The U. S. Forest Service announced on August 15 that they intended to award a non-competitive multi-million dollar contract to the Rand Corporation to continue studying the air tanker issue. Rand had a previous contract with the USFS to provide advice about the long term management of the air tanker and helicopter fleet. The report from that study was due in January, 2011, but rumor has it that their product was virtually worthless and they were sent back to the drawing board. Now the USFS wants to throw good money after bad, giving Rand what appears to be an additional $7 million to milk the public coffers even more. This issue has been studied to death already. The USFS staff in Washington simply needs to review the previous four studies and make a damn decision about how to reconstitute the large air tanker fleet which has declined through mismanagement from 44 to 11. This is turning into a very bad joke on the American taxpayers. Someone needs to put some firefighters in charge a making the decision, like in this classic video.
UPDATE at 4:14 p.m. Sept. 26, 2011; we just found at another web page a “modification/amendment” to the above announcement:
Added: Sep 01, 2011 5:01 pm. Due to the responses received expressing interest in this procurement, the program has decided to withdraw its sole source determination. A competitive acquisition will be conducted after the end of the fiscal year.
This is a good news/bad news announcement. Good, in that there is a chance that someone who actually has knowledge about aerial firefighting might do the study. Bad, in that… ARE YOU KIDDING ME? STILL ANOTHER STUDY! The previous five are not enough? How many do we need? 10? 15?
******
The Dollar Lake fire burning on the slopes of Mt. Hood in Oregon received some rain and is being turned over to a Type 3 incident management team. They are calling it 90% contained after burning 6,304 acres.
*****
Texas wildfires became political fodder on Sunday when President Obama, speaking at a fund-raiser in Woodside, California, said:
I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change.
Mark Miner, a spokesperson for Governor Rick Perry of Texas, shot back saying it was “outrageous” that the president…
…would use the burning of 1,500 homes, the worst fires in state history as a political attack.
*****
And in more wildfire-related political news, if Congress can’t get their s**t together and pass a bill funding disaster relief, thousands of victims of the Texas fires may not get the help they need to rebuild home and businesses. Meanwhile, more than 3,000 Texans have registered for about $5.8 million in federal government wildfire-related aid from FEMA, including Housing Assistance, Other Needs Assistance, and Disaster Unemployment Assistance.
*****
Some firefighting resources are being released from the Pagami Creek fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota. The fire has not increased in size in a week or so and the incident management team is calling it 93,459 acres and 53% contained. (Definitions of “contain” and “control”). Yesterday, air resources dropped 267,000 gallons of water and delivered 11,000 pounds of cargo.
*****
On Sunday the Norton Point fire southeast of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming grew by 3,000 to 3,500 acres and has burned a total of 20,500 acres. It is staffed with two people.
If an IC on a fire needs an airtanker but he knows there are none available, does he order one anyway and thus add another UTF to the stats? Or does he order other resources because he knows all the current airtankers are unavailable?
Very good question. Bueller, Bueller, Bueller? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zyjLyBp64
Best used, fixed wing air tankers during the first few minutes of an evolving fire that is or could threaten wildlands. Cal Fire has proven this tactic works saving the taxpayer ten of millions of dollars annually. UTF, in what time frame? I.A, extended or eventually in days. An “order” may be filled but the tanker is coming from who-knows-where, with a ETA of who-knows-what? I.A. value LOST.
http://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelligence/2010_statssumm/charts_tables.pdf
page47. “Air Tanker Mobilization”
UTF (“unable to fill”) for 2010 was only 15%. Even with a smaller fleet size (19 large airtankers) than in 2002, (~44 LATs), we are still meeting 85% of the demand. Increasing this percentage toward 100% starts to frame the debate. Can we add planes to the fleet and will the UTF value decrease? How many planes are needed to meet 100% demand? Are all large airtanker resource demands justified, or are they meeting political pressure? At what expense are we willing to incur to meet demand? What’s the breakdown between meeting initial attack vs extended attack demand? Should the fleet size design accommodate primarily initial attack, extended or both? I’d like to see a chart of UTF values from 2002-present, but I doubt these data exist. I think we would see that UTF values have increased as the fleet size has decreased.
Best I can tell, all tankers to date tanker studieshave suggested that VLATS could be viable platform but there was no data at the time of the study. I just wonder if the RAND folks will be guided to 6 years of data from Cal Fire and now fires in Tx,NM,AZ. I wonder if they will seek out vendor data for other platforms that have not been used? You can bet RAND is just using data the USFS wants them to see to steer it the way they want. That is how all agencies use RAND. Dirty little secret..Do not expect any conclusion other than new C 130s and maybe a few 146’s , 4 scoopers and seats(shift the cost to BLM) till the new birds come online.
I think the figure on page 47 from the nifc.gov website is interesting. It shows that even as the fleet size has decreased, that we can still meet demand reasonably well with a small number of large airtankers. “Of 246 heavy airtanker requests, only 37 were UTF (unable to fill).” That’s only 15% of the time an order wasn’t filled when the fleet size was 19 planes in fy 2010. So the question becomes if you want to meet 95%-100% of the demand, than how many more planes do you need?
I think one quick and dirty easy logical answer would be to add planes to the fleet each season until you reach an acceptable UTF %. Maybe meeting 85 % of the demand is acceptable, I don’t know. The UTF value fluctuates year to year and I would like to see a trend on how this has changed since 2002. I suspect the UTF values have gone up since then because the fleet size has decreased, but I’d be surprised if these data exist prior to 2007. This quick and dirty method makes big assumptions; 1. all orders are reasonably justified, 2. cost isn’t an issue, and 3. UTF will decrease as the fleet size increases.
Let me get this straight. I am suppose to have knowledge of my needs based on sixty years of experience, i.e. fire aviation. How best can I waste a ton of money and have someone tell me about something they have no knowledge of, perfect, a study! However I need to tell them my answer (study) that I want them to come up with.
Boondoggel….looks like fun. “Canoe training for firefighters on the Pagami Creek fire”
I remember the when we (The Black Hills FUM) went to the boundary waters in 1999 to assist after the blowdown event. That was one of the best assignments ever, paddling in the wilderness of the Boundary Waters. I went back there on vacation several times!
Out of work tanker pilots and/or retired agency aviation people can establish a company, get the job done for a fraction of the price, on or ahead of time with expert knowlege.
If I see a solicitation my company could bid on it and sub contract some of the work out to ex-pilots. These studies really need to mesh together objective empirical data with subjective expert opinion.
And yet the other VLAT, the DC10 – tanker 911 is sitting on the ground in California
“okay everybody- paddle up for morning briefing”