AP labels the 2012 Colorado wildfires worst in state history in this story.
My friend and fellow climate skeptic, nationally syndicated radio host Lars Larson, asks some pointed and pertinent questions about what appears to be some of the most idiotic policy ever devised by government. Since we’ve been covering some of the folly of trying to link the fire to global warming, I thought this government folly with trying to put it out would go along with the issues discussed here. – Anthony
He writes in an email to me from Friday:
I have new questions rolling around in my head every day but there are at least four things I know for sure this morning. This year the U.S. Forest Aervice will spend north of a billion dollars fighting forest fires across America. Billions of dollars worth of trees owned by the American people will go up in flames. And a $50 million dollar airplane that could put those fires out faster sits on the ground in Arizona because the U.S. Forest Service refuses to hire Evergreen Aviation. Now you may be saying, “There must be a good reason”. That’s what I thought, but then I remembered that government is capable of multibillion dollar stupidity on a daily basis. The Forest Service offers no explanation whatsoever.
And evergreen aviation points out that their 747 supertanker fire fighting plane has been hired by Mexico and Israel to fight fires and earned high marks. It drops ten times as much water as the biggest forest service tanker in use…and does it at half the cost per gallon. It’s big enough and fast enough to cover fires anywhere in America…and the forest service refuses to use it…and it’s your forests that are going up in flames.
Today’s statement from Evergreen Aviation about why the U.S. Forest service refuses to use its 747 flying supertanker firefighting plane.
http://www.evergreenaviation.com/pdf/Supertanker_Statement_062912.pdf
==========================================================
Date: 6/29/12
Evergreen International Aviation Statement Concerning the Supertanker
We felt compelled to release this statement due to the overwhelming amount of calls we have received concerning the availability of the Evergreen Supertanker. We at Evergreen are saddened by the fire devastation now taking place in many Western US states. For over 60 years, we have supported the US Forest Service in its important mission to battle and control fires, and it is our desire to continue this rich history of service. While our helicopters continue to work fires for the State of Alaska under State contracts, unfortunately, our Boeing 747 Supertanker Very Large Air Tanker (VLAT) aircraft awaits activation with the US Forest Service.
We have never been told why we have not been activated by the US Forest Service, so we can only speculate as to why we face this outcome:
1. We were offered a Call-When-Needed (CWN) contract a few years ago by the US Forest
Service (proving our technical viability), but we were never called into action resulting in
a multi-million dollar loss to our company as we were required to maintain and have
flight crew available should we be called. The only contract that will sustain a VLAT
program is an Exclusive-Use contract, which provides an income stream to sustain the
program even if the asset is not utilized. We invested over $50M to develop this asset in
the firm belief that we could better control fires as we proved in Israel and Mexico under
CWN contracts that we could afford to offer at the time.
2. There have been recent changes to the US Forest Service procurement policies. Today,
only small businesses are eligible for contract awards concerning air tanker assets;
Evergreen is not a small business and, therefore, is excluded from consideration for any
award.
3. The US Forest Service’s specification for Next Generation Air Tanker aircraft limits tank
size to 5,000 gallons. The Supertanker’s tanks hold about 20,000 gallons, which is
considered outside the USFS specification. The USFS just awarded contracts to four
small businesses with aircraft equipped with these smaller tanks, and excluded the
Evergreen Supertanker. Since World War II, tank capacities have been in the 3,000 to
5,000 gallon range, yet we continue to face the growing threat from mega fires today. We
believe the Supertanker represents an overwhelming response to this growing threat.
Please contact your state representatives in Washington DC to demand an examination of their current procurement policies concerning VLAT aircraft. The US Forest Service says it best: “Only YOU can prevent wildfires.”
==============================================================
Here’s Lars Friday interview with Evergreens VP:
Here’s Lars interview with Evergreen three weeks ago:
Here are videos of tanker that could be fighting fires in Colorado and elsewhere…that have killed Americans, burned houses, destroyed public property and timber
Where’s the President?
Check out my new page and “like” me at The Lars Larson Show
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There’s no national security or even economic trade secrets in this situation, are there? Why not put the data on the fire out on the ‘net and allow these fellows at Evergreen to point out exactly where their plane could be used and how it would improve results. If they can’t do it, then maybe the USFS people aren’t calling for a reason. If they can identify large numbers of potential runs complete with figures on how it would result in better fire reduction, that gives lots of ammunition to those who want to change things.
Peter W. says:
June 30, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Ultimately, aircraft do NOT extinguish fires. They are only ever a supporting tool for the crews on the ground….. and big fires are only ever controlled when the weather moderates. Therefore we need to retain a reasonable level of cynicism over media claims that one piece of kit will make all the difference. Air-tankers are good, but not magic.
Excellent assessment, Peter. Air assets in firefighting, as in the military, exist solely to support the ground guys.
Evergreen should just do the job gratis. They would save lives, property, and get a lot of gratitude and good publicity.
The obama administration would prolly sue them though.
Larry Ledwick (hotrod) says:
June 30, 2012 at 9:42 pm
It gets to be sort of an aerial ballet as it is keeping all the air craft properly coordinated over a burn.
A controller I yakked with after one fire told me it was like directing “Swan Lake” with chainsaws.
This has all happened before! In Yellowstone National Park, in the mid-1980’s. Stupid National Park fire suppression policies, and refusal to thin the undergrowth.
See “Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park” by Alston Chase.
Chase’s title appropriately captures the quasi-religious self-delusion of “our betters” who set up these conditions.The villain in that crime was one Aldo Leopold, an environmentalist/professor from…University of Wisconsin. His special area of expertise seems to have been… “Environmental Ethics”!
“OH, THE HUMANITY!”
I have known a few golfers from the narcissism generation in my life. They hate ticks, so they’d probably be content to let them fry in the bush. If they have beliefs in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and perceive the wildfires to aid the fear to others enabling easier control, well that’d be all the better! Hmm?
Evergreen could certain start with this map on inciweb.
Earlier I meant to include a link to aerial photos of burned houses with some near burned forest but many that just seem to have caught fire from the house next door.
I suspect that most of the 32,000 evacuees did not live close enough to forest or scrubland for their houses to have picked up fire directly from those sources. And their housing developments weren’t short-grass prairie anymore, either.
I know this with certainty for the house I lived in that was in an evac area, anyway. If it had burned, it just plain would have been because a suburban neighborhood had caught fire and was burning house-to-house.
Australia has a similar problem with government stupidity. The Greens have passed a law prohibiting underbrush to be cleared around property, to help the indigenous animals. The local trees are eucalyptus which burn like a petrol fire and the underbrush helps to extend the fire rapidly and burn houses and kill people.
Arizona based company and the Feds have it in for AZ and all connected?
McMinnville, Oegon, per their website.
^^^ Oregon
=//=//=//=//=
Well, the feds do pretty much have a monopoly over fires in National Forests and on military property. (The Air Force Academy was part of the Waldo Canyon fire’s evacuated area.) The 747 was used in California, but I suspect there was little or no federal land involved.
Also, the state doesn’t have the authority to act for these people – they’re the responsibility of the cities and towns that they live in or else the counties if they’re on unincorporated land.
The exceptions would be the few people living on state land. Students in dormitories at state universities, for example. And bigger issues have seen intervention on flimsier pretexts. But all the agencies involved are working hard to cooperate within an Incident Command System.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
The government’s contracting is broken. The rules make no sense any more for most procurements. I’ve seen contract awards for as little as $499–obviously not something worth the contracting process. Contact your reps!
Gerry Dorrian says:
June 30, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Scarface has a good point: crises are good for causes. If the worst wildfires in Colorado’s history didn’t exist, the AGW lot would have to invent them.
——————————————————————
The “worst fires in Colorado history” are not this fire, or the 2002 fire. CAGW proponents like to use their personal ignorance as defining history, and so they “invent” their own history.
This fire was far worse.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/massive-1898-fire-in-colorado/
Also, in regard to CAGW in Colorado, well, it appears there is no CAGW in Colorado.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/jeff-masters-making-up-statistics-in-colorado/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/phil-jones-shows-no-trend-in-colorado-temperatures-since-1850/
…there is another aspect behind the scenes that contribute to the size and scope of these fires. The aviation group who hire the pilots to fly these fire fighting missions take their sweet time getting started. Bigger the fire, the more they fly, the more money in the bank. Pretty sad.
Not sure what the question is?? The C-130 is a marvelous airframe I don’t care who flies it. One of its major advantages is it is an airframe with a very long history of deployment, that means it is a mature design and well understood. It is also still in production so the part system is not a scavenger hunt for rare bits and pieces. If the Civilian contractors had a fleet of them I am sure they would make good use of the birds. I do care about “when” the military flies any slurry missions, as noted above as a matter of good government policy, the government should never usurp civilian enterprise.
Yes modern zoning is the cause of most of those housing losses in subdivisions. Building codes and home owner association restrictions regarding acceptable roofing materials, and permitted spacing between adjacent structures (fire break width between buildings) are often the root cause of large subdivision losses, not wild land management practice.
Many subdivisions in modern Metro areas have home spacing much closer than was the norm 30+ years ago so the developers the tax authority can squeeze and extra few homes into the subdivision (also one of the reasons for the insane winding streets with lots of cul-de-sacs rather than an efficient grid layout of streets.)
The 12 -20 foot separation between homes which you see in some of the subdivisions will only prevent fire propagation from one property to the next if a fire fighter is standing there with a hose protecting the exposure of the neighbor house from the radiant heat and direct fire contact from home to home. In winds gusting 30-60 mph those narrow fire break spacings are just about useless.
Larry
Harold Pierce Jr says:
June 30, 2012 at 8:13 pm
High heat from fire is required to melt the resin so the scales of the cone can open whereupon the seeds drop straight to the ground.
=================
Pine is an incredibly flammable tree due to the high resin content. It makes one wonder if pine trees don’t use fire as a survival advantage. By encouraging fire, they get rid of the competition, making room for their own seeds to take root.
Isn’t fire fighting ultimately self-defeating? The more you stop fires, the more fuel builds up, the more likely you will get larger and larger fires, the less likely you will be able to stop the fire.
If anything should we not be setting fires when conditions are right, rather than waiting for lightning when conditions are wrong? Done correctly doesn’t fire remove the fuel build up while leaving the larger trees intact?
If that is true (entirely possible) the solution is to properly apply the military assets.
If the incident commander says he needs 6 aircraft on the fire, and 2 are on site and 4 civilian contractor aircraft are on route but won’t be operational for 36 hours. If the local military assets can be on station and operational sooner, activate them and let them deploy until the civilian contractor is on station and fully operational, then stand them down as back up.
It would be interesting to see if the Forest Service contracts for air tanker service include a provision for timely response, and what the service level agreement is for operational activity after a call out is made.
Having worked in emergency management I would caution how ever that many times there are logistic concerns that complicate what on the surface would be simple decisions. You are not fighting just one fire but a complex of fires over several states. Each day they evaluate risks and asset needs and try to deploy limited assets to best service all the fires. You also have the logistics hurdles regarding how long it takes to get an asset like the military tankers in service and on station after their are activated. It takes time for National Guard pilots to get off work at their civilian jobs, report for duty, get briefed, get all the necessary approvals, have ground crews configure the air craft, fuel and fly them to their destination. Then they need to get briefed and prepped to fly a mission once there. Sometimes those lead times are long enough that they would “just” begin to be operational at the same time or even later than civilian assets which are already moving in that direction.
Sometimes no matter what you do either option gets results about the same time in the future.
Larry
TG McCoy (Douglas DC) says:
June 30, 2012 at 4:52 pm
First the USFS decided that the Tankers Should be more modern, i.e. Jet powered.
========
Why would anyone want to use jets instead of turbo props for fire fighting? At low speed don’t the larger, slower turning props have an advantage over the smaller, high speed fans?
Common Sense: “My brother says that the entire central part of the mountains around Silverthorne is completely beetle kill. If it goes, it will be the largest fire anyone has ever seen.”
I was curious so I googled “Silverthorne Co” and looked at the area on Google maps. If you back off the resolution a bit you can easily see brownish mountainsides in all directions from the city, and greener ones farther out. Scanning in, you can easily see dead pine logs laying on the mountainsides like toothpicks, no doubt numbering in the thousands. If those mountains were private property, I doubt such waste would ever have occurred, and the mountainsides might even still be green, though perhaps someone more knowledgeable about logging in the west would disagree? Incidentally, it looks like each mountainside of brown trees is about 4 to 6 square miles on the map, and there are several brown mountainsides visible around Silverthorne.
One further comment: This article, and particularly the comments accompanying it, is a good example of why I regularly visit WUWT. The articles are usually good, but the comments are, in the main, truly excellent, because people with real life experience in almost any issue discussed in here manage to show up and educate the rest of us, and each other. It’s the back and forth in the comments that puts WUWT at the top of the heap when it comes to getting an accurate assessment of the article topic. As an example, I suspect that, before the comments cease, “someone more knowledgeable about logging in the west” will address my point about private ownership as it would apply to use of the forest resources.
Denver Post has an article on the fire system and efforts to update it.
http://www.denverpost.com/wildfires/ci_20981962
I’ll quickly provide some info on factors:
– there are other large tankers, incuding DC-10s and http://www.martinmars.com (which was used well in the fires in Mexico south of Del Rio TX, picking up water from a reservoir near Del Rio).
– the tanker must be able to safely maneuver to hit the hot spot of the fire. The first Mars tanker crashed due poor piloting strategy, the first Tanker10 brushed through tree tops on one run. – Larger tankers may be able to simply put water everywhere, perhaps not viewed as efficient use of money. When Western Forest Products used the Mars against a fire in the dificult “Sooke potholes” terrain west of Victoria BC two Mars made repeated drops then went into a holding pattern while smaller aircraft like helicopters hit remaining hotspots (probably using buckets on a long line to stay above the narrow canyon)
– similarly, ground fire fighters may manually address remaining embers and such if safe to do so (presumably that’s who the S-61 helicopter were getting off the mountain before dark, when it crashed in the Chico CA area, an especially bad accident due number of people on board).
– good spotting is essential to effectiveness and safety, the spotter aircraft crew determine safe routes for the tanker drop. The current owner of the one operational Mars tanker uses a fast helicopter, equipped with IR and datalink, and always in radio contact with the Mars.
– as for jets vs turboprop, size is a factor for some fires, the DC-10 and 747 are much larger than the C-130 (which got a bad reputation with USFS due inadequate maintenance)
Many factors for optimum use, with fires near homes such as now in CO and in 2003 near Kelowna BC we’d like authorities to throw everything they can at the fire.
Larry you hit on a point and a problem with MAFFS deployment. It takes about 20 or so personnel
to deploy each MAFFS Aircraft. Not saying that’s wrong, just the way it is. As one who has been there, Yes you have to preform on your contract.Back when there were civilian contractors flying C-130A’s (there were reasons they were parked,btw.) A 130 crew consisted of 3-2 Pilots,and a flight engineer. The reason is the aircraft was already tanked and the pressurized system of the MAFFS Unit is more maintenance intensive.
I have to comment on the C-130A Back in the 90’s there were several Civilian contractors who
used C-130A ‘s provided by the government. The 130A’s had a big problem. The wing spars.
Or really the lack thereof. There were continual problems with this aspect of the aircraft.
The Crash of T-130 in California in 2000 was the final straw..I knew the Caption well(Steve Waas.).I had been in that plane many times back in the day… There were mods and inspections,
but the operator had avoided them by “cooking the books, ”
Also there was a trumped up controversy about the Operators of the C-130 and the ahem,CIA.
Sam Donaldson et.al. reveled in it and even the honest operators like Butler and TBM were
painted with the same brush. I even was accused by a lefty in my home town at the time, of
working for the CIA.something I did nothing about-at least they left me alone….
My point- When this whole thing happened the USFS and others proceeded to strip
all contracts from the 130 operators good and bad, no questions of performance of maintenance.
just gone.This was done without any look at who was responsible and who was not. Now
after a certain operator lost the USFS contract their C-130A’s are now flying in experimental
programs at Edwards.
Was this not the same tactic used by the US government during the Gulf oil leak?
Refusing to call in Dutch skimmer boats and the biggest skimmer in the world?
Is there a pattern here?
Bill
My bro is active CalFire flying the twin engine hueys running buckets on longlines. The consensus among his circle of wildland firefighters and pilots is that big jets cannot go slow enough nor low enough to drop their load with enough precision or concentration to do any good. Cali has deployed the DC10 (The Govenator knew how to fake heroic gestures for the rubes and punters) which was great for PR and completely ineffective on the ground. Water from these supertankers completely evaporated before hitting the ground like virga.
The real issue here is that the forest circus is famous for creating tinderboxes, then letting the fires get horribly out of control no matter who is the Prez.