Fire
June 26, 2015 10:46 am Leave your thoughts
It’s finally Happened! We got to fly into a fire! Many people would see this an odd thing to be excited about and I am in no way saying forest fires are a good thing however; it was a very exciting moment for my crew and I because we were finally able to use all our training on the real deal and see where our strengths and weaknesses are within the crew and how we can become better for next time. We had a blast!
We were the first to discover the fire during one of our scheduled flight patrols. We found it pretty early and was only showing surface fire characteristics with some of the upper canopy beginning to ignite. Because we were the first on scene for the fire I had been given position of Incident Commander which gives me control of required resources and and tactics as well as providing ESRD with up to date information on the fire. One of the challenges for me during first discovering the fire was providing ESRD (Provincial Fire Protection) with an assessment and details on the fire behaviour and progression. Additional fire suppression resources had also been sent out to the which also created more stress for me trying to coordinate everything with communications.
We eventually landed at the location of the fire where extra fire suppression crews eventually arrived shortly after. We also had the privilege to witness two air tankers to drop retardant on the fire before us and the other crews began actioning the fire. Incident Commander status was eventually handed over from me to a member of a provincial helitack crew where he began coordinating and assigning roles to each crew. The fire behaviour at this point was very minimal so we were able to safely approach the fire and work the perimeter with handtools and water. A few spot fires had occurred within 100m of the original fire but were quickly extinguished by other crews. After a few hours of working the perimeter we were released by the Incident Commander and flew back to our day base.
After the fire had been declared fully extinguished it was sized up at 0.2 hectares an no high priority values were destroyed with the exception of a small amount of timber. It was a great experience for me action a fire as a helitack leader and it provided me with a lot of things to work on and prepare for so that we are all better prepared for next time. We had a good time and hopefully we got a few more opportunities to work on some fires this summer.
Thanks for reading!