News and opinion about wildland fire
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized7 Comments on MAFFS air tankers assist crew in trouble A TV station in Sacramento, California has a story about Military MAFFS C-130 air tankers making some retardant drops to assist a hand crew that was in a difficult situation on the RIM fire recently.
I am intrigued by the “common operating picture” that was mentioned by the national guard gentleman.
Our main article about the Rim Fire at Yosemite National Park is updated daily with maps and current information.
Two reports released about air tankers
The U.S. Forest Service recently released two reports about firefighting aircraft, the products of contracts issued by the agency. The details are over at Fire Aviation, but here is a summary:
Summary of fire stats
The National Park Service’s Morning Report written by Bill Halainen has a table that tracks some of the statistics about fires over the last five days. Here is an example from today’s report:
Judge rejects California’s lawsuit over 2007 fire
A judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the state of California against the state’s largest timber company over liability for the 2007 Moonlight Fire which burned more than 65,000 acres in Northern California. The state was hoping to recoup some of the $22.5 million spent fighting the fire.
Last year the company, Sierra Pacific, agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to settle a federal government lawsuit over the Moonlight fire.
Congressional Task Force Links Worsening Wildfires to Climate Change
On Tuesday the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change convened a panel of experts on climate and wildland fire to discuss the impacts of climate change on wildfires. Below is an excerpt from an article at the National Journal:
…Panelists cited a number of reasons for wildfire flare-ups, including land-use patterns and insect activity. But the discussion kept circling back to climate change.
“Scientists tell us these changes are not just random variability,” Waxman said. “Bigger and more-intense fires are one of the red flags of climate change.”
Climate-change expert William Sommers, a researcher at George Mason University’s EastFIRE Laboratory, agreed. Sommers cautioned that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will only worsen wildfires in decades to come. “If current greenhouse-gas emission trends are not sharply reversed in the immediate future, we will see observed trends in wildfire risk accelerate,” he warned.
Waxman and Whitehouse asked firefighting and forestry experts for policy recommendations to help mitigate the situation.
Panelists, including Santa Fe, N.M., Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg and Rick Swan, director of supervisory personnel and health and safety for the California Department of Forestry Firefighters, cited budget cuts as a major stumbling block in efforts to combat wildfires, and called for increased funding for park services and firefighters.
“We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of fires, especially in California,” Swan said. “But we are not seeing the same increase in staffing levels and funding.”
(UPDATE at 10:20 a.m. MDT, July 16, 2013)
The Arizona State Forestry Division has issued a report that summarizes information about some of the major events and the firefighting resources that were deployed for the Yarnell Hill Fire. This new document corrects some of the information reported by the Associated Press below.
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(UPDATE at 10:15 a.m. MDT, July 13, 2013)
We checked with Rick Hatton, CEO of 10 Tanker Air Carrier, the company that operates the two DC-10 air tankers, about the use of their aircraft on the Yarnell Hill Fire. Mr. Hatton said each of their two DC-10s, which carry 11,600 gallons, made five drops on the fire. Throughout the day on Sunday June 30, the day of the tragedy, they made a total of eight drops, and then made two more on July 1.
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(Originally published at 8:20 p.m. July 12, 2013)
The Associated Press is reporting that a request for six “heavy” air tankers was placed about 50 minutes before the Granite Mountain Hotshots became entrapped and deployed their fire shelters on the Yarnell Hill Fire. However the request was never filled, and was classified as Unable to Fill, or UTF. There were only 12 heavy air tankers on duty June 30 in the lower 48 states and none were available to respond to the fatal fire near southwest of Prescott, Arizona.
The Granite Mountain Hotshots lost 19 of their 20 crewpersons that day when a passing thunderstorm caused the wind to change direction by 180 degrees and increase in speed, gusting to over 40 mph. In winds that strong it is unlikely that any aircraft could operate safely 200 feet above the ground or effectively drop a liquid that would accurately hit the intended target.
The last retardant drops before the fatal entrapment were made at 12:30 and 1 p.m. by P2V air tankers which carry a maximum of 2,082 gallons. After that the air tankers went back to another fire they had been working in northern Arizona. According to the AP, earlier the two DC-10 very large air tankers had been requested which drop 11,600 gallons each, but they were not available. The AP also said, “Only a spotter plane was in the air when the Prescott, Ariz.-based Granite Mountain Hotshots died. The state’s fleet of small single-engine retardant-dropping planes was grounded in Prescott because of the weather, and no helicopters or heavy tankers were available.”
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In 2002 there were 44 large or heavy air tankers on exclusive use contracts. Today there are 9. The day the 19 Hotshots died, four military MAFFS air tankers had been activated days earllier, but of those potential 13 air tankers, some of them would have been on their day off. And some, or all of those on duty, would have been actively working other fires. There were 50 uncontained large fires in the United States that day. If they all needed air tankers, which is not likely, each of the 12 that were on duty (according to the AP) would have to be shared by 4 large fires.
In 2012 about half the requests for air tankers could not be filled according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. Of the 914 requests, 438 were rejected as “unable to fill” (UTF), meaning no air tankers were available to respond to the fire; 67 were cancelled for various reasons.
The worst wildfires
The Mother Nature Network has assembled what they call “10 of the Worst Wildfires in U.S. History”. Check it out to see if you agree with their list.
Furloughs cancelled for NWS
As wildfire season heats up the National Weather Service has cancelled their plans to force their employees to take four days off without pay before September 30. While a memo to all 12,000 NWS employees did not mention fire weather forecasts or Incident Meteorologists, it did refer to the tornadoes that plowed through Midwestern states last month. The Las Cruces Sun-News has more details.
Photos and videos of the 747 Supertanker, and a new CWN contract for the 20,000-gallon beast
Fire Aviation has some photos and videos of Evergreen’s 747 Supertanker that is receiving a new call when needed contract from the U.S. Forest Service. When you see the two photos of the 747 dropping on a fire in Mexico, compare them to this photo of a P2V dropping on a fire in the San Diego area Monday.
Denver post on the shortage of air tankers
The Denver Post has an article about the shortage of large air tankers in the United States and how that may have affected the early stages of the recent fires in Colorado. They also quote a very reliable source about the number of Unable to Fill (UTF) requests for air tankers.
Aspen Fire on Mount Lemmon, 10 years ago
It was 10 years ago today that the Aspen Fire ripped across the top of Mount Lemmon in Arizona, destroying nearly 340 homes and burning 84,000 acres.
Birds start fires in California and Nevada
A deluded conspiracy theorist might assume that terrorists have trained birds to fly into power lines and start fires, since over the last two days it happened in Chico, California and in Reno, Nevada. But in spite of the tin foil hat I’m wearing, I don’t think this quite meets the threshold for our Animal Arson series, since it is fairly common.
In case you have not been following the reports over at Fire Aviation closely, you may not be up to speed on what has happened in the last few months concerning air tanker contracts, so here is a quick summary.
Legacy air tankers
Exclusive use contracts for eight air tankers were announced by the U.S. Forest Service on March 27, 2013, saying that during the first year of the contract, 2013, Minden would have one P2V, and Neptune would have six P2Vs and one BAe-146. A few weeks later an additional BAe-146 from Neptune was quietly added, bringing the total to nine air tankers for the first year. If the USFS decides not to activate optional years in the contract, there could be as few as six legacy air tankers after 2013.
Next Generation air tankers
After many false starts, a contract protest by Neptune, and 555 days after the USFS issued the first solicitation, the USFS announced on June 7 that exclusive use contracts were going to be awarded for seven next generation air tankers.
Only one of these seven aircraft has both a Supplemental Type Certificate from the FAA and the approval of the Interagency AirTanker Board (IATB), and that is the Very Large Air Tanker, the DC-10, which has been busy since the award dropping on fires in California, New Mexico, and Colorado. The other six have a limited amount of time, a couple of months or so, to become fully certified in order to meet the Mandatory Availability Period in the contracts. It would be surprising if all six met the deadline, since some of them are still going through the retrofitting process, and then will begin the FAA and IATB reviews, with the latter being lengthy and expensive.
Very Large Air Tankers
Call when needed contracts were announced June 14 for two call when needed Very Large Air Tankers — a second DC-10 from 10 Tanker Air Carrier, and a 747 “Supertanker” from Evergreen. These three-year contracts start July 1, 2013. The second DC-10 already has a CWN contract expiring June 30, and was activated for fires in New Mexico June 14. The 747 has the required FAA and IATB approvals from earlier CWN contracts, so it should be ready to go on July 1 — unless a little thing like two missing engines could be a problem. We posted some photos and videos of the 747 doing some demo drops with water, as well as dropping on a fire in the United States and one in Mexico.
To summarize the summary:
Totals by date in 2013, including CWN:
And yes, it’s confusing that two next-gen aircraft are included in the legacy contract, and a very large air tanker is mixed in with the next-gen. (I am almost surprised that a Single Engine Air Tanker is not clumped in with the Very Large Air Tankers.)
Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories Uncategorized2 Comments on Neptune withdraws their protest of air tanker contracts Neptune Aviation has dropped their protest of the contract awards for next-generation air tankers. The protest held up the issuing of the contracts that were originally announced by the U.S. Forest Service on May 6. Fire Aviation has more details.
