Politicians get involved in air tanker debate

DC-10 air tanker, 6-11-2011
Air Tanker 911, a DC-10, drops retardant on the Wallow fire to reinforce the fireline above Greer, AZ, 6-11-2011. Photo by Jyson Coil. Credit: US Forest Service, Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.

It is rarely a good thing when politicians start providing advice about firefighting tactics and strategy. Too often they think air tankers and helicopters put out fires, as you can see in the excerpt below from an article at KXAN.com about the fires in Texas. Aircraft don’t put out fires, but in some cases they can slow them down enough to allow firefighters on the ground be more effective. They are simply one tool in the proverbial tool box.

…”The DC-10 got here in time to put out the fire just west of Houston but unfortunately not for Bastrop, and that’s something I’m going to chair oversight hearings on Homeland Security to get to the bottom of why can’t we more rapidly deploy?” Congressman Michael McCaul, R-Austin, said Monday at ABIA .

The DC-10 is used to drop retardant around the fire area to prevent it from spreading more. The aircraft arrived last week but sat at the airport because the pilots needed the FAA-mandated two-day downtime after a full two weeks of flying, fighting fires in California.

McCaul chairs the Congressional subcommittee that oversees all Department of Homeland Security operations. One of his main concerns is with the National Forest Service not having an exclusive contract with 10 Tanker, which owns the DC-10, or other private firefighting services.

The congressman said exclusive use agreements would ensure long-term use of such aircraft to fight fires, meaning the company would have money to hire extra crews to be on standby, not to mention having fire retardant systems ready to go near fire-prone areas.

From an article at brenhambanner.com:

One of two DC-10s and half of the military’s fleet of eight C-130s are now indefinitely stationed in Texas to fight wildfires, National Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell assured U.S. Michael McCaul after McCaul expressed deep concerns about delayed response to wildfires that burned more than 34,000 acres in Bastrop County.

The Forest Service committed to keep the DC-10 and C-130s stationed at Austin Bergstrom International Airport for the foreseeable future while fire danger remains high, according to McCaul’s office.

“We’ve known and Washington has known that Texas has been a tinderbox for months,” said McCaul (R-Texas). “The right approach is to have federal aviation assets strategically prepositioned to deploy within hours instead of days.

“This has to be a priority moving forward and I plan to explore this in an oversight hearing.”

Exclusive use agreements would contractually obligate tanker planes such as 10 Tanker’s DC-10s long-term. In turn, the agreement would ensure a revenue stream, allowing the company to hire extra crews who are on standby and to build multiple fire retardant loading systems within striking distance of the most fire-prone areas.

“When I toured Waller County they said the DC-10 was like ‘the cavalry coming in’ and it made a difference in Bastrop in the run it made before it was diverted,” McCaul said. “Had it been on the ground here a week ago it would have made a huge difference.”

Taking firefighting advice from a politician is a scary proposition, but maybe some good can come out of this if the mismanagement of the federal air tanker fleet gets more attention in Washington.

Check out the video below of the DC-10 dropping on the Riley Road fire in Texas. Everything gets very red. It was uploaded September 12, 2011.

The video below shows the DC-10 dropping near Panorama Village north of Houston, Texas. It was uploaded to YouTube September 10, 2011.

Here is a link to another video showing the DC-10 in action recently in Texas:

Fire engine burns in Texas, firefighter sent to hospital

Posted on Categories Uncategorized

A Rio Hondo Fire Department engine burned in a fire on Saturday, and one of their firefighters was transported to a hospital and treated for smoke inhalation. According to the Rio Hondo Fire Department, the truck got stuck and the fire overran its position. Firefighters contained the fire after it burned 15 acres of brush in Cameron County, Texas.

Air tanker studies

CL-415_LA_County
CL-415. Photo: LA County FD

(Note: we edited this on 9-10-2011 to add two additional air tanker studies that we became aware of today.) 

As we wait for another air tanker study to be completed, someone reminded me of one that was completed in the mid 1990s. Luckily, a summary of the study was published in the US Forest Service’s Fire Management Notes. We found out today that two of the reports about the 2009 fatal helibase rappel accident that we had linked to have been removed from the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center site, so we put a copy of this edition of FMN on our Wildfire Documents page, along with the Blue Ribbon Panel report we refer to below.

Called the National Air Tanker Study (NATS), it had two phases. The first was released in 1995 and had this recommendation:

Phase 1 used initial-attack efficiency analysis to recommend staffing for 38 large airtankers nationally. These 38 airtankers, as staffed in the 1996–98 National Airtanker Contract, came from the existing fleet, which had retardant tanks that range in capacity from 2,000 to 3,000 gallons (7,570 to11,360 L). Goals for phase 1 were to optimize the existing available large airtanker fleet and to find the best airtanker base locations. Accordingly, the optimum number of 38 airtankers was determined based on an aggregate of geographic-area analyses called “scenarios.” In each scenario, the number of large airtankers was increased and decreased from existing levels to determine the number within the geographic area that minimized total airtanker program costs (fire suppression costs plus net value change costs).

Phase 2 had eight recommendations. Here is one of them:

Establish a future fleet of 20 P3–A aircraft, 10 C–130B aircraft, and 11 C–130E aircraft.

So the study recommended 38 to 41 large air tankers. It seems odd, then, that there are now 11 large air tankers under exclusive use contracts and the USFS keeps saying we have plenty. Tom Harbour, the Forest Service’s director of fire and aviation, referring to the cancelled contract for the six P3 air tankers operated by Aero Union in July, was quoted by aNewsCafe.com on July 31, 2011:

This contract termination notwithstanding, we possess the aircraft support needed for this year’s fire season.

And an article from the Riverside Press-Enterprise published on September 3, 2011, happens to be on Senator Dianne Feinstein’s web site. In this article, Mr. Harbour is referring to the air tanker situation:

This fall in SoCal, we’ve got more than enough stuff to cover the fire needs.

While it may have been a reasonable decision for the USFS to cancel the Aero Union contract for the six P3 air tankers based on safety, this just further exposes the fact that we we keep losing air tankers in chunks, in addition to an average of one a year being lost in a crash. In 2002 we had 44 large air tankers. Now we have 11. As we have said many times before, a long-term large air tanker strategy should have been developed and implemented shortly after the two mid-air wing failures in 2002. It’s been nine years and nothing significant has been done. And nobody has been fired.

To summarize, there have been at least three five air tanker studies either completed or overdue for completion in the last 16 years:

  1. 1995-1996, National Air Tanker Study (NATS) was summarized in Fire Management Notes. The study recommended 41 large air tankers be staffed nationally. While there should be debate about the models of aircraft they suggested, the sheer numbers of air tankers may still be valid, since recent recommendations for future air tankers (3,000-5,000 gallons and speed of 300 knots) have similar performance capabilities as those that were recommended in this 1996 report, which was a capacity of 3,300 gallons and a speed of 260 knots.
  2. Blue Ribbon Panel report. (1.1Mb) Federal Aerial Firefighting: Assessing Safety and Effectiveness; Blue Ribbon Panel Report to the Chief, USDA Forest Service and Director, USDI Bureau of Land Management; December 2002. This five-person panel was co-chaired by Jim Hall, former Chairman of the National Transportation Safety board. They were tasked with identifying weaknesses and fail points in the aviation program, focusing on safety, operational effectiveness, costs, sustainability, and strategic guidance. The panel (on page 17) seemed to shy away from recommending that we acquire additional ex-military aircraft and leaned toward development of “a fleet of purpose-built, turbine-engine, fixed-wing air tankers based on well-defined requirements”. Their report said: “The panel believes obtaining and outfitting newer military aircraft, such as C-130s and P-3s, would only perpetuate a cycle that has proven to be unsustainable and dangerous. Unless the FAA and operator community change its methods, one could expect to see another cycle of structural failures and pilot fatalities within a decade or two.”
  3. 2005 Wildland Fire Management Aerial Application Study. This study recommended 34 to 41 air tankers.
  4. 2009, National Interagency Aviation Council. This study endorses the acquisition of 25 new large air tankers which was recommended in the 2005 study. It projects on page 21 the number of large air tankers increasing from 19 in 2008 to 32 in 2018, and 3 scoopers. This takes into account the air tankers on hand when the report was written plus additional acquisitions. It also considers attrition through age of retiring P-3s and P-2Vs. The table with the numbers is below. The report recommends on page 73 that the new air tankers be C-130Js.
  5. The study by the RAND Corporation that was due in January of 2011. This study is supposed to craft still another large air tanker strategy, meant to guide the Forest Service’s acquisition of air tankers in the years to come. The U.S. Forest Service intends for the report to remain secret and has refused a Freedom of Information Act request. Copies of the report have been leaked.
  6. UPDATE September 26, 2011. The USFS announced they intend to give the Rand Corporation still another contract for still another study. This, apparently, is not a joke. UPDATE October 12, 2011. After the USFS announced that they would give a non-competitive contract to Rand, they changed their mind and are opening it up to competition. UPDATE June 12, 2012; the contract for this study was awarded to AVID. It is required to be completed by the end of 2012.
Air tanker numbers, projected through 2018
The number of firefighting aircraft on exclusive use contracts, not CWN, projected through 2018. Source: page 21 of the 2007-2009 report referenced above.

Here is an interesting excerpt from a letter from the USDA Office of Inspector General, written in 2009 to the Chief of the Forest Service, Tom Tidwell, responding to the US Forest Service’s “replacement plan for firefighting aerial resources”:

…For example, FS’ initial attack success rate has dropped since it began losing air tankers in 2004 due to safety concerns. By 2007, FS’ success rate had dropped from 98.8 percent to 97.3 percent. FS estimates that this 1.5 percent decrease represents approximately 150 more fires that escaped initial attack and cost FS an additional $300 million to $450 million to suppress. In comparison, new airtankers cost up to $75 million each. So, if FS can demonstrate that new, faster, more reliable, higher-capacity airtankers increase the agency’s initial success rate, then it can show that acquiring them is cost effective.

If we have learned anything from history, around 2017 to 2022 we will be left with three to five large air tankers on exclusive use contracts and we should be expecting a new air tanker study. And nobody will have been fired.

Helicopter makes hard landing on the Blackburn Canyon fire

Helicopter's hard landing on Blackburn Canyon fire
Helicopter's hard landing on Blackburn Canyon fire. Photo credit Jeff Zimmerman, Zimmerman Media LLC

Jeff Zimmernan took this amazing photo of helicopter 205ww after it make a hard landing on the Blackburn Canyon fire near Tehachapi, California September 4, 2011. Jeff said the pilot was making water drops and had to release the bucket, then auto rotated to a hard landing. You can see that the skids flattened out as designed. Paramedics took the pilot to a hospital.

We wish the best for the pilot. And thanks, Jeff, for the photo.

Fuels and fire behavior advisory for central Idaho

Idaho fuels and fire behavior advisory

The video the document refers to is below:

Here is the description of the video:

Footage taken on the Salt Fire August 29, 2011, on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho. The fire made a 1-1.5 mile run in about 1 hour and 15 minutes starting in the bottom of Goodluck Creek drainage burning towards the south. The fire burned in a mountain pine beetle bug killed lodgepole pine stand. The area had previously been mapped as an area with “Extreme Crown Fire Risk” by the Salmon-Challis N. F. The fire size at the time of the footage was about 2,600 acres. Footage taken from above Woodtick Creek drainage.

In case you’re curious about the Salt fire shown in the video southwest of Salmon, Idaho, it is currently mapped at 17,567 acres. Here is an overview from InciWeb:

Lightning started the Salt Fire on Thursday, August 25, 2011. The fire is 16 miles southwest of Salmon, Idaho, burning in a rugged area of the Salmon-Challis National Forest with large areas of beetle-killed trees. Firefighters are using a variety of strategies to manage the fire, including direct attack, indirect attack and point protection. A mix of these strategies will be used to protect values in the fire’s path in a combination that provides the highest probability of success while minimizing responder exposure to risk. The goal of the incident management team is to manage the Salt Fire in such a way that there are no serious injuries or fatalities, no critical values have been adversely impacted and the public is supportive of fire management operations.

We believe the advisory was written on September 6, 2011. A suggestion for future advisories: adding the date and the author would be helpful.