- This program is made possible by Wings Over the Rockies, educating and inspiring all people about aviation and space endeavors of the past, present and the future.
Hi, I'm Shahn Sederberg, and this is “Behind the Wings ”.
In this episode, we'll explore the challenges posed by wildfires and the role of aviation in fighting fires from the skies.
Only you can prevent forest fires.
Fire aviation teams are critical, complex efforts made up of pilots, technicians, coordinators, and ground crew who work together to put out and contain wildfires.
In this episode, we'll speak with the pilots to learn what aviation firefighting is and how it works.
Then we'll explore the aircraft themselves to learn more about the modifications and the technical aspects that enable these planes and helicopters to operate in firefighting missions.
And finally, we'll meet some of the many community members who were so drastically affected by the historic 2020 Colorado fire season.
It's time to go Behind the Wings.
- My name's Clare Waldoch and I'm a crew chief here at CoFire Aviation.
Today is our first week of company training 2021, and we're out here in Fort Morgan, Colorado.
So to get ready for the fire season, we've got our airplanes here and we do our annuals, our 100 hours, we get our trucks and trailers ready, get those all fixed up.
We just make sure that our equipment is in tiptop shape and ready for a full fire season.
CoFire is a big family.
You know, the fire aviation world, it can be a dangerous thing to do, so everybody comes together and makes sure everything is safe and done correctly, properly.
CoFire has a support crew and the drivers that drive the support vehicles, it's kind of like a mobile base.
So we have the ability to mix retardant on our trailers and load it onto the airplanes.
So essentially, if we get stationed for a fire where there's no resources, we're able to support from the ground and help out with that fire.
So we've got everything available.
We get there in the morning about nine o'clock typically, and the pilots will do their walk around the airplane, and we are on duty from then on.
We wait for a fire call, but when it's time to go, we're ready, and we've already done all our prep work.
Our load is mixed if that's the case, and we're loading off of that base.
And then everybody, you know, it's go time.
Us as drivers, we can help those guys on the ground, you know, because they're the real heroes.
Our pilots can help those guys on the ground because they put themselves in a very dangerous situation to protect structures and homes and the forest, and it's really special to know that we can help a little bit by mixing that load and getting those pilots off the ground safely and getting them to the fire on time and back home to see their families.
It's a really cool world to be a part of.
- One of the things we're learning is that fire season is no longer a fire season.
Fire season is a year-round thing, and we have fires burning at a rate that we've never seen before.
To understand the scope of wildfires today, we need to understand how climate change and the environment impact fire systems.
We're going to talk to Dr. Russ Schumacher, Colorado's state climatologist to learn more.
- My name is Russ Schumacher.
I am the state climatologist for Colorado, and we are here on the official Fort Collins Weather Station.
The weather station has been here at CSU since the late 1800s.
Wildfires, it's always a complicated issue, because there's so many factors involved, the health of the forest itself, whether people are living in that area that might be impacted, but certainly the weather and climate aspects play a big part in setting that up.
The big fire years that we've had in Colorado since 2000 or so have tended to come in the hot dry summers, the big drought years.
The folks who kind of study wildfires I think are just seeing new things that haven't really been observed before.
They focus on three things when it comes to weather.
It's hot, dry, and windy.
And we saw that on so many days in 2020, where it was hot and dry and windy, and the fuels had dried out from kind of a longer period of it being hot and dry.
How the fires behave, the fires creating their own weather, having a big wildfire set within a day that's quite windy, you know, that makes the fire take off on its own.
But then within the fire itself, you see vortices, kind of like tornadoes within the fire.
Since the turn of the 21st century here in Colorado, and many places in the west, we've seen this increase in acreage burned from wildfires, and that's what climate models and other analyses have been pointing to.
We had these huge fires burning in a time period when that's never really happened before.
The fires of 2020, it really was very eye-opening.
The warming up and drying out of the forests that we've seen in the last 20 years or so, and then these big fires, climate change is playing a role in that.
It's not the only thing that causes that, but it sets up these conditions for this explosive kind of fire year that we saw last year.
- Issues like wildfires need to be approached from every angle.
Ground crews, aviation teams, and even lawmakers come together to invest in resources and infrastructure needed to face the new reality of wildfires today.
- I'm Senator Bob Rankin.
I represent seven counties in northwest Colorado, and four of our major fires this year occurred in my district.
So this is one of the most important subjects of our legislative session to try to be prepared for the next fire season.
We had been seeing increasing wildfires for a number of years, but this last fire season really made an impression on us, I think, largely because several of those fires just got out of control.
The 2020 wildfire season was the worst on record, more than 625,000 acres burned, more than 1,000 fires.
It's not if, it's when.
When will that next wildfire hit us?
Every person in this state was impacted by the plumes of smoke, by the change in our air quality, and for those of us living in the mountains, that kind of day-to-day trepidation, you know, is another wildfire on the front for me and my home and my neighborhood?
We have to be thinking in the short-term mid-term and long-term.
So in the short-term, what can I do to make sure this next summer is a safer one?
How can we prepare the state, whether that be with mitigation efforts, you know, where can we reduce the hazardous fuels that are accumulating in our forests?
What can we do to restore our watersheds that have been so heavily damaged by wildfire?
And then how can I expand and strengthen our wildfire response?
And if that is through technology and new tools in the toolkit, like aviation resources, or just training firefighters and making sure they are ready, boots on the ground to get out there and tackle a fire, it doesn't mean we can ignore that mid and long-term challenge around climate change.
So I hope that my colleagues and I will have the opportunity to make those investments in the right way to ensure that Coloradans are taken care of, and that we protect our great state.
- Wildfires impact everybody from mountain communities to wildland urban interface, and even in cities.
Wildfires are changing how we live.
- My name is Schelly Olsen, and I'm the Assistant Fire Chief at Grand Fire Protection District Number One here in Granby, Colorado.
Every year we get more and more calls, wildland fires have been on the rise and the most of the fires in Grand County that are put out.
It's when you have those large ones that just escape your capabilities and your resources, and they just grow exponentially, and we call that a megafire when it's over 100,000 acres.
And we have never seen that in Grand County.
Firefighting aircraft is a great tool.
It can only be used in certain circumstances if everything is lined up.
I mean, if the weather and the wind.
It's not the end all, be all.
You can't just drop retardant and say the fire is out.
Retardant just slows the fire down.
Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control with the Multi-Mission Aircraft, an invaluable tool for us to map the perimeter, to look for hotspots.
- My name is Jeff Rasmussen.
I'm a MSO with the Colorado Multi-Mission Aircraft.
I have a background in wildland fire, multiple capacities.
I worked on engine crews, hotshots and smokejumpers, and I've been here since March of 2019.
The general role of firefighting aviation is to support firefighters on the ground and support their efforts.
And so whether it be tankers or air attack or an intelligence gathering aircraft, like we have here, it's all in support of the effort on the ground to suppress the wildfire.
I've definitely witnessed an increase in scale and complexity of wildfires throughout my career.
Especially in 2020, that was kind of a off-the-charts year with fires like the East Troublesome Fire growing 100,000 acres in one day.
That was unheard of when I started 12 years ago, so throughout my career fires have definitely been gaining in complexity and size.
And the complexity part typically comes from the wild urban interface where people are moving more into the mountains and into the woods, and that's creating a lot of complexity on these fires.
When you're on the ground, intelligence and situational awareness is really everything, right?
And so we're able to provide firefighters on the ground with a broader sense of what's going on around them, that they wouldn't be aware of otherwise.
Other firefighting aircraft do participate in suppression.
Those are the tankers, the single engine tankers and the large air tankers and helicopters.
They deliver retardant and water on the fire, which suppresses the fire enough for those ground crews to get in there and work.
Really all we need is a location and a way to get a hold of who's ever on the ground out there.
We'll work with the pilot to determine if the weather is gonna be workable in that area and what kind of the conditions are over there and getting there, and so it's a team effort in that sense.
There's typically, on any fire, there's multiple agencies and jurisdictions involved and everyone's working towards the same goal.
- So I'm Dave Bickerstaff.
We're here at Centennial Airport in Centennial, Colorado, and I work for Bode Aviation.
Bode has a contract with the state of Colorado to provide pilots and maintenance for the airplane behind me.
Has a couple of different names.
this is a Pilatus PC-12.
Here in Colorado, it's known as the Multi-Mission Aircraft.
So the job for me specifically as a pilot is to be here at the airport on shift for a 10 hour shift, and essentially if the Division of Fire Prevention and Control gets a mission, then they'll come in, let me know, and I'm responsible for pre-flight in the airplane, building a flight plan and then flying the crew where they need to go.
So single pilot operations do all the coordination, work with air traffic control.
Get pretty good at changes on the fly, 'cause almost every time we take off, the plan changes and whatever we filed is not what we fly, And it's kind of fun working with Denver, and they're really fantastic.
Shout out to the Denver center controllers, everybody who's a really patient and flexible working with us to get where we need to go.
We could be just about anywhere in the state in an hour, and we have about six and a half hours of loiter time, depending on how close the nearest airport is that we can divert to.
So the aerial firefighting ops is definitely a symphony in terms of how it's orchestrated and coordinated.
It's pretty neat to see it from above, and there's been a couple of fires where we've watched and there's the lead plane, there's the air attack pilot leading around a couple of large tankers, and then there's like a couple of SEATs zipping in and out and some helicopters.
So it's really neat to see how that is orchestrated.
There's a lot disparate groups that come together to make it happen from all over the country, even the world.
But ultimately everyone has the same focus, which is trying to protect lives and property, minimize the damage and get the fires under control when they're not if we can.
- For firefighting teams, air resources are tools in the toolbox.
From large air tankers to helicopters and single engine planes, each aircraft has a unique capability.
With high maneuverability, single engine air tankers or SEATs, are a class of aircraft that can zip in and out of firefighting incidents with precision, and when used properly, with great effectiveness.
- So CoFire Aviation is single engine air tankers based on the Air Tractor 802, and when Chris Doyle and I formed CoFire Aviation, we put a little different focus on how we were gonna go about it in that we wanted to put together the safest, best performing single engineer tanker out there that we possibly could.
Being that we were gonna be based in Colorado and knew that we could be fighting fires, you know, as high as 11-12,000 feet, you need that performance to be able to get to the fire, to be able to maneuver on the fire and efficiently get back to the airport for another load and back to the fire.
Typically we can point the nose at a fire and climb right up to wherever that fire's at and go to work, where in the past, SEATS have not had that kind of horsepower, and maybe had to circle around, climbing up to altitude further out, taking more time to get fire to respond.
There's a lot more fires than what they hear about because they only hear about the big ones that make the news.
And a lot of times we catch these fires small.
We help the guys on the ground and they're able to contain that and it becomes a non-event.
And so nobody ever really knows about it, but there's a lot more fires than what people know, and we catch a lot of them before they get, before they get big and get a big name.
So it is fun and satisfying when you can go out and help those guys on the ground and save structures or contain a fire.
It's also frustrating when you can't go because it's too windy or you do go and what you do isn't effective enough and they still lose the fire and lose a structure.
You can get the full rollercoaster of emotions throughout the season.
- For firefighting teams and those affected directly by the fires, the impacts are drastic and the lessons are profound.
- I'm Ernie Bjorkman.
Been a news journalist for probably 40 years.
Retired two years ago, came up to a beautiful place called Grand Lake, Colorado.
I've been coming up here since the 80s part-time and I'd like to give back to the town, so I ran for office, I won, and so now I'm one of seven town trustees.
You got Grand Lake, which is Colorado's deepest and biggest natural lake.
You have a lot of boating in the summer.
You can have a lot of paddle boarding and you have a lot of sports and water recreation.
Then of course, October came along and we kept watching the fire down by Kremmling, moving up to Granby, and then the night of October 21st, it hit here.
- The East Troublesome would start on October 14th.
It was a fire that started in Kremmling, near Kremmling, you know, in the west side of our county and really traveled miles and miles very, very quickly, you know, over 100,000 acres in one evening.
No one in the incident management team had ever seen something like that and have it move that quickly.
Things aligned and created this, you know, firestorm that we saw on October 21st.
It had direct sunlight, temperatures were higher, the relative humidity was very low, the winds were very, very strong.
You know, we ended up unfortunately losing 366 homes, but we saved a lot.
So, you know, that's a big number.
It could have been much worse.
- We kept seeing smoke to the south of us down by Granby, Kremmling.
And then, you know, we kept saying, oh, that's a shame.
You know, it's large billowing smoke.
And so far there wasn't any destruction, it was just mostly back in the woods, but we knew because of all the beetle kill up here, that it was just a matter of time that that thing was gonna spread.
This whole sky was kind of orange smoke.
We knew that there was no stopping it.
We heard that the fire department was starting a pre-evacuation on the west side of 34, which is the main highway that comes into Grand Lake.
And we said, ah, no big deal.
You know, it's a pre-evacuation.
Well little did we realize, and a lot of firefighters didn't realize, that first of all, we had 60 mile an hour winds.
And then within the fire itself, it was creating a 200 mile an hour mini weather system itself.
So that thing spread about 16, 17 miles in a matter of hours, and so by seven o'clock that night, my wife and I are sitting watching TV, having a glass of wine, and suddenly we hear there's a mandatory evacuation.
Luckily we had gotten some things together, some important papers, 'cause we said, you know what?
You never know.
The lights started flickering in our house, and the firefighters were coming by with a bullhorn saying get out, get out immediately.
So we have basically 10 minutes to get out.
We live on one end of Main Street, so driving out, it was like a thick fog of smoke.
Maybe five feet in front of you is all you can see.
Burning embers all around us.
And I kept looking at all these old buildings and I said, oh my God, this whole town is gonna go up.
But the nice relief was firefighters from numerous, numerous agencies had lined this street.
They were like soldiers ready to take on the enemy.
When we left town, I said, we don't know if we're gonna come back to a town or not.
If it wasn't for those firefighters, this place would have burned, because any of those embers could have hit one of these wooden porches and put the whole town on fire.
I firmly believe that the aerial firefighters really stopped the spread until they couldn't fly anymore on that day, and that's the day that really affected us and had to evacuate out of town.
- I know at my house, I ended up losing a house in Grand Lake, and at 3000 some degrees, you know, everything just turns to dust, and that's really what happened.
It was so incredibly hot.
Grand County has never had to go through something like this.
- With fire seasons intensifying each year, new approaches are advancing firefighting team's abilities to fight fires.
One of these methods used is infrared camera technology to map, track, and even predict what a fire will do next.
Now we'll hear from Camille Calibeo to learn exactly how.
- How do infrared cameras work?
We use infrared cameras to detect and fight fires, but how do they work and why infrared?
First let's talk about what infrared actually is.
We can't see infrared with our own eyes, but we can see it with special infrared cameras that we use for a variety of things, including detecting and fighting fires.
Instead of taking a visual image of an object or area of interest, infrared cameras take a thermal image by measuring the temperature of each pixel in the image.
We can then apply a color scheme to these temperature readings, to visualize hotter and colder parts of the image.
We use infrared cameras for firefighting in many ways.
We can monitor rising temperature spots to detect where a fire might start before it ignites.
We can also take temperature readings of a fire that is already burning to help firefighters make informed decisions about where to target their firefighting activities.
Infrared cameras have changed the way we detect and fight fires because they allow us to monitor the fire even with a thick smoke cover that limits our ability to see the flames with our own eyes.
Infrared cameras are placed on board firefighting planes and helicopters, but they are also used on satellites to provide even more data to firefighters and local officials.
- From satellite cameras to Colorado's own Pilatus PC-12 Multi-Mission Aircraft, infrared technology is empowering ground crews from the sky like never before.
- My name is Andrea Drinkhouse, and I'm one of the MSOs that we have here, which is the mission sensor operators that ride in the back of the plane and do the fire mapping or tactical infrared or anything they needed from us back there.
So we use the camera, move the camera around to see what's below the plane.
When there's tons of smoke, especially it seems like this last year, it happened more than it did the previous year, probably 'cause the fires were so much bigger this last year.
but with all that smoke, normally you would have an air attack platform flying around or you'd have helicopters flying around and they can give ground crews situational awareness about what's happening, but with all that smoke, they couldn't see anything, and they were all grounded, but we were still able to be up flying through the smoke and the clouds, and we were usually above the smoke, but we could look down with our infrared camera and we could scan around and we could see where all the fire was.
We could see where the heat or spots were with the infrared.
It was a hotshot crew member who was our ground contact.
We told them it's right along, you know, this berm area, we think we see like a dozer right here on this edge part.
So lat-long plus just the description of where it was.
So he takes off on his quad, goes over to wherever it is, we continue on our flight path, 'cause we're still, again, looping up and down to any other spots we find.
And he called back on the radio and he was like, yeah, I found the spot.
It's one inch by three inches in a dozer berm.
I don't know how you found that.
At one point, we were just writing down like a list of lat-longs, and like every time we get like three or four, we would call down to our ground contact.
Goal of the program is to do detection where we're flying and we try to find fires when they're really small.
- When I was on the ground as an engine boss running an engine crew, this data wasn't even present to me.
This wasn't something that we had access to.
It was definitely not real time data or near real time data.
And that's probably the biggest leap we've made with this platform is that it is near real time data.
The biggest thing is just the increasing need for more bandwidth, for data connectivity.
As a ground crew member, at some point in time, I'm gonna be able to just pick up my iPhone or my Android device or whatever I'm using for a smartphone and just hit a couple buttons on an app and instantly have that data in real time.
The air resources, they are expensive, but you have to weigh the cost of that expensive resource with the overall cost of fighting a very large fire that gets completely out of hand.
- Large scale, we really need to do more.
We are definitely still in recovery mode, which is a tricky place to be when you're looking at the next season of fire.
And having gone through it now, even more so important, because yes, it can happen to us.
- Wildfires continue to grow in frequency, intensity, and complexity, and at the same time, new applications of aviation resources, investments in infrastructure and innovations in technology are providing aviation firefighting teams with new ways to approach these major challenges.
Wildfires are not going away anytime soon, and in part two, we'll explore how these new technologies may shape the future of aviation firefighters.
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