New Maps of the Wolfskin VFD District

Any homeowner in the county can be assured that at least three departments will together be immediately paged for a structure fire. Our ongoing analysis will hopefully improve that response for some and lower insurance rates for others.

We wanted to know how the County defines the Wolfskin's primary district. For structure fires, the County automatically pages three departments; the primary department and two neighboring departments, so we wanted to know in which neighboring areas the County pages Wolfskin as one of those two automatic aid departments. This was thought to be known, in at least general terms, but conversations between Fire Chiefs suggested we had some of the details wrong.

The County's 1997 E-911 maps and current E-911 Dispatch by Address records has this information, and the modifed E-911 map here is one way to present it. Click here for a 0.8 Mb pdf of the entire area with higher resolution. Eventually, we will change to composites of The Oglethorpe County Tax Accessor Parcel maps on which to put this and other information we would like to know before arrival at an incident.

There are only a few surprises in the primary district. Lois Lane is not in their dispath lists (though we show it here). Dogwood Trail is in our primary district but Wolfskin Road between Faust Farm Road and HY 78 is in Crawford's primary district. No part of HY 78 is in our district. Most of it is assigned to Crawford.

Our automatic aid assignments are not always so logical. If possible, they are based on how fast particular departments can get to a particular address in another department's primary district. Although it appears that we should easily get to Bear Mill Road and lower Farm Faust Road, each are unimproved dirt and each requires fording (no bridges) of Barrow Creek. In practice we would have to take the trucks through Crawford. We would also have to go through Crawford to get the Tanker or Pumper to Lower Wirebridge Road in Maxey's primary district. You can also see some strange islands in our secondary converage. We can now get the Fire Chiefs to review their assignments and perhaps arrival times of secondary departments might improve if some reassignments were made.

It is difficult to show both primary and secondary coverage on one map, so our secondaries are not shown here. Crawford VFD is one of the two secondaries for all of Wolfskin. Arnoldsville VFD is the second one in the north and Maxey's is the second one in the south.

And now fundraising letters from Wolfskin VFD will clearly identify the three departments that protect the recipient.

On a related subject, the maps show the limits of the Georgia Militia District 227 (GMD 227 in red) which was one of thirteen established in Oglethorpe County. It only aquired the permanent name of Wolfskin long after the others. The origins of that name may be the subject of another post. Here, however, it is obvious that there is only a limited correspondence between the Wolfskin GM District and the Wolfskin VFD District. The other GMD in the county have met a similar fate. Although still used as political districts, they only roughly predict the limits of the Fire Districts in the area that may share the same name.

Hottest Month on Record

That's my declaration, anyway, going over 110 years of data. By a smidge.

We were either amazingly lucky this past month, or folks around here were admirably careful. Or both. As far as I know there were only a couple of brush fires around Maxeys, and of course the big one near Vesta on that 107 degree day, August 10. It could have been much worse.

Your misery this past month did not go for naught. For Athens, August 2007 was not just the hottest August since "record keeping began in 1898", it was the hottest month period, edging out July 1993 by a hair. Our average daily high this month was 9 degrees higher than usual, for August.

Hold your head, here come some statistics:

We had an average daily high of 98.2 degF, approached only in July 1993 with an average daily high of 98.1 degF, and in July 1925, 96.9 degF. There were 13 days with temperatures of 100 degF or over, a record approached only in July 1925 with 10 days, August 1925 with 9 days, and July 1993 with 10 days. On two days this month my personal observations indicate that we came to within less than 1 degF of matching the highest temperature recorded, 108 degF. Officially we broke 110-year historical records on nine days. Officially we got only 47% the amount of rainfall average for August, are at 60% for 2007 to date, and 61% since Jan 2006.

Besides the record-breaking hot temperatures, in the end there were an astonishing 23 days in August at least one standard deviation above the 17-year average for that day; far above any other year except for the 26 days significantly above average in July 1993. There are usually 5 days significantly above average in August. There were no nights when the lows were at least one standard deviation before the average low.

Usually these sorts of extremes would reflect a deep La Nina in the equatorial Pacific. Not this time. We are in ENSO-neutral conditions and so we did it all by ourselves ;-) .