Replies

First, why write all this? Because the lack of airplanes looks to me like another oblabla amateur hour mess.

I’m in Texas. We just about burned down last year. Thank goodness this year is turning out better so far.

There are a lot of different stories about tankers and forest fire fighting. There is even more confusion it seems than there are stories. The firefighters know their business though. I’m not so sure about the people that manage them though.

I think our biggest problem is that nobody realized just how bad things were here. I also wonder frankly if there was also some political punishment by the oblabla administration since we are a RED state. The disaster declaration took an awfully long time to get and we were in very very bad way long before it came. You can’t get the big guns in until that disaster declaration comes.

Once it came though stuff came in from as far away as Idaho. We got the biggest baddest BLM brush trucks they had. It was like the professionals knew how bad things were and were just waiting for orders. They came in a flood when released.

We learned a lot about aerial tankers and the DC-10, the only large tanker operating in the U.S. last year we were told, was our savior. That and about 1,500 men and women from all across the U.S. who came to our little town and labored in 105 degree sweltering heat. Congressman McCaul and a few others managed to go against the grain and get us our help and the tanker. We are in Kevin Brady’s district but we never saw or heard a dang thing from him. I think he is actually deceased and they just have a stuffed dummy of him in his office. We were losing until the big plane arrived. The Blackhawks and the Air Tractors just couldn’t handle the big blow-ups.

Here is what we learned about aerial tankers:

1. The USAF built a whole bunch of modules to load in C-130s but red tape of some sort also kept them from being used here in Texas, see this article of just this week. Great idea but somebody forgot the logistics or something. It isn’t very clear what the reason is that they can’t be used. You would think it would just come as a package ready to go. The other story is that these planes do not fly until all the USFS commercial resources are dried up. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/14/as-wildfires-rage-modern-tanker-planes-sought/

2. The article talks about P2Vs and accidents... this is a red herring. The accidents have taken place and it put the old outfit at Greybull, Wyo. (Hawkins and Powers) pretty much out of business way back in 2004

3. Here is the biggie. Aerounion, who operates the largest tanker fleet in the US, didn’t get their contract that they have had for decades renewed. Seems the owner is a Republican and USFS decided that their airplanes don’t meet some safety restrictions. That is one story. It is a big mess. AeroUnion operates a fleet of Lockheed Electras. Same airplane the Navy just retired from submarine hunting. The loss of this contract really put aerial firefighting in a bad bind. Aerounion is trying to stay in business. I don’t know their current status. http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/01/17/aero-union-is-appealing-the-cancellation-of-their-air-tanker-contract/

According to Wikipedia Aerounion may not be squeaky clean but neither is the USFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Union#Airtanker_scandal

4. The mess about not having facilities to load tankers is BS as well. The logistics lady for the DC-10 got it set up at Bergstrom since it was near the Bastrop fire and kept it going round the clock. There are modular mixing units. The DC-10 is operated by 10 Tanker Air Carrier out of Victorville, Ca.

This is a summary of the air tankers that operate in the US and Canada: http://www.air-and-space.com/Tankers.htm

These guys saved individual houses by doing a 1-2-3 drop and boxing the house in with fire retardant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njZnMAofwg&feature=related

The USAF and ANG guys would be happy to fly meaningful missions instead of just burning holes in the sky. It just can’t be that hard to get and mix the retardant. It is just about 10% phosphate, 85% water and some stuff. It won’t hurt anything but fires. Everything comes up green where they drop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkvETSCq4Q&NR=1&feature=fvwp

The story of the Riley Road Fire is another story entirely. I needs to be a movie about people helping each other and a community pulling together against a task they had no idea about and getting the job done. The night FEMA and Red Cross got thrown out of our mess hall is one for the books. One retired Marine cooked B,L and D for as many as 500 firefighters off of a smoker trailer for almost 5 days until H.E.B. Grocers came to our rescue with their disaster kitchen. Just people took care of everything. They said what do you need? I’ll get it and dug in their pockets and got busy. We were on our own for days and thank God for the firefighters from USFS in Ca., State of NC, Georgia, Florida, Idaho and even up in Pennsylvania or New York we are told. For the first 4 days though it was volunteer fire departments, big and very small, from all over the State of Texas that held the line.

The Friday afternoon when the fire blew up and was about to burn over our command post was the turning point though. We prepared to be burned over. One pond, the Blackhawks and the DC-10 stopped the flames. Mostly it was the Blackhawks and the trucks and the firefighters though. How they got so much water out of that dried up pond nobody understands. I guess it may have been a miracle. It probably saved our town.

Good luck.