By Richard Brooks
The Press Enterprise (Riverside, California)
Copyright 2006 The Press Enterprise, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The nation’s first firefighting Supertanker returned Tuesday to its home base in Victorville after making three days of airdrops that Washington state officials say helped save millions of dollars worth of homes.
“I can’t tell you how many . . . but this thing absolutely saved homes. No questions about it,” said Dave Doan, fire aviation manager for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
The modified jumbo jet hauls 12,000 gallons of fire retardant, four times the capacity of the largest conventional air tankers, all of which are propeller-driven.
The plane made eight drops Friday, Saturday and Sunday to protect the town of Dayton and nearby inhabited areas, along with millions of dollars worth of timber, in southeastern Washington.
Lightning strikes on Aug. 21 ignited several fires that soon merged. The Columbia Complex Fire blackened more than 67,000 acres, said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Virgil Mink, a Corona resident who is on loan from the Cleveland National Forest in Riverside County.
On Thursday, Washington state officials asked to borrow the DC-10 from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which is evaluating the privately owned jet.
The blaze was threatening about 1,000 homes, no other air tankers were available, the governor of Washington had declared a state of emergency, and officials were short of fire engines, bulldozers and ground crews, Doan recalled.
“Overall, it far exceeded our expectations,” he said. “It held several fire lines for us. In our estimation, it helped us control this fire (around homes) much faster than we normally would.”
If they’d been available, conventional air tankers could have done the same job, but it would have taken as many as 10 of them, Doan said.
Unlike conventional air tankers, the big jet’s massive capacity enabled it to drop enough retardant immediately adjacent to the flames to markedly reduce the heat level.
“It changed the behavior of the fire. It decreased the intensity,” Doan said. “You don’t see that with normal tankers: They don’t drop enough retardant at any one time.”
In his opinion, he said, the plane was cost effective.
“It cost us $100,000 a day to have it here,” Doan said. “There wasn’t a home that was threatened that had a value less than that.”
He also credited the DC-10 with helping to save several stands of trees, collectively worth millions of dollars.
The plane’s operators are hoping that a consortium of Western states - and maybe large counties such as Los Angeles - will be willing to sign a long-term contract for the tanker.
A large contract would pave the way for a second similar plane, and the resulting pair would be able to cover a very large region, said Rick Hatton, managing partner of 10 Tanker Air Carrier, the plane’s owner.
In the meantime, Hatton said he is grateful to CDF for sending support staff and equipment that enabled the DC-10 to work smoothly in Washington.
“It made it quite easy for us to do the job,” he said. “The same procedures, the same lead plane, and the same command-and-control. That’s what’s really important from a safety point-of-view.”