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Show 63 three 100s. Then, because she-needed an immediate salary, she signed up again as a Youth Conservation Corps leader. Toward the end of that summer in the Lolo Forest, Karen learned fchat she'd qualified for a position with the Forest Service in the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory in Missoula, a center for research on wildfire behavior. In i t s 66-foot-high combustion chamber, fuels are burned directly underneath a funnel-bottomed cylinder vihich looks like an enormous stovepipe. Scientists ignite fuel beds of grass or tviigs or pine needles while they control the temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure in the chamber. This way they learn how hot and how fast fuels will burn under different vieather conditions. Next to the combustion chamber is a wind tunnel which looks like a long, high, square-sided folding telescope. Artificial winds of up to 50 miles an hour can be produced inside this tunnel and a smaller one like i t . When f i r e s are l i t inside the tunnels, scientists discover how flames behave in winds of different speeds. Although the test fires are much smaller than real forest fires would be, the test results are verified in controlled fires set in a fevi acres of forest around Missoula. Based on information from these experiments, forest managers can decide whether to risk sending firefighters into dangerous, windborne f i r e s. Karen's job vias in an office, a very tiny, crowded office because there wasn't much space l e f t in the Laboratory buildings. It involved reading a r t i c l e s and documents about wildfire, condensing the information into short abstracts, and storing the abstracts in a computer memory bank. She vias hired as a temporary employee on a one-year contract. |
