FIGHTING FIRES FROM THE AIR

CLAYTON S. CROCKER.

The roar of the motors faded almost to silence as the patrol plane disappeared behind a gray peak. Then it came again, its rumble a conglomerate of echoes bouncing from one canyon wall to the other. It lurched each time it crossed over the craggy divide on either side of the mile-deep canyon. Updrafts boosted it like a feather, then dropped it hundreds of feet toward the timbered country below the Selway Wilderness Area in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana, one of the most rugged and inaccessible areas in the United States.

Midway on the mountainside below was a small, steadily smoking fire; lightning had touched off a dry tree. In an hour it would spread through the timber and race up the steep slope, leaving devastation in its wake. No man on foot or horse could reach the blaze in less than 2 days; there are no roads near it.

The plane leveled off. It slowed almost to a stalling speed a quarter of a mile to windward and a half mile above the fire. In rapid succession three men, mere dots in that tremendously big sky and background of giant mountains, jumped out. Above each smokejumper the minuteman of the national forest fire organization a thin, white streamer billowed out, waved crazily for a moment, then took on the shape of a snowy umbrella.

Updrafts, downdrafts, side winds opposed each smokejumper, dangling 30 feet below his parachute, in his effort to alight on the spot he had selected. He, in turn, manipulated his chute to compensate for the contrary currents. His life and that of the forest depended upon his safe landing. He dumped the air from the chute and plummeted like a rock so as to offset too much side drift. Then, to avoid being speared by sharp-topped snags, he collapsed one side of the canopy and glided rapidly forward, falling all the while at the rate of 16 feet a second. His selected landing spot was the top of a hundred-foot green tree. With feet close together, he crashed through the branches; twigs, needles, and cones flew in all directions. Then his chute tangled amid the top branches and jerked him to a stop, his feet 70 feet above the rocky mountainside. To the trunk of the tree he quickly fastened one end of the rope he carried conveniently at his side; with it he clambered down.

Five minutes later, he and two companion smokejumpers attacked the fire. In 2 hours they had put it out, in what to them was routine fashion, a routine part of a day. Besides saving the virgin timber from devastation, they exemplified the precept that effective fire fighting depends on the fast mobilization of men and tools. Mobilization depends on transportation. Transportation now depends increasingly on aircraft, the fastest and most effective method developed since systematic protection against forest fires began in 1905.

That year a small group of pioneer foresters started to set up a system to reduce the tremendous yearly losses in the inaccessible and priceless forest wildernesses. Transportation then was by pack horses or by pack humans. Trails were few. Fire fighters struggled afoot across deep canyons and up mountain divides 12,000 feet high. They had no marked routes or dependable maps. It was hard to detect fires, and many became running conflagrations before they were sighted. A fire could spread from a spark to a disaster while the smokechaser backpacked wearily cross country 2 or 3 or 5 days to begin his attack.

The spirit of the pioneers is a glorious challenge to men of all times, a lesson in courage and sacrifice but glory puts out no fires. The odds against them were hopeless. The inadequacy of their system was demonstrated in the great fires of 1910, which pointed up the need for accessibility and more speedy attack. As a result, in 1911 to 1925, a network of trails was built, and hundreds of pack mules were used to reduce travel time to fires. Even so, the 2 1/2 miles an hour over the great distances within the national forests was too slow. Too many fires still got out of hand; the costs and losses were still too heavy.

Then came the automobile and road era. Between 1926 and 1938, the development of low-cost truck trails opened many forest areas to automobile transportation. Travel time was speeded up to 15 miles an hour and it became possible to put out fires that otherwise might have grown into disasters. Costs and losses were reduced materially further proof that speed of attack is the determining factor.

But at a certain point road transportation ceases to be economically sound; in the remote areas rugged terrain makes the cost of construction prohibitive. Besides millions of acres of valuable forest remain outside the reach of road transportation. From that problem, air transport was born.

The terrible fires of 1910 left foresters desperate and willing to try anything that held any hope of solution. Airplane patrol, searching for fires, was tried in a few flights in the Lake States in 1915. The results were negative. Flying equipment was not dependable.

In 1919 the Army Air Force provided airplanes and experienced pilots for patrol work over California forests. Not much came of it. The planes available were poorly adapted to the pounding they got in the currents that rush through the mountain country. Often the downdraft was greater than the climbing ability of the planes. Pilots took tremendous risks; many had to make forced landings amid towering trees or on cliffs and rock slides.

Experiments were continued nevertheless in an attempt to make the airplane a useful tool in combating forest fires. By 1926 the airplane was accepted as an adjunct to the lookout system of the Northwest. Air patrolmen helped in observing and reporting going fires and obtaining information on the head end of fast-running fires in remote timberlands. Photographs taken from high-flying planes gave some information for maps, but equipment was poor, and cost and risk were great. Foresters were beginning to see the possibility of uses other than fire observation.

A few landing strips were built in the 1930's in central locations in the most remote forests, and fire fighters were flown to the one nearest a fire. From there they walked, and they cut hours, often days, from the time required by the old trail-travel system. Even so, the landing strips were few, and the men still had to trudge long distances and reach a fire fatigued and only partly effective. Fires still had from 4 to 36 hours to spread before the attackers could reach them.

In 1929, a bad fire season, a crew at the head of a fire was cut off from all ground transportation. They held a key point, far up on the mountainside. To maintain their stand, they required additional equipment; without it, they would lose the fire, and great tracts of valuable timber lay ahead. There was no possibility of getting pumps and other tools through by pack mule; all trails were shut off by fire. To man-pack the heavy equipment over the many miles of rough, log-strewn country would have taken too many hours. The fire would not wait. The fire boss, more interested in saving the forest than in his own personal safety, suggested dropping the equipment from an airplane. That was done. Axes, shovels, and hand pumps, bundled in excelsior and blankets, were tossed out, as the little plane bounced through the churning air at treetop level. Many handles were splintered, pumps were smashed against boulders, and much of the equipment was damaged. But enough was salvaged to do the job at hand. The fire was held. That was the beginning of aerial delivery of supplies direct to fire-fighting forces.

Since then, air transportation has developed rapidly. As aircraft was improved in performance, so were techniques for dropping cargo. Pilots, the so-called bush variety, learned to maneuver planes into almost impossible spots amid spikelike peaks, into narrow rock-walled canyons, and in the difficult air currents that prevail in such country during the turbulent weather of the fire season.

In the early years of cargo dropping, bundles were released at treetop level, to fall free at the target site. Extreme accuracy was essential because an overshot of a few feet might carry the package far down into a canyon beyond the target. Breakage was severe in the free falls, and packaging to lessen that damage was costly and bulky there was more insulation material than actual pay load. Parachutes, first used for dropping supplies in 1936, eliminated the need for bulky packaging.

The principle of the static line, or mechanical tripping of the ripcord, was discovered by a forest pilot and fire fighter in 1937. It permitted abandonment of free-fall methods and made the job more efficient and safer. By 1938 much of the initial supply of food, equipment, and material necessary in the attack upon inaccessible fires was delivered by cargo chute.

A specialized use of the freight chute, one that greatly simplifies fire fighting and lowers costs, is the delivery right on the fire line of prepared hot meals for the fire fighters. The practice is favored when the fire is in country so far from trails that the use of pack mules would be costly and in instances when reliance on K-rations is impracticable and the nature of the job does not warrant a field kitchen.

Air-delivered meals are prepared by restaurateurs according to a standard menu. Hot meat, vegetables, gravy, and other foods are packaged in tin buckets. Each 5-gallon bucket is insulated by a kapok-stuffed canvas cover, which retains the heat for several hours. Paper plates, forks, spoons, and cups are included. Cold water in milk cans and hot coffee in insulated 5-gallon cans go along with the meal. This method of feeding the crews eliminates their need for leaving the fire line for meals. Breakfast, dinner, or supper is dropped at the edge of the fire and there is no mess gear to be packed back to base after the fire.

THEN CAME an exciting experiment parachuting men directly to the fire. The idea had come and gone many times, but before 1939 nobody had been willing to advocate such seeming fantasy of sending a live man crashing down among spearlike snags, sheer precipices, ragged peaks, foaming streams, rough underbrush, and dense stands of trees. Airmen had smiled and walked away when the subject was mentioned; they thought of the vicious currents, the rarified air at high elevations, and the unpredictable winds over the rough mountains. But a handful of Forest Service smoke-chasers did it in the summer of 1939. They had no precedent, no information about that type of parachuting. Their equipment was crude according to present-day standards. They had assembled their protective clothing from whatever they could get football padding, baseball masks, and such. They had only the standard emergency parachutes. So equipped, they were at the mercy of the elements.

Their first jumps were aimed at soft, grassy meadows high on the mountainside. Such sites are few in the wilderness forests, and the original concept of the possibilities of jumping was restricted to that limitation. Then, during some trial jumps, a gust of wind chanced to carry a jumper away from the meadow and slammed him down into a thicket of tall trees, the accident that all had dreaded. The jumper, swinging lightly down from the springlike branches, reported the most gentle landing he had experienced. Thereafter, jumpers attempted purposely to land in green trees, which they call "feathers."

Eleven fire seasons have passed and a war has been won since those first timber jumps. The smokejumpers, as they are now called, have had an important part in both.