Author: N.Z. Bear

[Map has been relocated to the top-left of the page]

Disclaimers:

1) This is not an offical fire map, but rather is my own personal attempt to combine information I’ve found on the official fire sites and other media outlets into a single, readable map. If you believe you may be in danger, consult your local authorities (see below for phone #s).

2) The data I’ve based the map on is virtualy guaranteed to be many hours behind the actual fire. The fire services are not able to keep their data updated so quickly, so the “current” data is always stale. The map that was just posted to the web is most likely based on a survey of the fire that took place three, six, or even twelve hours before.

The fire continues to grow, obviously. The Colorado media are all over the story, and in particular seems to be staying on top of things (I got the evacuation data for my map from one on their page).

KUSA is now reporting the fire as the largest in Colorado history. Some additional updated stats:

Size: 77,000 acres (I would bet it is most likely 90,000 – 100,000 by now)

Personnel Assigned: 400 firefighters on scene, 2 Type 1 crews, 8 Type 2 crews (see my earlier posts for descriptions of Type 1 vs. Type 2 crews)

Equipment Assigned: Type 1 Helicopters, Type 3 Helicopters, Type 1 Air Attack, Type 1 Air Tankers, Lead Planes, 11 engines, water tenders and dozers

Structures Lost: (This is directly from the fire services:) “Several with potential for many more”

Evacuation Information:

Park County Sheriff 719-836-2494
Douglas County Sheriff at 303-660-7500.

The American Red Cross is assisting and may be reached at (719) 748-3911 or 748-8215.

Jefferson County – Elk Creek Elementary is now changed to Chatfield High School 7227 S. Simms cross Freemont, Littleton 303-982-3670

Teller County – Woodland Park High School, 151 N. Baldwin 719-331-3645

Douglas County – Sedalia Elementary School, 5449 Huxtable St. 303-814-4735

Park County – Lake George Elementary, Hwy 24 in Lake George 719-748-3911

Continued good luck to all, and stay safe…

-NZB

I’m out to deal with some reallife things for a few hours. If you are genuinely in need of immediate information on the Colorado fires, first: contact your local authorities and listen to your local media. But if that doesn’t help, now has the same primary source information that I do, and can hand it out to those in genuine need.

I’ll be back later tonight and will try to do another fire update. Be safe everyone…

put in a special request for a larger map showing the Colorado fires in context of the entire state with major roads & cities. So, never one to reject the VP, I’ve attempted to comply.

The first map shows the fires (Hayman, Coal Seam — also known as Glenwood Springs, and a few others) in the context of Colorado as a whole, with major cities & roads marked.

The second map is a satellite image from yesterday which shows you the fires and their smoke plumes. I crudely annotated it with the major highways and cities of Colorado for context (placement of these was handdrawn in very approximate).

Note: Both of these maps are out-of-date; the most accurate map of the fire boundaries remains the one below in my previous post. (But keep in mind even that one is at least twelve hours out of date.)

I strongly urge anyone in the areas affected by these fires to stay closely tuned to your local media, and contact your local authorities if you are looking for official information on evacuation status.

Hope that helps VDude…

New Hayman Fire Map
[Map removed; see most current map at top-left of page]

The fire has now “split” and has two forks, each heading northeastward.

The black and white line map comes direct from the fire teams. The color terrain map is a modified version of the first map I posted today, which I marked up (very roughly) with the new information on the fire’s spread so that the fire’s relationship to the surrounding area can still be shown.

[Map removed; see most current map at top-left of page]

Brief non-fire item: Suman Palit has another (if grim) analysis of the prospects for war between India and Pakistan.

We are now getting very close to the time when reports suggested India would launch a limited attack into Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, if the terrorist attacks being launched from that territory were not stopped.

Predictions:

– We will see another major terrorist attack against Indian targets very soon, most likely this week. These people don’t want peace, and we’ve seen this game played out in Israel before: they will attack to ensure that there is no possibility of peace. I highly doubt Musharraf has the ability to stop the attacks entirely, even assuming he has the desire to do so.

– India will proceed with their attack, probably within the next two weeks, using the latest terrorist killings as the trigger.

– After that, I have no idea. As Suman points out, the threshold for useful prediction will get really short, really fast.

Hayman Fire Update

The fire is now being reported as follows as of 10am CDT:

Acres: 60,850 (up from 20,000 at last report)

Percent Contained: 5 % (down from 10%)

Teams Assigned: There are now two Type 1 teams assigned to the fire.

Air Equipment: 3 Type 1 helicopters, 2 Type 1 Air Attack, 4 Type 1 Air tankers, 2 lead planes, water tenders and dozers

Fire Behavior: Continues to be described as “extreme” and the fire is heading north / northeast

I’m finding mixed messages about the total # of personnel involved and the structures threatened; the 10am report indicates 220 personnel assigned, and only 20 residences threatened. I am inclined to believe the previous, more grim report, however — but maybe I’m just a pessimist.

Finally, the following narrative description of the situation is being published:

The Great Basin Type 1 team is assigned and assumed operational management of this fire effective this morning at 6 AM. A second Type 1 team will be arriving sometime this morning and will be stationed in Castle Rock. This second team will focus efforts on the northern end of the Hayman fire, especially working with the Sheriff’s offices in Douglas and Jefferson counties to coordinate evacuations. This wind driven fire, which was reported approximately 5 PM Saturday, grew very quickly due to the high wind conditions, high temperatures and low relative humidity’s. Last night, crews worked to burn out portions of the line along Platte Springs, in efforts to secure the heel of the fire. Today a priority for crews is to continue working along the eastern perimeter, anchoring and flanking the fire. Along the northern end of the fire, the priority will be on any additional evacuations, should they become necessary. We continue to receive resources in support of firefighting efforts.

If you read this closely, I think what it says is that on the northern end of the fire — the front of the fire — the teams are essentially focused on getting people the hell out of the way of this thing. I’m not sure they can do much to contain or stop it, at least until they get a break from the weather.

Some additional information on the Hayman fire:

– The map to the right shows the fire shaded in red. Populated areas are shaded in purple. Although this data is from the past 24 hours, it is still most likely out-of-date; the fire has almost certainly grown since this map was created. (Note: I’ve removed this version of the map; see above for a more current map)

– This morning’s report from the National Interagency Fire Center, which tracks all fire activity nationwide, describes the status of the Hayman fire as follows:

HAYMAN, Pike-San Isabel National Forest. A Type 1 Incident Management Team (Martin) has been ordered. This fire is burning six miles northwest of Lake George, CO in ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forest. High rates of spread to the north and east with extreme fire behavior were observed. Several camps, ranches, recreation areas and towns are being evacuated with 3,700 residences threatened. Twenty commercial structures and one outbuilding were lost.

A Type 1 team represents the highest level of escalation. Fires are generally managed by local resources, and then a regional team is called in if needed — a Type 2 team. For the most serious fires, a Type 1 team is called in — these are Federal fire management professionals. There are about twenty teams nationwide, and three active in Colorado currently. The Federal teams come with both experienced management resources to determine the most effective methods to attack and contain the fire, as well as personnel and equipment such as air tankers.

– The incident teams are reporting the following statistics about the fire:

269 people are currently dedicated to fighting the fire

3,700 homes are currently identified as threatened

The fire is estimated at 10% contained, which indicates it is essentially uncontrolled at this time

The fire behavior is being described as “extreme”, and the rate of spread is estimated at 1-2 miles per hour. (Look again at the map and the scale to understand the significance of that number).

The following media resources are tracking the fire closely and have photos & video of the situation:

– NBC affiliate

KMGH – ABC affiliate, “The Denver Channel”

The Denver Post

The Colorado Springs Gazette

PS – In case you are wondering, none of the data I’m providing is “inside” info from my father; it is all coming from publicly available resources. However, I’m going to break a blogging rule-of-thumb and not provide URLs for the moment, as these resources are the same ones that the actual fire teams use. And on the unlikely event my traffic spikes today, I don’t want to be responsible for hundreds of unanticipated hits bringing down those sites…

The Fire in Colorado is shaping up to be one of the worst ever. Keep an eye on this one, folks: I’m afraid it may get worse before it gets better.

And best of luck to the teams fighting it. Stay safe, and remember that motto: we can replace houses. We can’t replace firefighters.

Minimal Disclosure: I have a vested interest, here. My father is one of those who has been fighting this thing — although hopefully, from the safety of the command post today, though I think he might rather be out in the field. Hang in there, Dad…

I guess I’m a warblogger.

Get it?

Technically a warblogger?

Oh never mind….

Chicks with dick jokes

Okay, time for some serious sociology. Or at least snarky media criticism, which often passes for serious sociology in our particular culture (well, mine, if you happen to not be reading this from the good ole’ US of A ).

But first, let me unload my official position on aesthetics: when it comes to art, there are no right answers.

None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Bupkiss.

Art, by definition, is subjective. If it weren’t, they’d call it science, and they’d have to peer-review Guide.

Stating that one particular musical composition is “better” than another is a complete absurdity. Same goes for television, theater, movies, painting, sculpture, and abstract compositions of religious icons composed solely of dung from endangered species found only in and around MOMA.

The only criteria commonly used to assess art that can be said to be objective is how many people like it. This is a painful realization. It means Britney Spears comes out ahead of Moby. It means that Independence Day is “better” than Vanilla Sky. It means that Friends is superior to Buffy.

I’m trying to point out unpleasant ideas here, if it isn’t getting through.

But that’s the way it is. So best not to worry about it. And therefore: best to approach any discussion of art with the idea that, unlike history, politics, and science — there are no right answers. There’s just the noise you’re making in your argument, and the noise the other guy is making with his. And the question is: who can shout louder.

And so: On to the shouting.

I will put it simply: I do not understand Sex and the City.

Sopranos, I get. (I have issues with it, but I enjoy it, and I wouldn’t for a second try to say it’s not an extremely well done show — and my qualms are subject for another post). Six Feet Under, I haven’t seen. But Sex and the City, I have, and damnit, it drives me nuts.

So what’s the problem? you ask. Don’t watch it. Take your own advice, and sleep soundly knowing that there are no objective measures of culture.

Surely you can figure this part out.

Yup. You got it right. My fianc

Mickey says Coleen Rowley was wrong. He’s right. And wrong.

Mickey had brief entry this week on Coleen Rowley’s testimony and the issue of which is more to blame for intelligence failures : the bureaucrats at the FBI, or the laws they must follow.

While I am taking to heart Mickey’s own solemn admonishment to “Always trust content from kausfiles!” (like we didn’t already?), I think the Mickster overplays his hand slightly on this one.

He starts out OK, pointing out (correctly) that there is more than just the problem of Those Damned Bureaucrats to deal with at the FBI in his reference to a piece by Stuart Taylor in the National Journal. His money quote, referring to the need under current law for a suspect to be a member of a terrorist group to merit full surveillance, is bang on as well: “So if it’s just one guy who wants to blow up the Superbowl, we leave him alone!”

Flush with this nice turn of the phrase, though, Mickey slides over the line with his closer: “The problem is less dumb bureaucrats than dumb law.”

Well, maybe. There are a whole heck of a lot of things that went wrong here, and I’m not convinced that we’re in a position yet to point definitively to which factor was the most significant (although to be fair, Mickey’s statement only explicitly compares two of them). But here’s my list:

– A culture of caution at the FBI and other agencies where not screwing up was viewed as more important than catching the bad guys

– A particular fear of anything that resembled ethnic profiling (i.e., looking at Arabs taking flight lessons), particularly due to recent embarrassments in that area (i.e., Wen Ho Lee)

– Legal restrictions that set the bar for surveillance requests unreasonably high in a well-intentioned but misguided attempt to protect civil liberties

– Antiquated processes for analyzing incoming intelligence information which resulted in a failure to be able to add 2 and 2 and reach a number somewhere between 3 and 5.

To make matters more complex, these factors aren’t independent, but all blend together and cause nasty little feedback loops with each other: if there was a culture more attuned to catching the bad guys than not rocking the boat, wouldn’t somebody have bitched enough to get their analysis processes fixed long ago? And if there wasn’t that culture of caution, couldn’t a smart FBI lawyer have made a legitimate argument that the case Rowley complained about had met the standard of probable cause?

If that argument had been made and was rejected, then I’d put more credence in the idea that the problem is the law, not the bureaucrats. But the problem is that to my understanding, the folks submitting that request didn’t even really try — a token effort was made at best, and the request was torpedoed at worst. That suggests to me that the law may indeed be a major part of the problem — but the bureaucrats are just as big a part.

That said, Mickey is absolutely right to keep hammering on his point o’ the week: that those who just want to blame the bureaucrats are wrong. Blaming the bureaucrats is appropriate. But thinking that they are the only problem is the same kind of oversimplification that got us into this mess in the first place.

Whoo-hoo! The poll is now working. Thanks to the nice folks at PulsePoll for getting back to me.

For anyone else trying this, the problem was that apparently having the default for my page set to open new browser windows for links was screwing it up (go figure). Since I’ve been thinking about resetting that to remain in the current window anyway, I just went for it.

So go vote, already!

Finally saw Attack of the Clones yesterday with my lady.

Late, I know, but we had the opportunity to do so at one of the few digitial projection theatres, and so waited until we had the time to schlep over to it (it is not quite our local theatre).

So we saw it. And It Was Good.

I’m not quite sure how good yet — it usually takes a few days for the buzz to wear off for movies like this. But it was definitely better than Episode I (by far), and I think compares reasonably with the first trilogy.

Mr. Lileks has some thoughts on the matter, and I’ll add mine:

– Yoda kicks ass. Most folks knew that going in, but I’m here to tell you — Obi Wan is cool. Anakin can deal it out. But Yoda — Yoda will fuck you up.

– The dialogue wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Only one line really made me wince with the strong urge to hire Lucas an editor. And to my pleasant surprise, there actually are some wonderfully Han Soloesque one-liners thrown in here and there (an area in which Episode I was sorely lacking).

– Surprises. I hate movies where I know exactly what is going to happen from moment to moment. Lucas keeps things interesting, and while you certainly know that Anakin and Obi Wan aren’t going to get killed by those beasties coming at them right now, the overall plot of the movie is nicely opaque. You genuinely have to think about who’s actually on the right side. (Arguably, a little too opaque — there’s one aspect of how the clones get created that still has me scratching my head).

– Digital projection was pretty neat, but didn’t totally blow me away. We had literally 2nd row seats, which turned out to be great. If there were any cracklies and scratches to be seen, we sure as heck would have seen them. There were zero, naturally. This was nice… but I will confess to being a little skeptical about how long its going to take to get theatre owners to convert, given that, as I understand it, the economics are pretty sketchy.

Anyway, all in all a darned good ride….and one that makes me really look forward to Episode III.

Hey. I think Lucas just regained my faith. Think of that!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weblog… Blogspot had a nasty patch of downtime this morning, but seems to be back up now. Sorry about that, folks.

From the Dept. of Just Plain Neat

Check out Bookwatch . It’s a fellow who has set up a routine to scan through weblogs (using weblogs.com for his source list) and track when various books are mentioned. So you can look at Snow Crash, for example, and see that TTLB mentioned it (which is how I found the site — I got a referral from them).

Paul Bausch, the fellow who runs it, also has a blog with a few very nice photos of Yosemite that are making me jealous.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is to Coleen Rowly’s defense from meanies Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias :

“From here it looks like the problem is that the people in charge of our security think pretty much exactly like Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias–which is to say, like a well-connected East Coast media maven and a smart Harvard undergrad. For people like them, or like Robert Mueller and George Tenet, someone like Coleen Rowley is and always will be the sort of person you ignore…Jarvis and Yglesias are good guys, but (wittingly or unwittingly, I can’t quite tell) they’re offering a window into exactly why we’re where we are. “

Well said. I listened to a bit (only a bit) of her testimony and I was frankly charmed. She seemed like a very practical, down-to-earth professional who knew her job and was patiently trying to explain it to folks who didn’t. And the Fargo accent works for me, unlike for Mr. Jarvis.

I haven’t examined her full testimony, but the parts I did hear were pretty straightforward: notably, the section where she testified that the FBI’s search engine only works on single words, so you can search on “aviation” but not on “aviation schools”. I think there’s quite a legitimate question to ask why it has taken this long for somebody to testify to Congress about that basic a failing, but you can’t fault Ms. Rowley for that, and she seemed to do a fine job of it to me…

has an interesting referral to a Village Voice piece with statistics on Israeli and Palestinian casualties over the past few years. It says volumes about those doing the killing on each side; funny how actual facts can do that sometimes.

Did you think there could never possibly be an upside to a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?

again.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

First liberals — and now Christians. Seems like TTLB is becoming a haven for… well I don’t know what, but certainly not what I thought it would be.

Dean, the nice fellow over at Your Church Website, asked politely for a link, so I figured I’d oblige, as his page is (probably) unique and is at least out-of-the-ordinary for a non-practicing agnostic like me to be linking to. And I like to keep people guessing.

While I strongly suspect Dean and I might have some amusing and/or infuriating theological and philosophical debates were we to meet in person (said debates preferably to be served with a decent wine), I think I can endorse his — dare I say holy? — mission to bring good web design to Christian pages. If for no other reason, than at least from a clean-up-the-virtual-environment kinda perspective.

Hearkin unto his mission statement:

“Yes, I know most church sites are developed and maintained by volunteers. However, this doesn’t mean they have to look or feel cheap, cheezy and/or down right stupid. This website is here to ‘preach good design … to correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction’ on how to design church and para-church websites that are effective, fast-loading, informative, edifying and hopefully a bit fun. To do this will mean critiquing various sites in hopes of removing the splinters so we can view our sites in a new, more ‘prophet-able’ way.”

Yeeech. I was with him until that prophet-able thing. Didn’t Moses say anything about bad puns? Should be at least venal, IMHO.

Anyway, if you are looking to exorcise the demons of painfully bad design from your most holy pages, then head on over to Heal Your Church Website.

And while you’re there, don’t forget to put in a good word for the Bear. ‘Cause, you know, Pascal had a pretty good point…

Aha! Suman over at Kolkata Libertarian finally responded to the article I mentioned last week regarding India’s detailed plans for a limited war against Pakistan. After hearing about the plan last week, it sounded pretty realistic, but I wanted to hear some analysis from somebody who knows better than I. Having read Suman’s assessment, I’m convinced: Barring some unforseen and bizarre turn of events, this is what is going to happen. It just makes too much sense, from the twisted logic of the region, not to.

Suman’s money quote:

“A sense of the dramatic plays very well in the subcontinental psyche. Furious and explosive exchanges across a relatively stagnant front-line provide for much drama, but make little tactical sense in this age of modern warfare. Keep in mind, however, that the goals of this war are very different from traditional wars of aggression and defense. It’s not how much land the armies can grab, it’s how well they can soothe the jingiosm of the people back home without crippling themselves in the process. “

Whether this little adventure stays the nice, tidy limited conflict that India has planned is another question entirely.

PS – Incidentally, if my implicit recommendation wasn’t clear enough, here’s an explicit one: you should be reading Sumit if you have any interest at all in the India-Pakistan mess. And if you don’t have any interest in what may turn into a nuclear war, well then there’s just no helping you.