The amount of retardant pumped at the Medford Air Tanker Bases this year was more than four times the 10-year average for the airport.
Below is a report provided by the Jackson County Airport Authority:
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“Here is an update with some interesting statistics from the Medford Air Tanker Base for our recently-ended (and VERY busy) fire season:
The Medford Air Tanker Base mission is to support wildland fire suppression in the Pacific Northwest. We provide support mainly to Southern Oregon and Northern California.
Season Activity
2014 was very big fire season for our suppression area. The Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport was fortunate to have two Airtanker Bases. We managed both the Medford Air Tanker Base (MATB) and the portable Medford Very Large Airtanker Base (VLAT). Medford ATB pumped out 1,068,226 gallons of retardant on 440 Air Tanker loads this season. This is more than 4 times our ten year average. At the Medford VLAT we pumped 506,893 gallons with 104 Air Tanker loads. Together the two Air Tanker Bases pumped 1,575,119 gallons of retardant.
Our highest one day total for the MATB was on 8/29. We loaded 6 Large Air Tankers 28 times with 79,422 gallons of retardant. The highest one day total for the VLAT base was 84,894 gallons on 9/7/14. We loaded two VLAT’s 8 times.
Together the two Air tanker Bases had 5 days over 90,000 gallons and 2 days over 100,000 gallons and a one day total of 143,000 gallons. On 9/6 and 9/7 the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport had its busiest two days ever with the regular commercial operations, 3 Scoopers, 5 Air Attack Planes, 2 Lead Planes and with us pumping 209,000 gals of retardant on 7 SEATs, 7 LAT’s, and 2 VLAT’s.
Medford ATB hosted a total of 31 different Air Tankers. These air tankers made 562 landings at the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport.”
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4 Comments
It came within a hair width of being closed too ..
good for them…
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that the USFS was unable to open the Siskiyou Reload Base due to a wide range of reasons. This failure to utilize the base placed additional pressure on Medford to handle as well as lengthen reload times for the fires in Siskiyou County, California, thus diminishing the effectiveness of aircraft operations.
With that many gallons pumped Medford would be a prime candidate for closure. Sound ridiculous doesn’t it. Exactly what happened to the Lake Tahoe area base at Minden, closed!
If the USFS is ” not using reload bases due to one reason or another.”
Then any future requests for infrastructure at airports, whether owned by Guv or LMA requests for use on capable airports ought to be carefully vetted by airport operations personnel as when these facilities go into lack of use ” due to one reason or another” that mandatory preservation practices take place or the possibility of shutdown take place or hand off to more operators that can properly take care of the infrastructure.
I would imagine wide range of reasons in USFS talk…….would be……wait for it……
Budgetary and politics
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