Forests Aflame

Oh, gee. I believe converting a Boeing 747 to a tanker is a pretty big step:

Wikipedia has numerous articles on the subject: One here.

When I lived in Missoula Montana, our shop was across the highway from USFS Headquarters. Located on the campus include:

Aerial Fire Depot, Missoula Smokejumpers, Rocky Mountain Research Station, the Fire Sciences Laboratory, Missoula Technology and Development Center (MTDC), Wildland Fire Assesment System (this is an interesting site), and numerous others.

All of these entities have a constant project: Improve what we are doing today, and respond to an incident RIGHT NOW with the tools and methods that we have.

As far as the "Let 'er burn" policy, that option is not exercised in USA too often anymore. Reference the fire in Yellowstone, 1988 as the end (almost) of that policy.

To my knowledge the methods are basically the same, and so is the (lack of) data. My brother worked with a couple of fire departments in Alaska. Disclaimer: we're stat geeks. He said he had never seen any data to indicate that the water and fire retardants dropped from air craft coupled with the efforts of ground crews had any significant impact on the duration or extent of major forrest fires. Have you ever seen data on the topic?

While the modified 747 grabs the aerial firefighting headlines for the large load that it can deliver, Bombardier makes the purpose built model 415 firefighting plane. This amphibious plane does carry a lighter load but is designed to skim a lake or deep river to fill the water drop tanks. This smaller load craft can then much more quickly and repeatedly get a smaller dousing of water to fight a forest fire.

But you are correct that one of the newest ideas is to let small fires burn themselves and particularly the small scrub brush out to reduce the amount of fuel available to be converted into a large unmanageable fire. The problem with this approach is that we've been previously quickly extinguishing small fires for decades, so there's lots of kindling like scrub in the forests now to ignite the large trees and becoming an unmanageable fire.

I'm in Red Deer... The rain last night took a lot of the smoke away here.. but it was pretty thick yesterday.

Outside of red deer is a manufacturer/provider of Coiled Tubing for oil & gas drilling. They have a field full of rolls of 2-3" tubing... I bet there must be dozens of kilometers of tubing. I also know that Red Deer is home to CalFrac, amongst other frac companies, which operate dozens of high pressure (10000psi) pumping trucks. I also sure there are a few hundred mud tanks and mud pumping skids around.

I think that with all this high pressure, high volume pumping equipment, plus tubing, around here, that some of it could be put to use pumping water from lakes and rivers to containment ditches, and/or sprayed directly on fires, or used to fill localized ponds for helicopter delivery.

just a thought. I think the tubing should be available for rent or lease, and probably the pumping equipment too. Is there funds available from governmental emergency organizations?

Also from some online research, I understand that 1 gallon of water can produce 20 gallons of firefighting foam. therefore, I suggest that more foam be brought to the fight.

Chris