Posted on 06/16/2012 8:16:47 PM PDT by OrangeHoof
Additional crews were arriving Saturday at a wildfire in northern Colorado that has scorched about 85 square miles and destroyed at least 181 homes, the most in state history.
( snip)
Meanwhile in New Mexico, questions were being raised about whether bureaucratic red tape prevented firefighters from saving more homes affected by the Little Bear Fire after federal officials released transcripts of the firefighters' response.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
It's an AP story or I'd include Sec'y Vilsack's rather tone-deaf comments about the situation.
If you're thinking of building in California's woods, you're better off picking a spot in CalFire’s territory, where they care more about putting out fires and less about environmentalist friendly forestry management.
The NW quarter of Colorado is completely dead from the depreadations of a little bug called the pine beetle. The only solution is to cut the dead trees and turn them into wood pellets. However, the 9th Circuit is afraid that the roads required for logging will harm the forest so they banned them in the Federal lands. They’d rather let it burn than clear cut and replant. If it burns after dead trees fall over, the topsoil will also burn and it will look like the moon here for the next 100 years.
Thanks so much, californicators...
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There is alot of pine beetle killed trees in the forest in the area where I live and 40 miles north where this fire is burning. The envitonmentalists have been blocking proposals for taking out dead trees for lumber or wood pellets that can be used for pellet wood stove heating or to be used in power plants for electrivity production.
Not the only solution; furniture, lumber, etc.
However, the 9th Circuit is afraid that the roads required for logging will harm the forest so they banned them in the Federal lands.
Colorado is in the 10th Circuit not the 9th.
Specifically what are you referring to?
Are ya sure you don't mean Colofornicators?
californicators are libttards (not conservative californians) who screwed up california, decided to move someplace better but brought the same stupid ideas with them and jammed them down the throats of the sane rational people (except the people’s republic of boulder of course) who live here. they can’t help but crap on anyplace they live.
I’d argue that most of those people aren’t native Californians either. They came from somewhere else outside California before they trashed the state and moved on.
More homes, more destruction.
Colorado, Florida...etc., you’re going to have that.
And all that babble has what to do with #3?
I can only hope that trend continues!
First, why write all this? Because the lack of airplanes looks to me like another oblabla amateur hour mess.
I’m in Texas. We just about burned down last year. Thank goodness this year is turning out better so far.
There are a lot of different stories about tankers and forest fire fighting. There is even more confusion it seems than there are stories. The firefighters know their business though. I’m not so sure about the people that manage them though.
I think our biggest problem is that nobody realized just how bad things were here. I also wonder frankly if there was also some political punishment by the oblabla administration since we are a RED state. The disaster declaration took an awfully long time to get and we were in very very bad way long before it came. You can’t get the big guns in until that disaster declaration comes.
Once it came though stuff came in from as far away as Idaho. We got the biggest baddest BLM brush trucks they had. It was like the professionals knew how bad things were and were just waiting for orders. They came in a flood when released.
We learned a lot about aerial tankers and the DC-10, the only large tanker operating in the U.S. last year we were told, was our savior. That and about 1,500 men and women from all across the U.S. who came to our little town and labored in 105 degree sweltering heat. Congressman McCaul and a few others managed to go against the grain and get us our help and the tanker. We are in Kevin Brady’s district but we never saw or heard a dang thing from him. I think he is actually deceased and they just have a stuffed dummy of him in his office. We were losing until the big plane arrived. The Blackhawks and the Air Tractors just couldn’t handle the big blow-ups.
Here is what we learned about aerial tankers:
1. The USAF built a whole bunch of modules to load in C-130s but red tape of some sort also kept them from being used here in Texas, see this article of just this week. Great idea but somebody forgot the logistics or something. It isn’t very clear what the reason is that they can’t be used. You would think it would just come as a package ready to go. The other story is that these planes do not fly until all the USFS commercial resources are dried up. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/14/as-wildfires-rage-modern-tanker-planes-sought/
2. The article talks about P2Vs and accidents... this is a red herring. The accidents have taken place and it put the old outfit at Greybull, Wyo. (Hawkins and Powers) pretty much out of business way back in 2004
3. Here is the biggie. Aerounion, who operates the largest tanker fleet in the US, didn’t get their contract that they have had for decades renewed. Seems the owner is a Republican and USFS decided that their airplanes don’t meet some safety restrictions. That is one story. It is a big mess. AeroUnion operates a fleet of Lockheed Electras. Same airplane the Navy just retired from submarine hunting. The loss of this contract really put aerial firefighting in a bad bind. Aerounion is trying to stay in business. I don’t know their current status. http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/01/17/aero-union-is-appealing-the-cancellation-of-their-air-tanker-contract/
According to Wikipedia Aerounion may not be squeaky clean but neither is the USFS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_Union#Airtanker_scandal
4. The mess about not having facilities to load tankers is BS as well. The logistics lady for the DC-10 got it set up at Bergstrom since it was near the Bastrop fire and kept it going round the clock. There are modular mixing units. The DC-10 is operated by 10 Tanker Air Carrier out of Victorville, Ca.
This is a summary of the air tankers that operate in the US and Canada: http://www.air-and-space.com/Tankers.htm
These guys saved individual houses by doing a 1-2-3 drop and boxing the house in with fire retardant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njZnMAofwg&feature=related
The USAF and ANG guys would be happy to fly meaningful missions instead of just burning holes in the sky. It just can’t be that hard to get and mix the retardant. It is just about 10% phosphate, 85% water and some stuff. It won’t hurt anything but fires. Everything comes up green where they drop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkvETSCq4Q&NR=1&feature=fvwp
The story of the Riley Road Fire is another story entirely. I needs to be a movie about people helping each other and a community pulling together against a task they had no idea about and getting the job done. The night FEMA and Red Cross got thrown out of our mess hall is one for the books. One retired Marine cooked B,L and D for as many as 500 firefighters off of a smoker trailer for almost 5 days until H.E.B. Grocers came to our rescue with their disaster kitchen. Just people took care of everything. They said what do you need? I’ll get it and dug in their pockets and got busy. We were on our own for days and thank God for the firefighters from USFS in Ca., State of NC, Georgia, Florida, Idaho and even up in Pennsylvania or New York we are told. For the first 4 days though it was volunteer fire departments, big and very small, from all over the State of Texas that held the line.
The Friday afternoon when the fire blew up and was about to burn over our command post was the turning point though. We prepared to be burned over. One pond, the Blackhawks and the DC-10 stopped the flames. Mostly it was the Blackhawks and the trucks and the firefighters though. How they got so much water out of that dried up pond nobody understands. I guess it may have been a miracle. It probably saved our town.
Good luck.
Mostly clowns from NY state, from my personal observation.
Just to add to my other post. Found this on the tendering process. The article speaks for itself. There are idiots running the USFS program.
We want tankers but we don’t want to commit for them but we only want the best but we don’t want to pay too much or too long and we may want more but we may not want any after we think about it for awhile. You know, like, this whole fire thing may just go away. Especially if we keep burning all the trees and stuff like, ya know, there won’t be anything left to burn and all that like, ya know?
http://wildfiretoday.com/2012/01/28/air-tankers-on-contract-for-2012-and-beyond/
If they didn’t do any more than carry water and shovels we were glad to have them. There wasn’t a lot of people rushing in from outside and volunteering.
I appreciate your postings on this thread.
The fires in Texas in 2010 and 2011 burned many times more homes, acres and square miles than those in CA and CO, but received little assistance from the Obama Admin. and the MSM in comparison. Was a member at The Cliffs at Possum Kingdom in the ‘80s-’90s before all the big expensive homes were built there. At least over 100 were burned down during the fires a couple of years ago and only local news media coverage occurred. The liberal MSM doesn’t like Texas.
Aside... I was surprised to see mention in one of your postings about the P2V aircraft. I enlisted in the USNR near the start of my senior year of HS and was in a VP squadron that flew P2Vs out of NAS Dallas. Hard to believe one could be converted to a tanker to fight fires.
The big problem in Colorado is beetlle kill. We have whole mountain sides of dead trees that the envirowhackos won’t allow to be logged out. The entire front range of the Rockies is just waiting to burn the forest service has said if the fire enters those areas it will be too dangerous to fight -dead trees falling on firefighters etc.... And gov Chickenlooper is another left wing whacko so no help there. His response to this? A statewide fireworks ban......
It's not mismanagement. This is what they intend. Fires are wonderful and natural in their eyes. They also burn out people living in the woods and gets them back into cities where they belong. I have spoken with more than one idiot fed about the subject and and they all seem to be on the let it burn bandwagon.
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