Firefighters will continue to monitor hot spots within the fire, while also focusing on heat and smoke around the perimeter. Suppression repair continues to return the watersheds and recreation areas to pre-fire conditions. Hot and dry weather is forecast to continue through Thursday as are shifting gusty winds.
Today, CAL FIRE Incident Management Team 2 will transfer command of the fire to the US Forest Service. Subsequent incident updates will be provided by the Los Padres National Forest Unit. Visit -information/caanf-2024-post-fire for continued updates.
The 2024 fire season in California presents a mixed scenario due to diverse climatic conditions. January is likely to see above normal precipitation in the north, shifting to below normal from February to March. Southern California, influenced by weakening El Nio conditions, expects cooler temperatures and more rainfall through spring. However, the state's snowpack is critically low at 30% of normal. This imbalance raises concerns about potential drought conditions worsening if El Nio's wetter effects don't materialize. The season's outlook calls for vigilant monitoring and preparedness, as these varied weather patterns may lead to differing fire risks across regions.
The 2024 WaterFire season currently includes six (6) full lightings and two (2) partial lightings. The 2024 WaterFire Season will kick off with a wall lighting in Memorial Park in coordination with the scheduled release with the first full lighting to follow on Saturday, June 1st. Community favorite events including, honoring Rhode Island Educators, Breast Cancer Survivors, and Rhode Island Veterans will return in 2024 and bring our friends and neighbors together to learn from and celebrate with each other. Additional lightings may be added to the schedule as funding becomes available.
Full WaterFire Lightings light up over eighty braziers from Waterplace Park to Memorial/South Main Street Park on scheduled evenings throughout the season. Lighting occurs shortly after sunset and the fires will remain lit until midnight (unless otherwise noted). Full lightings include onshore programming such as performance stages, art and food vendors, and the Starry, Starry Night installation in Memorial Park.
Partial Lightings can include braziers in any section of the river. Examples include a Memorial Park Lighting which would include the 12 wall-mounted braziers in Memorial Park or a Basin to Steeple Street Lighting which would include all the braziers in Waterplace Park as well as the braziers in the two downstream sections of the installations ending at the Steeple Street Bridge. Typically Partial Lightings of WaterFire do not include onshore programming or food vendors unless otherwise noted.
Each year WaterFire attracts nearly 1 million visitors to downtown Providence to experience art in the city. Annually, WaterFire activity creates $149 million in economic output for local businesses, generates over $9 million of tax revenue for the State of Rhode Island, and supports 1,294 jobs for community residents.
Fire marshal regulations do not permit folding chairs to be set up on any of the riverwalks to ensure safe passage for all of our visitors. WaterFire is an event to be explored and savored on foot as you wander around to discover its many surprises, leave your chairs in the car, and start exploring all that our event has to offer.
Partial lightings are smaller, typically only one section of the river is lit, and do not include any or include only a small portion of our onshore programming. There is more info about the different types of lightings on our schedule page.
Now in its fifth year, the 2024 ESO Fire Service Index continues to examine aggregated industry data to promote strategic growth, looking at insights from over 6.5 million incidents nationwide from January 1-December 31, 2023. With the insights gleaned from the latest Index, the ESO research team hopes to give departments benchmarks for refining their strategies towards improving outcomes within their communities. The ESO 2024 Fire Service Index helps answer questions such as:
At the current time the four apartments located in Building A at the Homestead Apartments have been repaired and the four families that were displaced have been authorized to return to their residences.
The fire has been extinguished and suppressed thanks to Central Arizona Fire and Medical Authority personnel and other fire personnel from around the State of Arizona but is still being monitored as of today, Tuesday, April 2, 2024, at 6:30 AM.
At the current time a portion of Building A at the Homestead Apartments at Talking Glass is off limits and management has been notified. The ingress and egress into the Homestead Apartments is the east entrance off Lake Valley Rd.
For the fourth year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit organization committed to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, and College Pulse surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.
Our gratitude goes to Sean Stevens for questionnaire design, developing the scoring methodology, data analysis, and authoring this report; and to Komi Frey and Nathan Honeycutt for support with questionnaire design, developing the scoring methodology, data analysis, data validation, and editing. We would additionally like to thank Sam Abrams for help with questionnaire design and developing the scoring methodology; and Logan Dougherty, Angela C. Erickson, and Sigrid Fry-Revere, for support with data validation.
In 2020, FIRE, in collaboration with College Pulse and RealClearEducation, launched a first-of-its-kind tool to help high school students and their parents identify which colleges promote and protect the free exchange of ideas: the College Free Speech Rankings. The response to the rankings report and corresponding online tool was overwhelmingly positive.
We heard from prospective students how helpful it is to see what a large number of current students reported about the campus climate for open discussion and inquiry, allowing for comparisons between colleges. We also heard from colleges and universities that the rankings helped them better understand their campus climate in order to improve it. Similarly, professors and staff became better able to understand which topics students on their campus find difficult to discuss.
It contains three sections. First, it presents the core findings of the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. Next, it compares the top five and bottom five schools in the rankings in detail. Finally, it presents analyses of the free speech attitudes and experiences of the college students surveyed at the national level.
In its first year of inclusion in the College Free Speech Rankings, Michigan Technological University obtained the top spot with an overall score of 78.01. The full list of the top five schools and their scores is as follows:
At the other end of the rankings, Harvard University came in dead last with the lowest score possible, 0.00, more than four standard deviations below the mean. The full list of the bottom five schools and their scores is as follows:
The full rankings for all 248 schools and the methodology are available in the Appendix as well as on the College Free Speech Rankings dashboard on the College Pulse website and on the FIRE website.[2]
Over the past four years, a handful of schools have consistently performed well in the College Free Speech Rankings. For instance, the University of Chicago claimed the top spot in the rankings twice (2020 and 2023) and earned a ranking of 2 in 2021 and a ranking of 13 this year. Kansas State University twice earned a ranking of 2 (2020 and 2023), earned a ranking of 14 in 2021, and earned a ranking of 18 this year. Indeed, with a few exceptions (this year, Purdue; last year, Texas A&M and the University of Colorado, Boulder) every school listed in the table below finished in the top 25 of the College Free Speech Rankings every year that it was included, and those that did not did not finish in the top 25 did not land far outside of it.
Identifying schools that consistently perform poorly is trickier because the number of schools surveyed has increased each year. Thus, a school dropping in the rankings could result from the first-time inclusion in the rankings of schools with better speech climates and does not necessarily indicate that the speech climate at a previously surveyed school has gotten worse.
The average overall score of the top five schools is 72.78. The average overall score of the bottom five schools, in contrast, is 12.51. Both of these averages are lower than those of last year, when the average for the top five was 75.80 and the average for the bottom five was 16.96.
A majority of students at the top five schools supported allowing four of the six controversial speakers on campus, including all three controversial liberal speakers. Students at the bottom five schools supported allowing all three controversial liberal speakers on campus but opposed allowing all three controversial conservative speakers. On this component, the top five schools and the bottom five schools, again, received similar average rankings (98 and 95, respectively).[6]
The percentage of students at schools ranked in the top five who said it is never acceptable for students to shout down speakers, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech is at least eight percentage points greater than that of students at schools ranked in the bottom five.
Nevertheless, a bias toward allowing controversial liberal speakers on campus and not allowing conservative ones is evident at the bottom five schools. Schools ranked in the bottom five have a significantly higher tolerance difference than schools ranked in the top five (2.41 and 1.32, respectively). Furthermore, this favoritism toward allowing controversial liberal speakers on campus among students at schools in the bottom five is not due to their counterparts at schools in the top five being significantly more tolerant of controversial conservative speakers. Students at the top five schools and students at the bottom five schools also have similar levels of tolerance toward controversial liberal speakers (6.80 and 6.30, respectively).[7]
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