Last Wednesday afternoon, I watched four large airtankers drop tens of thousands of gallons of fire retardant on the Green Ridge Fire, which is burning within sight of my backyard. The airtankers included two twin-jet MD-87s, a DC-7, and a CV-580.
A DC-7 dumps 3,000 gallons of retardant on an area already painted red with the stuff to try to keep the fire on the left from to the right (south) overnight. Click image for a larger view.
Between them, the four planes were capable of dumping more than 11,000 gallons of retardant, and they each made several passes at the fire. A west wind was pushing most of the fire to the east, but there was also some push to the south. The tankers were painting a wide swath of forest red south of the burning area to try to slow or halt the southerly expansion of the fire.
The fire may have been retarded in the red-painted area, but it easily by-passed that area and continued moving south. Look closely to see a helicopter dumping water on the fire. Click image for a larger view.
The next morning revealed that the fire had crossed over the retardant-drenched area and was continuing to burn south. This naturally raises the question of whether aerial firefighting is worth the cost.
With the tankers costing thousands of dollars an hour to operate, and the retardant costing at least $2 a gallon, the Forest Service spent more than $500 million on aerial firefighting in 2017. It may end up spending even more this year as the pandemic has led firefighting agencies to rely more on aerial attacks and less on ground forces.
Dollars aren’t the only cost: so far this year, at least four pilots have lost their lives due to crashes of firefighting tankers and helicopters: a helicopter pilot in Arizona, another in California, and two airplane pilots whose planes collided in Nevada. That’s after zero aircraft fatalities in 2019.
As it happens, the Forest Service spent the last eight years writing a report addressing the question of the effectiveness of aerial firefighting. Although the report is dated March 2020, it wasn’t released to the public until last week. It’s quite possible that the delay was because the Forest Service didn’t want to admit how poorly it makes aerial firefighting appear.
On one hand, figure 11 in the report makes it appear that most aerial drops of water or retardant were effective at something. But figure 10 makes it clear that most weren’t effective at doing very much. Only about 10 percent actually halted the spread of fire, while another 20 to 30 percent slowed it down. The remaining “success” was from “reducing the intensity of fire,” but that doesn’t mean much if the fire continues to spread (and become more intense) beyond the drop area.
The report also indicated that helicopters tend to be more successful than airtankers. One reason is speed: it takes seven minutes or more to fill the 3,000-gallon-tank on an MD-87, and it can only be done at an airport with a runway that is at least 6,000 feet long. That means they can only do four or five runs per hour. In contrast, some helicopters can carry more than 2,500 gallons of liquid, and they can dip down to a creek or lake that is close to the fire and fill their tank in less than 45 seconds. That means they can do ten runs dumping a total of 25,000 gallons of water on the fire per hour.
A second issue is the difference between water and retardant. Water douses or at least cools the fire; retardant is only expected to slow its spread. While helicopters were dumping water right on the Green Ridge fire, the tankers were dropping the retardant next to the fire. If it is windy or the retardant failed to completely drench the ground cover, the fire can leap over or pass through the retardant-covered area. Retardant is also environmentally controversial. While air tankers can carry water as well as retardant, why bother with the high cost of an airtanker when helicopters can drop more per hour?
The Forest Service report also found that aerial actions were much more likely to be successful if they were providing support for on-the-ground firefighters rather than working alone. Figure 20 indicates that retardant drops were twice as likely to halt the spread of fire and significantly more likely to delay the spread of fire if ground forces were also present. On the Green Ridge fire, nearly all of the ground forces were working on the east side of the ridge, where the wind was pushing the fire, while the west side was defended mainly by the helicopters and airtankers.
My friend Andy Stahl, who sometimes comments here, is critical of the methodology used by the Forest Service. Before the recent report came out, he noted that incident commanders — the people who lead the fights against wildfires — tended to judge success by whether they hit their targets, not whether it helped to suppress the fire. That’s “like measuring a vaccine’s effectiveness on how well needles hit arms, not whether disease is prevented,” he told a reporter with E&E News.
The Forest Service report responds by providing some measures of effectiveness: halting the fire, reducing the rate of spread, reducing the intensity of the fire. But the real question shouldn’t be whether aerial firefighting is effective but whether it is cost-effective, that is, is it doing as good a job as if the same amount of money were put into on-the-ground forces.
There is a way of answering this question, Stahl points out. About half the requests by incident commanders for retardant drops aren’t fulfilled. “Looks like the makings of a natural experiment with 50% controls and 50% treated,” he says. “So compare the two datasets as to measurable parameters.” But the Forest Service refused to do this in its report, saying that there were too many variables. But if that’s true, Stahl concludes, how can any conclusions made by the report be considered meaningful?
While Stahl is particularly skeptical about large-scale use of retardants, due to their environmental costs and effects on human health, he is also dubious about dropping water on fires. “What doesn’t evaporate before it hits the ground will do so shortly thereafter,” he says. “Twenty minutes later, nothing will have changed.” This is especially true if the aerial work is done in place of, rather than in support of, on-the-ground firefighters.
The hard reality is that the Forest Service has virtually unlimited money to spend on firefighting. If money is unlimited, then it doesn’t matter whether retardant drops from expensive airtankers is effective or not. In fact, it’s better to make ineffective drops than to have the fire get away when it appeared the agency was doing nothing to prevent it.
Fifty years ago, when I was in forestry school, some of my professors admitted that aerial firefighting was done solely for the show. If they didn’t do it, reporters would ask why and demand that it be done. Supposedly, the technology has improved since then. But it seems that much of it is still for show.
I’m watching the firefighting from a different perspective. The technology for firefighting is well behind the cutting edge. Is it a case of money?
Modern warfare uses drones. The firefighters don’t. They’re still using human crewed appliances. They are putting the crews lives at risk. Generally speaking, do crewed appliances offer any benefits.
On a modern battlefield, tanks come in about the same size every time. Too small, and they are ineffective. Too big, and they become bullet magnets. But when you’re firefighting, nobody’s shooting back. Big appliances mean more water carried, and the appliance is less likely to be dwarfed by the flames.
Re: Firefighting Drones.
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From Wikipedia.
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“The Kaman K-MAX (company designation K-1200) is an American helicopter with intermeshing rotors (synchropter) by Kaman Aircraft. It is optimized for external cargo load operations, and is able to lift a payload of over 6,000 pounds (2,722 kg), which is more than the helicopter’s empty weight. An unmanned aerial vehicle version with optional remote control has been developed and evaluated in extended practical service in the war in Afghanistan.
After being out of production for more than a decade, in June 2015 Kaman announced it was restarting production of the K-MAX due to it receiving ten commercial orders.[1] The first flight of a K-MAX from the restarted production took place in May 2017 and the first new-build since 2003 was delivered on July 13, 2017 for firefighting in China.”
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaman_K-MAX
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Write you congressman. They’re not cheap.
“Is Aerial Firefighting Cost-Effective?”
The discussion here is about different modes of fighting forest fires. Shouldn’t there be a discussion about whether fighting forest fires in these places at all is cost effective? If we just let them burn (as they certainly did before Europeans came to North America), what will be the cost? Certainly there will be loss of timber but not all of it.
Editorial Comment: If the US had a finite amount of spendable money and a limit on borrowing (zero would be nice) then choices would be made.
California’s water usage has also exacerbated the fire problem. For the last 120 years, the big cities and agriculture business have pulled water from the Colorado river, Sierra Nevada mountains and sub surface wells and springs which have been tapped to accommodate domestic water consumption so LA County residents and suburbanites can have jungle plants in a xeric climate. Combine a drastic reduction in the natural ground water, the replacement of native vegetation with weedy, invasives (and sometimes oil rich plants like Eucalyptus) is a recipe for disaster. So the subsurface water has been depleted; California’s forests have lost significant ground water; soil moisture has heavily declined.
Las Vegas has also resorted to paying people to augment their property landscapes for water conservation. Las Vegas has resorted to paying residents to trade their fescue for cacti. California also knew for decades the consequences of water crisis and did little to replenish their supplies, desalination plants, they’ve only built one this decade while they’ve had 50 on the drawing boards….drawing boards is where they’ll stay. Israel manages to run facilities thy produce fresh water at 40 cents per cubic meter or over 6 gallons of water for a penny. Nuclear power uses ocean water as it’s coolant……they can desalinate millions of gallons of water per day using only the waste heat. While desalination is more expensive than improving conservation the fact is WE Cant conserve your way out of a drought that by the looks of it appears to be perpetual.
For 500 million a year California could build a 100 million dollar desalination plant and a cheap PVC pipeline to pump water to restore the states natural ground water.
It would be nice to believe that the California forest fire problem could be solved with a few nuclear powered desalinization plants. Interestingly, Mike Shellenberger today, in a tweet, wrote that “The area burned in California has declined over 80% since Europeans arrived. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.”
Prehistoric annual average acres burned: 4,447,897. 2010-2019 average acres burned: 775,325.
https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1297954406202187777/photo/1
(I recognize that historic numbers presented with an apparent six or seven significant digits is bad statistics but that’s what Shellenberger wrote.)
The following is from an excellent piece in ProPublica about the fire problem in California. The information will not be new to readers of The Antiplanner but it’s interesting to see it so completely and publicly published. The piece is about much more than airplanes.
“More quantitatively — and related — fire suppression in California is big business, with impressive year-over-year growth. Before 1999, Cal Fire never spent more than $100 million a year. In 2007-08, it spent $524 million. In 2017-18, $773 million. Could this be Cal Fire’s first $1 billion season? Too early to tell, but don’t count it out. On top of all the state money, federal disaster funds flow down from “the big bank in the sky,” said Ingalsbee. Studies have shown that over a quarter of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression spending goes to aviation — planes and helicopters used to put out fire. A lot of the “air show,” as he calls it, happens not on small fires in the morning, when retardant drops from planes are most effective, but on large fires in the afternoon. But nevermind. You can now call in a 747 to drop 19,200 gallons of retardant. Or a purpose-designed Lockheed Martin FireHerc, a cousin of the C-130. How cool is that? Still only 30% of retardant is dropped within 2,000 yards of a neighborhood, meaning that it stands little chance of saving a life or home. Instead the airdrop serves, at great expense, to save trees in the wilderness, where burning, not suppression, might well do more good.”
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They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
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https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen?
From Portland General Electric …
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“Preventing wildfire is a shared commitment, and we’re working with local, state and federal land and emergency management agencies to ensure we’re all doing all we can.”
https://portlandgeneral.com/our-company/improving-energy-grid/wildfire-safety
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” … all we can.” doesn’t include forest management.
For our part, we’ve intensified our existing protections and are taking proactive, comprehensive action to keep our system wildfire-safe.
It isn’t all 747s and helicopters.
“In Fighting California Wildfires, Hardscrabble Bulldozer Operators Are Secret Weapon
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“Aging ranchers and loggers called in by the state are vital for clearing brush to halt advancing flames
“For decades, bulldozer operators, many of whom cut their teeth in a bygone logging era, have played a key role in helping the state battle blazes. But as many now near retirement, replacing these veterans’ niche skills is a tall order, contractors say.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-fighting-california-wildfires-hardscrabble-bulldozer-operators-are-secret-weapon
Maybe the Forest Service could give them year around employment clearing brush and cutting firebreaks.