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Community Forestry Sort Yard program prepares for seasonal location change Site near Nederland to close July 9; alternate site near Allenspark to open Aug. 9
Jun 28th
Boulder County, Colo. – Boulder County’s Forest Health Initiative is gearing up for its seasonal transfer of the county’s Community Forestry Sort Yard program from Nederland to Allenspark.
Because the county only has the resources and staff to operate one site at a time using an air curtain burner and related equipment to reduce volume and process woody material, the two sites operate on alternate schedules each season.
At 5 p.m. on Saturday, July 9, the Nederland area sort yard, located at 286 Ridge Road, will close for the summer. Residents using the Nederland area site are encouraged to continue with their beetle mitigation and defensible space improvement projects by cutting and transporting beetle-infested logs and slash to the site before mountain pine beetles begin flying in mid-July.
The Boulder County Commissioners are reviewing proposals for reopening the Nederland area sort yard on a limited basis this year to accept additional slash and logs from county residents. More information on potential dates and hours for these extra collections will be released later this summer.
Additionally, Nederland area residents are invited to attend and provide input about their experience using the sort yard in its first year of operation at a community meeting scheduled for 7 p.m., Tuesday, July 12, at the Nederland Community Center.
The Allenspark/Meeker Park sort yard, located on the Peak-to-Peak Highway just north of the Boulder-Larimer county line, will open for log and slash disposal at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 9 and remain open through Oct. 15. The Allenspark area site will not accept logs infested by mountain pine beetles until the majority of beetle flight has ended in mid-September.
To better understand the types and preferred lengths of material accepted at the sort yard, please visit www.BoulderCounty.org/ForestHealth before using the yard for the first time.
For more information about bark beetle management tips, upcoming trainings, and sort yard operations, contact Ryan Ludlow, Boulder County’s outreach forester, at 720-564-2641 or pinebeetle@bouldercounty.org.
Left Hand Canyon Fire Maxwell Fire Boulder
Jun 26th
9:15 9/26 update: Elsha Kirbyl is a USAF fire fighter and lead public information Officer for the Maxwell Fire. We talked to her from the fire line tonight. Here is what she told us. The fire started with big plumes and started to run. Now it has settled down and the forest service is starting back fires. The fire is creeping back down to Left Hand canyon road and it is hoped it will burn into the area where the March fire was and burn out. 3 air tankers have bee suspended for the night. The fire is approximately 100 acres. There are 100 fire fighter on the line. There are more crews staged at Left Hand and Old stage just in case.
City Dispatchers told us The fire initially started at approximate 5:00 pm ( according to first calls to city of boulder Dispatch records)
Rick Brough Sheriffs Department Commander told us the fire started about 1/4 mile from the “off highway entrance to gun shooting and 4 wheeling, on the side of the road. “It could have been a spark or a cigarette but no cause has been determined” He said initially, some homes we mandated to evacuate when the fire started to run during high winds when it started. ” But now there is no mandatory evacuations except for 1.5 miles of Left Hand Canyon past old Stage road.
8:12 A reverse 911 call went out to 340 homes according to Boulder PD PIO Kim Kobel. The evacuations are not mandatory. The US forest service has taken over the fire.
With hope and no high winds tomorrow morning, we have escaped the bullet this time Boulder.
7:58 Colorado ORM reports in:
Maxwell Fire Info Sources – Boulder, CO
The Boulder County Office of Emergency Management (OEM) has been activated in response to a fire in Lefthand Canyon being referred to as the Maxwell Fire. Response information – including evacuation and shelter information – is being posted on Boulder’s Office of Emergency Management Emergency Information Page at http://boulderoem.com/emergency-status. Boulder OEM is also providing information via their Twitter feed (@boulderoem) at http://twitter.com/boulderoem, their Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/BoulderOEM and via Boulder County’s Twitter feed (@bouldercounty) at http://twitter.com/bouldercounty.
Fire Fight/Suppression information for the Maxwell Fire is being posted on Inciweb at http://inciweb.org/incident/2384/
An evacuation center has been established by the Red Cross at the YMCA at 28th street in Boulder. Evacuees are encouraged to go to the evacuation center for information and assistance. Red Cross Shelter information is being posted at http://twitter.com/redcrossdenver
The Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center (@rmaccfireinfo) is also posting fire-related information at http://twitter.com/rmaccfireinfo as is the Arapahoe National Forest at http://twitter.com/usfsarp.
Boulder County also maintains a txt/email alert system – register for alerts online at https://ww2.everbridge.net/citizen/EverbridgeGateway.action?body=home&gis_alias_id=160781.
There are two hashtags currently being used on Twitter for fire-related information: #maxwellfire and #boulderfire. Search for fire info using the hashtags at
The Maxwell Fire is burning on National Forest System lands in the Lefthand Canyon area. An airtanker is working the fire and additional resources have been ordered.
7:47 6/26 from us forest service
Basic Information
Incident Type Wildfire
Cause Under Investigation
Date of Origin Sunday June 26th, 2011 approx. 05:00 PM
Location Lefthand Canyon Area of Roosevelt National Forest
Current Situation
Size 100 acres
Outlook
Planned Actions
Additional crews have been ordered and an air tanker is making drops.
6/26 7:30 p.m. – Maxwell Fire Road Closures
Roads closed to public traffic:
Left Hand Canyon at North Foothills Highway (local traffic allowed with I.D. to Old Stage Rd.)
James Canyon at Lefthand Canyon to Old Stage Rd
Old Stage at Lefthand Canyon to James Canyon
6/26 6 p.m. – Fire in Lefthand Canyon
Firefighters have responded to a fire near the 3.7 Mile Marker on U.S. Forest Service land. There is a mandatory evacuation for residents within a 1.5 mile radius of the 3.7 MM. The Emergency Operations Center is activated to help support firefighting efforts. Additional information will be posted here when details are available.
The “Maxwell Fire” began at approximately 5:39 p.m. this afternoon. Fire is estimated to be between 10 and 20 acres in size.
The Boulder
CU RESEARCHERS DEVELOP NEW SOFTWARE TO ADVANCE BRAIN IMAGE RESEARCH
Jun 26th
A University of Colorado Boulder research team has developed a new software program allowing neuroscientists to produce single brain images pulled from hundreds of individual studies, trimming weeks and even months from what can be a tedious, time-consuming research process.
The development of noninvasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, spurred a huge amount of scientific research and led to substantial advances in the understanding of the human brain and cognitive function. However, instead of having too little data, researchers are besieged with too much, according to Tal Yarkoni, a postdoctoral fellow in CU-Boulder’s psychology and neuroscience department.
The new software developed by Yarkoni and his colleagues can be programmed to comb scientific literature for published articles relevant to a particular topic, and then to extract all of the brain scan images from those articles. Using a statistical process called “meta-analysis,” researchers are then able to produce a consensus “brain activation image” reflecting hundreds of studies at a time.
“Because the new approach is entirely automated, it can analyze hundreds of different experimental tasks or mental states nearly instantaneously instead of requiring researchers to spend weeks or months conducting just one analysis,” said Yarkoni.
Yarkoni is the lead author on a paper introducing the new approach to analyzing brain imaging data that appears in the June 26 edition of the journal Nature Methods. Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas Nichols of the University of Warwick in England, David Van Essen of Washington University in St. Louis and Tor Wager of CU-Boulder contributed to the paper.
Brain scanning techniques such as fMRI have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of the human mind by allowing researchers to peer deep into people’s brains as they engage in mental activities as diverse as reciting numbers, making financial decisions or simply daydreaming. But interpreting the results of brain imaging studies is often more difficult, according to Yarkoni.
“There’s often the perception that what we’re doing when we scan someone’s brain is literally seeing their thoughts and feelings in action, but it’s actually much more complicated,” Yarkoni said. “The colorful images we see are really just estimates, because each study gives us a somewhat different picture. It’s only by combining the results of many different studies that we get a really clear picture of what’s going on.”
The ability to look at many different mental states simultaneously allows researchers to ask interesting new questions. For instance, researchers can pick out a specific brain region they’re interested in and determine which mental states are most likely to produce activation in that region, he said. Or they can calculate how likely a person is to be performing a particular task given their pattern of brain activity.
In their study, the research team was able to distinguish people who were experiencing physical pain during brain scanning from people who were performing a difficult memory task or viewing emotional pictures with nearly 80 percent accuracy. The team expects performance levels to improve as their software develops, and believes their tools will improve researchers’ ability to decode mental states from brain activity.
“We don’t expect to be able to tell what people are thinking or feeling at a very detailed level,” Yarkoni said. “But we think we’ll be able to distinguish relatively broad mental states from one another. And we’re hopeful that might even eventually extend to mental health disorders, so that these tools will be useful for clinical diagnosis.”
