We had an opportunity to photograph some of the aircraft at McClellan Air Force base today. Click on the photos to see larger versions.
Sacramento aircraft
California: Pine Fire
The Los Angeles County Fire Department is battling the Pine Fire that started around mid-afternoon Friday on the south side of Highway 138 in Gorman. At about 5:30 p.m. PDT the estimated size was 150 acres and it was 35 percent contained. CAL FIRE and the US Forest Service are assisting.
The Predator UAS on the Rim Fire
(UPDATE at 6:41 p.m. MDT, March 17, 2014)
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center has publicized information from two reports about the Unmanned Aerial System, the Predator, used on the Rim Fire. There is a report written by the LLC, and an AAR developed by one of the Incident Management Teams that was assigned to the fire.
One thing is clear. We need to decide on a name. UAS, drone, RPV, or UAV.
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(Originally published at 12:49 p.m. MDT, March 14, 2014)
These videos describe the use of a California Air National Guard Predator unmanned aerial system on the Rim Fire, which burned 257,000 acres in and near Yosemite National Park last summer.
HERE is a link to a 17-second video which can’t be embedded, but it shows the operator’s screen.
Throwback Thursday
Six years ago this week, these are some of the topics we wrote about on Wildfire Today in 2008:
—Ice Storms in Missouri increased the fuel available for wildfires by a factor of 10.
—CAL FIRE was being taken to court, according to a suit, for partially demobing the Piru fire before it was 100% contained. The fire grew from 1,200 to 64,000 acres. Apparently the strategy and tactics that were used on the fire are being questioned in a court of law 4 years after the fact.
—Fire Captain Matt Moore with the Murrieta (California) Fire Department died, succumbing to complications from meningitis, fire department officials said. He had been in various hospitals since November battling an aggressive form of meningitis. It is believed Moore inhaled a parasite while fighting the region’s wildfires late last year. The parasite reportedly caused swelling in his brain.
Wildfire briefing, March 12, 2014
West Virginia man found dead at wildfire
A man that was found dead near the scene of a fire Tuesday in Kanawha County, West Virginia has been identified as Donald Chandler, 66. The cause of death has not been determined but relatives thought he probably suffered a heart attack while trying to put out the fire. Officials were not sure if the fire started in a storage building and spread into the vegetation, or if a brush fire ignited the structure.
Our sincere condolences go out to the family and friends of Mr. Chandler.
Fire resistant vegetation leads to a success story
Usually when a wildfire makes the news there has been a failure, perhaps more than one. The first of course is the ignition, if it is human caused. Then if the initial attack does not succeed it can spread — into the headlines of the media. But we rarely hear about the fires that are aggressively attacked and kept small, like what happened today in the southern California community of Brea.
Not only did the ground and aerial firefighters succeed, but decisions made by the homeowners association also deserve a pat on the back. The fire in Tonner Canyon near Lambert Road and the 57 Freeway was kept to only two acres thanks to the firefighters AND the fire- and drought-resistant vegetation that had been planted by the association. Even though there were Red Flag Warnings in effect today and strong winds were pushing the fire up a hill, it was stopped by the suppression forces and the proactive mitigation measures in place.
The fire was reported at 12:40 p.m. and firefighters were mopping it up by 1:20 p.m. Soon thereafter, they were back at their stations and ready for another fire.
Wildfire briefing, February 25, 2014
Insurance companies cancel policies
Some homeowners in the Scripps Ranch area near San Diego have received notices that their policies are being cancelled. The residents live near the areas that burned catastrophically in 2003 or 2007, fires that destroyed thousands of homes and took 16 lives. According to an article at 10news, one of the homeowners said, “They canceled us and also several people on our street, saying they couldn’t renew our policy because we were too close to the brush line.”
Which area near Colorado Springs will be next?
Some residents in the Colorado Springs area are a little concerned about the vulnerability of their homes after the fire disasters of 2012 and 2013. Last year the Black Forest Fire just north of Colorado Springs destroyed approximately 480 structures, and in 2012 the Waldo Canyon Fire on the other side of the city wiped out 347 homes. There is concern now that the Broadmoor area could be susceptible to fires that start in the Cheyenne Mountain area. Fox21 news has more details.
Two Senators on the same page as President Obama about fire funding
Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley have praised President Obama for proposing that wildfires be funded in a manner similar to other natural disasters. Monday the President met with most of the nation’s governors and told them that wildfire funding in the administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2015 would be similar to provisions in a bill introduced in the House, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2014 (H.R. 3992), which would create an emergency funding process for fire response. If enacted, it would mean the federal land management agencies would no longer have to rob dollars from routine ongoing non-fire activities to pay unusually high fire suppression expenses.
Tom Zimmerman lectured at the University of Montana
Tom Zimmerman, a former Area Commander and Type 1 Incident Commander, lectured at the University of Montana on February 20. He was the first speaker in the Mike & Mabelle Hardy Fire Management Lecture Series which was established through an estate gift from Mike Hardy, a 1939 alumnus of the School of Forestry. Now the President of the International Association of Wildland Fire, Dr. Zimmerman, had a key role when he worked for the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service in promoting, training for, and establishing procedures for managing wildfires that are not fully suppressed. In fact, he has the dubious honor of being instrumental in coining some of the terms for these fires, including “fire use fire” and “fire for resource benefits”. Below is an excerpt from an article in the Missoulian about his lecture.
“…Fire has a natural role in the environment and we need to embrace that and accept that,” Zimmerman said. But we also need to keep preventing human-caused, unwanted fires. And we have to understand that the firefighting tools we have aren’t designed to protect the thousands of private homes that now stand at risk of wildland fires.
“You’ve got to keep working with your communities to explain what’s going on,” Zimmerman said. “You’ve got to keep laying out the facts. But there’s a threshold to understanding, and I don’t know if you can keep that buy-in for very long when people are breathing smoke all summer. We talk about restoring fire as a natural process, and then you have one that burns five times as much as the plan calls for. You can’t say, well we won’t burn anything for the next five years.”
Judge orders CAL FIRE to pay $30 million for conduct in Moonlight Fire case
A judge has ordered the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) to pay more than $30 million in penalties, legal fees, and costs to Sierra Pacific and others for their actions related to a lawsuit over the 2007 Moonlight Fire. Retired Superior Court Judge Leslie C. Nichols in a 28-page order issued Tuesday accused CAL FIRE of “egregious and reprehensible conduct” in pursuing a lawsuit against the company.
The Moonlight fire burned about 65,000 acres in 2007, including 46,000 acres in the Plumas and Lassen National Forests in the northern part of the state. CAL FIRE and U.S. Forest Service investigators said the fire was started by a bulldozer operator for a company hired by Sierra Pacific, which denied any involvement in the fire.
In 2012 Sierra Pacific, in order to settle the suit presided over by U.S. District Judge Kimberly J. Mueller and prevent further actions by CAL FIRE, agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to the USFS. The company thought CAL FIRE was ultimately seeking $1 billion, and they were aware that Judge Mueller had ruled earlier that the company could be liable even if it had nothing to do with starting the fire.
Below is an excerpt from an article in the Sacrameto Bee, which said Sierra Pacific…
…was a victim of stonewalling by Cal Fire in that agency’s Plumas County suit, including the alleged withholding of thousands of pages of key internal documents relevant to the legal struggle.
In a 28-page order issued Tuesday, retired Superior Court Judge Leslie C. Nichols essentially agreed with all of Sierra Pacific’s points, adopting a separate, 57-page order proposed by Sierra Pacific and the other defendants almost word-for-word, and excoriating the behavior of Cal Fire and two lawyers from the office of Attorney General Kamala Harris, which represented the agency.
“The court finds that Cal Fire’s actions initiating, maintaining and prosecuting this action, to the present time, is corrupt and tainted,” the judge wrote. “Cal Fire failed to comply with discovery obligations, and its repeated failure was willful.”
The agency withheld documents for months, “destroyed evidence critical (to the case) … and engaged in a systematic campaign of misdirection with the purpose of recovering money from (Sierra Pacific).”
Sierra Pacific, according to the Sacramento Bee, claimed there is evidence that a USFS employee in a fire lookout tower may have been smoking marijuana during the early stages of the fire, which delayed the detection, and they reported that “defense lawyers had to work hard to pry that information out of the Forest Service”.
CAL FIRE was also involved in questionable behavior before the case went to trial. In their billing sent to Sierra Pacific in 2009, they demanded the company make two payments; one for $7.7 million to the state, and another for $400,000 to an account belonging to a nonprofit organization administered by CAL FIRE. The funds in that account had been used for off the books purchases of items such as 600 digital cameras and 26 evidence sheds. In Sierra Pacific’s investigation into CAL FIRE’s demand for payment, they discovered the very unusual account, named “Wildland Fire Investigation Training and Equipment Fund”, sometimes referred to as “WiFiter”.
That account, as we wrote in January of 2013, was not exactly secret, however it was not commonly known that it was an off-the-books account not subject to the standard state regulations for managing and spending money. We found a memo from former CAL FIRE Director Walters, apparently written in 2009, summarizing the year’s fire season in which he mentioned the account:
Office of Program Accountability (OPA) finalized three audits (Volcan Incident, Wildland Fire Investigation Training and Equipment Fund, and Indirect Cost PCA 99200)…
The current Director of CAL FIRE, Ken Pemlott froze the fund in August, 2012 after, according to the LA Times, “receiving a briefing from his staff, said Janet Upton, a Cal Fire spokeswoman”.
Thanks and a hat tip go out to Dick, Sunil, and Kirk.
CAL FIRE helicopter pilot featured on Los Angeles news
Los Angeles Local News | FOX 11 LA KTTV
CAL Fire helicopter pilot Desiree Horton is featured in a news report on MyFoxLA (above). Desiree has been flying helicopters for at least 14 years, including piloting and reporting from news helicopters for several TV stations in Los Angeles, flying on U.S. Forest Service contracts for a firefighting helicopters on the San Bernardino National Forest and in Oregon, doing heavy lifts in a Sikorsky S-58, and then in 2013 flying a fire helicopter for CAL FIRE. She even has her own Wikipedia page, and has been nicknamed “Chopper Chick”: She is currently working on a limited term appointment, but hopes to get a permanent job with CAL FIRE.
Back in the days before FireAviation.com was born, we wrote several articles about Desiree on WildfireToday.com.
Desiree is the first female firefighting helicopter pilot in California working directly for a public agency. However there has been at least one other woman who worked for a private company on a firefighting contract — Bonnie Wilkens, who flew out of Ramona.
Thanks and a hat tip go out to Joseph.
Cause of helicopter hoist fatality similar to earlier rappel death
An investigative report determined that the cause of a fatality that occurred to a volunteer while he was being lowered by a helicopter’s hoist over the Sequoia National Forest was similar to a previous rappelling accident that killed a U.S. Forest Service employee in 2009.
The Air Force report released last week by the Virginia-based Air Combat Command said improper rigging and inadequate oversight caused the death of Shane Krogen, executive director of the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew, 30 miles east of Visalia, California, on September 12, 2013.
Mr. Krogen was participating in an environmental clean-up and restoration of a contaminated marijuana grow site in the Sequoia National Forest that was carried out by California Air National Guard’s 129th Rescue Wing. While preparing to be lowered by the hoist on an HH-60G Pavehawk helicopter, a variant of a Blackhawk, Mr. Krogen mistakenly attached the aircraft’s hoist to a non-load-bearing plastic D-ring of a tactical vest instead of to the load-bearing metal D-ring of his harness. When the plastic D-ring broke, Mr. Krogen fell from the aircraft to the ground from an approximate 45-foot hover and sustained fatal injuries.
The report concluded that the helicopter crew’s safety man did not maintain adequate oversight during flight and hoist operations and that Mr. Krogen’s use of his personal equipment “excessively cluttered the area around the load-bearing metal D-ring”, interfering with a safe connection and visual inspection. And, “due to the extremely close proximity of the Yates harness load bearing D-ring in relation to the Condor tactical vest’s non-load bearing D-ring, and the concealment of both D-rings by the cluttered pouches on the Condor tactical vest, which included a handgun, the [safety man] incorrectly concluded the Civilian Fatality was properly secured”.
The report also said that according to the Pentagon only law enforcement personnel should be allowed on counterdrug flights and that Mr. Krogen, as a civilian, was not authorized to be on the helicopter.
Thomas Marovich, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter, died on July 21, 2009 when he fell while performing routine helicopter rappelling proficiency training while assigned to the Backbone fire near Willow Creek, California. The USFS report was posted and later removed from the Lessons Learned web site, but Wildfire Today was able to report on it while it was still public. The National Transportation Safety Board Narrative revealed that Mr. Marovich’s “J” hook had been attached to a rubber “O” ring, rather than to a load-bearing Tri-link (see the photos below).
Before the rappelling attempt, four people looked at or inspected Mr. Marovich’s rappelling gear: the spotter trainee who installed the “O” ring, Marovich, and in the helicopter a spotter, and another helitack crewperson who did a “buddy check”.
Forest Service criticized for early management of the Rim Fire
The U.S. Forest Service is being criticized for their early suppression attempts of the Rim Fire, as well as their lack of transparency about how it was fought and the cause of the fire. Starting on the Stanislaus National Forest but eventually spreading into Yosemite National Park, it became the third largest fire in California’s history, burning 257,000 acres, 11 homes, and 3 commercial structures. As of October 25, 2013, at least $127 million had been spent on the suppression and rehabilitation efforts.
Rumors swarmed about what started the fire, blaming a variety of causes including marijuana growers, the law enforcement officers pursuing them, or even an object falling to the ground that was related to a military operation. The USFS was very tight-lipped about the investigation and finally said a hunter’s campfire was the cause, but provided little additional information.
According to an article in the Union Democrat, the initial attack as well as the firefighting response during the first 48 hours was less than overwhelming. Below is an excerpt from their article:
…Jim Dunn, [a CAL FIRE S-2T air tanker pilot] who retired in November after a 24-year firefighting career , said he was making drops on the fire near Natural Bridges on Aug. 17 when he responded that afternoon to what later became the Rim Fire.
He told The Union Democrat that both air tankers stationed at the Columbia Air Attack Base responded when the fire was first reported. The Forest Service already had planes in the air and initially dispatched the other Columbia air tanker pilot, but grounded him shortly after Dunn began making drops. He said the Forest Service put him on hold as well, after only a couple hours of dropping retardant.
The fire was only about 40 acres after the first day, but grew to about 250 by the morning of Aug. 18.
“The next morning we started early and nobody was on the ground,” Dunn said. “After about an hour or two, we got retardant around most the (fire) line while it was still in the canyon.”
“On the third day, they (the Forest Service) called us and we made two or three drops — but then they put us on hold,” he said. “The next thing I heard on the air was that it had crossed the Tuolumne (river) and was running toward Pine Mountain Lake.
Thanks and a hat tip go out to Johnny.