Prosecutors found that Metheny was motivated by “pure greed” in misrepresenting the choppers’ weight and how much they could carry. After the accident he schemed with Phillips to conceal their fraud by illegally removing items from helicopters before they were weighed by investigators, manipulating the choppers’ fuel gauges to show they were carrying more fuel than they actually were, and falsely claiming to investigators that Carson’s scales were out of service. Investigators also discovered that Metheny was stealing and reselling parts and supplies, including helicopter rotors, and using Carson funds to purchase jewelry and pay for renovations to his home.
On June 16, 2015, Judge Ann Aiken, in Oregon’s U.S. district court, sentenced Metheny to 12 years and 7 months in prison—a year and a third for every person who died in the crash that resulted from his fraud.
Other revelations documented wildland firefighters’ ties to covert military operations overseas. A month after Aiken handed down her verdict, the National Smokejumper Association, the club for firefighters who parachute into wildfires, held its 75th-anniversary celebration in Missoula, Montana. Simultaneously with the event, the summer 2015 issue of Smokejumper magazine published the names of 96 smokejumpers who had secretly worked on covert operations for the CIA in Taiwan, Tibet, Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and South America.17 The CIA found that the smokejumpers’ skills and equipment for dropping cargo in remote wildernesses, parachuting in themselves, working independently, and keeping their mouths shut were ideal characteristics for covert military intelligence operatives. For instance, after the Chinese invaded Tibet in 1950, smokejumpers worked as “kickers” dropping Tibetan commandos (239 of whom had trained at Camp Hale in Colorado) and pallets of weapons, radios, and supplies into the country. In 1959 those commandos helped spirit the Dalai Lama out of Chinese-occupied Tibet and into India. At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a painting of the “Khampa Airlift to Tibet” shows guerrillas and equipment being dropped out of a CIA-operated C-130 above Himalayan glaciers 150 miles northeast of Lhasa in the moonlight. The jumpsuits and steerable parachutes in the painting are clearly U.S. smokejumper equipment. Missoula smokejumpers riding in the C-130s oversaw the operation.
U.S. jumpers fought alongside Laotians in their resistance against Laotian and North Vietnamese communists. One Missoula smokejumper, Jerry “Hog” Daniels, who worked for years in Laos and Thailand, is credited with the air evacuation of Hmong resistance leader General Vang Pao and some 2,500 of his soldiers and their families when Laos fell to the communists in 1975. Many of those Hmong ended up in Missoula. Daniels allegedly died of asphyxiation resulting from a leak in his propane water heater in Bangkok in 1982, but his casket was sealed, with orders that it never be opened. Many Hmong claim to have seen him since then.
While the editor of Smokejumper magazine, Chuck Sheley, reveres the heroic history of aerial firefighting, even he bristles at the waste in modern firefighting aviation. “I just see all the money wasted with this aircraft business,” he told me. After he finished his stint as a jumper, Sheley managed firefighting hand crews for more than 30 years and grew frustrated with how he had to count pennies on the ground while aircraft poured expensive retardant on fires where it would make little difference. “There’s no accountability at all for thousands of dollars,” he said.
BY LATE JUNE 2012, as wildfires threatened Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, and others erupted all over the West, all the private firefighting aircraft were working blazes, and the U.S. Air Force C-130s joined the action. Less than 24 hours after the Waldo Canyon Fire ignited, aerial porters began loading MAFFS tank systems into the cargo bays of the two C-130s at Peterson Air Force Base. From the runway they could see the fire burning toward Colorado Springs. The planes, with the Air Force Reserve Command’s 302nd Airlift Wing, were ready by noon and started flying on Monday, June 25. The next day four of the planes—two based in Colorado and two from Wyoming—ran laps between the base and the fire. With the fire so close, it took just three minutes for the planes to get from the runway to their targets, so both support crews on the ground and the airmen ran like pit crews through their work.18
“Having this in town gave us a different sense of urgency about it,” Senior Master Sergeant Dave Carey, a C-130 flight engineer on one of the planes who had worked with the firefighting system for 22 years, told Citizen Airman magazine. “It was our backyard.”19
The planes dropped 58,000 gallons of retardant between the fire and the city, but when winds hit 65 miles per hour and the fire took off, the planes were grounded due to smoke and turbulence. Their crews stood on the tarmac and watched the fire roll over the lines of retardant and into the city.
“I’ll never forget that feeling of helplessness as we stood on the flight line and saw the excessive winds blowing the fire into the city,” Carey said. “There was a blanket of smoke over the whole city. You knew it was coming into town, you just didn’t know how far it would go.”
The next day the planes were back in the air. They had dropped a total of 133,554 gallons of retardant on the Waldo Canyon Fire by June 30, when they were diverted to fires in Wyoming and South Dakota. Within a day the losses in Colorado Springs would seem small, at least to the Air National Guard.
Edgemont, South Dakota—July 1, 2012
MAFFS 7, A C-130 HERCULES with its six-man crew, arrived in Colorado Springs on June 30 from North Carolina’s 145th Airlift Wing, which sent three planes and three dozen airmen to fight the Colorado wildfires. The plane was piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Paul K. Mikeal, who had been on just seven retardant drops as a MAFFS copilot and none as the aircraft’s commander. The chief of training for the 156th Airlift Squadron, Major Joseph McCormick, was far more experienced in fighting wildfires with C-130s and was an instructor pilot on the plane. Major Ryan S. David was the plane’s navigator, and Master Sergeant Robert Cannon was the flight engineer. Two other airmen rode in the back of the plane to operate the fire retardant delivery equipment.20
By the time they arrived, Colorado didn’t need them, so the next day, July 1, they made two retardant drops on the Arapaho Fire in the Laramie Mountains of central Wyoming. MAFFS 7 refilled at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport near Boulder and was headed back to Wyoming when it was diverted to fires in South Dakota. It refueled again in Cheyenne, then headed to the White Draw Fire, about five miles northeast of Edgemont, South Dakota. A thunderstorm was brewing southeast of the fire when they arrived.
The pilots kept the plane high and watched a small lead plane execute a “show me” run below them. The next time the lead plane swooped over the fire, MAFFS 7 followed a half mile behind. Its drop was dead on target, but the pilots had trouble maintaining air speed, even gunning the engines to maximum power. Repositioning the flaps from 100 percent to 70 percent got the crew through the run, and they decided to keep the flaps at 70 percent for their second and final drop of retardant.
Five minutes before the air tanker made that pass, Doppler radar detected a very large thunderstorm cell just southwest of the drop zone.
An incident commander with the Army National Guard was riding his motorcycle to the fire’s command center and could see the air tanker flying to his right, banking toward the fire. He lost sight of the plane as he descended past a hill, just as he was “hit with this extreme, fierce wind” that blew him to the other side of the highway. A third plane flying about 2,500 feet above the C-130 to manage the air attack was hit by turbulence that bucked the aircraft into 90-degree banks and rapid changes in speed. The pilots could see the fire “sheeting” and smoke lying down across the ground below, indicating “hellacious” surface winds.
At 5:38, as the lead plane and MAFFS 7 swooped in to make the final retardant drop, the lead plane hit a “bad sinker,” falling to within 10 feet of the ground. The pilot “smoked” his engine pulling out of it and would have to go to the Rapid City Regional Airport for repairs.
“I got to go around,” the pilot of the lead plane called over his ra
dio, indicating that the planes should circle back and make another run at the target when they were either better aligned with it or when flying conditions were better.
“Yeah, let’s go around, out of this,” one of the MAFFS 7 pilots responded.
Thirteen seconds later the lead plane pilot advised the air tanker pilots to “dump your load when you can.” Giving up the drop altogether and dumping the retardant would make flying easier.
Three seconds after that the tanker’s pilots called, “E-dump, E-dump!” The crew was making an emergency release of the retardant to lighten the plane’s load. But while other air tankers can jettison their entire load of retardant, a MAFFS can only spray the slurry in the same way it would drop it on a fire, slowing the effort to lose weight.
A firefighter on the ground saw the tanker dropping its retardant, just as winds she estimated at 50 miles per hour slammed into her.
“Bring some power,” one pilot ordered.
“Power’s in,” the other answered.
“Power!”
“Power’s in.”
“We’re going in!”
“Hold on, crew!”
The massive plane’s right wingtip cut through several tree branches. The back end of the fuselage hit the ground. The plane careened up a sparsely wooded slope into a ravine, pivoting right, then rolling left. A propeller chopped the ground, then ripped loose from its engine. The left wing broke off, and another propeller hammered the ground. The number four propeller chopped off the plane’s paratrooper door. When MAFFS 7 came to a stop, the front of the plane lay crushed and folded against the far end of the ravine.
The two crewmen in the back of the plane were severely injured but managed to escape through the door that the propeller had cut open. The plane’s emergency locator failed to activate when the plane crashed, but one of them called 911 on his cellphone. Heavy rain, the turbulence of the thunderstorm, and uncertainty about where the plane had gone down kept help from reaching it for about half an hour. When a chopper finally arrived, its crew found one of the survivors still on the phone with 911 and the other wandering, dazed, nearby.
The four crewmen in the cockpit died in the crash, leaving their wives and nine children behind.
MAFFS 7 was the first C-130 equipped with the firefighting system to go down in the 40 years since the technology had been developed. The next day the remaining seven MAFFS were grounded, but with fires spreading through the West and the nation already short of air tankers, they ended up taking only one day off.
THE AIR FORCE INVESTIGATION INTO the crash determined that the microburst that brought down the plane was avoidable. Other planes at the fire had failed to pass on critical information about the thunderstorm and the mission, and the MAFFS crew had underestimated the severity of the conditions. The National Weather Service had issued a severe thunderstorm watch for the area, but there was no evidence that it had been passed on to the crew of the C-130 or that they had requested updated weather information.
“If you add all the pieces up, it was very clear they should not have attempted the second drop,” said Brigadier General Randall Guthrie, the Air Force Reserve officer who led the investigation.21
In North Carolina flags hung at half-mast and Governor Bev Perdue spoke at the memorial service for the airmen in one of the Air National Guard hangars at Charlotte Douglas International Airport.
In South Dakota residents of Edgemont complained that had firefighters attacked the blaze earlier, it wouldn’t have grown to the 9,000 acres at which it was finally contained. Firefighting, particularly with aircraft, is most effective when blazes are young and small. But firefighters elsewhere in the nation wondered what justified the incredible cost, even before the airmen paid the ultimate price, of sending planes into violent weather to fight a fire that threatened only the relics of two historic cabins, some pastures, and forests that were bound to burn someday. In fact, all of the crashes of firefighting aircraft during 2012—twice the annual average—occurred in remote locations where little private property or infrastructure was at risk.
The twin tragedies of the Waldo Canyon Fire burning right over the more than 125,000 gallons of retardant dropped from planes and, days later, four airmen perishing while flying in stormy weather over rugged ground with little to protect pointed out the contradiction at the heart of America’s air war with wildfire.
A firefighter’s risk of dying in a wildfire goes up tenfold the moment he or she steps into an aircraft, according to Andy Stahl, executive director at Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. Of the 13 firefighters who perished battling wildfires in 2012, six died in plane crashes.
Yet many firefighters and ecologists question how effective aircraft are in fighting fires.
AT FIRES ACROSS COLORADO I repeatedly stood with homeowners who cheered as swooping air tankers dropped lines of retardant that arced like giant, scarlet Nike Swooshes over the forest. Other times I showed up after a drop to hear that I’d “just missed it,” as if it were a performance for which I’d arrived late.
Even a decade ago, some firefighters were calling them “CNN drops” and “air shows”—a bit of theater for news cameras like my own and a public desperate to see something dramatic done to stop the destruction. And some of the most outspoken critics of the nation’s air war with wildfire are people who once led the charge—former Forest Service firefighters.
A few weeks before the tankers started crashing in 2012, George Weldon, who was deputy director of fire and aviation for the Forest Service’s northern region, based in Montana, when he retired in 2010, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any data related to the effectiveness of air tankers and what they drop on fires. None of the 30 documents he received dealt with retardant.
“That really underscored the limited success we were having with the aviation program,” he told me. “That proved to me that the government doesn’t have any scientific studies that deal with the effectiveness of retardant. We have completely taken the large air tanker program out of the context for which it was developed. They’re basically a waste of money. The only effect they have is to demonstrate to the public that we’re fighting the fire aggressively and doing everything we can.”
Since 1995 at least 14 studies conducted by the Forest Service, the Department of the Interior, NASA, the State of Colorado, and several private companies have attempted to determine the effectiveness of firefighting aircraft and retardant in hopes of using that data to determine the number and types of planes and helicopters the nation needs for its firefighting efforts. But a 2013 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in response to questions from Congress regarding the use of firefighting aircraft noted that a lack of data gathered about the performance and effectiveness of air power used against wildfires hampered all such research.22
For years government reports had asked the U.S. agencies involved in fighting wildfires to collect data on aircraft performance, but not until 2012, the year of the P2V and MAFFS crashes, did the Forest Service begin compiling such data, and then only on large air tankers. The results of that research won’t be available for years.
But a 2014 study published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that in 2010 and 2011, of the fires on which air tankers dropped retardant during the initial attack, nearly 75 percent still escaped containment. And many of the aviation resources were used in extended attacks on longer-burning fires, despite official policies that prioritize their use in initial attacks on new fires, where retardant and water drops are more likely to succeed.23
Despite the lack of data on their effectiveness, and their seemingly low success rates, aircraft account for about 25 percent of the Forest Service’s firefighting costs, and half of the nation’s wildland firefighter fatalities.
To Weldon the use of air power to fight forest fires was an example of industry driving federal wildland firefighting policy. “There’s this fire industry that puts more political weight on the agency to
spend more money on these fires,” he said. “The retardant industry has a powerful lobby in Washington.”
“If retardant weren’t red, it wouldn’t be used anymore,” Andy Stahl told me. “There are no studies whatsoever that retardant use saves homes.”
All of the various formulas of retardant are basically fertilizer, made primarily from ammonium phosphate and water. Retardant won’t extinguish a fire, but it will slow the flames’ progress. Firefighters on the ground still have to put it out. Firefighting agencies in the United States have been dropping retardant around fires since the late 1950s. In 2013 the Forest Service dropped 23 million gallons of retardant, which cost about $19 million.
“It’s kind of like trying to stop a stampede. You really can’t get in front of a stampede and stand your ground,” said Cecilia Johnson, a specialist with Wildland Fire Chemical Systems, at the Forest Service’s Missoula Technology and Development Center, in Montana. “You turn it. You herd it. You gradually slow it down.”
There are lab tests showing the effectiveness of retardant, but field studies would involve so many variables—vegetation types and density; slope angles and aspects; temperature; wind; humidity—that it would be difficult to determine whether the fires were responding to the retardant or other factors.
“A lot’s being dropped, and it isn’t making any difference,” Stahl told me. “But it’s terrifically expensive, and it has serious side effects.”
Retardant is particularly hard on fish. In 2002 a wayward slurry bomber dropped more than 1,000 gallons of retardant into the Fall River, near Bend, Oregon, wiping out the river’s brown trout, redband trout, and whitefish.24 A lawsuit after the incident forced the Forest Service to remove sodium ferrocyanide from the retardant’s formula, and a few months before the tankers crashed in 2012, a judge’s ruling forced the Forest Service to keep slurry drops at least 300 feet away from waterways.25
Megafire Page 24