Free Republic

BIG SUR -- The fires that bedevil California took another ominous turn Thursday as a blaze near Goleta triggered more evacuations and authorities shut another 10 miles of Highway 1 along the flaming Big Sur coast. Mushrooming in size, the Goleta fire was declared a local emergency by Santa Barbara County officials. Because of its proximity to populated areas, it was also designated the top firefighting priority in a state currently plagued with a multitude of fires, some of them burning without intervention in remote areas. In Goleta, residents of more than 1,600 homes had been ordered to evacuate by...

TASWELL, Va., Feb. 12, 2008 – More than 120 Virginia National Guard soldiers went on state active duty yesterday to join in the battle against wildfires raging throughout the state. Virginia Army National Guard aviators Warrant Officer Aaron Trombley (left) and Chief Warrant Officer John Anderson (center) check the location of their water drop on a Virginia wildfire Feb. 11, 2008, near Tazewell, Va., with Dave Slack, Virginia Department of Forestry regional forester. Virginia National Guard photo  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. While a Virginia National Guard helicopter dumped 600-gallon buckets of water to help contain fires in...

Pilots Take On California Blazes With Powerful Aircraft By MICHAEL MILSTEIN   Wayne Lannin, a pilot with Helicopter Transport Services Inc., readies for a firefighting flight. (Photo by Michael Milstein)     OTAY MESA, Calif. — On California's border with Mexico, the furnacelike Harris Fire hopscotches ridgetops and cinders anything, including homes, in its path.Helicopter teams from Oregon are the first line of defense, sucking water from a lake and dumping it in air-raid style sweeps at the fire linThese chopper teams lead in this risky kind of work, as successfully navigating forests with choppers derives from logging experience in...

SACRAMENTO -- Although Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has improved its readiness for big blazes since the last major round of wildfires hit California in 2003, the state still confronted this week's infernos without all the equipment its experts had advised. A special panel appointed by Schwarzenegger recommended in 2004 that California buy 150 more firetrucks for emergencies. So far only 19 have been ordered. They are scheduled to arrive in time for next year's fire season. The state has not replaced its Vietnam-era helicopters, although the Blue Ribbon Fire Commission had warned that many were nearing the end of their...

FRESNO, Calif - Crews hoping for wet weather to help combat lightning-sparked wildfires in California faced a new threat Wednesday: too much rain. Flash flood warnings were posted for much of the eastern Sierra Nevada on Wednesday as the National Weather Service predicted a 40 percent chance of rain over a cluster of wildfires in Plumas National Forest. Fire officials worried that crews battling a 22,000-acre blaze about 125 miles northeast of Sacramento could face mudslides on burned-over slopes. That blaze was only about 20 percent contained late Tuesday, after afternoon lightning sparked some new spot fires on the parched...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

Federal officials on Friday were tracking 60 large, active fires that were burning more than 1 million acres, or more than 1,500 square miles, across the West. The states in the region with the most number of fires included Idaho, Nevada, and Montana, according to the Web site of the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center, composed of various federal agencies that coordinate to battle wildfires. In Idaho, fires had burned more than 231,000 acres, or 360 square miles, the center reported. State officials toured fire camps to survey the damage -- as well as to tell federal firefighting crews here,...

WINTHROP, Wash., Sep. 3, 2006 -- Task Force Blaze is returning home to Fort Lewis, Wash., today, following a three-week deployment to fight wildfires in the state’s north-central region. Spc. Aldo Gonzalez lights a fire as part of a burnout operation. Gonzalez is one of 550 soldiers making up Task Force Blaze, which deployed to firelines Aug. 17 to assist civilian firefighters with containing the huge Tripod Complex fire near Winthrop, Wash. Gonzalez is an Avenger crew member assigned to 5th Battalion, 5th Air Defense Artillery Regiment, Fort Lewis, Wash. Photo by Patti Bielling  '(Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available....

As many Freepers know the C-130 firefighting aircraft were removed from service about 3 years ago. In their place the US Forest Service has patched together a mismash of smaller less effective aircraft for wildland fire fighting efforts. Most notable they are depending on DC-4's which are all ancient by any standards and Agri-cats which are small, along with the usual helicopter contigent. I live in Reno, NV and during the last five days we have had over 14 fires in Northern Nevada that are mostly raging out of control. Watching the Agri-cats try and stop a fire is a...

Coming soon to a wildfire near you: The next generation in airborne fire fighting. It is a converted 747-200. Instead of carrying passengers, the retired airliner has been outfitted with huge tanks capable of carrying 20,500 gallons of fire retardant roughly 7 times the amount carried by the largest air tankers in the current, aging fleet. Evergreen International of Oregon showed off its "supertanker" Tuesday in Boise. Its spent $40,000,000 converting the 747 and is now campaigning to get the Federal land management agencies to add it to their fire fighting arsenal. The Federal government is working out the details...

CAMP MABRY, Austin, Texas (Jan. 8, 2006) – Since the statewide disaster declaration by Gov. Rick Perry on 27 Dec, 2005, the Texas Army and Air National Guard have been working in coordination with the United Stated Forest Service and a number of other local, state and federal agencies. In total the Texas National Guard has been supporting the wildfire suppression with seven UH-60 Black Hawks from Austin, Brownwood and San Antonio, and four CH-47 Chinooks from Grand Prairie, along with three UH-60 Black Hawks with 18 crew members from Louisiana. On Dec. 28 two of the Texas Black Hawks...

U.S. Forest Service District Ranger Pam Brown and Joe Lowe, the state of South Dakota's top fighter of wildfires, were almost giddy Wednesday over what happened last Sunday during the Camp 5 forest fire near Deadwood

Tanker Aircraft That Crashed Near Walker was Former CIA Plane A federal investigator has revealed that some maintenance records for a C-130A firefighting aircraft that broke up in mid-air near Walker are missing, apparently because the plane flew spy missions for the CIA. George Petterson of the National Transportation Safety Board told The Associated Press the plane was used for a time as an electronic surveillance aircraft for the Central Intelligence Agency. Maintenance records from that period are unavailable. As a result, NTSB investigators cannot determine the flight history of the four-engine aircraft. The aircraft was used in fighting...

SEATTLE -- Since first taking off in 1969, Boeing 747s have carried 3.6 billion people and flown the equivalent of 74,000 round trips to the moon. (A) consideration is whether the large planes could fly low and slow enough to be used effectively against the kinds of fires that have raged across the West in recent years -- charring 60 million acres in the past decade, or an area the size of Oregon, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, based in Boise, Idaho.

FERNDALE -- Talk about fighting fire with fire. Crews fighting a smoky, stinky blaze in the dried crust of a 3-acre manure lagoon on a dairy farm finished smothering the flames yesterday with more of the same -- a blanket of wet cow poop. Desperate times called for desperate measures, said Assistant Fire Chief Larry Hoffman with Whatcom County Fire District No. 7. Hoffman received an earful of complaints about the smoke and odor as the fire burned for four days on the farm outside Ferndale, northwest of Bellingham. "We're not the most popular department in town," he said. "It's...

Just two years ago, the Hayman Fire roared through the Rockies, blackening 138,000 acres and destroying more than 130 homes. It cost roughly $240 million to fight. Did that fire have to grow to that size? Did that many homes have to burn? 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski has exposed a troubling trail of conflict and red tape inside the U.S. Forest Service. Earlier this month, after years of problems, the Forest Service grounded its fleet of air tankers. 7NEWS asks: has the government wasted taxpayer money on outdated, dangerous and underperforming aircraft while ignoring bigger, faster and newer technology? Twenty-three...

Stop calling firefighters "heroes." By Douglas Gantenbein Posted Friday, October 31, 2003, at 12:05 PM PT A cush job, most of the time When California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the state's catastrophic wildfires a few days ago, he uttered the phrase that now accompanies any blaze as surely as smoke: "The firefighters are the true heroes." It's understandable why he said that. As fires go, the California blazes are scary. They are moving incredibly quickly through dried brush and chaparral that practically explode when they ignite, threatening the life of any firefighter nearby. Steven L. Rucker, a 38-year-old firefighter and...

<p>The wildfires that blackened more than 1,200 square miles of Southern California this past week were not simply "acts of nature." For most of the 20th century, the Forest Service has failed to properly manage our national forests while treating fire as a virtual moral evil (the California fires are burning in or near four national forests). Unless these policies are reversed, fires that consume millions of acres and inflict billions of dollars in damage will become more and more common.</p>

A massive Russian jet capable of releasing more than 10,000 gallons of water in a single dump could help solve California's wildfire crisis, but the federal government continues to resist it, asserts two U.S. congressmen. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said at a news conference yesterday the Russian government repeatedly has offered the Ilyushin-76 'Waterbomber' – reportedly capable of dousing a fire the size of 10 football fields – to the U.S. Forest Service for its use but has been rebuffed each time. Rohrabacher spokesman Aaron Lewis told WorldNetDaily the federal government's response amid wildfires that have...