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September 2024

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U.P. Notable Book Club - Greg Lusk 🔥 The Great Seney Fire: The Walsh Ditch Fire of 1976
by Victor R. Volkman 01 Sep '24

01 Sep '24

Librarians - feel free to share the link with your patrons. *Note: this event was originally scheduled for July 11th but was postponed to September 12th* *Official Seal of the U.P. Notable Books <https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…> UP Notable Book Club:* The Crystal Falls Community District Library in partnership with the U.P. Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA) has scheduled author events with winners of the /UP Notable Book List/. The 38th event is with author and retired fire safety professional Greg Lusk who was the Assistant Fire Boss for the many months of the 1976 Seney Fire. According to /The Mining Journal/ <https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>: "All told, the fire spread over 72,500 acres during a period of record drought, requiring an interagency firefighting force of more than 1,200 firefighters from twenty-nine states to achieve containment. It burned until the winter snow extinguished it." /*When: */September 12th, 2024 at 7 pm Eastern / 6 pm Central /*Where: */Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86284714758?pwd=sTHe6NYXBJl7heVzQ2NY9p9agE0X18.1 Meeting ID: 862 8471 4758 Passcode: fire *<https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>GREGORY M. LUSK*, a native Yooper, who grew up in lower Michigan and southern California, has two grown sons and now lives in Hancock, Michigan, with his wife, Sandra. He spent the long, dry summer of 1976 helping to suppress the largest, most costly forest fire that had burned in Michigan since 1908. In early August, he left his regular duties as a fire management specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources in Marquette to work on the fire as the assistant Fire Boss for the State. His experiences several years earlier in Vietnam as a platoon leader were as valuable as his degree in forestry from Michigan Tech and his extensive training in forest fire behavior in the effort. The leaves had fallen, and the early winter snow was starting to fall by the time he got home. Long after he retired as the Upper Peninsula State fire supervisor in 1997, he dug out his news clippings, maps, and notes and began writing the history of the Great Seney fire. He was partly motivated by the aphorism that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"; with hopes that this account will help others remember this essential piece of Michigan history. <https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>"Greg Lusk is a native Yooper who had a front-row seat for the Seney Fire. Specifically, he left his job as a fire specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to become the Assistant Fire Boss for the State’s suppression of the Seney Fire. As such, Lusk would need to call on both his experience as a seasoned veteran of Vietnam as a platoon leader as well as his degree in forestry from Michigan Tech to succeed. An inveterate and meticulous recordkeeper, he unearthed his many boxes of official and unofficial documentation after his retirement to write /The Great Seney Fire/. I can only describe as eerie the sensation of reading Lusk’s story of a nearly 50 year-old-fire while similar events unveiled day-by-day in Lahaina, Hawaii as I read on. One of these he describes in detail is how a fire can burn underground following tree roots like a long dynamite fuse and emerge on the other side of the fire suppression line. Literally, the next day a photographer reported seeing this phenomenon in Lahaina. I am generally not a person to dog-ear pages, but as I read about the scale of firefighting, possible mismanagement by the Seney Wildlife Sanctuary, and the heroics of men and their machines I was marking page-after-page! Today, I can watch the progress of wildfires on the NASA FIRMS page (Fire Information Resource Management System) with fresh satellite imagery on my laptop. This was not the case in 1976 where the only communication was old-school police radios and visuals were just photographs snapped from aerial surveys. Lusk leads off with a complete “natural history” starting millions of years ago before the U.P. itself was even a land mass! This continues on as the ever-changing parade of flora and fauna cross the U.P. and leave their mark. In 1908, land speculators purchased the Seney marsh from Cleveland Cliffs in hopes of selling it on as arable farmland. To that end, they dug the Walsh Ditch, a 16-mile-long trench between M-28 draining into the Manistique River. The main problem being that, although the soil was rich, it would simply not hold water and after Spring rains the soil would quickly dry up. Such a summer drought was well underway in 1976 when the great fire broke out. A normal summer in the central U.P. would see 13 inches of rain in the summer but only 5 inches had fallen and August of that year saw barely ½ inch of that total. ." -- *Victor R. Volkman, Read the entire review on /U.P. Book Review/ <https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>* More information about the U.P. Notable Book list, /U.P. Book Review, /and UPPAA can be found on www.UPNotable.com *<https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>About the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association (UPPAA)* Established in 1998 to support authors and publishers who live in or write about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, UPPAA is a Michigan nonprofit association with over 100 members, many of whose books are featured on the organization’s website at www.uppaa.org <https://UPPAA.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b1016c5c910959a236f2ff48f&i…>. UPPAA welcomes membership and participation from anyone with a UP connection who is interested in writing -- Regards, Victor R. Volkman, President L H Press Inc. www.LHPress.com

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