MAFFS
6 Rim Fire 22 Aug 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_eGiGG1B-Q#t=295
The
image above is a screenshot from a mind-blowing video shot from the cockpit of
a California Air National Guard C130J aircraft as the crew gets ready to drop
fire retardant on the massive Rim Fire. As I watched the video, I was struck by
how low and slow these aircraft fly — and the risks taken by the crews.
Is it
worth the risk? The answer is not entirely clear. More about that in a minute.
But first, make sure to click on the image and watch the video.
For me,
a few things stand out. At about two minutes into the video, as the tanker
is approaching the wildfire, someone in the crew says, “Oh, that’s kind of
creepy.”
About
two minutes later, as the plane is banking directly toward a wall of flames and
smoke, he says, “That is unreal.”
And as
if the view of Hades out of the cockpit window isn’t enough to create a sense
of unreality, a synthesized female voice can be heard repeating, “LANDING GEAR,
LANDING GEAR, LANDING GEAR,” over and over.
On a
regular flight, this is supposed to remind the crew as they descend toward the
ground not to do a belly landing. But in this situation, the point isn’t to
land but to fly down to almost treetop level adjacent to a blazing inferno and,
at low speed, drop retardant.
After
watching the video, I’ve gained even more respect for what these crews do. With
numerous deadly crashes over the years, including the one below captured in an
amateur video, it’s obvious that they risk their lives every time they fly over
a fire.
Are the
risks they take worth it? Some say no — because, they argue, there is little
evidence that dropping retardants on a fire actually makes much of a
difference.
Among
them is Richard A. Minnich, an expert in fire ecology at the University of
California, Riverside. I interviewed him earlier this summer, when California’s
wildfire season was just getting started. In a phone conversation, he told me
that fighting wildfires with retardant drops is “founded on a myth.”
In
explaining why he believes that, he says “count the calories.” What he means is
this: Compare how much of a fire’s energy is prevented from expanding by a drop
— “negative calories,” he calls this — versus how much energy comprises
the fire overall. From my interview:
For
every calorie an aircraft drops on land, during that moment of time when we’ve
added negative calories . . . while that is happening, the flame line is
putting out a thousand or a million calories. It’s not even close. The
assumption is that we can just draw lines in the sand. They paint the landscape
with [fire retardant] and the fires just go right past them. And only thousands
of acres later does the fire stop. And guess what? Rain puts it out.
Others
have a similar perspective, among them Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest
Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, or FSEE. “It looks good on
television,” he said of retardant in an interview with Marc Lallanilla at Live Science.
However, “there is no benefit to its use.” Moreover, retardants can have
negative environmental impacts, including triggering algae blooms that can kill
fish.
For
it’s part, the Forest Service says it has taken steps to minimize environmental
risks, and that laboratory testing as well as the experience of firefighters on
the ground both show that retardant can help crews launch an effective ground
attack.
“When
enough people in enough places say retardant helps, we have to believe they’re
not making it up,” Cecilia Johnson, fire chemicals technical specialist at the
Forest Service’s Missoula Technology and Development Center, told the Associated Press last year.
My
colleague at the Center for Environmental Journalism, Michael Kodas, is writing a book
(it will be the book)
about wildfire. He’s done quite a lot of reporting on this issue, and I’ve
emailed him to get his perspective. As soon as I hear back from him, I’ll post
an update.
Update 9/3/13, 9:45p MDT: Michael
got back to me. Here’s what he had to say in an email message:
Stahl
and Johnson do a good job defining opposite ends of the issue.
Even
ten years ago, firefighters were calling retardant drops “CNN drops,”
because they are often called for in situations where they look good on
television but will have little impact on the fire. Part of the problem is that
in much of the West, wildfires are wind driven events. During the Fourmile
Canyon fire, here in Boulder, I heard one contractor announce that the fire
wouldn’t have destroyed all the homes it did if they had just put his planes in
the air when it broke out, but the wind was ripping at more than 60 miles an
hour at that point. It’s pretty difficult to fly a plane at low speeds
into a canyon to drop retardant in those conditions, and often the wind just
blows the retardant away.
Last
year two P2V air tankers crashed on the same day – one belly landed in Utah and
the crew survived. The other crashed into a fire in Nevada killing its two crew
members. A couple months later a C130 from the Air National Guard crashed while
dropping retardant, killing four members of its crew from the North Carolina
Air National Guard. Statistically, according to Andy Stahl, firefighters’ odds
of dying fighting a fire go up tenfold when they climb into a plane.
There’s
a lot of politics behind getting the planes in the air. For one thing, the
contractors with the planes want the work and politicians strive to get it to
them. It’s also something that make government leaders look like they’re doing
something about a disaster that they actually have little control over and, to
some degree, appeases their constituents.
The entire link can also be found at:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/?p=4701
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