My addiction to weather reports may be a holdover from three seasons of living on a fire lookout. Every afternoon along about 3:00 pm, a radio voice from the Fremont National Forest dispatch center would broadcast a message to “stand by for the weather forecast.” That meant getting my little pocket notebook out and taking notes. (I’m still not sure why I needed to do that, but that’s what I did.)
Those days are long gone, but for no practical reason at all, I still feel the need to know the numbers for things like wind speed, wind direction, humidity, temperature, fuel moisture, lightning prediction, and BIV.
The internet gives me most of what I want to know about the weather any time I want to sign on, but I don’t have a source for BIV figures. I haven’t had since the sixties, but it doesn’t mean my desire to know the Burning Index Value is any less. You just can’t get a good Burning Index Value these days, not even from the internet. Dang. When those hot summer days cook the moisture out of the “fuels,” and the wind begins to blow I can’t help myself. I still want to call dispatch and ask, “What’s the BIV?”
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