fire tornado

Three volunteers from the Central Minnesota chapter of the Red Cross are going to San Diego to help victims of wildfires hitting the area.

Program Manager Katie Wayne said two of those people will help in bulk distribution to get supplies out. The third will supervise feeding those in need, she said. They will leave today and will be gone for at least 10 days, Wayne said. Six more volunteers are waiting to be called, she said.

The Central Minnesota chapter sent volunteers last spring to help with flooding in South Dakota and tornado damage in Kansas, Wayne said.
Katrina missteps still haunt White House
By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press Writer

Alex Brandon
Screens that keep debris out of the water intakes are seen at pump station No. 6 on the 17th Street Canal in New Orleans Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2007. The city's system of pumps and drainage canals, while nearly back to its capacity before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, couldn't keep up.Hurricane Katrina has many legacies for the Bush White House, none pleasant. One is the guarantee that as soon as disaster strikes in the United States, President Bush's every move is closely scrutinized to gauge the speed and tone of his response to the suffering.

This became clear yet again on Tuesday, as the enormity of the wildfires sweeping across Southern California became apparent.

The White House reacted with what has become a familiar pattern: Bush dropped a few lines of sympathy and promised assistance into an already scheduled speech. Across the administration, aides volunteered as many facts and figures as possible about the federal contribution to the disaster response, a federal emergency to speed relief funding was declared in the middle of the night, and a presidential visit to the affected area was quickly arranged.

The White House's handling of Katrina in the days before it hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August 2005 seemed set to follow this model. Bush and his aides issued repeated warnings to worried locals, conferred with officials in the region and promised Washington would do all it could to help.

But once the massive storm blew ashore, smashing Mississippi's coastal communities to sticks and submerging New Orleans in water, the federal response turned dismal.

Locals were left wanting for urgently needed supplies. Bush seemed disengaged from the crisis and then stumbled through initial appearances in the disaster zone aimed at correcting the impression. And some locals feel the White House's level of engagement in the Gulf Coast's continuing misery hasn't improved much in two years.

Katrina was a departure from Bush's handling of previous disasters.

Most notably, Bush endeared himself to the nation with his bullish but comforting stance after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He also was praised for his reaction when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003, killing its seven-member crew. He was omnipresent in Florida when that state was hit by four hurricanes in 2004.

But all that was wiped out by Katrina, and the White House has struggled at times since to regain its disaster-response footing.

After a devastating tornado in Greensburg, Kan., in May, the administration had to backtrack after initially appearing to blame the state's Democratic governor, Kathleen Sebelius, for not asking quickly enough for help from the federal government.

In August, Bush also reacted quickly to a deadly bridge collapse in Minnesota by scheduling a visit. But this followed an unseemly early emphasis from the White House on how fixing structural deficiencies is the state's responsibility.

On Tuesday, with the California blazes already affecting hundreds of thousands of acres and forcing the evacuation of more than half a million people, the White House presented a picture of a heavily engaged administration.

White House press secretary Dana Perino came to her daily briefing armed with slides detailing Washington's contribution so far. It included 32 firefighting crews and dozens of fire engines from the Agriculture Department, 1,239 federal firefighters, 25,000 cots and 280,000 bottles of water.

"We send the help of the federal government," Bush declared during a speech otherwise devoted to the war on terror.

The president called a Cabinet meeting for Wednesday morning, to hear a first-hand report on what more Washington could do from Federal Emergency Management Administrator R. David Paulison and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The president had dispatched his two top federal disaster officials to California on Tuesday night, and they were to address their boss and the Cabinet via secure videoconference from the region.
Fire whirl
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A fire whirl with flames in the vortex.A fire whirl is a phenomenon in which a fire, under certain conditions (depending on air temperature and currents), acquires a vertical vorticity and forms a whirl, or a tornado-like effect of a vertically oriented rotating column of air. Fire whirls may be whirlwinds separated from the flames, either within the burn area or outside it, or a vortex of flame, itself.

A fire whirl can make fires more dangerous. An extreme example is the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in Japan which ignited a large city-sized firestorm and produced a gigantic fire whirl that killed 38,000 in fifteen minutes in the Hifukusho-Ato region of Tokyo.[1] Another example is the numerous large fire whirls (some tornadic) that developed after lightning struck an oil storage facility near San Luis Obispo, California on April 7, 1926, several of which produced significant structural damage well away from the fire, killing two. Thousands of whirlwinds were produced by the four-day-long firestorm coincident with conditions that produced severe thunderstorms, in which the larger fire whirls carried debris 5 kilometers (3 mi) away.[2]


National Institute of Standards and Technology 2003 ventilation experiment that dramatically changed a fire into a fire whirl.Most of the largest fire whirls are spawned from wildfires. They form when a warm updraft and convergence from the wildfire are present.[3] They are usually 10-50 meters (30-200 ft) tall, a few meters (~10 ft) wide, and last only a few minutes. However, some can be more than a kilometer (a mile) tall, contain winds over 160 km/h (100 mph), and persist for more than 20 minutes.[4]

These can also aid the 'spotting' ability of wildfires to propagate and start new fires.


[edit] See also