Evergreen’s 747 “Supertanker” made its first drop on a live fire in the lower 48 states today. Flying out of McClellan near Sacramento it made at least two drops on the Station fire. It split its 20,000 gallon capacity into two separate drops of about 10,000 gallons each, without having to make the 55-minute one-way return trip to McClellan to reload.
The Fox TV station out of Los Angeles got two of the drops on tape. Click on the image below to play the video.
The plane may also have dropped earlier in the day on a fire near Yucaipa, southeast of Los Angeles.
As Wildfire Today reported on July 30, the 747 made its first drop on a live fire in Spain in mid-July. The second fire it dropped on was the Railbelt Complex in Alaska on July 31. If it also dropped on the Yucaipa fire earlier today, then the Station fire was the fourth fire it has dropped on.
Here are a couple of screen grabs from today’s video.
Here is the photo of it on the Railbelt Complex in Alaska on July 31 that we published on August 1.
Did they say a million dollars per drop? Is that right?
No. That is not right. Here’s what we had in a post on July 10 about the Call When Needed contract CalFire has with Evergreen, who operates the 747:"Cal Fire will pay Evergreen International Aviation Inc. of McMinnville, Ore., $29,500 an hour, plus the cost of fuel, with a minimum of four hours per day guaranteed any day the plane is used. The contract calls for paying for a minimum of 10 days at a cost of $1.183 million, regardless of whether the plane is used."
Do i want one A/C with 20K tanks or 20 TBMs with 1K tanks that refill localy if I was the fire bossThank You but ill take the Turkies ( that get down and dirty )
R. A. Dentice: I’m not familiar with "Turkies", but good luck with that TBM. I don’t think one of them has been seen over a fire in 35+ years, and I think they only held 300 gallons.
I’d love a few squadrons of these planes so that you can have wave after wave dropping the wet stuff on the red stuff. That’s how fires go out. Smaller airplanes might be better in certain situations, but when the fire is that big, size matters.