Station Fire Threatens Mount Wilson

[neufer]

<<Saturday, 29 Aug 09, 4:48 pm PDT - A major effort at Red Box has apparently beaten back the fire in that area. Although they both wanted to stay on site to continue to assist the fire fighters, I had to ask both Larry and Dave to take advantage of this opportunity to leave the mountain, and they are, as I write this, being led down Red Box Road by the battalion fire chief to the Angeles Crest Hwy where they will leave the mountains via Wrigthwood. Alternately, we had a very kind offer from KABC to provide for their evacuation via helicopter.

We have been in contact with staff members in the offices of California Congressman Adam Schiff, Georgia Congressman John Lewis and Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson to seek their assistance in ensuring that the Forest Service and California Forestry Division have all the resources they need to defend Mount Wilson.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/towercam.htm

It is expected that the fire, if it cannot be brought under greater control, could reach the Observatory sometime Sunday. The positive outcome at Red Box is very encouraging.

Now that we no longer have any Mount Wilson staff on site, my access to fresh news from the Observatory is greatly diminished. I will continue to pass along news as I get it.>>

[bystander]

Wildfire Creeps Closer to NASA Facility
Space.com - 2009 August 30 1:09 pm EDT

The wildfire raging in the forests near NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., intensified on Saturday, edging closer to the research facility.


The so-called Station fire is burning in the Angeles National Forest near homes on the northside of La Cañada Flintridge, according to news reports. The fire came within one quarter to one eighth of a mile of JPL, but does not pose any immediate danger, said NASA spokeswoman Jane Platt.

[bystander]

Flames from Station Fire Threaten Communications Towers on Mt. Wilson
Pasadena Star-News - 08/30/2009 05:35:03 PM PDT

The Station Fire is moving toward Mount Wilson and fire officials said they plan to do their best to prevent the massive blaze from destroying the 20-plus television transmission towers located there.

Los Angeles County Fire Department Capt. Mark Savage said a strike team and engines were in place and air tankers had laid down fire retardant on the mountain directly in front of the “huge communication location.”

“It’s not a matter of if it impacts Mt. Wilson, it’s a matter of when,” he said. “Unfortunately today it was so smoky that our tankers couldn’t work anywhere near that area.

As of 5: 30 p.m. the fire was “just a couple fo hours away from Mt. Wilson,” Savage said.

“We’ve done a lot of work to slow the flames down, but some are predicting up to 300-foot flame lengths.”

The Mt. Wilson observatory was evacuated Saturday, leaving the historic and scientifically important facility in the hands of firefighters.

Station fire likely to hit historic Mt. Wilson observatory, fire officials say
LA Times - August 30, 2009 | 5:42 pm PDT

The fire burning in Angeles National Forest is approaching the historic solar observatory and television transmission towers atop Mt. Wilson, according to Los Angeles County fire officials.

The communications towers house transmitters for every major television station in Los Angeles.

“We expect it to get there in the next two to four hours,” said county fire Capt. Mark Savage.

Crews were clearing brush around the structures, but fire officials were not sure if they could leave personnel on the mountain to fight the flames because of the danger and limited escape routes. The fire is less than two miles away.

“It’s a serious situation,” said Bob Shindelar, operations branch director of California Incident Management Team 5. “Is the observatory going to make it? We’re doing everything in our power. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it is impacted by fire today or tomorrow.”

[bystander]

JPL Update
JPL News and Features - August 30, 2009

Fire conditions around JPL have continued to improve throughout the day, and the Lab is no longer threatened by the Station Fire. However, there has been heavy smoke in the area. To ensure acceptable air quality for the safety of employees, the Laboratory will be closed on Monday except for mission-critical personnel.

Mission-critical positions will be determined by JPL's Deputy Director. Those designated individuals will be contacted by their supervisors to report on Monday. JPL and the Woodbury complex will be closed on Monday to all other personnel. Public tours originally scheduled for Monday will be cancelled.

[bystander]

Incident Information System: Station Fire
UCLA Mt. Wilson 150-Foot Solar Tower Towercam
Mount Wilson Observatory: Station Fire News

[geckzilla]

No better place to post this:
http://www.brandonriza.com/Video/HTML/Z ... ained.html

It's neat. Hope everyone and the equipment is ok.

Edit: By the way, anyone have any explanation for the white tops? I was thinking it must be some form of condensation but I don't understand it.

[interstellaryeller]

The fire is out of control and threatens Mt. Wilson Observatory. feel free to read about it @ http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2 ... s-say.html

Old news: Article dated August 30, 2009 | 5:42 pm (bystander)

[neufer]

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap950701.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081213.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081203.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960406.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap950620.html

[bystander]

Raging Fire Threatens Mount Wilson
Sky and Telescope - 31 August 2009 2:15 pm EDT

Update, 2:15 p.m. EDT Monday: Mount Wilson Observatory survived through Sunday night and Monday morning. At 2:03 p.m. EDT the Los Angeles Times reported:

"Crews battling the Station fire believe that it's only a matter of time before the deadly blaze hits Mt. Wilson, but officials are hopeful that frantic work by hand crews and aircraft dropping flame retardant will protect the communications centers there.

" 'There is a good chance the fire will hit Mt. Wilson today,' said Ray Dombroski, spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. 'The fire is currently on two sides of Mt. Wilson, about one-half mile to the north and about one mile southwest.'

Update, 2 p.m. EDT Monday: Mike Simmons writes to us:

"I was surprised and delighted when I got up this morning to find that Mt. Wilson had not been overrun by the fire during the night. The fire has almost doubled in size during the night but it seems it has not proceeded along the last mile of the ridge to Mt. Wilson. The firefighters have been withdrawn from the observatory grounds. Presumably they have also been withdrawn from the communications facilities, which are the highest priority since they include broadcast facilities for most area TV and radio as well as cell phones and various other types.

[neufer]

A detailed view of the Station fire burning in southern California at 18:45 UTC
(11:45 local time) on August 30, 2009, [MODIS instrument on Terra satellite.]
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=40011

[bystander]

Monday, 1 Sep 09, 7:15 am PDT - I wish I had some fresh substantive information to post this morning, but I do not at this point have any news - only what we can all deduce from Towercam and other sources. Towercam scenes continue to show thick smoke on the mountain with a concentration on the right side of the image implying activity on the mountain's north side. It clearly has not reached the mountain and, if advancing towards us, it is only doing so slowly.

Update, 10:00 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, Sept. 1st: Despite the loss of the summit's primary power line, Mount Wilson's webcam is still working, and its westward view at dawn shows standing trees and lots of smoke — but no flame ...

Yesterday fire officials blanketed the area with aerial drops of fire-retardant chemicals, a move designed to let the fire burn around the historic observatory and the nearby farm of transmission towers. So far, this strategy has worked.

[neufer]

• 
  Mt. Wilson's famous, and besieged, observatory
  By Tim Rutten September 2, 2009
  
  <<There has been tragedy and loss aplenty in the fire ravaging the Angeles National Forest, but it has been particularly poignant -- and, somehow, humblingly circular -- to watch what's probably the first natural element man subdued to his purpose threatening one of the great monuments of modern science.
  
  The 101-year-old observatory at the top of Mt. Wilson houses some of the most productive scientific instruments of the 20th century, and it continues to play a cutting-edge role in various branches of astronomy, though the ambient nighttime light rising from the metropolis that now sprawls up its foothills makes deep space observation too difficult. Paradoxically, it was the Los Angeles Basin's inversion layer -- and the "stable air" it created -- that originally made the mountain a perfect site for the great telescopes that revolutionized mankind's notion of its place in the universe.
  
  Beginning in 1919, the astronomer Edwin Hubble used the Mt. Wilson Observatory's famous 100-inch Hooker telescope to prove that our Milky Way was but one galaxy among billions of stellar aggregations coming to life and dying across the universe. It was through his observations on the mountain that Hubble also realized that creation's most primal impulse, the force of that singular event we now call the Big Bang, continues to echo through our universe, creating new distances where none had existed just a moment before.
  
  You'd think the place and instrument that so fundamentally altered our notions about ourselves and our relation to the cosmos would be a place of pilgrimage. But, for whatever reason, we don't really turn the sites of our great intellectual realizations -- and that, more than "discoveries," are what they are -- into shrines the way we do other historical venues. Who, for example, now bothers to visit the Zurich flat where the young Albert Einstein worked out his special theory of relativity and first jotted down the most famous equation of the 20th century? Does anybody still visit the drafty Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge where James Watson and Francis Crick first constructed a model of DNA and, as the latter modestly announced to colleagues in the Eagle Pub that night, "discovered the secret of life"?
  
  Perhaps it's simply in the nature of science and those who pursue it to keep their eyes fixed on the forward horizon, though it's hard not to feel that the rest of society undervalues the scientific contribution to our collective life, because we don't hold in our memories and adequately value the triumphant moments achieved in places like Mt. Wilson. If this country taught the true history of science to its children, would we still suffer through the endless know-nothing-ism of pointless controversies like creationism?
  
  Perhaps, though, the best mementos of Hubble's contribution you can collect today are the stunning pictures of other galaxies taken from the space telescope that bears his name. Still, it would be a shame to lose forever the place where such genuinely mind-bending work was done.
  
  On the other hand, if this "angry" Station fire has done nothing else, it has reminded us that we remain rather small and often helpless before the most basic of terrestrial elements -- fire, water, wind. Those huge pyrocumulus clouds looming over downtown L.A. on Monday were like monuments to a kind of heedlessness and vanity that flourishes with particular force in this city -- where a fantasy of control long ago took hold. How do you accept implacable nature of the sort that's been on display for the last week in a city where so many believe they can reinvent their lives, their looks and even their psyches?
  
  The last time fire burned all the way through what's now the Angeles National Forest was in 1897, eight years before astronomer George Hale began work on the first phase of the Mt. Wilson Observatory. Dave Boucher, the L.A. County Fire Department's historian, and other local scholars of fire ecology believe that the Station blaze already has surpassed that conflagration in size.
  
  Almost all of the largest fires in California history -- including the largest, the 273,246-acre Cedar fire in San Diego County six years ago -- have occurred in this century, products of urban sprawl, the thoughtless propagation of non-native plants, unwise fire suppression policies and, probably, global warming.
  
  The dreams that propelled Hubble toward the world-altering discoveries he made atop Mt. Wilson may very well have had their origins in our ancestors' reveries beside their flickering fires. It's sobering to witness how easily it can become once again an element of dread.>>

[bystander]

MWO fire blog relocated to GSU CHARA site

http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/fire.php

[bystander]

Mount Wilson Observatory: View from the Mountaintop
Astronomy.com - September 2, 2009

As the 2009 Station Fire threatens Mount Wilson Observatory, Astronomy magazine offers a look back at this facility's legacy.

In September 2003, Astronomy magazine published this article about the birthplace of the discovery of the expanding universe. Here is that article, in its entirety. For updates on Mount Wilson Observatory's status, visit Fire threatens Mount Wilson Observatory

[neufer]

Backfires burning the north flank of Mount Wilson Observatory

<<On the morning of September 1, 2009, while the Station fire raged in the Angeles National Forest, firefighters set backfires near the telescopes on the peak of Mount Wilson Observatory to consume fuel so that the wildfire would not reach it.>>

[bystander]

Two Observatories Saved from Wildfire
Sky and Telescope - September 8, 2009

Although Southern California's devastating Station Fire still rages nearby, the Mount Wilson and Stony Ridge observatories have escaped destruction.

[bystander]

Mount Wilson: One Year After the Fire
Sky and Telescope | 26 Aug 2010

The severity of Southern California's Station Fire is evident in this 2-hour sequence of images recorded by a webcam at Mount Wilson Observatory as the Sun set on August 29, 2009. [i](Credit: UCLA Dept. of Physics and Astronomy)[/i] [s][/s]

---

Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 26, 2009, Larry Webster, site manager for the CHARA interferometer array on Mount Wilson's summit, sent around a brief email message: "A new fire broke out on the lower Angeles Crest Hwy at about 15:20 today."

That small roadside fire, set by an arsonist near the Forest Service's Angeles Crest Fire Station, would become known as the "Station Fire." It exploded into the surrounding national forest, killed two firefighters, destroyed dozens of homes and other structures, and consumed 160,000 acres of wildlands. As it intensified, fire officials predicted that the inferno would soon sweep across Mount Wilson, posing a dire threat to the extensive collection of broadcast facilities at its summit as well as to historic Mount Wilson Observatory.

The next few weeks were a roller-coaster ride of alternating despair and relief until, finally, on September 25th, we could declare the observatory safe from any further danger. We'd been spared due to a combination of wonderful expertise, energy, and determination of the hundreds of firefighters who protected the observatory during those weeks, as well as by the vagaries of a fire that seemed to run out of steam just short of the summit's ridgeline. But to our north and west, as far as the eye could see, it left behind an obliterated, ashen landscape.

[geckzilla]

Bah, it's already been a year? Get out of here!