On Saturday the U.S. Forest Service finally certified the 7,200-gallon Martin Mars air tanker to work on fires for the agency. After a seven-hour flight from Canada on July 12, it flew several check rides on Friday and Saturday. It will be based at Lake Elsinore in southern California.
Here is an excerpt from an article at Fire Department Network News:
A Canadian-registered Martin Mars water bomber and its sophisticated spotter helicopter were officially certified Saturday as “Mission Ready” by the U.S. Forest Service for battling potential wildland fires in the Angeles, Cleveland and San Bernardino National Forests.
Owner Wayne Coulson, of Coulson Flying Tankers, told FDNNTV his crew flew several “check rides,” or test missions, late Friday and then again Saturday morning with USFS observers on board.
The vintage aircraft made practice, thirty-second long, water scoops on nearby Diamond Valley Lake then, as Coulson described the maneuvers, “roared around” a mountainous section of the San Bernardino National Forest for monitored 7,200 gallon target drops.
At the same time Coulson’s new Sikorsky S-76 electronics-filled chopper successfully demonstrated its ability to lead the Martin Mars into fire zone target areas while video taping and relaying aerial observations of water drops back to Forest Service incident commanders on the ground.
Coulson said, “It was a 100-percent successful familiarity performance for Forest Service personnel who now know how best to deploy the two aerial firefighting aircraft when needed.”
Debate continues in Australia following the tragic Black Saturday fires of February 7. Some want to scrap the “prepare, stay and defend, or leave early” policy, but the program still has its defenders as evidenced inan excellent article by John Schauble, a fire researcher, Country Fire Authority captain, and author of The Australian Bushfire Safety Guide.
A Sikorsky S-61 Type 1 helicopter crashed on the Backbone fire on the Klamath National Forest on Friday July 17. Thankfully there were no serious injuries to the only people on board, the two pilots.
From the Mail Tribune:
A pilot was injured when a helicopter owned by Croman Corporation, of White City, crashed Friday afternoon while fighting the Backbone Fire on the Klamath National Forest in Northern California. A U.S. Forest Service spokesman said both the pilots on the aircraft walked away from the crash, and one was flown to Mercy Hospital in Redding, Calif., where he was treated and released. The pilots’ names were not available.
The aircraft was an S-61 military-style helicopter, the same kind that went down Aug. 5, 2008, near Junction City in California’s Trinity County, killing nine firefighters, six of whom were from Jackson and Josephine counties, from Merlin-based Grayback Forestry.
“They’re calling it a hard landing,” Forest Service spokesman Jim Mackensen said. “I’m calling it a crash.”
Mackensen said the aircraft came down hard and flipped on its side at 3:16 p.m. Friday while working at a heliwell, a plastic container that holds thousands of gallons of water for use in fighting forest fires far from good dipping sites in streams or lakes. Water had been hauled to the heliwell by trucks for the aircraft to pick up to attack the fire.
“He had just finished loading up,” Mackensen said. “It did roll over and beat itself up pretty bad. It’s not going to fly off the mountain.”
The site of the crash was a wooded part of Siskiyou County about six miles north of the community of Forks of the Salmon and about 12 miles northeast of Willow Creek. The fire had spread over about 6,300 acres as of Saturday morning. Mackensen it was 50 percent controlled.
Mackensen said an investigation team was on its way to the accident and would begin at once trying to determine what went wrong. He said he believed the pilots were Croman employees. Phone calls to Croman’s White City headquarters Saturday were not answered.
The Sikorsky helicopter in last year’s tragedy was owned by Carson Helicopters of Grants Pass. That 30-year-old aircraft was made in Connecticut and upgraded in 2003 and had been used in firefighting for 10 years. A Carson spokesman said it was the first fatal crash for his company in 50 years.
The 747 air tanker operated by Evergreen has signed a Call When Needed (CWN) contract with CalFire, confirming what one of our readers said in a comment on Wildfire Today on June 10.
According to a story in the Press-Enterprise:
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.
The 747 carries about 20,000 gallons of retardant which is six to seven times more than a conventional large air tanker.
The U. S. Forest Service issued a solicitation for “Very Large Airtankers (VLAT)” on June 25, specifying that the minimum acceptable payload would be 11,000 gallons of mixed retardant. The solicitation is scheduled to be archived on July 10 and may not be available after that date. FBODaily may have some information available after July 10.
It is our understanding that CalFire has an exclusive use contract with one of the 12,000 gallon DC-10 air tankers operated by 10 Tanker Air Carrier, Tanker 910, and has a CWN contract with their second DC-10, Tanker 911.
For a lot of reasons, this fire is going to be a part of the heritage of wildland firefighters for a long time.
The Thirty Mile Fire was first discovered during the evening of July 9, 2001. During the afternoon of July 10 high winds developed causing the Thirty Mile Fire in the Chewuch River Valley, north of Winthrop, WA to blow up and grow from approximately 5 acres to over 2500 acres within 2 ½ hours.
21 firefighters and 2 civilians were entrapped in a narrow canyon of the Chewuch River Valley. Fires shelters were deployed in an area surrounded by fire on all sides. Four firefighters were killed and another four firefighters and 2 civilians were injured.
Those killed were:
Tom L. Craven, 30, Ellensburg, WA; Karen L. Fitzpatrick, 18, Yakima, WA; Devin A. Weaver, 21, Yakima, WA; Jessica L. Johnson, 19, Yakima, WA.
Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist, recently traveled to Australia where she learned a little about fires in eucalyptus forests. In an article she wrote for the New York Times, she wonders if some plants have specific characteristics that make it more likely that fires will burn intensely. Here is an excerpt from her article.
….It’s common knowledge that plants regularly exposed to fire tend to have features that help them cope with it — such as thick bark, or seeds that only grow after being exposed to intense heat or smoke. But what is less often remarked on is that the plants themselves affect the nature and severity of fire.
For example, dead branches burn more readily than living branches, so a tree that keeps dead branches (rather than letting them fall) makes it easier for a fire to climb into a forest canopy: the dead branches provide a ladder for the fire. Deadwood also allows fires to get hotter. Leaves that are high in cellulose, or that contain oils, also stoke the flames. Resins and gums are highly flammable. And as any girl scout knows, twigs catch light more readily than branches, so a twiggy sort of plant can catch fire more readily than its non-twiggy sister.
But here’s the odd thing. Many plants that live in places prone to fire are highly flammable — more flammable than plants that live elsewhere. This has led some to speculate that these plants have actually evolved to cause fires: that they “want” fire, and have evolved features that make it more likely that a spark will become a flame, and a flame will become a fire. I call this the torch-me hypothesis.
The argument goes like this. Many plants depend on fire for their propagation. Indeed, without fire, these plants disappear. If, for example, longleaf pine forests do not burn regularly, the pines will be replaced by water oaks and other species. So — runs the argument — fires are desirable because they kill the competition. Plants that enhance fires may thus have an evolutionary advantage: they murder the competition while creating the right circumstances for their own seeds to sprout.
This idea has sparked a heated debate. The problem is, showing that a trait has evolved because it enhances fire is difficult. Yes, oily leaves are more flammable; but perhaps the real advantage of oily leaves is that insects don’t enjoy eating them. Then, their flammability may be a by-product of tasting terrible.
The best evidence that some plants may have evolved to promote fire comes from pines. Some species of pine keep their dead branches; others tend to self-prune. As you would expect under the torch-me hypothesis, the more flammable species — the ones with the dead wood — also tend to have seeds that are released by fire. In short, the two traits go together….
The author seems to think she is the first person to consider this concept.
Lodgepole pine, photo: N. C. Heywood
One example of this is the lodgepole pine. It has shaggy bark and does not self-prune its limbs readily, so a fire at the base of the tree can, under dry conditions, run up the trunk of the tree and become a crown fire. It has a fire return interval of about 300 years, and fires tend to be of the stand replacement type, leaving nothing but snags. The serotinous cones open and disperse the seeds after the fire, promoting the resurgence of another lodgepole forest.
Lodgepole pine infested with dwarf mistletoe. Photo: D. Johnson
UPDATE: Chuck Bushey wrote to us about this.
Bob Mutch actually wrote his MS thesis on this topic at the University of Montana in the late 70’s. It was later published in the Journal of Ecology and I think he was the first to formally express the concept in the scientific literature.
Chuck later said the actual citation is:
Mutch, Robert W., 1970. Wildland Fires and Ecosystems – A Hypothesis.
