30 2022
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AUGUST
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Austin • Coudersport • Crosby • Eldred • Gifford • Kane • Lewis Run • Mt. Jewett • Otto Eldred • Port Allegany Ridgway • Roulette • Smethport • Turtlepoint
Photo courtesy District 15 Wildfire Crew District 15 crew members work to cut in a fire line to stop the advancing fire in 2021.
Three local volunteer firefighters deploy to Montana BY MANDY COLOSIMO
As many have heard, three members of the Bradford Township Volunteer Fire Department have been deployed to Montana for two weeks. Nick Colley, Mike Maze, and Jim Maze, are among the 20 firefighters from Pa. who left for their journey last Tuesday. Their mission is to lend relief to the embattled crews out west. They are due back in just over a week and another group will be deployed from Pennsylvania. Throughout the years, crews and highly specialized
individuals from Pa. have gone to every state west of the Mississippi, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Bureau of Forestry. All volunteers from Pennsylvania have received intensive training at a Bureau of Forestry training camp, which duplicates real-life firefighting experiences. Wildfires in the western United States have been about as frequent as snow in this area. It is a sad sight to see. In Montana, though this summer has been reportedly better
than last year, still, nearly 56,000 acres have burned so far — the total for 2021 was a devastating 940,000 acres, according to Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. To the west of Montana are Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. All of which are watching their forest go up in flames due to severe drought conditions. And the drought intensifies in California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Believe it or not, the majority of wildfires burning in the U.S. are in Montana and Alaska, according to National Fire News.
Collins Timber announces land acquisition
KANE — Collins Timber Company recently announced the major acquisition of 58,000 acres of forestland in northeastern California. Collins Timber also owns Kane Hardwood. The primary tracts of land acquired during this purchase on Aug. 4 are near the towns of Westwood, Susanville and Adin.
According to the company’s President and CEO Eric Schooler, the recent transaction was the company’s largest purchase in their 160 year history. Collins is a 167-year-old, family-owned forest management and forest products company with operations in Chester, Calif., Klamath
Falls, Ore. and Kane. Kane Hardwood has approximately 120,000 acres of forestlands. Based in Oregon since 1855, Collins produces wood products from more than 370,000 acres of forestlands nationwide, five manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and one retail yard in California.
It’s not just a west coast or pacific-thing either. Oklahoma and Texas have wildland firefighters battling blazes, but that’s still midcountry to the eastern states, right? Florida, sparked a wildfire this past week as well. One of the best web resources to track the fires, incidents, acreage, and crews working to put out the flames, is www. fs.usda.gov/sciencetechnology/fire/ information The site is interactive. Choose the state, click on the location, and then click on the left side icon that looks like a presentation screen. Doing so gives more information than
anywhere else on the web. With so many Pennsylvania firefighters traveling out west and with the spread of drought conditions across the country, having this information a click away might be enough to settle some nerves. Lastly, somehow it was missed in Round the Square this year but aptly fits with this article. August 9 was Smokey Bear’s 78th birthday. For anyone too young to know who that is, Smokey was developed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council to promote their joint campaign of forest fire prevention, and now
wildfire prevention as well. He was one of the most iconic advertising characters ever. Smokey’s message that, “Only you can prevent wildfires” is just as relevant and urgent today as it was in 1944. Driving through the region, Smokey the Bear holds many signs indicating the level of fire danger in the area: Red is extreme, Orange is very high, Yellow is high, Blue is moderate, Green is low. Some signs have corresponding numbers, 1 through 5, with 5 indicating extreme, as well as colors and words.
Pittsburgh woman recovering after shark attack at Myrtle Beach
HARRISBURG (TNS) — A Pittsburgh woman was injured in a shark attack on Myrtle Beach and is now recovering, according to WPDE. The woman named Karren Sites reportedly was swimming “wastedeep” in the water with her 8-year-old grandson, and that’s when a shark bit her arm on Monday. Her grandson was
only 10 feet away from her when the incident occurred. “I just felt something, I guess, bite me and there was a shark on my arm. I was only in waist-deep water. I kept pushing at it to get it off my arm and it did,” Sites told WPDE. Sites had to get hundreds of stitches due to the incident. Though, she told
WPDE she will continue to visit the beach. Daniel Abel, a Marine Science professor at Coastal Carolina University’s Marine Science stated, “It’s very clearly a shark bite, when you look at the arc of the tooth marks and the damage that was done, my sympathies to the victim that’s a horrendous thing to go through.”