[Michlib-l] U.P. Notable Book Club - Greg Lusk 🔥 The Great Seney Fire: The Walsh Ditch Fire of 1976

[Victor R. Volkman]

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&id=95a863d9cc&e=fd2c186103>
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&id=56ae256977&e=fd2c186103>:
"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&id=b09e0db8c8&e=fd2c186103>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&id=f912b6b525&e=fd2c186103>"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&id=cf852f0d66&e=fd2c186103>*

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&id=d28421e267&e=fd2c186103>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&id=c195f97e96&e=fd2c186103>.
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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