The following is from an article in the Redding, California Record Searchlight
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Timothy Ingalsbee says he owes his life to a firefighting helicopter.
In 1990, when he was a scout perched on a house-sized boulder overlooking a blaze in Washington’s North Cascades National Park, a shift in wind pushed wildfire uphill to him. Encircled in flames, he radioed for a helicopter to drop 2,000 gallons of water directly on top of him.
The deluge from a massive twin-rotor helicopter knocked down the fire and saved his life, he said. Still, given the deadly risks to those aboard, he wonders whether helicopters should be used to fight wildfires in the backcountry.
Over the past four years, four helicopters have crashed while fighting wildfires in the north state. Three of the crashes were fatal, killing 12 people in all. That includes the nine deaths in last summer’s Iron 44 crash near Weaverville, among the worst aviation crashes in terms of lives lost in the U.S. Forest Service’s history.
Another firefighter also died last week when he fell 200 feet from a helicopter during a routine rapelling exercise as part of the fight of the Backbone Fire in the Trinity Alps Wilderness.
Now the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) based in Eugene, Ore., Ingalsbee said there is no tool as versatile as a helicopter in fighting fire. But flying them over blazes burning deep in the woods increases the chances of their crashing.
“Using helicopters in this steep, mountainous terrain is fraught with peril,” Ingalsbee said.
Useful tool
As people movers, cargo carriers and flying fire hydrants, helicopters have become a major part of modern firefights.
“They are one of our biggest assets,” said Robert “Buck” Silva, fire management officer for the Modoc National Forest.
Shuttled into fires by helicopters, “helitak” crews may slide down ropes to reach the ground.
It was during a rappelling training session that Tom “T.J.” Marovich, 20, of Hayward fell and died last week at the Backbone Fire’s temporary helicopter base in Willow Creek.
The pain of his friend’s death still stinging, Cody Sandberg, assistant chief at the Adin Fire Protection District in Lassen County, said helicopters provide firefighters a huge advantage.
“There is going to be a risk in the air or on the ground,” said Sandberg, who has also worked with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in fighting wildfire.
Often spending much of the fire season in the small town, Marovich had been a volunteer for Adin Fire for four years. Sandberg said Marovich accepted the risk of riding in and rappelling from a helicopter along with the other dangers of the job.
Compared to hiking or driving on winding forest roads, flying in a helicopter can bring a firefighter to a blaze in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
“They are, unfortunately, worth the risk,” Sandberg said.
When to fight fire
Ingalsbee and other critics of the Forest Service’s wildfire management said they don’t doubt helicopters’ usefulness.
“When you need to put a fire out, a helicopter is a great tool,” said Rich Fairbanks, a former Forest Service firefighter and a current fire specialist with The Wilderness Society, a national conservation group.
But examining the dangers of firefighting helicopters leads to the underlying questions of when and where wildfires should be fought, Fairbanks and Ingalsbee said.
Three of the four crashes over the past four years involved helicopters flying over fires in federally designated wilderness.
Fairbanks said fires in wilderness could be allowed to burn to rocky ridges and rivers, where they’ll go out naturally. That way, expensive and risky helicopters wouldn’t have to be used.
“Is spending this money and killing some young folks a good idea?” he said.
But such a “let it burn” attitude doesn’t take into account the health risks brought by the smoke from wildfires, the chief reason cited by the Forest Service officials as they aggressively fought the 6,324-acre Backbone Fire.
Forest Service officials at the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, the state’s regional office and the Washington, D.C., headquarters declined to discuss the use of helicopters on wildfire last week, saying they wanted to wait until after Marovich’s funeral. The funeral is set for Thursday in Hayward.
On the Klamath National Forest, Riva Duncan, deputy forest fire chief in charge of aviation, said the dangers of using helicopters are weighed before each mission. She said fire officials fill out a risk assessment form when deciding whether to send up the copters. A helicopter pilot, being the most familiar with their ship and skills, also can veto any mission.
Duncan said the officials aim to make sure that each flight is safe, effective and efficient.
“If we can’t meet those criteria,” she said, “we need to think about doing something else.”
