In Colorado wildfires, 'worst in state history', why won't the Forest Service use the biggest firefighting tool available?

As with the Gulf oil incident, why let a crisis go to waste?

Actually the DC-10 isn’t bad it does have limitations but for laying line_if they use Retardant_
it’s great for that and frees up smaller aircraft. But, as been discussed it is not perfect.
Perfect would be a DC-7 with PW-100’s…

Well after this discussion, today’s events over at the Jeffco Airtanker base are sort of funny.
I just got back from there and the Canadian Convair 580’s which have been in use from the beginning on the High Park fire up near Ft. Collins are no where to be seen (at least for the last couple hours) —– but the day after the Media event for the President in Csprings, guess what ?
I just watched 3 ANG C-130’s load with slurry and depart for the north (presumably for the High Park Fire). They were aircraft from both the Wyoming ANG and the North Carolina ANG.
I’m sure many of us will read into this some political posturing after the Presidents visit.
Larry

Ed Dahlgren says:
June 30, 2012 at 11:56 pm
Gary Hladik says:
June 30, 2012 at 7:35 pm
…
Indeed, there may be very good reasons for not using the VLAT, but if so the Forest Service should be able to explain them.
Well, maybe they’ll get around to it; I’m not going to stress over it. I saw something somewhere (can’t recall at the moment) that said Evergreen had wanted an exclusive-use contract from the Forest Service – which I think meant having a plane and crew ready 24 hours a day – and the USFS wouldn’t agree. Could be a valid cost-saving argument if still true.

I suggest you re-read the letter from Evergreen. A $50 million cost to develop the 747 air tanker – highly skilled and specialized pilots and crew required to operate. Extensive maintenance and inspections required by government to operate.
It costs huge sums to keep any of these firefighting aircraft operational and available, let alone the 747 program.
Yet the idiots at the USFS making the contract decisions refused to provide any financial minimum guarantee. A “Call when needed” contract is ridiculous for an asset with this kind of cost base.
The Evergreen tanker uses a pressurized system to disperse retardant – it can moderate the dispersal from high velocity to as they say “falling rain” – they can also do segmented drops – allowing one tank load to hit multiple spots. It is not as some claim a single 20,000 gallon 1/4 mile long drop.
The pressurized system also allows the aircraft to operate at a few hundred feet higher altitude – adding to its safety margin. This higher altitude drop capability also potentially allows for night drops and or in lower visibility.
Its 20,500 gal retard load capacity is the equivalent of operating the aircraft with a little more than 100 people on board – for an aircraft that holds as many as 600+. At 150,000 lbs under gross takeoff weight the aircraft has a considerable safety margin and significant increased performance.
With 20,500 gal load capacity (at appx 9lb per gal) and operating at 150,000 lbs below gross weight appears they should be able to carry appx 147,000 lbs of fuel. After taking out taxi (out and in), climb out (to estimated 15,000 feet) and descent – it looks like they would have appx 92,000 lbs of available “mission” fuel. If I got the correct numbers and calculated correctly this should give the 747 starting with a full 20,500 gal retardant load well over 3 hours flight time. I tried to be conservative in fuel calcs but if a lot of the time is in low speed high drag “drop” configuration air time could be somewhat less.
Regardless – a single 747 flight could make the same drops as 7 flights of the smaller aircraft.
I also think the high drop capacity could have been critical in attacking the Queens Canyon portion – which led to the loss of 340+ homes IN Colorado Springs. Reports show they knew this was a critical area and if fire breached the canyon it would make it in to the city. A couple high capacity 747 drops it seems could have been a significant benefit.
The alternative would seem to have been to heavily target the area immediately up slope from the homes – with retardant drops in advance of the fire. The 747’s large capacity would have been perfect for that. Could even have targeted the homes once fire reached them.
I suspect that the 747 (and DC 10’s) can operate in conditions where smaller aircraft and helo’s cannot – with their large mass and slightly higher altitude operating abaility – would seem they’re less susceptible to turbulence, wind etc. and could have continued operating when others were grounded and/or at night.
Extreme risk public safety events are really stupid place to invoke or try to practice government cost accountability as well. As is the idea of protecting private contractors by restricting use of government assets in a high risk public safety incident.
If you are having a heart attack, a policy that first checks for private ambulances, and only dispatched EMT’s if none are available would be pretty stupid. That is exactly what a “private/local first” policy to firefighting is.
The attacks on the Obama administration over their failure to maintain an adequate availability of fire fighting aircraft are entirely valid. Not only have they blown off Evergreen, but as the “Aero” story above noted also have shut down other private contractors – over bureaucracy and little more.
In that case the company passed all airworthiness requirements – their aircraft were certified safe to fly. Some pencil pusher however decided they didn’t like their long term maintenance plan. So they cancelled their contract and refused to use them – their 8 aircraft sat idle while Texas burned – for zero valid reason.
The air tanker fleet is down to a couple handful of aircraft from close to 50 not long ago. These important tools to fight these mega fires are no longer available thanks directly to the current administrations actions – or lack there of.
In Colorado Springs at least 2 people are dead and almost 350 homes destroyed – not out in the forest as some here have claimed – not built where they shouldn’t be … these homes and deaths were IN THE CITY of Colorado Springs.
In my opinion … and I was in the forest, near the fire lines during the Hayman Fire and others – have seen close up and first hand the destruction as it was occurring, but also seeing the effects even years later of fires like the Buffalo Creek fire … had these assets first been available, and second had the available assets been deployed immediately rather than waiting days – the loss of life and property could have been significantly reduced.
Its time to do away with all the bureaucracy and silly protectionist “rules” and do what every rational and logical person knows is right. Properly manage these national forests. That means appropriate selective logging, controlled burns, and all the other best forestry management practices.

And equally moronic is any decision to restrict use of aerial fire retardant because a few fish may be killed. When faced with extreme danger, including possible loss of life, the extremely minor and relatively rare negative affects of fire retardants are dramatically outweighed. Management practices MUST be for the overall benefit of the resource – and damages to small, even tiny, groups must be balanced against the whole.
The spotted owl “protectors” saga is a perfect example of the extreme ignorance and arrogance of these groups. For decades these would be spotted owl protectors blocked virtually all forestry management in a huge portion of the spotted owl habitat. When one groups actions were ultimately defeated, a different group would simply sue on the same facts again and tie things up for another decade while being litigated.
All the while fuel load were dramatically increasing due to these idiots blocking even the best, most prudent, good forestry management practices.
The result were the huge Cerro Grande (and other nearby) fires that even threatened the Los Alamos nuclear facility – destroying 689 square miles – nearly all of the spotted owl habitat was destroyed. The idiot treehuggers succeeded in causing exactly what they claimed to be trying to protect – almost complete destruction of the entire habitat.
This story regarding the Cerro Grande fire in Los Alamos LINK HERE provides details of a university study of the fire:

… the intensity of the catastrophic habitat destroying fires was a direct result of the fuel load biomass levels created by the Mexican Spotted Owl lawsuit. Logging restrictions were imposed on government controlled lands. The study reveals US Forest Service controlled lands in New Mexico forests alone had accumulated approx. 1.4 billion board feet of fuel load biomass buildup between the years of 1986 to 1999, as logging declined 82.4% during the period.
All of the Mexican Spotted Owl habitat in the Los Alamos area and the owl nesting protected locations were lost, as were many of the ground dwelling endangered species.

This same study found that the growth of the forest because of the lack of logging was significantly detrimental to the owls, with open areas decreasing by almost 20% and bare ground decreasing almost 40% – both necessary for the owl to see and catch prey. During the same time the tree density has increased over 28%.
The extremely interesting discovery however was the ancillary effects of this tree mass – the huge impairment on water resources. They note a rule of thumb is each 1′ diameter tree uses appx. 50 gals of water per day. Historical records show typically there were 300-500 trees per acre, but currently there 1,000 to 5,000 trees per acre. At the low end that would correspond to at least a doubling (550 to 100 per acre) of water used by trees – at the low end approx 50,000 gals per day per acre.
Multiply that at least doubling of water used by trees by hundreds of thousands of acres and it seems clear why the droughts are increasing. For just 100,000 acres the total conservative water needs at avg 1,000 trees per acre would be 5 billion gals per day – a 2.5 billion gal per day increase from 500 trees per acre typical not long ago. This water is not available to flow to streams and reservoirs.
Yet another seemingly clear benefit of logging – of managing these forested lands to maintain their normal, typical forest makeup. Thin trees by 50% and you have 2.5 billion gals less water needed, much healthier trees and forest, and a dramatically reduced fire risk.
And in Colorado’s case it would seem unhealthy trees stressed due to lack of water could be more susceptible to pine bark beetles as well.
The Arizona Wallow fire last year was almost identical to the Cerro Grande fire – covering more than 538,000 acres, larger even than the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire that burned 468,638 acres.
Between just the two – Wallow and Rodeo fires – 20 percent of the Mexican spotted owl nests that exist in the world were lost.
MORE INFO AT LINK HERE
What is so stupid is the fish are killed by these mega fires anyway. And a lot more than the 50 fish that a retardant drop allegedly killed. Heat from these fires baked streams and killed aquatic life. And then the damage from the fires – that destroyed all vegetation – also caused the streams to be filled with silt and ash
SOS Forests wrote about retardant use as follows:

The Big Lie About Fire Retardant
A reader writes, “Doesn’t fire retardant kill fish?”
No it doesn’t. In one case in history, when an entire truckload of the concentrate drained into a stream after the truck drove off the road and over the embankment, a few fish were killed.
Never in history is there one single case of even a single fish being killed by aerially-applied fire retardant.
Never ever ever. It’s a total LIE that fire retardant kills fish.
What kills fish is fire (and firebombing).
Wait, you say, how can fire kill a fish under the water?
Because forest fires burn so hot they sometimes boil streams or at least raise the temperature of the water enough to kill fish.
That’s right, sports fans. Fires burn right to the water’s edge. This may shock you, but riparian vegetation isn’t fireproof!
The new rule prohibits fire retardant in so-called riparian zones 300 feet on either side of streams. So that vegetation will burn and the streams will boil.
Fire also creates ash, which when wet becomes lye, and gets into the water and raises the pH. Fire turns fresh water alkaline via the ash, and that kills fish.
Fire also burns the humus layer down to mineral soil, which then erodes into streams — killing fish by reducing the dissolved oxygen and coating fish gills so the fish strangulate.
The fishing is nil after a forest fire. Nobody goes into a burn zone to catch fish, because the fish are dead. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that fire retardant use ruined their fishing experience (no kidding, it’s in the plea) but the opposite is true — fire kills fish, fire retardant saves them.
Which is all well known to the USFS, but they are on a mission to incinerate America’s forests, and so they kowtowed to the fire retardant LIE.
There was nothing scientific about the fire retardant decision. It was pure politics — and arson politics at that. They are arsonists in a big way. Million-acre arsonists. Arsonists who are burning the Federal Estate with glee and abandon.
Which is why the USFS shuns fire retardant and embraces napalm as the their treatment of choice for our forests.
What ought to be banned in the US Forest Service. Keep them by law no nearer than 30 miles from any public forestland. Dump retardant on them if they get any closer

And more example of gross ignorance pointed out by SOS – what is the USFS replacement for retardant?
Basically, its napalm.

USFS Replaces Fire Retardant With Napalm
The US Forest Service will no longer be using fire retardant to douse forest fires. Instead they will be using a type of napalm to blast America’s forests to charcoal.
In response to a lawsuit brought by the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and the subsequent ruling by Federal Judge Donald Molloy [here], Thomas Tidwell, Chief, USDA Forest Service decided last December to ban the use of fire retardant on 30 percent of USFS lands.
The Nationwide Aerial Application of Fire Retardant on National Forest System Land — Record of Decision is [here]. Some quotes:

Aerial retardant drops are not allowed in mapped avoidance areas for threatened, endangered, proposed, candidate or sensitive (TEPCS) species or in waterways … Some species and habitats require that only water be used to protect their habitat and populations; these habitats and populations have been mapped as avoidance areas. Incident commanders and pilots are required to avoid aerial application of fire retardant in avoidance areas for TEPCS species or within the 300-foot (or larger) buffers on either side of waterways. … When approaching an avoidance area mapped for TEPCS species, waterway, or riparian vegetation visible to the pilot, the pilot will terminate the application of retardant approximately 300 feet before reaching the mapped avoidance area or waterway. … [T]he Proposed Action prescribed a 300-foot buffer area between retardant application and surface waters on national forests, excluding about 30 percent of NFS lands from aerially delivered retardant use. …

In Western Oregon, a 300-foot buffer on either side of streams encompasses about 85 percent of the land base (because it’s wet here and we have lots of streams). So the USFS has effectively banned the use of fire retardant on the most productive lands in the National Forest System.
What they didn’t ban was the use of aerially applied incendiaries, such as were used in Western Oregon last summer to catastrophically burn (100 percent mortality) green, old-growth, spotted owl habitat [here].
Fire retardant is a phosphorus-nitrogen-water based slurry that puts fires out. It has no effect on plants or animals, except to very slightly fertilize the soil. The effect is so slight it cannot be measured. Oh yes, another effect of fire retardant is to save the plants and animals from incineration and immolation.

Much more here: http://westinstenv.org/sosf/
If I were the little fishies or the poor old spotted owl I would not want ANYTHING to do with the alleged protectors. These idiots have succeeded destroying – not saving – a large portion of the spotted owl (and other protected habitat) in the country (and a large share of worldwide habitat) through their ill-conceived efforts.
Wanna know whats even scarier? These same people will tell you they are perfectly fine and happy with the result. They will tell you fire is “natural” and as such these fires are perfectly normal, natural and A-OK with them. All the while IGNORING there is NOTHING remotely NATURAL about the severity of the fires – a severity directly cause by their interference in both the natural course and interference with the Forest Service using best forestry management practices to prevent these severe and catastrophic effects.
The term eco-terrorist is a perfect description for these people. All they care about is winning their battle – forcing their unsupported by science beliefs on others. And then being oblivious when it all blows up and causes the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent.
.

And yet another reason to be upset with the stupid federal bureaucracy:

After 11 years, U.S. Fire Program Analysis system still isn’t ready
Eleven years ago, federal agencies announced a bold strategy to battle the growing threat of catastrophic wildfires.
Across the West, vast expanses of forests had grown dangerously thick from decades of all-out fire suppression. At their edges, an army of urban refugees bored deeper and deeper into the woods, building dream homes in the trees.
The government’s planned response: a sophisticated new computer system — called Fire Program Analysis, or FPA — that would enable firefighting agencies to coordinate their efforts and maximize their resources.
For years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has warned Congress in reports and committee hearings that federal firefighting agencies were failing to develop the vital new tool they promised more than a decade ago.
Tom Tidwell, the Forest Service chief … acknowledged that the Forest Service faces daunting challenges in its efforts to control wildfires, a task that has grown from 13 percent to 48 percent of the agency budget since 1995. He said unnaturally thick growths of trees have accumulated in “65 million acres just in the nation’s forests,” which the Forest Service is hoping to treat with thinning and burning measures at a rate of up to 4 million acres a year.
FPA was established [in 2001] after officials in Congress and the White House Office of Management and Budget grew unhappy with the way federal agencies developed their wildland-fire budget requests, believing them to be wish lists rather than based on cost-effective analysis, said Stephen Botti, who led the project in its first phases before retiring as the National Park Service’s fire-program planning manager.
But when the tool was used for a preliminary analysis in 2006, not everyone liked what it found, Botti said. The results showed which areas needed more resources and which needed less, throwing into uncertainty budgets used for staff programs and some administrative overhead, he said.
For instance, one recommendation was to move resources from coastal Alaska, where wildfires are relatively rare, to California, where they regularly wreak havoc in populated areas, Botti said.
“We’re talking about a couple of billion dollars in federal wildland-fire funds here,” he said. “Any time you tinker with that, it becomes political in a hurry. There was pushback from the bureaus that the answer was not acceptable. This was mainly the Forest Service objecting to that.”

MORE HERE

Of course, if Evergreen wanted to really p*ss them off, what they’d do is go and fly a few firefighting missions anyway – drop in a nice photogenic area where a pile of camera crews were filming the fire encroaching on a bunch of houses so that they were all over the TV, and THEN go to press saying the forest service were threatening to prosecute them for trying to help…

I just got back from the tanker base, the Convair 580’s are gone. They have been re-tasked to South Dakota. Two of the C130’s are on the ramp for the night and the third the COANG 130 just departed tanker base. Not sure if he is flying north to make one last drop (sun set locally) or returning to home base (probably Buckley AFB for the night).
Larry

Howard says:
July 1, 2012 at 9:51 am
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.
Sounds like the wrong tool in the wrong place used both improperly and too high above the ground, Howard. Kudos to your brother on the longline work — any time you’re suspending the bucket farther than 50 feet below the belly of the aircraft requires extraordinary skill to control the load.
A. Scott says:
July 1, 2012 at 2:00 pm
The attacks on the Obama administration over their failure to maintain an adequate availability of fire fighting aircraft are entirely valid. Not only have they blown off Evergreen, but as the “Aero” story above noted also have shut down other private contractors – over bureaucracy and little more.
In that case the company passed all airworthiness requirements – their aircraft were certified safe to fly. Some pencil pusher however decided they didn’t like their long term maintenance plan. So they cancelled their contract and refused to use them – their 8 aircraft sat idle while Texas burned – for zero valid reason.
It sounds like someone in the FAA overstepped his bounds — they have no mandate to tell a company how to run their long-term maintenance plan, just to insure that their *current* maintenance operation is effective. And if it wasn’t an FAA pencil-pusher who made the call, the contractor has solid grounds to file a whopping lawsuit.

Appears it was a C-130 — details not all sorted out yet.
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Black-Hills-FOX-News/122161657947
http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/plane-goes-down-fighting-white-draw-fire/article_9b8b5de1-862c-570d-add9-9231cb3fe5e5.html

“Putting the Forest Service in charge of a forest is like putting Jack Kevorkian in charge of a cancer clinic.” -Dave Hannah, retired graverobber (US Park service archeologist)

Several pictures I have found on the web show that serial number recently painted with the tanker ID MAFFS number 7.
Larry