Copyright 2006 Denver Publishing Company
By KEVIN VAUGHAN
Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)
Two Colorado congressmen said Wednesday that they are worried about the federal government’s ability to respond to the looming wildfire season — especially with a depleted fleet of large air tankers — and that they want answers from the head of the U.S. Forest Service.
In a one-page letter, U.S. Reps. Mark Udall and John Salazar, both Democrats, requested a meeting with U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and a briefing on efforts to prepare for what many experts fear could be a difficult wildfire season in parts of the West.
In particular, they want to know what has been done since two deadly air tanker crashes in 2002, one of which occurred in Colorado, and a subsequent report by a panel of aviation experts that was highly critical of the aviation system for fighting wildfires, which it called “unsustainable.”
Udall said Wednesday that he believes it is “a serious situation and one that’s fallen by the wayside.”
“I know there’s some mitigating circumstances, but I don’t think they’re significant enough to justify ignoring the tragedies of the ’02 summer,” Udall said. “While it’s easy to point a finger at the paucity of federal funds, we still ought to be clear on what we have in the way of assets as we go into the summer.”
Joe Walsh, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, said late Wednesday afternoon that Bosworth had not yet seen the letter from Udall and Salazar.
Udall and Salazar wrote to Bosworth that they were “concerned about the Forest Service’s readiness to adequately respond to this threat — especially as regards the availability of aircraft.”
Udall and Salazar were reacting to a story in Saturday’s Rocky Mountain News, which showed that nearly four years after the deadly crashes in Colorado and California the fleet of large air tankers had dwindled from more than 40 planes to 16 and that there was no concrete plan for updating and modernizing the system.
The planes scheduled to fly this summer are, on average, 41 years old, according to federal records.
The two men who co-chaired that 2002 panel testified earlier this year before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that they believed too little had been done to improve the system, particularly when it came to replacing aging planes and improving safety for airmen.
One of them called the development of a plan to modernize the fleet “so slow as to be baffling.”
While federal official acknowledge that they haven’t finalized a plan for replacing the large air tankers, they have brought more small, single-engine tankers into service and also have contracted for the use of heavy-lift helicopters that can scoop water and drop it on fires.
They have imposed rigorous new inspection requirements for the air fleet as well.
Still, Udall and Salazar said in their letter to Bosworth that they want to “know more about the way the Forest Service has responded to the 2002 report, the current status of the air tanker fleet to respond to upcoming wildfire events, other aircraft that the Forest Service may have available to help augment the fleet, obstacles and constraints to improving safety and availability of air support for fighting wildfires, and any other information about the upcoming severity of this fire season and the Forest Service’s response planning and capabilities.”
In addition, Udall and Salazar said they would seek congressional hearings on the matter.
Udall said he wants the federal government to respond to the recommendations made by the panel.
“We ought to harken back to the feelings that we had at that time,” he said. “We brought together these experts, and they’re calling on us to act.”