason for neighbors to pay a $10 annual sponsorship to the CV FSC. So far we’ve raised an additional $800 to go towards next seasons cost of the system and the $10 checks keep rolling in as we spread our Neighborhood Fire Watch program through the community.

All of this has happened because you had the courage to grab the ring of opportunity as it was passing by one Friday night in May when I placed my call to you to ask for support. Thanks again for your support and I look forward to that Photo op of holding that large cardboard check early in September.

Regards,
Roger Young
CV FSC Chair

Click Here for More information on how One Call Now’s emergency notification service can help your community.

Victorian taxpayers are about to fund a full-scale royal commission into the catastrophic bushfires of February 7 in which 208 people – probably more – were burnt to death.

It is significant to note that two stakeholder groups have already come to concluded views: the 13,000 professional firefighters of Australia and the Climate Institute, which commissions scientific research in Australia into fires and global atmospheric warming.

Climate Institute CEO John Connor told Stateline NSW (on February 20, 2009) that in his organisation’s concluded view: “These are the fires of climate change that we’ve seen in Victoria and perhaps indeed in Port Lincoln in South Australia in 2005. Climate change is not just about warmer weather. It’s about wilder weather. Climate change costs … climate change kills”.

In 2007 the Climate Institute (www.climateinstitute.org.au) commissioned research by the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre, the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO Marine and Atmosphere Research. The researchers produced a paper, “Bushfire Weather in Southeast Australia”, which, like actuaries for the insurance industry, projected extreme and catastrophic fire weather risks for the regions of Australia through each increment in global atmospheric warming.

The paper did not then declare Sydney’s ‘Black Christmas’ bushfires in late 2001, the Canberra bushfires in January 2003 or the 2003 and 2007 eastern Victorian bushfire to be directly related to climate change. The language was equivocal: “The recent observed rise in fire danger may be due to a mix of both natural variability and human-induced climate change. The relative importance of these two factors is not known at this time. Observations from the next few years to decades will allow the determination of the role played by each of these factors”.

While some politicians have accepted that climate change is behind the exponential increase in extreme fire weather, no government – state, territory of federal – has yet declared the now deadly bushfire phenomenon in Australia to be by scientific definition ‘the fires of climate change’.

The 13,000 professional firefighters of Australia have collectively determined that climate change is producing the extreme fire weather conditions which have confronted them over recent years. This again is a significant declaration in a body (the United Firefighters Union of Australia) which is known to have its share of climate change sceptics within the membership.

In the open letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (dated February 12), national secretary Peter Marshall said:

“Consider the recent devastation in Victoria. Research by the CSIRO, Climate Institute and the Bushfire Council found that a ‘low global warming scenario’ will see catastrophic fire events happen in parts of regional Victoria every 5-7 years by 2020, and every 3-4 years by 2050, with up to 50 per cent more extreme danger fire days. However, under a ‘high global warming scenario’, catastrophic events are predicted to occur every year in Mildura, and firefighters have been warned to expect an up to 230 per cent increase in extreme fire days in Bendigo. And in Canberra, the site of devastating fires in 2003, we are being asked to prepare for up to a massive 221 per cent increase in extreme fire days by 2050.”

The Climate Institute’s website gives a state by state, region by region break down of FFDI (forest fire danger index) tracking the annual change in fire weather.

“Of most concern to firefighters are days classified as having ‘very high’ or ‘extreme’ fire dangers. The number of very high and extreme fire-weather days is projected to increase in all scenarios. For example, in Canberra, if the rate of global warming is low, the number of extreme days increases around 8-10 per cent by 2020, and 17-25 per cent by 2050. If the rate of global warming is high, the number of extreme days rises 25-42 per cent by 2020 and 137-221 per cent (around double to triple) by 2050.”

As the politicians, economists, insurance companies and emergency services struggle to come to terms with what this means, Australians residing and working in the bush landscapes have clearly been warned.

Do they abandon their now-dangerous lifestyles, or do they push for policy responses which confront the fires of climate change?

- from abc. 20 Feb 2009

Joyful news to more West Kelowna residents as they were permitted to return to their homes this morning. Gorman’s mill area evacuation order has been lifted, however Gellatly Bay still remains under an evacuation order until further notice.

The 1250 residents of Rose Valley are still under evacuation order, and fire crews are still agressively managing the wild fires.

Evacuation Order

416 properties west of Glenrosa Road
420 properties in the Rose Valley area

Evacuation Alert:

Gellatly Road area and Gorman Mill – 118 properties
North of Glenrosa Road and north of Powers Creek – 1,942 properties
Fintry High Farm – 10 properties
Bear Creek area – 49 properties
Shannon Woods – 366 properties
West Kelowna Estates – 1,500 properties
Crystal Springs & Brookhaven – 216 properties

Once residents are able to enter their homes, if they find theft or property damage, they are requested to call 250 768-2880.

Residents returning to their homes are urged to inspect their property and be aware of the following:

· Danger trees – trees that are burned that may fall without warning
· Dangerous structures or fire-damaged property ie: melted siding, burned landscaping
· Non-visible collapse risk areas such as potentially compromised septic systems
· Visible open holes and pits
· Hot or burning materials
· Hot ground (hot areas may exist, )
· Downed electrical wires and utility lines
· Hazardous materials
· Sharp objects
· Wildlife that may have been pushed out of their normal areas

Terrace Mountain fire is 30% contained as of last night, and water bombers are actively working on the east flank in an attempt to keep the wild fire from threatening the area known as Fintry High Farm country.

Campfire bans have been posted for the entire Okanagan region. Knox Mountain in Kelowna has been closed until further notice.

Have you seen the headlines lately wondering if we will ever have a summer?  I think they had my area in mind!  Even though I live on top of a mountain, I think my house may just slide down the hill any minute.  I think we have had rain every day since June 1^st!   Fortunately, it’s been more of the thunderstorm variety than the mucky overcast-all-day sort.   And it has given us the most beautiful start to summer – everything is green and lush – which is a most unusual sort of summer for the high desert!  However, that same lushness can mean only one thing once we dry out to a normal summer:  extreme wildfire danger. 

Where we live, there is not much that overly concerns us when it comes to natural disasters.  We don’t have hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, or tornados…except the ones my boys seem to create in my house everyday now that school’s out.  Earthquakes – or should I say THE earthquake – does concern us.  Supposedly our little ‘ole metropolitan area of Salt Lake is quite overdue for the big one here in Utah.  Having come from California, though, and lived through many a quake, that does not worry me quite so much on a personal and family level.  We’d be OK, precluding any fatalities.  How our community and the wider metropolitan community would fare, though, does worry me given the extent of damage a large quake could do not only to buildings and homes but to emergency response.  The sheer number of those who would be affected could be crippling.  

Wildfires are another thing that does concern me, more so than an earthquake.   They scare me more from a personal and family standpoint than from a community standpoint.  A wildfire is typically contained fairly quickly and affects a smaller area than something like an earthquake.  Granted there are those crazy big fires that southern California seems to get annually, but it seems that for most areas, wildfires are more localized to outlying areas where not many people usually live and are put out fairly efficiently.  If you happen to be one of those people in such an outlying area, though, you worry! 

Our home is a bit remote, being about a mile from a main road and a few miles from the highway.  We can walk to our neighbors’ homes, but it’s a long way and you arrive only after passing acres and acres of undeveloped wilderness .   There is one road and only two entrances/exits.  If a wildfire struck our little neck of the woods, it would be truly terrifying!  That means preparation for us is an essential.  That’s why I really appreciated the CDC’s website on wildfire preparation and protection:

          http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/citizens/all_citizens/home_fire_prev/wildfire/

Also, try these couple of sites, including FEMA and FireWise:

          http://www.fema.gov/hazard/wildfire/wf_prepare.shtm

          http://www.firewise.org/

If you’re like me and mine and find yourself living in an area so dry the trees bribe the dogs, do yourself and your family a favor and be prepared for the possible.

The cause of the forest fire, that has spread over 31 square miles of South Carolina and destroyed over 70 homes, has been discovered. Yard debris.

Some not-so-smart individual was apparently burning yard debris next to a wooded area and then failed to report any spreading of the flame. With 70 destroyed homes, over 100 effected homes, and an early damage estimate of $8.3 million, I would think that the individual responsible for the yard debris should be held accountable. He could have at least called someone!

But instead? That particular South Carolina resident (no reports have included a name) who has negatively effected the entire South Carolina economy will receive two citations, CITATIONS, for a total of $736. And the fines are expected to be paid.

Are you serious? Is this even possible? This moron goes next to a woodland and decides to burn some sticks and leaves. He then lights some stuff in the woods on fire and he doesn’t find it necessary to call anyone or let anyone know?!? Can someone really be that stupid?

The poor families that have had their lives turned upside down and the number of businesses that feel the crunch even more in these harsh economic times, probably won’t even be able to sue this individual. Judging by his actions, I would assume he isn’t too smart. And if he isn’t that smart, I would assume he doesn’t have a whole lot to settle for in the case of someone suing him.

WTF?

Disaster Alert

Texas - Several Wildfires burned over 600 acres, damaged homes and prompted the evacuations of thousands of local area residents within the north central portion of the state on Thursday. The Chapters provided food and drinks to emergency responders and staffed evacuation and command centers in collaboration with local officials.

Chapters Responding:

• Dallas Area Chapter
• Chisholm Trail Chapter
• ARC of North Central Texas
• Heart of Texas Chapter

At the time of this writing, Australia has lost more than 1,000,000 acres to wild fires.  A photo of this firefighter was shown on Ellen yesterday.  Today she featured the following video. 

I am currently unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, so unfortunately, I am not able to donate to the Red Cross to help the Australians who are in dire need of aid, but if you are financially able, PLEASE click the following link to the Australian Red Cross.

• En este album:

1. Misplaced Descarga!
2. Blinded No More Descarga!
3. Ain’t Your Fairytale Descarga!
4. Reckoning Day, Reckoning Night Descarga!
5. Don’t Say A Word Descarga!
6. The Boy Who Wanted To Be A Real Puppet Descarga!
7. My Selene Descarga!
8. Wildfire Descarga!
9. White Pearl, Black Oceans Descarga!
10. Shamandalie Descarga!
11. Wrecking The Sphere (Japan Bonus) Descarga!

——————–

Descarga! (Parte1)

Descarga! (Parte2)

——————–

Pass arriba

You can get noticed online only when you are on the first page or two of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Finca Fantastica has developed a techinque that will put you, your business, your property your cause or whatever it is that you want to get noticed online, on top of the search engines. It is called Wild Fire.

It is called Wild Fire because it spreads  your message out to the world as quickly as a wildfire.

Wild Fire may sound terrible and it is! It is terrible because it spreads like wildfire. This is exactly what you want. You want your message to spread like a wildfire but with far better consequences!

Wild Fire is a whole strategy of creating a network of interconnecting links that all point to your website or even get you noticed online without a website!

It will save you hundreds or thousands on any advertising budget. This strategy takes advantage of the age old ‘word of mouth’ method to explode your message to thousands and then possibly to millions of people in your area and across the world.

This principle was used by MSN Hotmail when they started in business so you are in good company. When Hotmail set up as a free email system, everyone sending an e-mail using Hotmail was a free advertiser for MSN Hotmail. Not a bad idea!

Times move on and now we can do the same by creating your own e-book and delivering it across the internet with the Wild Fire techniques.

Wild Fire targets your audience (your potential clients and customers in the case of businesses) as it encourages
people to pass on your message. It will be passed to others interested in you. In doing so, you create an environment for exponential growth through the exposure and influence of your message.

Wild Fire works because instant communication today is commonplace and your message will be sent in digital format from friend to friend, from colleague to colleague. Effectively, you will get noticed online by recommendation and word of mouth.

The downside is that there are no Middle Eastern terrorists in this one, and Asad “The Lion” Khalil is just a memory whose name gets brought up a couple of times by our old friend, protagonist John Corey.

John Corey is one of those characters who I get a kick out of in print or on screen, but who I would stay far away from in real life. He’s a police officer cum federal agent who never follows a rule that isn’t absolutely convenient. Yet his abrasive humor is sometimes funny, and I like funny.

The name of the book does not derive from the seventies song that has something to do with a horse. It’s supposedly the code name of an ultra super secret government program. Remember how, during the cold war, supposedly the USSR wouldn’t nuke the US because if they did, we’d nuke them right back? This was the principle of deterrence, or as DeMille calls it over and over again in the book, mutually assured destruction. Remember how Dr Strangelove made fun of this concept?

Wild Fire in the book is a supposedly current government program wherein the US has supposedly warned all the corrupt governments of the “Land of Islam” that if any weapon of mass destruction is used against the United States, the United States will automatically launch dozens of nukes against basically the whole Muslim world.

You can probably see flaws already. There’s the fact that we’d probably miss hitting anybody actually involved with the attack, that it might not have been Muslim terrorists in the first place, that we’d kill hundreds of millions of innnocents, that millions would be non-Muslims, anyway, that remaining Muslims would still be around and able to seek vengeance, that governments of Muslims countries can’t necessarily prevent a small band of determined bad guys from carrying out a terrorist attack (after all, we couldn’t), that irreplaceable wildlife and historical artifacts would be destroyed forever, etc.

Sure, you can see those flaws, but apparently most of the characters in this book can’t. Nor can the author, who mentions in an author’s note at the beginning of the book, “I personally believe that some variation of Wild Fire (by another code name) actually exists, and if it doesn’t, it should.”

The funniest thing of all is that most of the characters in the book who think Wild Fire is a good idea are motivated by their desire not to be wanded at the airport. Not to say that any of them ever have been. In fact, it’s very unlikely that any one of them has ever been inconvenienced in flying, since they are a megabillionaire, a couple of military generals, a presidential advisor, a CIA agent, and John Corey. And I think a good, baseline rule of humanity is that if you are willing to have hundreds of millions die, many of them in a really horrible ways, so that you don’t have to maybe get wanded at the airport someday, you need to immediately kill yourself.

DeMille cleverly explains how such an asinine program ever could have come to be: it was started during the Reagan years.

Now, the main antagonist, the megabillionaire, is insane. So that makes sense. It doesn’t explain why so many other characters also think that Wild Fire is a hunky-dory idea. Maybe the fact that they refer to “The Land of Islam” as “Sandland” repeatedly is a clue. It’s as if they see it as a cartoony place that nobody ever goes except people who dress funny and eat funny food. But no, they all do take time to reflect that a massive nuclear attack on “The Land of Islam” would kill millions of non-Muslims along with all those bad, bad Muslims who are all responsible for terrorism everywhere in the world. But hey, shorter lines at the airport.

DeMille, having stated that he hopes we have a system to automatically launch nukes at “The Land of Islam” in case we are attacked with WMD, nevertheless cheerfully thanks a Bob Atiyeh in the Acknowledgements. “Sure Nelson, no hard feelings about your desire to obliterate my homeland.”

DeMille wrote the book wrong. He should have had everyone sane and rational except for the bad guy. Instead, he had the presidential advisor, the generals, and the CIA man all on board with the nutcase’s plan from the get-go. Except for the CIA guy, you’d expect all of them know better than to buy any of this:

Even when the United States was attacked on its own soil–the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center–we did nothing. He looked at Harry. “Correct?”
“Yeah…but that changed things–”

Did nothing? We caught the perpetrators and put them in jail, where the are now.

“…Wild Fire is a pro-active response. It is a gun to the heads of Islamic countries–a gun that will go off if they fail to keep their terrorist friends from going nuclear. Undoubtedly most, if not all, terrorist organizations have been warned of this by the Islamic governments that harbor, aid, and have contact with them…”

Neat. All terrorist organizations, besides being Islamic, are also harbored and aided by Islamic governments, their friends. That’s why Wild Fire works!

And here’s his answer to the question of the environmental impact of dozens of nukes:

“I told you, the answer to global warming is nuclear winter. Just kidding. Look, the effects of fifty or even a hundred nuclear explosions detonating across the Mideast have been studied extensively by the government. It won’t be that bad.”

Hey, that puts my worries to rest.

This guy here has a review of the book from back in January 2007, not long after it first came out. You have to scroll down a ways to get to it.

Naturally, Madox is a right-wing nut — what would American fiction writers do without the standard right-wing nut? — but John Corey is something of a right-wing nut himself. For that matter, one has to wonder the same thing about DeMille himself, since in his foreword, speaking in his own voice, DeMille candidly says that he hopes a plan like Wild Fire exists.

Really? A plan to respond to the destruction of an American city by killing a hundred million Muslims all over the world? I suppose DeMille really means that he hopes we have told the heads of the governments of Muslim countries that such a plan exists, so they’ll keep a tight rein on the terrorists that operate in so many Islamic countries.

But to really carry out such a plan would be a monstrous crime against humanity on a par with Hitler’s and Stalin’s and Pol Pot’s. Especially since some Islamic terror groups are so fanatical that they might accept the deaths of a few hundred million Muslims as an acceptable risk — betting, of course, that the United States would never actually make good such a threat.

Bonus:

I do wish, however, that writers like DeMille would stop using the pathetically lame device of trying to persuade us that a couple of lovers (or a husband and wife) are really really really in love, by explicitly showing them having sex in some weird circumstance. In Wild Fire, it’s lovemaking on a Long Island beach in icy weather; apparently DeMille thinks it’s extremely significant to their characterization that we know who’s on top and other details.

And yet somehow we manage to get by without knowing which hand they use to hold the toilet paper, so DeMille must know there are some intimate details we just don’t need to know. Come on, my fellow novelists, don’t throw in meaninglessly detailed sex scenes — if it doesn’t tell us something that matters to the story, then get over it. You’re not twelve years old anymore, faunching over the Sears catalog, and nowadays explicit sex in fiction is a trite waste of time.

Word.