Hello JohnA,
Thanks very much for your great posts, and even more so for the great work that you and your company do. I wish that the USFS would develop an interest in achieving even a passing glance in the direction of sanity and coherence in terms of their wildfire fighting approach, but that appears to be far too much to ask. I suspect it will take another bad fire season with thousands of homes lost and hundreds dead before the public will really put some serious pressure on the USFS for real change.
I'm glad to hear that Rep. Rohrahacher and Rep. Weldon are still fighting the good fight. My apologies if I spoke presumptuously....it was a reflection of my overall disheartened attitude over this whole situation and of the sense of foreboding I feel regarding the upcoming fire season this year. I hope that they will be able to help set things right.
Re the TV broadcast, I'm wondering if there's any way that you can host a video clip of that TV event at your site, perhaps as an MPEG or AVI file that people can download? I don't live anywhere near Colorado and it looks like the only option that the TV station provides is for people to purchase a thirty dollar videotape from them.
I'm sure that you would have many people eager to see that footage all over the world, especially in light of the recent retirement of the bulk of the USFS firefighting fleet.
Thanks again for contributing your posts and I hope that you will continue to keep us updated :-)
Believe me, if we had this clip, we would post it
to the website. We don't expect to have it (format
unknown) until Monday. I expect we will be seeing
more from ABC on this matter. ABC left no trace of
the story behind at DenverChannel; not even a writeup.
Bear in mind that the Russians were in Colorado recently
on one of 100 NATO-Russia exercises scheduled for
this year, 20 of these exercises in Russia alone, and
that this coming week, US military forces will be
training with the Russians in Moscow.
Note from our rebuttal that we recommend hosting
the waterbomber at a US military base for a variety
of reasons, not the least of which is that it is
a good fit with MAFFS.
You don't have to imagine a MAFFS/C-130 fit with
EMERCOM/Ilyushin. I have a picture of what that
may look like right here: http://www.desastres.org/ger/global/photomedia/17.jpg
Perhaps somebody with computer skills can post this
as a picture here and not as a URL.
