Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Red Flag Warning in NJ and online scanner feed


I got the map shown above from the National Weather Services Experimental Fire Weather Page, the counties colored in red are under Red Flag Warnings. You can see that the Red Flag Warnings extend to other States in the Mid Atlantic region and into southern New England. To see a copy of the Red Flag Warning issued by the Mt. Holly Office of the National Weather Service for portions of NJ and eastern PA, see this post on wildland fire.

In my wanderings around the web this morning I have seen that various media outlets have reported on the Red Flag Warnings, see for example here and here.

I saw on another post on the wildland fire hotlist forums that the NJ Forest Fire Service (NJFFS) has what they call Patrol Level One in each Section of each of the three Divisions today. What this means is that the section warden plus one other NJFFS firefighter is patroling each section.

For the last three days, I have spent a part of each afternoon listening to live scanner feed from the NJ Forest Fire Service on Radio Reference. For example the scanner feed from the NJFFS Division A may be found here, and the Division B feed may be found here. I did not see a feed for Division C on Radio Reference.

I have been learning a lot by listening to the live scanner feed from the NJFFS. I am not going to report on what I am listening because I can't be sure that I will "get it right." But I can say, for example, that while I was listening to the Division B feed on Monday afternoon, I heard them mention "Bravo 1", the AT-602 assigned to Division B being sent to a fire, finding out later in the day from the Section B10 website that the AT-602 had made a couple of drops on a fire in Barnegat Twp. in Ocean County.

If you don't hear anything more from me on today's Red Flag conditions here in NJ that will probably mean that there was light initial attack that was quickly dealt with by the very capable folk at the NJFFS.

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