“They gotta make sure that this doesn’t get across Flying W Ranch Road,” he told the firefighter who was driving as he shot video out the window.
But a house on the other side was already burning. Firefighters from the neighborhood’s station were trying to keep the flames from spreading. If it got past that one house, however, it would “take out the rest of the neighborhood to the east of Flying W,” Schopper told me. “That was about 277 homes down there.”
At a nearby cul-de-sac, a hotshot crew from Redmond, California, had no pump, so they tapped their small hose directly into a hydrant and were spraying a curtain of water between a burning house and the rest of the neighborhood. “They were smoked up and heated up so bad,” Schopper said. “You could see the embers bombing down.”
Both crews seemed to be fighting losing battles, but an hour later they had managed to keep the fire from spreading out of Mountain Shadows.
“That was the first success,” Schopper said. “That was when we turned the corner.”
THAT NIGHT COLORADO GOVERNOR JOHN HICKENLOOPER flew over the nine-square-mile burn zone and the firestorm in the northwest corner of the city. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a wildfire like this in the history of Colorado,” he said when he saw the devastation.9
“How many people do you think we’ve lost?” he asked Steve Riker, when they met at the command post after the flight.
“If we haven’t lost a dozen people, I’d be surprised,” Riker responded.
Jim Schanel was less optimistic.
“I’m guessing we lost 50 to 75 people,” he said, but he had difficulty believing his own words. “Seventy-five people, are you kidding me?”
Rich Harvey and Steve Riker, the two incident commanders, hadn’t spoken face-to-face during the fire. About 10:30 that night they found themselves standing next to each other.
“Would you like this?” Riker joked, gesturing to the firestorm in the city.
“Absolutely not,” Harvey answered. “You’re doing a great job. You stay where you’re at.”
By sunrise 347 homes had burned. But the list of missing persons was going down fast, and all of the firefighters were accounted for.
“Early Thursday morning we started looking at missing people reports,” Schanel said. “We were looking at 18 to 25.”
In the end, only two residents perished in the blaze. William and Barbara Everett had called relatives to say they were evacuating their home on Rossmere Street in Mountain Shadows before it caught fire. They were found in the home so badly burnt that William was identified by the surgical hardware that held together an old ankle break.
Schanel, Riker, and Harvey winced at the announcement of the fatalities and the final count of destroyed homes, but each had a sad smile later. They had all expected the clearing smoke to reveal many more deaths.
“We dodged a bullet,” Schanel said. “We were beyond lucky, and I can’t explain it.”
22
Seeing Red
Park County, Colorado—June 3, 2012
THE PLANES STARTED FALLING from the sky even before Colorado exploded, but would add another layer of tragedy when the fire season was at its peak. On Sunday, June 3, while hiking through the barren burn scars of the 10-year-old Hayman Fire, I noticed smoke in the distant Rampart Range. The blaze was just a quarter acre in size when the lookout at Devils Head saw it. At a highway overlook I chatted with a ranger who was confident that it wouldn’t grow much larger and wouldn’t need any aircraft to knock it down. It might have been hard to get planes I learned when I returned to my car and saw a news alert on my phone. Two air tankers had gone down while fighting fires in Utah and Nevada.1
One couldn’t lower its left landing gear at the Minden-Tahoe Airport, in Nevada, after dropping retardant on a blaze about 50 miles south of Reno. The two pilots kept the plane in the air for 90 minutes to burn off fuel, then brought it in for a belly landing. They scraped down the runway and skidded off the end, leaving a wake of dirt. Both pilots walked away uninjured.
The other’s crew wasn’t so lucky. Within two hours of the crash landing at the airport, an air tanker swooped low to drop fire retardant on the White Rock Fire, a lightning ignition on the Utah-Nevada border. The plane clipped some trees, a wing hit the ground, and the plane cartwheeled into a rugged canyon filled with piñon pines, junipers, sagebrush, and cheatgrass.
Firefighters hiked for more than an hour to reach the 600-yard debris field. Several fought the fire back from the wreckage while others retrieved the bodies of the pilots, Captain Todd Neal Tompkins and First Officer Ronnie Edwin Chambless. When they retreated, the fire burned over the crash site.
Both planes were P2Vs built in the 1950s primarily to hunt submarines, but with a history of one-way missions. At one point P2Vs were stationed on aircraft carriers and equipped to drop atomic bombs. The planes were incapable of landing on the carriers, so any nuclear mission would require the crew to find a friendly airfield on land or ditch the plane after dropping the bomb.
Korean War surplus, the 60-year-old planes were designed for patrolling over open ocean rather than diving through flaming canyons. A week after the planes went down in Utah and Nevada, Chuck Bushey, the past president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, counted nine fatal crashes of P2Vs, which killed 20 firefighters, since 1987.2
The day after the Sunday crashes, authorities grounded the two remaining heavy air tankers available to fight fires in Utah, the latest in a string of groundings and demobilizations of firefighting aircraft.
In 2004 the U.S. Forest Service began removing planes even older than the P2Vs from the fleet after several crashes, some of which involved wings coming off planes. One air tanker crashed in Lyons, Colorado, during the state’s epic 2002 wildfire season. A photograph of it streaking toward the ground in flames, with an amputated wing and a fireball spinning behind it, hangs in a hallway by my office, 30 miles south of the crash site. Two pilots died, and two weeks later a helicopter crashed while mopping up the same fire, killing a third airman. At the end of that year, a blue-ribbon panel put together by the chief of the Forest Service reported that “the safety record of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters used in wildland fire management is unacceptable.”3
Private contractors operate the majority of the nation’s firefighting aircraft, many of which they dig up at the Pentagon’s “boneyard” in Arizona to send on the most wing-stressing of missions.
“There are few checks and balances to ensure that the aircraft are airworthy and safe to fly throughout a fire season,” the blue-ribbon panel noted. “Contractors have no financial incentive and are not required to ensure that their aircraft are safe to fly . . . Both government employees and contractors assume that Congress, the administration, and federal agencies will never provide the money needed to do the firefighting job correctly and safely.”
Earlier reports had noted that flight loads and the aggressiveness of firefighting maneuvers exceeded pilot estimates. The current report identified layers of safety concerns, including contracts that prioritized short-term costs over safety, underfunded training, “mission muddle” between land management agencies, and the fact that “the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has abrogated any responsibility to ensure the continued airworthiness of ‘public-use’ aircraft,” including military planes retrofitted for firefighting. In addition, according to the report, the FAA “[doesn’t] require testing and inspection to ensure that the aircraft are airworthy to perform their intended missions.”
When the forest fires of 2012 first ignited, the United States had just 11 heavy air tankers, one-quarter of the 44 available to fight wildfires 10 years earlier. And that was before the two crashes and subsequent groundings.
Demands for the nation to modernize and expand its firefighting fleet came from all sides.
“As the air tanker fleet continues to atrophy, it’s going to reduce the country’s ability to get there early, which is why so many of these fires mushroo
m,” Democratic senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests, said the day after the crashes.4
Wyden had led a push three months earlier to get the U.S. Forest Service to bring more and newer planes into service. “I have serious concerns about both the size and age of the aging air tanker fleet, and fear that it isn’t up to the job of stopping wildfires that grow larger every year.”
The public was just as critical of the nation’s diminishing firefighting airpower.
Four days before the crashes, Randall Stephens, who blogs about firefighting aircraft, wrote a post titled “Washington Will Let Americans Die in 2012 Wildfires Due to Attention Deficits,” a screed attacking Congress and the Obama administration for not providing the Forest Service with $5 billion to purchase next-generation air tankers. (The title of the post has since been changed to “Is Washington Policy Conducive to a Stable Civil AFF Industry?”) Stephens promoted everything from purchasing “scoopers,” which can drop lake water on fires, to contracting the Supertanker, a 747 converted by the Oregon company Evergreen Aviation to drop 20,000 gallons of retardant.5 Evergreen has since gone bankrupt, and a new company is operating an updated version of the 747 Supertanker.
Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, whose home in the mountains above Colorado Springs was threatened by the Waldo Canyon Fire, used the diminishing number of air tankers available to protect her house as an excuse to attack President Obama.6 A year earlier, Malkin pointed out, the Forest Service had canceled a contract with Aero Union, a Sacramento-based company that had supplied eight firefighting air tankers but failed to comply with the schedule of safety inspections required by the contract.
“Where there’s smoke swirling over Team Obama,” Malkin wrote, “there are usually flames of incompetence, cronyism and ideological zealotry at the source. The ultimate rescue mission? Evacuating Obama’s wrecking crew from the White House permanently.”
Others recognized that getting rid of the president would have little impact on wildfires. “Getting into large, multiple wildfire scenarios, there’s just not enough [aircraft] to go around,” Chuck Bushey told the Associated Press.7
At the urging of the Colorado congressional delegation, Obama approved $24 million in funding to buttress the fleet with seven new planes, including next-generation, jet-powered air tankers.8 Those, along with eight planes leased from California and Canada, would bring the fleet up to 20.
“This is a major milestone in our efforts to modernize the large air tanker fleet,” Forest Service chief Tom Tidwell said in a release about the bill.9
“It’s nice, but this problem isn’t fixed with a stroke of the pen,” former Forest Service official and bomber pilot Tony Kern told the Denver Post. “You need to have the airplanes available now.”10
“The USFS should have awarded contracts for at least 20 additional air tankers, not 7,” Bill Gabbert opined at Wildfire Today.11
In the meantime, the U.S. military would fill the gap. Since the early 1970s Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems (MAFFS) have converted C-130 cargo planes into air tankers capable of dropping 3,000 gallons of retardant on wildfires. Eight Air National Guard C-130s equipped to fight fires were already waiting on runways from North Carolina to California.12 When the Waldo Canyon Fire broke out, Colorado Springs had an ace in the hole, with two of the planes stationed at the city’s Peterson Air Force Base.
But federal law prevents the government-owned tankers from fighting fires until all available civilian firefighting planes have been called into service, which points to some of the overarching business tensions in aerial firefighting. After the owners of private air tankers had griped about government planes eating away at their income, federal authorities agreed, in 1975, to mobilize MAFFS only after all suitable commercial resources were committed.13
That didn’t resolve the argument between public and private aviators, however.
“The bureaucratic tangle and frustration a requesting agency must face to activate MAFFS has served only to distract from the overall value of this unique firefighting system,” the Air Force noted in a 1979 report that claimed the tankers were relegated to a “secondary role” and were not widely used, even on the largest and most destructive fires.
In 1978, when a California fire destroyed more than 200 homes, Colonel Russell A. Penland, the air commander for the 146th Airlift Wing, argued that MAFFS could have saved a number of them. The county fire boss had requested large tankers to fight the blaze but had been sent only smaller, commercial aircraft.
Elton Gallegly, a Republican congressman from Simi Valley, California, recalled watching a fire in Camarillo, California, burn over a mountain while two tankers with the California Air National Guard were grounded nearby by the federal restriction. “I’m a private-sector guy,” Gallegly said, “but when I sat out on the tarmac watching houses burn in Ventura County and saw the airplanes ready to go and not be able to use them, I got very frustrated.”
In the weeks before Colorado blew up in 2012, he filed a bill requiring federal firefighters to use MAFFS as more than just a last resort. The relationship between private contractors, the military, and the Forest Service had more scandalous difficulties in the past.
IN 1987, AFTER A SERIES OF CRASHES, federal authorities permanently grounded the fleet of 1940s-era C-119 Flying Boxcars used by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to fight wildfires. Late that year Roy D. Reagan, whose company flew some of the C-119s, and Fred Fuchs, the deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service, concocted a scheme. They prodded the U.S. Air Force to list a number of C-130As—the military’s most reliable workhorse—as “excess property” and transfer their ownership to the federal government’s General Services Administration, which could make them available to other government agencies, so long as those agencies retained ownership of the planes. But instead of government agencies keeping the planes, Fuchs and Reagan secretly used the obscure Historic Aircraft Exchange Program to hand over the newer planes to private contractors in exchange for the grounded C-119s, which were given to aviation museums. The private contractors illegally received title to the government planes in return for commitments to retrofit them to fight wildfires on their own dime and to use the planes only for federal government firefighting missions.14
Eventually six contractors received 22 C-130As and six P-3s. Reagan, who served as a broker for the deal, paid himself a commission of four C-130s, which he sold for $1.2 million. His failure to note his commission on his income taxes was an indication, according to prosecutors, that he knew the deals were illegal. The planes given to the private contractors were valued by the Forest Service at as little as $15,000 each during the trade, but an investigation by the U.S. inspector general estimated they were worth about $2.4 million apiece. The aircraft the contractors gave to the government in exchange for them were determined to be largely junk with little historical value.
What’s more, the newer planes that were supposed to be dedicated to fighting wildfires in the United States ended up on unrelated missions far from U.S. forests. At least four were stripped, their parts and components sold off. Two were found hauling cargo in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War, one was sold to a South African fish hauler, and one, owned by T&G Aviation, crashed in France after a wing came off. Two other T&G C-130s were implicated in drug-smuggling operations in Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.15
One pilot, Tosh Plumley, admitted to flying loads of up to 2,500 kilos of cocaine into airfields in California and Arizona for the CIA in C-130s operated by Forest Service contractors.
“All of the contractors had unregulated air fields in remote places that were not usually subject to any kind of Customs inspections,” said Gary Eitel, a pilot, aircraft broker, and lawyer who blew the whistle on the scheme and sued the contractors on behalf of the government. “All of the contractors were able to come and go virtually undetected so they could have been doing anything. It was an ideal cover both for drug smu
ggling and a variety of covert operations.”
After the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) cited the Forest Service for “inadequate use of aviation resources” in 1994’s South Canyon Fire disaster that killed 14 firefighters on Storm King Mountain outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado, critics noted that many C-130s that were supposed to be available to fight that fire were overseas on missions unrelated to firefighting.
Eitel’s muckraking resulted in a Department of Justice investigation and several criminal and civil actions. Fuchs and Reagan served 20 months in prison before their sentences were overturned based on improper instructions to their juries. The federal government declined to try them again. A U.S. Forest Service employee who was involved in attempts to recover the planes is now the CEO of one of the largest aviation contractors for the service.
In 2004, after three of the planes crashed, the U.S. Forest Service permanently grounded all C-130s operated by private contractors, leaving only the C-130 MAFFS operated by the military to fight fires.
But the money involved in firefighting aviation continues to fuel tragedies and scandals. At 2008’s Iron 44 Fire in Oregon, a helicopter contracted from Carson Helicopters to the U.S. Forest Service clipped a tree while taking off and crashed, killing nine passengers, including seven Forest Service firefighters. It was the worst air disaster involving on-duty firefighters in U.S. history. Investigators determined that the helicopter was overloaded and the manuals guiding its pilots misstated its capabilities. Five years later, a federal grand jury indicted Steven Metheny, the vice president of Carson Helicopters, and Levi Phillips, the company’s chief mechanic, for submitting forged performance, weight, and balance information about the helicopters to help the company secure $51 million in Forest Service contracts.16
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