Original subtitles

- 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.

(upbeat music)