posted 10-24-2007 06:32 PM                   

quote: Mike Blakesley

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"Controlling the fuel" wouldn't have made any difference.

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posted 10-27-2007 07:09 PM                    

quote: Louis Bornwasser

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My understanding is that FAA grounded most all the heavy fire fighting planes last year for structural reasons. That is why so many (lightweight) helicopters. Louis

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Actually that happened right after the wings folded up on that Hawkins And Powers C-130 out in California. Hawkins And Powers Aviation in Greybull, Wyoming had the majority of the air tankers flying back then and all of them became grounded at least from fighting fires. H&P also does aircraft for movies and they have both the planes there from both "Flight Of The Phoenix" films.

I personally think the FAA is ludicrous on this because of just one incident all they had to do was a structural analysis of each airframe to find the bad ones and either scrap if beyond reasonable repair or repair them... Hawkins even has their own shop and does C-130 refurbishment for Uncle Sam, so there's no real basis to ground all their planes. With fires being as big and bad as they are these days it would seem beneficial for Uncle Sam to get these planes flying again.

The last KC-97 off Boeing's production line now sits idle in Greybull. A number of these and many other firefighting aircraft now sit idle on their airfield.





Several miles of "grounded" planes sit at the H&P airstrip.

posted 11-09-2007 09:20 AM                    

quote:

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Let California burn, say experts

New Scientist 01 November 2007

Arnold Schwarzenegger injects Hollywood glamour wherever he goes. When California's governor inspected the 2000 square kilometres charred in last week's wildfires, he looked every bit the movie hero. The script worked out well, too. Arnie won praise for mobilising rescue workers quickly and even the wind turned in his favour, dying down in time for firefighters to limit the damage.

Yet there is an alternative plot line that Schwarzenegger would not be pleased with. It's the story being told by wildfire experts. In this version, state and federal policies are partly to blame for the fires, and the moral of the tale is that policies must change if the million people ordered to evacuate last week are to be spared a repeat performance. There is accumulating evidence that rather than suppressing fire, we should allow it to return to the role it used to play in Californian ecosystems.

The latest evidence comes from a study of the era before European settlers arrived; a time when wildfires were sparked by lightning or started by Native Americans, who used them to for a variety of purposes including flushing out wildlife when hunting. Ethnographic studies and data from tree rings suggest that 18,000 square kilometres burned every year in California (Forest Ecology and Management, DOI: 10.1016/j.foreco.2007.06.005). That's almost as much as the area that burned across the whole of the US between 1994 and 2004.

In other words, says Nicholas Clinton at the University of California, Berkeley, last week's wildfires - labelled "extreme events" and judged the worst national disaster since hurricane Katrina - would have been unremarkable prior to 1800.

So what happened? Wilderness has been converted to agriculture, reducing the area that might burn, but the remainder would still experience large fires if forest managers allowed it. Instead, the authorities tend to suppress blazes.

It is an understandable response: California is one of the more densely populated states in the US, and residents inevitably want nearby fires stamped out as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, this small-picture attitude may be making the big picture worse. Richard Minnich, at the University of California, Riverside, has compared wildfires in California with those across the Mexican border, where land is managed less intensively. A similar amount of land burns on both sides, but the US fires are less frequent and larger because smaller fires - which use some of the available fuel - occur less often. That means that US fires are more likely to get out of control in high winds, as happened last week.

One solution would be to allow small fires to burn out naturally, at least in areas away from homes, says Clinton. Such policies have the backing of many wildfire experts, but remain controversial, not least with members of the voting public who live near forests, so progress in this direction has been minimal. Minnich's research, for example, is now almost 25 years old (Science, vol 219, p 1287). Last week's events show that the script has not changed a great deal in a quarter of a century - just be prepared for the sequels.

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