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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Handcrews are diverse teams of career and temporary wildland firefighters. These crews have the responsibilities of constructing firelines. These lines are generally constructed around wildfires to control them. In the United States, handcrews are typically classified into one of three types: Type 1 IHC, Type 2 (Initial Attack) or Type 2. Type 1 crews, hotshots, are the highest qualified and most experienced crews.
Prior to 1942, firefighting efforts were organized as-needed, with no formal training or organization. In 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps, also known as Roosevelt's Tree Army, began operating in National Forests nationwide. In addition to planting trees and maintaining the environment, they were used for fire suppression operations. This was the first time pre-established crews were ordered to fires.[1] In 1948, the first hotshot crew was established in the Los Padres National Forest under the name Los Padres Hotshots. The crew was made up of 35 crewmembers who were available 24/7/365 until 1965. In 1961, the Inter-Regional Fire Suppression (IRFS) program was developed, establishing six 30-man crews across the Western United States. The first woman to join a hotshot crew was Deanne Shulman, who joined the Los Prieto Hotshots in 1976.[1][2]
Several fatality events, such as the Mann Gulch Fire of 1949, the Rattlesnake Fire of 1953, the Loop Fire Disaster of 1966, South Canyon Fire of 1994, Thirtymile Fire of 2001, and the Yarnell Hill Fire of 2013 caused standard operating procedure to become standardized amongst wildland firefighters. In 1980, the term interagency hotshot crew was adopted by IRFS crews. In the mid-1990s, an Interagency Hotshot Crew Operations Guide was developed to standardize the training, qualifications and responsibilities of hotshot crews. This guide was updated in 2016 by a joint committee of federal agencies.[3]
Crews have been established by several federal, state, and county agencies. Currently, there are 90 interagency hotshot crews nationwide. The agencies that employ wildland firefighters include the following: United States Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Park Service, and several dozen state forestry agencies, such as CALFIRE.[4][5][6][7] In addition to federal and state agencies, some wildfire-prone counties have dedicated handcrews, such as Orange County and San Bernardino.[8][9]
A hand crew typically consists of 18-24 firefighters. As a crew, they are capable of initial attack, and of breaking up into squads in order to meet multiple objectives at the same time. They are often the first on the scene responsible for constructing a fireline.[4][5][6] Handcrews are generally distinguished from engine crews due to their size and role. Handcrews hike significantly more and are called upon for more remote fires which engines cannot reach.[6]
Within a crew, there is one crew boss or superintendent (in Type 1 crews), who leads the crew, organizes training, and implements tactics. Below that, there is an assistant crew boss or superintendent who assists the crew boss in their duties and hiring of firefighters. The rest of the firefighters are divided into squads, led by squad bosses or squaddies. These squaddies typically have 2-3 years of firefighting experience and are certified as FFT1s (Firefighter Type 1) and/or Incident Commander Type 5 (ICT5).[5][6]
Handcrews are usually a mix of career and seasonal firefighters. As crew typing goes up, there are typically fewer temporary firefighters. Temporary seasonal firefighters are recruited each fall-spring for the summer fire season, which lasts from late May to mid September in most regions.[4][5][6]
Hand crews specialize in using hand tools such as shovels, chainsaws, axes, pumps, water hoses, and drip torches. They use these tools to create firelines – strips of land cleared of flammable materials and dug down to mineral soil, typically around 18 inches wide along a wildfire’s perimeter. They also carry out firing operations, the controlled burning of vegetation ahead of a wildfire to limit the wildfire's ability to spread. As a fire is kept within the lines established, it is labeled as contained.[5][6]
Once a fire is contained, hand crews strengthen these initial containment measures during the mop-up phase of wildland fire management by extinguishing embers, searching and destroying for any heat or smokes visible, conducting full grids of the fire to locate any hidden fire, and cold trailing (gridding on hands and knees) it.[10] Once a fire is mopped up and gridded, it is generally considered controlled.[11]
Outside of active wildland fire suppression, hand crews may also work on prescribed burns and rehabilitate burned areas. In addition to ecological work, crews assist in many manual labor tasks in the district they're assigned to, including but not limited to chainsaw operations, fuels reduction, preemptive firebreak construction, and patrols along a district's land.[12]
There are 3 main types of handcrew:[6]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Handcrews are diverse teams of career and temporary wildland firefighters. These crews have the responsibilities of constructing firelines. These lines are generally constructed around wildfires to control them. In the United States, handcrews are typically classified into one of three types: Type 1 IHC, Type 2 (Initial Attack) or Type 2. Type 1 crews, hotshots, are the highest qualified and most experienced crews.
Bamboos are a diverse group of mostly evergreen perennial flowering plants making up the subfamily Bambusoideae of the grass family Poaceae. Giant bamboos are the largest members of the grass family, in the case of Dendrocalamus sinicus having individual stalks (culms) reaching a length of 46 meters (151 ft), up to 36 centimeters (14 in) in diameter and a weight of up to 450 kilograms (1,000 lb). It grows in tropical and subtropical regions, especially in Asia. The internodes of bamboos can also be of great length. Kinabaluchloa wrayi has internodes up to 2.5 meters (8 ft) in length, and Arthrostylidium schomburgkii has internodes up to 5 meters (16 ft) in length, exceeded in length only by papyrus. By contrast, the stalks of the tiny bamboo Raddiella vanessiae of the savannas of French Guiana measure only 10–20 millimeters (0.4–0.8 in) in length by about 2 millimeters (0.08 in) in width. The origin of the word "bamboo" is uncertain, but it most likely comes from the Dutch or Portuguese language, which originally borrowed it from Malay. In bamboo, as in other grasses, the internodal regions of the stem are usually hollow and the vascular bundles in the cross-section are scattered throughout the walls of the stalk instead of in a cylindrical cambium layer between the bark (phloem) and the wood (xylem) as in dicots and conifers. The dicotyledonous woody xylem is also absent. The absence of secondary growth wood causes the stems of monocots, including the palms and large bamboos, to be columnar rather than tapering. Bamboos include some of the fastest-growing plants in the world, due to a unique rhizome-dependent system. Certain species of bamboo can grow 91 centimeters (36 inches) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 millimeters (1+1⁄2 in) an hour (equivalent to 1 mm (0.04 in) every 90 seconds). Growth up to 120 centimeters (47.2 in) in 24 hours has been observed in the instance of Japanese giant timber bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides). This rapid growth and tolerance for marginal land make bamboo a good candidate for afforestation, carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation. Bamboo is versatile and has economic and cultural significance in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia, being used for building materials, as a food source, and as a raw product, and depicted often in arts, such as in bamboo paintings and bambooworking. Bamboo, like wood, is a natural composite material with a high strength-to-weight ratio useful for structures. Bamboo's strength-to-weight ratio is similar to timber, and its strength is generally similar to a strong softwood or hardwood timber. Some bamboo species have displayed remarkable strength under test conditions. Bambusa tulda of Bangladesh and adjoining India has tested as high as 60,000 psi (400 MPa) in tensile strength. Other bamboo species make extraordinarily hard material.
Rainforests are forests characterized by a closed and continuous tree canopy, moisture-dependent vegetation, the presence of epiphytes and lianas and the absence of wildfire. Rainforests can generally be classified as tropical rainforests or temperate rainforests, but other types have been described. Estimates vary from 40% to 75% of all biotic species being indigenous to the rainforests. There may be many millions of species of plants, insects and microorganisms still undiscovered in tropical rainforests. Tropical rainforests have been called the "jewels of the Earth" and the "world's largest pharmacy", because over one quarter of natural medicines have been discovered there. Rainforests as well as endemic rainforest species are rapidly disappearing due to deforestation, the resulting habitat loss and pollution of the atmosphere.
Forestry is the science and craft of creating, managing, planting, using, conserving and repairing forests and woodlands for associated resources for human and environmental benefits. Forestry is practiced in plantations and natural stands. The science of forestry has elements that belong to the biological, physical, social, political and managerial sciences. Forest management plays an essential role in creating and modifying habitats, and affects ecosystem services provisioning. A practitioner of forestry is a forester. Modern forestry generally embraces a broad range of concerns, in what is known as multiple-use management, including: the provision of timber, fuel wood, wildlife habitat, natural water quality management, recreation, landscape and community protection, employment, aesthetically appealing landscapes, biodiversity management, watershed management, erosion control, and preserving forests as "sinks" for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Forest ecosystems have come to be seen as the most important component of the biosphere, and forestry has emerged as a vital applied science, craft, and technology. The control of forests for timber production is known as silviculture, as practiced by silviculturists. Although forestry is a broader concept, the two terms are often used synonymously. All people depend upon forests and their biodiversity, some more than others. Forestry is an important economic segment in various industrial countries, as forests provide more than 86 million green jobs and support the livelihoods of many more people. For example, in Germany, forests cover nearly a third of the land area, wood is the most important renewable resource, and forestry supports more than a million jobs and about €181 billion of value to the German economy each year. Worldwide, an estimated 880 million people spend part of their time collecting fuelwood or producing charcoal, many of them women. Human populations tend to be low in areas of low-income countries with high forest cover and high forest biodiversity, but poverty rates in these areas tend to be high. Some 252 million people living in forests and savannahs have incomes of less than US$1.25 per day.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
