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.
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
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.
