Senators request PPE and testing for wildland firefighters

Oil Creek Fire near Newcastle, Wyoming
Developing a strategy at the Oil Creek Fire near Newcastle, Wyoming, July 1, 2012. On the right is Pennington County Fire Coordinator Denny Gorton. Photo by Bill Gabbert.

Three U.S. Senators sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence today urging the Coronavirus Task Force to help secure personal protective equipment (PPE) and COVID-19 testing kits for firefighters and federal law enforcement personnel tasked with wildfire response.

Below are excerpts from the letter crafted by Senators Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Joe Manchin, West Virginia; and Tom Udall, New Mexico.

“Peak fire season comes closer every day. However, it is our understanding that the supply of PPE in the Federal interagency inventories does not meet the expected need, and firefighters are having trouble acquiring additional PPE on their own. We also understand that many of the available testing methods may not be conducive for wide scale use.

“We ask that resources be used to develop and support an effective system of COVID-19 testing tailored to protecting firefighter health and maintaining the cohesiveness of federal wildland fire response.

“Wildland fires often occur in rural and remote areas, and already-taxed rural and tribal health services should not be expected to have the resources to manage COVID-19 cases coming from an active fire camp or when crews arrive in their hometowns after demobilizing from a fire.

“Firefighters and fire support staff put their lives on the line every day to protect us, and we need to make every effort to protect them from this virus, so they can safely fight fires and return to their families when the fires are out.”

Murkowski is Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies. Manchin is the Ranking Member of the committee and Udall is Ranking Member on the Appropriations Subcommittee.

Four senators urge federal officials to publish fire training materials in Spanish

Incident Response Pocket GuideOn Tuesday four U.S. Senators signed a letter urging federal officials to resume publication of wildfire training materials in Spanish as well as English.

The letter from Senators Ron Wyden, Jeff Merkley, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris follows a report that the National Wildfire Coordinating Group no longer publishes training materials in Spanish for wildland fire crews.

“Given that a significant number of these brave wildland fire crews speak Spanish as their native language, it would be wiser and safer to provide bilingual training materials,” the senators wrote in their letter to National Wildfire Coordinating Group Chairman Garth Fisher. “The alternative is to risk danger and harm by requiring that all firefighters rapidly attempt to understand training materials that are only available in English.”

The senators urged the NWCG to begin producing bilingual versions of key manuals like the Incident Response Pocket Guide.

“Firefighters must be provided with clearly understandable, updated training materials so that they can operate safely and respond to wildfires expeditiously and efficiently,” the senators wrote.

 

Senators want more timber sales to protect urban areas

Stage Hill Fire
Stage Hill Fire
Stage Hill Fire near Cascade, SD, June 16, 2012. Photo by Bill Gabbert

The six US Senators in Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota have signed a letter sent to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recommending an increase in the number of timber sales on national forests in areas prone to wildfires. In the letter dated November 8 the senators said overgrown forests, drought, vast stretches of trees killed by beetles, and more people living in fire zones have left the West at a critical juncture. They urged the US Forest Service to conduct more forest thinning near critical infrastructure and in areas where urban areas are up against forests.

The letter was signed by Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado; Mike Enzi and John Barrasso of Wyoming; and Tim Johnson and John Thune of South Dakota.

Secretary of Agriculture responds to Senators’ concerns about air tankers

DC10 dropping
Tanker-911, a DC 10 airtanker, drops retardant on the Wallow fire above Greer, AZ, as the Del Rosa Hotshots wait in a safety zone, June 11, 2011. USFS photo by Kari Greer

The Secretary of Agriculture said in a letter to congress that large air tankers, such as the P2V, are often more effective and provide faster response than very large air tankers like the 747 and DC-10.

Wildfire Today has obtained a copy of a letter that Thomas Vilsack, the Secretary of Agriculture, sent to Senator Lisa Murkowski and other senators who expressed concerns about the management of the federal air tanker fleet. Mr. Vilsack’s letter, dated March 29, 2012, is a very late response to a letter that the senators wrote on February 10, 2012. We can speculate on the timing of Mr. Vilsack’s response, but it comes shortly after a highly publicized letter dated March 27, 2012 that Senators Murkowski,Jeff Bingaman, Ron Wyden, and Dianne Feinstein wrote to the Government Accountability Office requesting an “independent third-party review….of the Forest Service and the Interior agencies’ efforts since 2002 to identify the number and types of firefighting aircraft they believe are needed to respond to wildland fires”. Some of the topics the senators asked the GAO to consider in the March 29 letter included:

  • whether the methodologies the agencies used to evaluate the number and types of aircraft needed were appropriate in meeting current and anticipated wildland fire challenges;
  • whether the methodologies the agencies used to evaluate the best approaches for meeting these needs were comprehensive and inclusive;
  • what range of alternatives the agencies considered, as well as those they did not consider, in assessing their needs and the ways to meet them.

Mr. Vilsack, in his March 29 letter, told the senators that the solicitation for the “next generation” of large air tankers which closed on February 15, 2012:

…should provide up to three next generation large airtankers this year and up to ten additional airtankers in 2013, contingent upon private industry’s ability to develop, test, and gain approval of these aircraft.

He also said the Forest Service is collaborating this year with the Department of the Interior on two contracts to provide water scooper aircraft. For the last few years the DOI has contracted for two CL-215 water scoopers.

Mr. Vilsack’s letter places the blame on the state of Texas for not deploying very large air tankers to “the Texas fire situation” due to the “high cost” of the aircraft.

Here is another quote from Mr. Vilsack’s letter:

Large air tankers are often more effective and provide faster response than the very large airtankers. This is because the large air tanker fleet can be deployed across a broader geographic area. The current airtanker base system has been developed to minimize the distance to a fire from the base, with average airtnaker mission flights that are generally less than 50 minutes, round trip. Costs increase and efficiency is reduced when airtankers must fly longer distances, regardless of their speed.

As you noted, the draft RAND report of July 2010, which was a preliminary draft and not the final report, recommended that field evaluaiton of water scoopers and very large airtankers be done. The Forest Service has begun the Aerial Firefighting Effective Use and Efficiency Study, which will evaluate water scoopers, large airtankers, very large airtankers, and helicopters.

It is interesting that Mr. Vilsack says this additional study, the sixth air tanker study in the last 17 years, will evaluate very large air tankers after they were specifically excluded from the 2010 study by the Rand Corporation which cost the USFS $840,092. The solicitation for the new study mentions large air tankers, but says nothing about very large air tankers:

Define the utility and operational parameters of large airtankers (LAT), heavy helicopters (defined as Type 1), and water scoopers in accomplishing the variety of aviation missions supporting wildfire management…

When you only have 11 air tankers, like last year, requiring that they be widely scattered across the United States making rapid initial attack only rarely possible, it is hard to support Mr. Vilsack’s characterization that very large air tankers are less effective than smaller air tankers. SOME additional air tankers, even if they can’t reload at every air tanker base, are better than none. Then there is the speed factor. The 11 P2Vs under contract now cruise at 225 mph while a 747 and DC-10 cruise at more than 550 mph. And the P2Vs carry 2,000 to 2,400 gallons, while the very large air tankers can hold five to ten times more, 11,600 to 20,000 gallons, requiring fewer trips back to an air tanker base to reload.

And I’m not saying very large air tankers are the answer to our air tanker shortage, but beggars can’t be choosers — we only have 25% of the fleet we had 10 years ago. Some of the money saved by not contracting for those additional 33 air tankers could be put toward alternatives, even if they are expensive. Air tankers don’t put out fires, firefighters on the ground do, but the very large air tankers could be one tool in the firefighters tool box, as part of a mix of aircraft including helicopters, single engine air tankers, scooper air tankers, and large air tankers.