Ms. Rhodes was fighting fires in rural Oregon in the 1980’s when she became intrigued by the business possibilities of the fire-retarding foam that she sprayed from her firetruck. The years passed. She married, had two daughters, founded a successful commercial landscaping and irrigation company and graduated with highest honors from a community college in Eugene. She and her husband, Ralph, also a firefighter, continued to debate the idea of business tied to fire-retardant foam.

“Finally, I said if we were serious, I needed some book smarts. I already had streets smarts,” comments Ms.Rhodes. Leaving her husband in charge of their landscaping company, she and her two young daughters moved to Los Angeles,where she enrolled as a junior in USC Marshall School of Business in the fall of 2004.

Ms. Rhodes says her company’s product is a realistic solution to a shortage of trained firefighters. “The problem is that people are moving to rural areas and businesses have followed. But putting out fires in homes and commercial buildings is much more complex than fighting a wildfire, and the reality is, firefighters won’t
be there,”Ms.Rhodes comments. Some 39 teams submitted plans to preliminary reviewers including Bill Zimmerman, Andy Thornburg and Steve Reich, members of the Pasadena Angels, a group of more than 80 entrepreneurial investors., Richard Koffler, president of Los Angeles Venture Associates (LAVA) and a member of Tech Coast Angels, the largest angel investors network in the U.S., and Jim Sowers, an entrepreneur and a member of the Greif Center Advisory Council.

The runner-up was a team of four USC Marshall graduate students including, Ryan Armstrong, James Frinier,
Fernando Rivas and Along Schwartz. They joined with USC Marshall alumnus Tim Mournian, whose company, EnviroMill, uses a patented extrusion technology to reduce tires to a valuable product, called ultra-fine crumb, at a third of the cost of virgin rubber.

The Greif Center has sponsored business plan competitions for years, but this was the first contest with a large cash prize. “We decided to put our money where our mouth was,” said Kathleen Allen, a professor at the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and director of the Center for Technology Commercialization, both of which sponsored the competition. Additional funds were contributed by six graduates of the entrepreneurship program: Torin Pavia, Joe Kaplan, Steve Robbins, Scott Adelson, Marshall Lerner and Blair Salisbury.

Judges eliminated teams over the next four months until only five remained. These finalists were judged by
Lloyd Greif, a boutique investment banker, John Dilts, president of Kieretsu Forum, Richard Morganstern, a member of Tech Coast Angels, Jonathan Goody of Bay Equity Real Estate Acquisitions and Andrea Belz, Dr. Kevin Scanlon and Davis Thompson, three members of the Pasadena Angels. ]

Other business schools sponsor competitions, but USC Marshall’s is the only one that requires the winner to
begin operations within six months of winning, which is why Ms. Rhodes has already started marketing FOAMSAFE. She’s talking to fire prevention officials from the Los Padres National Forest who have expressed interest and a fire safety organization may highlight news of FOAMSAFE in its 55,000-circulation newsletter. Ms. Rhodes had planned to meet with a Forest Service in chief of the Trinity National Forest.

“She wants one of our units for her new log home. “It might be my first sale,” says Ms.Rhodes.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – A blaze that killed five federal firefighters last year has challenged attitudes about saving homes on the fringe of wilderness. The five perished last fall while protecting an empty mountain vacation home from the Esperanza fire, which authorities say was started by a 36-year-old auto mechanic now charged with murder.

However, the deaths also were blamed on social and political pressures and decisions to put homes before the safety of firefighters, according to a report.

As another fire season heats up, some U.S. Forest Service officials say a shift in strategy is inevitable as firefighters increasingly risk their lives defending more and more communities built in prime fire territory. “We are not going to die for property,” said Tom Harbour, national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service. “It’s time for homeowners to take responsibility for the protection of their homes.”

Chief Forester Gail Kimbell would not say whether the service is considering a change in policy on defending homes in certain fire conditions, but the agency plans to address flaws in the response to the deadly fire in remote Twin Pines and is conducting a longer-term review of overall firefighter safety.

Firefighters’ attitudes also are an issue in protecting homes. Public expectations can sometimes lead to bravado and a cavalier mindset among firefighters, experts say. A recent investigative report in the five deaths listed overconfidence, excessive motivation and risk-taking as contributing factors.

“One of the standard fire orders states: `Fight the fire aggressively having provided for safety first,’ ” said Peter Leschak, a 26-year firefighter and a commander for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry. “There has been an argument recently to change that because we don’t need to encourage firefighters to be more aggressive – half the time we’re holding them back.”

Federal firefighters could scale back structural protection without too much political fallout, but that would not be easy for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which answers to the governor, said John Maclean, a federally certified firefighter and the author of several books on wildfire disasters.

The state agency spends 44 percent of its budget on wildfire suppression annually, he said, and much of that work means protecting homes where suburbs collide with wilderness.

More than 6 million homes in California stand in wildfire “red zones,” and that number is expected to grow by 20 percent in the next decade. “There is an expectation on the part of a lot of people that somebody better get in there and do or die for their house,” Maclean said. “If you stop doing that and you stop taking reasonable risk to protect structures, you’d have a new governor in about five minutes.”

“It’s driven by a couple of things: The number of large fires we have, and also the fires are occurring in several states and in several geographic areas,” said Randy Eardley, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center. “The resources we have are being stretched thin.”

The change allows fire managers to request help from international crews, and National Guard units could be mobilized. On Thursday, fire center spokesman Ken Frederick said new crews were arriving in the Pacific Northwest from Alaska and the Southeast.

Choppers Needed

Firefighters in the area critically need medium-sized helicopters, he said. With 23 uncontained large fires or fire complexes in Nevada, Utah and Idaho, there aren’t enough contractor-supplied helicopters to go around, he said.

About 15,000 U.S. firefighters were already battling nearly 70 fires bigger than 100 acres in 12 states. The level was raised as dry lightning blasted and sparked dozens of new blazes in the West, including more than 1,000 new fires since Monday, Eardley said. Thursday morning brought slightly lower temperatures in the Northwest, Frederick said, but the break wasn’t expected to last long. Dry, windy weather, temperatures over 100 and
thunderstorms were forecast for the next seven days, he said.

A new wildfire that started Wednesday evening on the Idaho National Laboratory grounds quickly swept across nearly 15 square miles or 9,500 acres of sagebrush and grassland at the 890-square-mile nuclear research area in the southeast Idaho desert. Its cause was not known, said John Epperson, an INL spokesman.

No INL facilities were in immediate danger, but the lab’s 700 employees in the building nearest the fire were told to stay home Thursday. Other facilities at the lab, which employs about 3,600 workers, remained open. Fire crews set a backburn to keep the fire from jumping the highway and “that appears to be working,” INL spokesman Ethan Huffman said late Wednesday night. The blaze was about 10 percent contained.

The nearest INL facility is the Materials and Fuels Complex, roughly five miles northeast of the edge of the fire and on the other side of the highway. Huffman described the complex as an area of research in nuclear reactor fuel development. He said the metal-roofed complex was surrounded by vast sand buffers and the wildfire posed no
danger to it, but operations were suspended Thursday and the workers told to stay home.

WASHINGTON — It was a monster fire — 175,000 acres of tinder-dry timber just south of the Canadian border in north-central Washington state. In places it burned with an intensity rarely seen, crowning through stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa and lodgepole pine that had been weakened by a bark beetle infestation.

“It was clearly a firestorm,” said David Peterson, a research biologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab in Seattle. At its height, 2,300 firefighters battled the blaze, including crews from New Zealand, Mexico and soldiers dispatched from Fort Lewis near Tacoma, Wash. Last year’s Tripod fire, the largest in Washington state in more than a century, smoldered through the winter, and several small spot fires have kicked up this summer.

Peterson and others scientists say the Tripod fire could be a sign of things to come in the Western forests. Rising temperatures brought on by global warming put added stress on trees, making them more susceptible to bugs and disease, and stimulating the growth of underbrush and other fuels to feed the blazes. Some studies suggest that the number of acres scorched by wildfire could increase fivefold by the end of the century.

Even as wildfires burn across the West this summer, the nation’s forests have become entwined in the larger debate over climate change. They are both a victim of global warming and a potential solution in helping reverse the trend, by sopping up huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Among all the talk of carbon sequestration, biofuels and corporate average fuel economy, forests have been mostly overlooked on Capitol Hill.

By some estimates, the forests could absorb 500 million tons of carbon dioxide a year — about a third of the carbon dioxide the United States produces annually. Like all plants, trees soak up carbon dioxide as part of the process of photosynthesis, using the carbon to produce leaves and wood and releasing oxygen. Additional carbon is stored in the forest floor. “If you are looking at greenhouse gases, forests are a great thing to focus on,” Forest Service Chief Gail Kimbell said in an interview.

Yet with most things involving federal lands, controversy is brewing. Bureaucrats, scientists, timber industry officials and environmentalists are already sniping over how best to manage the forests in an era of global warming. Based on nearly a century of detailed recordkeeping on many of the national forests, Kimbell said there’s no question that temperatures are rising, the forests are drying out, underbrush is becoming thicker, and bug and disease infestations are mounting. Since 1986, the number of major forest fires has quadrupled, and the number of acres burned has grown sixfold. Nearly 50 percent of the Forest Service’s budget is spent on fighting fires.
“Fire managers say they are seeing behavior they have never seen before,” said Kimbell, who began her career as a forest ranger in Oregon and Washington.

In the Pacific Northwest, the greatest threat is east of the Cascade Mountains. West of the Cascades, scientists are less sure of the effects of global warming. While the Douglas fir forests of western Washington and Oregon are susceptible to drought, they also thrive on carbon dioxide. “We know things are changing, but we don’t know all the answers on the west side,” said Don McKenzie, a research ecologist at the Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Lab.

Kimbell said there will always be forest fires, but the best way to help contain them is by clearing out the underbrush that has accumulated and thinning the stands. About 13 million of the Forest Service’s 193 million acres have been cleared and thinned out. Kimbell said healthy forests with young trees absorb more carbon than older forests. The old-growth trees are better at storing carbon.

“We can sequester more carbon with active management rather than a hands-off approach,” she said. Later this year, the Forest Service is expected to unveil a global warming-related forest management plan. It could involve planting additional acres, thinning existing stands and burning the leftover debris, or slash, to produce electricity. In Montana, some school districts are using forest debris to fuel their boilers. Kimbell said the new boilers run cleaner on the scrap wood than oil- or gas-fired boilers.

HELENA, Mont. — Hot, dry and windy weather helped a wildfire near Glacier National Park in Montana grow to roughly 5,000 acres (2,023 hectares) and continue to threaten an evacuated lodge.

The blaze had grown from 1,000 acres (404.7 hectares) a day earlier and was just 2 percent contained, fire information officer Dale Warriner said Sunday. The fire was running into heavy timber.

Elsewhere, a nearly month-old California wildfire that had stood still for several days flared up over the weekend, burning 1,500 new acres (607 new hectares) in Santa Barbara County and prompting an evacuation order for a dozen homes, authorities said.

Another 200 homes were told to prepare to flee at short notice, Los Padres spokeswoman Kathy Good said.
Warm and extremely dry conditions allowed the fire to burn through old, heavy trees in the Los Padres National Forest on its uncontained southeast side.

The fire had consumed some 33,500 acres (13,557 hectares), or 52 square miles (135 square kilometers), since it started July 4 and was 70 percent contained Sunday afternoon. The fire’s renewed activity in the inaccessible, heavily vegetated wilderness area compelled authorities to push back their anticipated containment date from Aug. 3 to Sept. 7, Good said. The 500-member crew of firefighters was expected to at least double in size, she said. Fifteen helicopters and eight air tankers were being used against the fire, which had cost at least US$37.1 million (?27.18 million).

Farther south, meanwhile, crews were battling a wildfire that had burned 200 acres (81 hectares) of brush in Menifee, an unincorporated area of Riverside County about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of downtown Los Angeles, fire Capt. Jennifer Ricci said. More than 200 firefighters were working against the blaze, reported Sunday afternoon, Ricci said. The fire was 40 percent contained, she said. A voluntary evacuation request for homes scattered within a nearby canyon area was lifted by Sunday evening, Ricci said.

BOISE, Idaho — Wildfires scorched an area four times the size of Yellowstone National Park and destroyed more than 5,200 buildings in 2007, one of the nation’s worst fire seasons despite a record amount of retardant dropped by aircraft.

The Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center reported nearly 14,000 square miles burned and the federal government spent more than $1.8 billion fighting wildfires, making it the second costliest season on record.

Even though fire managers used 22.4 million gallons of fire retardant — nearly triple the 10-year average — the area burned in 2007 trails only 2006 when fire consumed 15,500 square miles.

The number of buildings burned in 2007 ranks second since current counting methods began in 1999, trailing the 5,700 buildings destroyed in 2003, the fire center reported.

It was also the fourth consecutive year that flames torched more than 12,500 square miles, an amount not previously recorded until 2004, with records going back to 1960.

“The world we’re dealing with in fire suppression is changing,” said Lyle Carlile, chair of the fire center’s National Multiagency Coordinating Group and one of seven people who decide where to position U.S. wildfire fighting resources during the fire season. “We just can’t continue to do business the same way. We don’t have enough firefighters to draw from to handle the situations we’re faced with.”

Fire managers said a lengthening drought, hotter temperatures across much of the U.S., and an increased number of homes built in fire-prone wildland areas contributed to the severity of the wildfire season.

Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the center, said the last two years represent back-to-back fire seasons so fierce managers have been forced to change strategy.

“Our fire managers knew they couldn’t do things the old way — the frontal or flank attacks were just too dangerous,” she said. “In some places they had to steer the fire to natural breaks where they could fight it efficiently and not get anybody hurt or killed.”

Seven wildland firefighters died in 2007 as a result of activities related to wildfires, one on a fireline, said Davis. In 2006, 24 firefighters died, 12 on firelines.

About 15,000 wildland firefighters deployed during the season, and the U.S. asked for and received help from Canada with five hand crews of 20 firefighters each. The fire center in Boise remained on its highest alert level from mid-July to the end of August.

Preliminary data

In December, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration’s National Climatic Data Center released preliminary data that predicted the annual average temperature for 2007 across the contiguous United States at near 54.3 degrees Fahrenheit — which would make the year the eighth warmest since records were first kept in 1895.

Davis said extended drought also contributed to the 2007 wildfire season.

“The fire season started very early with the large, unusual fires in the East, in Georgia,” said Davis. “As it moved to the Western U.S., almost every section of the country issued fire behavior alerts.”

Alerts warn firefighters about elevated danger based on weather and potential fuel, including how susceptible trees, brush and grasslands are to fire based on how dry conditions have become. Carlile said years of fire suppression in some areas have made those areas more difficult to protect.

“We cannot keep fires out of these fire-dependent ecosystems,” he said. “That is just not sustainable. Fuels are going to build up and it’s just going to escalate.”

Nearly 80,000 wildfires started in 2007, the fire center reported, about 85 percent the result of human activity and the rest lightning strikes. Initial attacks by a web of firefighters who react quickly put out all but about 2 percent of those wildfires, but some that got away became memorable:

In Georgia and Florida, the season started in April with wildfires that lasted several months and burned more than 900 square miles, the Southeast’s biggest wildfire since 1898, according to the fire center.

At about 550 square miles, the Milford Flat fire in western Utah was the largest wildfire in that state’s history. Five people died, including a California couple riding a motorcycle when smoke swept Interstate 15 on July 7.

Idaho had the most area burned in the U.S. in 2007 with 3,100 square miles. That included the 78-square mile Castle Rock fire in August that forced the evacuation of more than 2,000 homes in the resort area of Ketchum in central Idaho and caused Sun Valley Resort to run its snowmaking equipment in a successful bid to protect a $12 million ski lodge atop Bald Mountain.

The Murphy complex of fires, started by lightning in late July, burned an area on the Idaho-Nevada border larger than Rhode Island. The fire blackened grassland used by cattle, and wildlife habitat that supports sensitive species such as sage grouse.

The Angora fire in June burned 3,100 acres and destroyed 254 homes on the west side of Lake Tahoe in California.

The Zaca fire that started on July 4 in southern California burned some four months and 375 square miles to become the second-largest wildfire in that state’s history, threatening ranches and vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley.

The Nov. 24 Malibu fire in southern California, fanned by Santa Ana winds, put the bookend to the season, destroying more than 50 homes, 35 other structures and burning about 5,000 acres. The total cost of the human-caused fire is estimated at $100 million, and six firefighters were injured.

Carlile said wildfires that threaten homes get top priority because lives and buildings are at risk. But he also said homes built in areas prone to wildfire use fire fighting resources that might otherwise be sent elsewhere.

“The expansion of the wildland-urban interface continues to challenge us,” he said. “Everybody wants to live out next to the forest. That expansion becomes high value areas we have to protect.”

Smokejumpers, who parachute out of airplanes, have seen their roles change in recent years from jumping into remote areas to jumping into more easily accessible areas where initial attack is considered a key to stopping fires before they get big, said Eric Reynolds, chief of the Bureau of Land Management smokejumpers in Boise.

“Because of the experience, our crews are in demand more than ever on those emerging fires,” he said.

The Boise base is one nine smokejumping bases in the U.S., and Reynolds said the 83 smokejumpers in Boise combined to go on 926 fire jumps in 2007.

“There were a couple real barn burners,” he said.

Source: Fire Rescue 1