“A $250K per day charge for the plane can wipe out the bureaucrat’s budget very quickly.”
What is really at stake is the big money from large fires. Whole cities spring up near large fires. The Supertanker can be a silver bullet and stop a fire cold. It could easily pay for it’s self by replacing 20 or 30 drops by smaller aircraft. One of the aircraft currently used in fire fighting is a converted crop duster. Almost a joke to watch them work.
Well, that's jobs provided, right?
Reminded me of an anecdote of how Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in China back in the Seventies or Eighties. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren't there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman's response: "Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?"
Indeed. Why not just pay individuals with drones to drop sugar packet sized quantities of flame retardant?
“What is really at stake is the big money from large fires. Whole cities spring up near large fires. “
Then let those affected cities, counties and states pay for it.
Fire and the Forest
We often regard fire as an agent of destruction, but to Nature, it is an agent of necessary change. Fire changes one form of energy to another. Green plants change light energy to chemical energy, fire changes chemical energy to heat energy.
Fire breaks down complex organic molecules to smaller ones - the same thing that occurs when we digest food. The protein in a piece of meat cannot be used directly by the human body to build cells and tissues. We must eat the meat before large protein molecules can be broken down to smaller amino acid molecules, recycled through our bodies, and rebuilt into human tissue. When a fire changes a log to ash, nutrients bound in chemical compounds are released and changed to a form that is more water soluble. In this soluble form, nutrients percolating into the soil are again usable in the growth of other plants.
Fire also effects a more visible change. Ash and nutrients occupy less space than trees and shrubs. By creating openings in forests, fire changes space relationships. Species that remain in these openings may be fire tolerant. Other species that cannot withstand fire are eliminated. Thus, fire changes both the composition and the density of the forest. This change will remain for several years and affect the fuels available during the next burning cycle.
Scientists who study plant and animal relationships tell us that forests in this part of the country owe their existence and continued presence to a long history of periodic fires. This association of some tree and shrub species with fire is an example of adaptation.
Forests in Florida have existed here for at least 12,000 years. During that time, thousands of fires occurred annually. Plant species that survived these fires did so because of special features or characteristics they possessed. Plant species lacking these features were eliminated from frequently burned areas; their distribution has been confined to areas where fires are less likely to occur, moist areas such as bays, swamps, and creek bottoms.
Fires, like many natural events, are somewhat cyclic. The cycle is governed by conditions such as general climate, topography, soil type, existing vegetation, and other factors. Accordingly, the repeatability of the cycle varies. Before 1900, fire-susceptible areas probably had fires every 3 to 10 years. In areas less likely to burn, the cycle may repeat every 10 to 100 years. Cyclic, recurrent fires of the past 12,000 years were important agents of selection in determining plant species and distribution in Florida.