Last year, the other 10 percent of California fires made news around the world. The 2014 Colby Fire started as a poorly tended campfire and ended only after 1,900 acres burned and 3,700 people were evacuated from its path. “We keep all our fires at 10 acres or less, 90 percent of the time,” Fire Captain Richard Cordova says.ĭuring fire season, anything can spark a major blaze. One measure of the agency’s success is the fact that most Californians never heard about the overwhelming majority of these conflagrations. Frequently, Cal Fire air units are the sole firefighting resource on-site during that critical time frame.īetween 20, approximately 5.4 percent of California’s total acreage was aflame at one time or another.
#Cal fire helicopters full#
Whether it’s a vague report of smoke from the trees or a brush fire poised to double in size, “One call and we’re dispatching 10 fire engines, two bulldozers, four hand crews, and a full complement of firefighting aircraft right from the get-go.”Īirplanes are deployed to arrive less than 20 minutes after the initial call, the window of opportunity when emerging wildfires can often be put down with an aggressive punch. “We’re really big on initial attack firefighting here,” he says. Crews at Hemet dispatch to fires from the San Bernardino mountains, near Los Angeles, all the way south to the Mexican border.Įnergetic and forthright, McGough doesn’t come across as a man content to “manage” drawn-out wildfires. Hemet-Ryan hosts a little of everything in Cal Fire’s standard contingent: a Bell UH-1H Super Huey helicopter, two Grumman S-2T tankers, and a North American Aviation OV-10A tactical observation aircraft. With 50 aircraft at 23 bases around the state, it has the largest firefighting air force in the world. Here at Hemet-Ryan, which remains open year-round, firefighting aircraft out on the ramp mark time quietly in the sun.Ĭal Fire-the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection-is a state agency responsible for fire control across 31 million acres of timberland, brush, and urban forest. To the east, Mount San Jacinto is topped with fresh snow, and ample rainfall has relieved most of the state’s drought. If there’s a fire that day, Cal Fire battalion chief Justin McGough says, “You just know it’s going to burn very, very well.”īut today is not that day, as I step one winter morning onto Cal Fire’s Hemet-Ryan Air Attack Base in Hemet, California. It’s hot, and the relative humidity is down in the single digits. There are days here when you walk outside and just know. The Huey can transport up to seven firefighters. A Cal Fire crewman prepares to rappel from a Super Huey to a small vehicle fire in Mendocino County.
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