A message from the owner of SoCalFire:

5/3/2002

Fire Season 2002 looks to be a real ripper with the lack of rain in both the Southland, and across the West. Already this year there have been dozens of small brush fires in SoCal, and as I write this, there is a ~100 acre fire being mopped up in BDU. 

Rainfall totals and snowpack totals this year are in the area of 33-66% of normal across the state, and roughly 50% across the West. New Mexico experienced its first major fire in March, and currently another major fire has burned almost 10,000 acres, with only 5% containment. Arizona is mopping up a 38,000 acre blaze, Colorado is mopping up a ~400 acre incident, and "very high to extreme fire indices" are indicated across the southwest. 

As many of you know, I'm currently a paid-call firefighter with Madera County Fire. One of our duties in the summer is to open the Madera Mobilization Center (Madera Staging) for resources traveling from one end of the state to the other. I'll be working that center this summer, so if any of you reading this page, or the list come through, look or ask for me, and we'll have a face-to-face and a few laughs. 

If you haven't joined the mailing list, please do so. There's a lot of info that you're missing.

If you have an alphanumeric pager, and you want to get updates on incidents, join the Incident Paging Network. If you have a scanner and can spend 20 hours a month listening, you can be a dispatcher for IPN, sending out pages. Central California is especially deficient in dispatchers, so we're missing hundreds of incidents per month.

Thanks to everyone that has contributed to the list, especially Harry Marnells, and my NorCalFire counterpart, Jake Hickok.

If you have any pictures that you'd like to see featured, e-mail me, and I'll put it up. I'm going to try and get pictures of various fire stations and apparatus around Central California, as well as pictures inside the various dispatch centers, so you can see the faces behind the voices.

John "Smokey Behr" Gleichweit

Previous messages:
2001