A helicopter that was assisting firefighters suppressing a wildfire in New South Wales obtained water from a sewage treatment plant and dropped it on the fire. According to ABC News in Australia, Mark Hughes of the Australian Workers Union said Rural Fire Service (RFS) commanders directed the helicopter to use the sewage rather than other water sources such as the Camden Haven River, Queens Lake or the Cowarra Dam.
There were two ponds at the sewage treatment facility near Port Macquarie, one with raw sewage and the other with treated water. The raw sewage used potentially affected up to 30 RFS firefighters. After using the contaminated water for three hours, a HAZMAT team shut down the site and talked to the firefighters.
Air-Crane helicopter on the Los Conchas fire in New Mexico drafting water out of heli-well at Los Alamos National Laboratory, June, 2011. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Revised November 8, 2012
Erickson Air-Crane, a company in Portland, Oregon, that builds, operates, and sells Erickson S-64 heavy-lift helicopters, intends to purchase Air Amazonia, a subsidiary of HRT Participacoes, a company in Brazil, along with their 14 helicopters.
Erickson’s Air-Cranes are used extensively in fighting wildland fires. At least 15 Air-Cranes or Ch-54 helicopters were on contract with the U.S. Forest Service in 2012. The company has been sending some of the ships to Australia since 1998 to fight fires there during the down-under summer, which of course is winter in the United States. During the 2011-2012 summer there, Erickson had three of them in Australia — aircraft named Elvis, Elsie, and Marty.
The Mail Tribune has some details about the transaction:
“It plays well to our unique capabilities,”Udo Rieder [Erickson’s president and chief executive officer] said during a conference call with analysts on Wednesday.
He said the deal for 14 medium and light helicopters will significantly increase Erickson’s capability in South American markets, adding revenue and making good use of the company’s capital.
“It will reduce the impact of the seasonality of our business and expand our footprint in the gas and oil industry,” Rieder said.
HRT owns seven Sikorsky-61 aircraft, which are smaller but have many similarities to Erickson’s current fleet.
“We’ve always talked about adding medium-lift capability to our operation,” Rieder said. “It’s complementary to our business. The S-61s are little sisters to the air-cranes. Many of the parts are similar and some are identical — the cockpits are the same. This would give us quite a bit more capability at our Central Point facility. This will provide a platform to bring in S-64s and exchange equipment fairly quickly in Brazil and Peru.”
He said the company is unsure of what it will do with the Bell 212s and Eurocopter AS-350s that are part of the deal.
“We have the option to move them anywhere we want near-term,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what the demand is, but we’ll pretty much absorb all the aircraft there.”
The deal, however, isn’t expected to close until the second half of 2013, Rieder said, because of “fairly complex regulatory requirements and licensing matters.”
Below is a portion of the text from an announcement by Erickson:
Erickson Air-Crane Inc. Announces Letter of Intent to Acquire Brazilian Oil and Gas Aerial Services Business
Plans Purchase of Air Logistics Business from HRT Participaes em Petroleo, S.A.
Early Stage Transaction Announcement, Closing Expected in Second Half 2013
14 Aircraft Fleet to Position Company as a Leading Air Services Provider in Brazil
PORTLAND, Ore. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Nov. 6, 2012 — Erickson Air-Crane Incorporated (NASDAQ: EAC) (Erickson Air-Crane or the Company), a leading operator and the manufacturer of the powerful heavy-lift helicopter, the Erickson S-64 Aircrane, today announced that it had entered into a non-binding letter of intent to acquire 14 helicopters and associated personnel and assets from HRT Participacoes em Petroleo, S.A. (HRT).
The letter of intent is non-binding and, for the acquisition to be completed, requires that EAC provide operational services to HRT in the Amazon, including both cargo and passenger transport, through a three-year, renewable contract.
Udo Rieder, Chief Executive Officer of Erickson Air-Crane, commented, We are very pleased to have identified what we believe is a strong future partner. Were confident that this acquisition can be an excellent path to diversification and growth. Brazil is one of the most dynamic and fastest growing industrial markets in the world and we are uniquely suited to provide our expertise and leverage the full capabilities of this fleet and our investment.
About Erickson Air-Crane Incorporated
Erickson Air-Crane specializes in the operation and manufacture of the Erickson S-64 Aircrane (the Aircrane), a versatile and powerful heavy-lift helicopter. The Aircrane has a lift capacity of up to 25,000 pounds and is the only commercial aircraft built specifically as a flying crane without a fuselage for internal loads. The Aircrane is also the only commercial heavy-lift helicopter with a rear load-facing cockpit, combining an unobstructed view and complete aircraft control for precision lift and load placement capabilities. Erickson Air-Crane owns and operates a fleet of 18 Aircranes, which are used to support a wide variety of government and commercial customers worldwide across a broad range of aerial services, including firefighting, timber harvesting, infrastructure construction, and crewing. Erickson Air-Crane also manufactures Aircranes and related components for sale to government and commercial customers and provides aftermarket support and maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for the Aircrane and other aircraft. Founded in 1971, Erickson Air-Crane is headquartered in Portland, Oregon with its principal manufacturing facility based in Central Point, Oregon. For more information, please visit http://www.ericksonaircrane.com.
Remember the story — that at first sounded almost like fiction — about the firefighter that was rescued from an approaching wildfire by climbing into a helicopter’s water bucket and being extracted to safety? We first wrote about it HERE, and later HERE with additional facts.
We can now disclose the identity of the pilot, and even have a photo of the award given to him by the U.S. Forest Service. You can read about it on our new sister web site, Fire Aviation.
Yes, Fire Aviation is a brand new web site we started yesterday. Obviously from the name, it will be devoted to aviation used in the suppression and management of fires. You may have noticed that we often write about fire aviation, but now there is a special home for those articles. We will still occasionally include aviation articles on Wildfire Today, but most of them will be on the new site, Fire Aviation.
We are still in the process of building the site. More features will be added over the next several days.
You can follow Fire Aviation on Twitter. It’s @FireAviation
You may have heard about the wildland firefighter who was rescued from an approaching fire by climbing into a water bucket below a helicopter and being extracted to safety. The story was first written up on our sister site Wildfire Today on October 1, 2012, and the followup details from a Facilitated Learning Analysis were posted there October 24.
Some of us were wondering what the official response from the U.S. Forest Service would be. Might they throw the book at him for violating the rules? However, I doubt if there is a rule that says “Thou shalt not transport a human in a helicopter’s water bucket”. The USFS is not known for bleeding edge innovation in their aviation program. Most deviation from standard procedure is strongly discouraged. And rightfully so in most cases. You don’t want to screw around with rules that provide for the safety of pilots and firefighters.
Fire Aviation is now able to disclose, with his permission, that the pilot was Joseph Berto. Congratulations to Mr. Berto! He may have saved the life of a firefighter.
Much to our surprise, the USFS officially commended Mr. Berto by presenting to him the following plaque.
In light of the incident in which a firefighter was rescued from an advancing wildfire by climbing into a water bucket under a helicopter and being flown to safety, I sent a Twitter message to @BambiBucketeer, the account of Bambi Bucket, a company that manufactures some of the more popular buckets. I asked them:
Will your next Bambi Bucket model include seat belts? 😉
Their reply was:
and 7 airbags plus an extra-size cup-holder. Stay tuned for press release in 2013! 😉
Fighting wildland fires can be a dangerous job. One of the most difficult challenges is providing treatment to an injured firefighter during that first “golden hour” if an accident occurs in a remote location.
The California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection is taking a step to speed the transfer of a patient from the fireline to a hospital by installing hoist systems on their 11 firefighting helicopters. They recently completed the first round of training on the new systems at the CAL FIRE academy at Ione. Some of the hoists have already been installed and all 11 should be ready to go by the end of the year.
This is a great step in the right direction and may save firefighters’ lives if they suffer an injury during daylight hours.
Currently there are no CAL FIRE or U.S. Forest Service helicopters that can fly at night. The USFS is going to tip toe into night flying operations again next year by contracting for one helicopter with that capability. It is unknown if it will have a hoist.
The USFS was criticized for not taking advantage of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s night flying helicopters during the first night after the Station Fire started near Los Angeles in 2009. The fire was three to four acres at 7 a.m. on the second day, but no helicopters were used the first night. The fire took off at mid-morning on day two and later burned 160,000 acres, killing two firefighters.
There were accusations that the USFS employed a less than aggressive attack on the Station fire in an effort to save money. If that was their strategy, it failed. A GAO review estimated the cost of suppressing the Station Fire to be $93 million, placing it among the most costly fires in the nation’s history. This does not include the costs of rebuilding the 89 homes that burned in the fire which may have been another $15 to $35 million. Thanks go out to Eric
I have to admit that when I heard about the firefighter on the Pole Fire in Oregon that was rescued from an advancing wildfire by climbing into a water bucket dangling below a helicopter, I was not 100 percent convinced that it actually happened. After all, most of us have heard the urban legends, totally untrue, about scuba divers being grabbed in water buckets or scooped up into an air tanker as it skims across the ocean, then later they were supposed to have been found dead at the scene of a fire.
But after the first report of the extraction, a team of fire and aviation professionals investigated the incident and recently released a Facilitated Learning Analysis (FLA).
We will summarize what led up to the extraction and then will include some text from the FLA:
The helicopter pilot was flying a Bell 205A1 and was dropping water to slow down the spread of the fire under the direction of a ground contact working alone in that area. The pilot was in constant contact with him, both visually and by radio. At first the person on the ground had a safety zone, the black burned area, since the fire behavior was slow with occasional torching of standing trees in an area that had a significant amount of bug-killed timber. But then the fire’s intensity picked up dramatically and the fire started reburning the black, vigorously consuming the fuels that had not burned previously, eliminating the safety zone. The pilot wrote in a SAFECOM: “The downed trees that had not burned were now igniting, and this heat was intense enough that it was actually torching heavily and burning the standing bug killed trees that were already in the black.”
The ground contact kept moving away from the fire but the fire was closing in. The pilot, who was making 5-minute turnaround water drops, frequently gave the ground contact advice about what the fire was doing and where it was, as the fire activity increased.
The text and the photo below are from the FLA; the ground contact is identified as “TFLD”, a Task Force Leader.
“…The pilot was very concerned with the TFLD’s position. The fire front appeared to move in waves of heat toward his position; the air between the waves was actually “shimmering.” The TFLD had a finger of fire to the southwest, which was within 200 feet of his position, and another finger to the northeast.
The helicopter made one circle around the area and the pilot noticed how rapidly the fire had progressed during that turn. The pilot urged the TFLD to start moving quickly away from the fire as the fire had closed half the distance to his position. The pilot felt that the TFLD was in the center with increasing fire behavior threatening both his south and north escape routes. He remembers using the term “raging.” He attempted to relay this concern, but the TFLD was comfortable with his location and escape routes to the black. The pilot believed that the black was not going to be the help he needed. He felt that the TFLD was going to need to deploy his fire shelter and that he would have to water-drop on the TFLD’s position. As he began pulling away to get water he realized that the fire would be upon the TFLD before he was able to make the trip to the water source and return. He had only moments to act.
The pilot noticed that in front of the TFLD, to the north, was a small opening of shorter, mostly dead lodgepole pine trees. He could hover safely and lower his bucket to the ground. As he hovered and watched the speed of the fire coming toward the TFLD, the pilot said “I’m going to suggest something to you and I hope you do it. I want you to get in the bucket.” The TFLD believed his escape route was open to the southwest and said “no, I’m fine.” The pilot repeated the suggestion with more urgency: “You don’t see what I’m looking at, you need to get in the bucket now.”
When the TFLD turned around, he saw the bucket on the ground. The TFLD replied to the pilot that “you can see better than I, and I am going to trust your judgment,” and entered the bucket, a 230 gallon Bambi design. He is over six feet tall, so it took him a few moments to get into and orient himself to the bucket and locate the correct cables to grab, not wanting to damage or disable the bucket. He managed to keep his radio but left his Pulaski at the pick-up site.
During the bucket transport, the TFLD maintained radio communication with the pilot. The DIVS was monitoring the communications but did not contact the pilot or the TFLD to avoid distracting their attention from the event. Once in the bucket and ready for lift-off the TFLD radioed to the pilot that he was ready and he said “This is a first for me,” describing his ride in a bucket. Once above the tree canopy the pilot asked if the TFLD now saw what he was talking about. The pilot remembers the TFLD’s response as “I see what you’re talking about.” Although the TFLD can’t recall what he may have said, the TFLD did not feel the same sense of urgency the pilot felt.
The TFLD’s decision to follow the pilot’s request was based on the trust the two had built with each other during previous and current bucket operations, and the pilot’s vantage point to assess fire activity around the ground operation. Although he felt safe with his predetermined escape routes, he deferred to the pilot’s view of the situation. The pilot set him gently down in a meadow about one-half mile away and informed him of the direction of travel back to DP 24. The pilot made a quick look back toward the pick-up area and believed it was engulfed in flame, taking the photo on page 10.”
The FLA discusses the differences in knowlege between the firefighter and the pilot. The firefighter knew little about aviation and the pilot had limited training in wildland fire behavior. The firefighter kept saying to the pilot that he had an escape route into the black, and the pilot told him that he had a better view from the air and the fire was advancing. Finally the firefighter said: “I can’t see what you see; I’m going to defer to your judgment,” and got in the bucket.
Here is one more interesting quote from the FLA:
“A safety zone to the pilot meant a safe place away from the fire – he transported the TFLD to a meadow half a mile into the green; to the TFLD, the more completely burned areas were the safest places he could be.”
As we said when we first wrote about this incident, we’re glad it had a positive result, and congratulate the firefighter and the pilot for thinking outside the box, possibly preventing a disastrous outcome.
A pilot walked away from the crash of a firefighting helicopter Sunday afternoon in Oregon. In fact, he at first declined to be flown from the crash site by another helicopter, saying he preferred to walk out. Eventually he accepted the lift but declined medical treatment.
According to a story in the Mail Tribune, the pilot, identified as Cody Seeger, told a Jackson County sheriff’s deputy: “As he was flying back, it started rattling and losing pressure, and then it went down,” deputy Jeff McGrath said. The Mail Tribune has several photos of the pilot.
The helicopter ended up on its side in a forested area several miles west of Shady Cove, Oregon (map) and from the air it looked fairly intact, with the tail boom still attached. The cockpit area did not look to be badly damaged.
The pilot had been dropping water on a vegetation fire and was heading back to Grants Pass when the accident occurred.
File photo of Columbia Basin UH-1H Helicopters. Photo courtesy of Columbia Basin Helicopters
Mr. Seeger works for Columbia Basin Helicopters with headquarters in Baker City, Oregon. The company owns and operates three single-engine Bell UH-1H (Bell 205) helicopters which they use fire suppression.
Last Friday, September 28, a firefighter’s life may have been saved when he was extracted from an approaching fire by climbing into a helicopter’s water bucket.
At least that is what was reported in a SAFECOM that was filed on September 30, 2012. We talked with Tom Lavagnino, the Information Officer on the Type 3 Incident Management Team that on September 29 transitioned onto the fire where this reportedly occurred, replacing a Type 2 team. He said that neither he nor the Incident Commander knew much about it; most of what they know came from reading the SAFECOM. He said during their transition they did not receive any detailed information about the reported incident. However a team of aviation and safety officials are en route to the fire to conduct a Facilitated Learning Analysis. They, of course, will be interviewing the pilot and the person that was reported to have been extracted in the bucket.
For now we are assuming that this is not a joke or an urban legend, like the scuba divers that were supposed to have been grabbed up in helicopter buckets, or scooped into the tank of an air tanker as it skims across the ocean.
The SAFECOM is fairly long, so I’ll summarize the first section. Then you can read the rest below, the part that sounds like it came out of one of the worst movies ever made about wildland fire, Firestorm, starring Howie Long, who should have stuck to his day job as a defensive end in the National Football League, later becoming an analyst for FOX Sports.
We are very glad the person on the ground was rescued, and since it sounds like it was the only option available to keep him from being burned to death, we applaud the actions of the pilot, thinking WAY outside the box, possibly saving a life.
According to the SAFECOM, it happened on the Pole Creek Fire on the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon. The helicopter pilot was flying a Bell 205A1 and was dropping water to slow down the spread of the fire under the direction of a ground contact working alone in that area. The pilot was in constant contact with him, both visually and by radio. At first the person on the ground had a safety zone, the black burned area, since the fire behavior was slow with occasional torching of standing trees in an area that had a significant amount of bug-killed timber. But then the fire’s intensity picked up dramatically and the fire started reburning the black, vigorously consuming the fuels that had not burned previously, eliminating the safety zone. The pilot wrote: “The downed trees that had not burned were now igniting, and this heat was intense enough that it was actually torching heavily and burning the standing bug killed trees that were already in the black.”
The ground contact kept moving away from the fire but the fire was closing in. The pilot, who was making 5-minute turnaround water drops, frequently gave the ground contact advice about what the fire was doing and where it was, as the fire activity increased.
“…I then asked my ground contact where he was and was surprised to find that he was still to the west of the torching area. This surprised me since I thought he had already passed the fire to the east, where I felt he should be. I immediately contacted him and circled back to find him. He gave me a mirror flash and I saw that he was within 500 feet of the face of the raging fire. This torching and the black column being generated was hidden from him by the smoke he was in, as well as the standing timber surrounding him.He had a spot finger to the SW, which was within 200 feet of his position, and another finger to the NE.
I urged him to start moving quickly north away from the fire, which he did, and when I circled again the fire was 50 percent closer to his position. The fire was moving in waves of heat toward his position: the air between them was actually shimmering! A 200-300 yard wide wall of trees would instantly ignite, and this in turn was igniting the next row of trees in front of it. My ground contact was centered in this wall, with the fingers on either side. I felt that he was in grave danger.
A photo that was submitted with the SAFECOM.
The fire was moving MUCH faster than he was: there was no way out to the SE or to the NW because he was in the center of a crescent between the two fingers of fire. The fire was moving to him so quickly and it was beginning to even affect the fingers behavior, which started to burn much more intensely. I was very, very concerned that he was in the center of energy. I tried to relay this concern, but he was sure that he was secure since he was in the black. I knew that the black was not going to be the help he needed. I felt that he was going to need to deploy his fire shelter and that I was going to be doing water drop on his position.
I started to pull away to get water but realized that the fire would have been upon him before I was able to make a trip to the lake and back. In front of him, to the north, there was a small opening in the trees and I was able to determine that I could hover into it without damage to the helicopter. I lowered the helicopter until the bucket was on the ground. I hovered and watch the speed he was moving and the speed of the fire coming towards us.
The fire was moving very quickly so I strongly suggested that he climb into the bucket so that I could haul him out. I felt that there were very few options and vigorously urged him. I honestly felt that we had only seconds or a minute before the fire was to the spot. I am sure he could feel the fire, because I could certainly feel the heat. He climbed into the bucket and wrapped his arms around the wires as I slowly lifted the bucket vertical. We were in radio contact during this time.
Once I was sure he was secure in the bucket I flew to the North, perhaps 1/4 mile to an open area where I felt he could walk to safety. I carefully lowered the bucket to the ground and he got out and walked to the trail.
I looked back at the spot where we had lifted out of and it was fully torched. I do not believe there were any other good options. The ground he was on was a carpet of dead bug killed trees, the fire was very intense and I`m not sure that even with a fire shelter deployed that the outcome would have been good. I am glad he had the courage to climb into the bucket and relieved that no harm has come to my ground contract.”
The video below shows something that I didn’t think was possible — fighting a brush fire with flappers. I have used them on grass and leaf litter fires, but never imagined that they could be an effective tool on a brush fire. However in this video which shows firefighters in Spain, they have the assistance of water drops from a helicopter.
It is an interesting video that features a helicopter-based wildland firefighting crew. Here is the description that is on YouTube, translated from Spanish by Google Translate:
Diary of a firefighter
A brief tour of the work of the fire fighters of BRIF (reinforcement Brigades forest fire) from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment.
MAGRAMA currently has ten BRIF service during summer campaigns, distributed all over the country, and five smaller BRIF during the winter-spring season, in the north and west of the peninsula during the winter also BRIF perform preventive tasks ranging from cleaning up tracks controlled burning. Their bases are located in areas of high fire risk or high forest wealth that must be protected. At the same time, seeking to achieve strategic locations by helicopter anywhere in the State within a reasonable time.
The video also has some footage of a fire whirl or fire tornado, however it is much smaller than some of the others we have reported on. But still, I would not want to be standing next to it.
