The Cradle of Forestry
North Carolina has a unique relationship with wildfire that can be traced back to 1889 when millionaire George W. Vanderbilt purchased a large, mountainous expanse for his estate. Vanderbilt then selected Gifford Pinchot to develop a forest management plan for this vast new land holding with the aim of restoring and managing its resources.
Pinchot himself was the first American trained in the science of forestry, having been formally schooled in France. Pinchot would later go on to become the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, from 1905 to 1910, and he would remain a strong force for reforming the management and development of forest reserves across the United States. For this reason, North Carolina became known as the “Cradle of Forestry.”
Based on its current ecosystems and population growth patterns, North Carolina has the most acres in the United States where homes and structures meet the forest fringe in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), and the state is listed fifth nationally for number of homes inside the WUI. Across North Carolina's landscape is a greater variety of trees than grows throughout Europe.
North Carolina's natural regions are divided into three distinct sections. The Coastal Plains to the east consist of sand dunes and islands that give way to large inland swamps, which transition to large flatlands and rolling hills that often are used for agriculture. The Piedmont Plateau stretches 200 miles across the state's central region from the Coastal Plains. This region of rolling hills is North Carolina's most densely populated, and it extends west to rise up into the rugged Mountain Region, which contains both the highest and largest ranges of the Appalachians.
Across the state, 18 million acres of forest still exist, of which 13.8 million are privately and collectively owned. The North Carolina Division of Forest Resources was created to manage this resource and ensure adequate, quality forestry resources. NCDFR is legally mandated to protect, manage and develop the state's forest resources, which includes protecting citizens on both private and state forest lands. To assist in achieving this goal, NCDFR has developed an extensive fire aviation arm over the years.
NCDFR's fire aviation program is impressive for its size and composition, as well as its cutting-edge experimental undertakings. The program began modestly during the 1940s with the acquisition of surplus Navy N3Ns and Piper observation planes and has grown ever since. Some of its aircraft were purchased outright, while others still are operated by NCDFR as federal excess property that is technically owned by the USFS but on loan for fighting fires.
The air fleet includes eight Cessna L-19s, 182s and 185s that are used for observation and support, as well as to assist in the detection of wildfires. They help with Air Attack airborne coordination duties as necessary, and provide ground-based firefighters with advanced visual support. Six T-34 airplanes are tasked as lead planes to guide airtankers on wildfire drops. The airtanker fleet has three Ayres/Thrush Snow and Melex M-18 Dromader single-engine airtankers, or SEATs, which primarily operate across the Coastal Plains and Piedmont Plateau regions. Each of these SEATs can carry up to 500 gallons of water or fire-retardant chemicals. A Canadair CL-215 water bomber is centrally located within the state, and three UH1H Huey and two A-Star helicopters are strategically located within overlapping response areas of both the Piedmont Plateau and Mountain Regions.
Across the ranks of America's state forestry divisions, NCDFR can be easily seen as a leader for its innovations. For example, in 1986 NCDFR bolstered its firefighting resources by creating its successful BRIDGE program in partnership with the state's Division of Prisons. BRIDGE is a young offenders' forest conservation program that offers selected inmates a broad variety of work and training experience in a forestry setting.
The program is designed to provide 18- to 22-year-old offenders with valuable vocational skills that can help them find their way into meaningful jobs instead of returning to prison. Inmates selected for the BRIDGE program must meet certain criteria and continue to perform at high levels to remain in it. Those who succeed are paid an incentive daily wage of $1, and they accumulate time off their sentences while developing new skills. Within BRIDGE, the most elite position is being a member of the six-person helitack crews that support each of NCDFR's three UH1H Huey helicopters.
Another NCDFR innovation is its CL-215 program. Added to the division's air force in 1999, the CL-215 is an amphibious airtanker built in Canada solely for airborne firefighting. This type of fire bomber is extensively fielded each summer above the firelines of Canada and Europe, but its use is limited in the United States. The aircraft is designed to drop down and skim across the surface of a body of water such as a lake or river at 90 mph. On its way across the surface, two scoops positioned on the aircraft's belly can take in 1,400 gallons of water in 10 seconds.
When dispatched to an incident, a CL-215 will take off from an airport like a normal airplane then fly to a nearby lake and scoop up its first load of water to be ready when it arrives on station for its bombing assignment. The CL-215's range is 90 minutes, during which it can drop its first load on a fire anywhere in North Carolina. In another 90 minutes, the bomber can be fully operational — flying return missions between a water source and the fire, dropping up to 125 loads of water in a single day.
NCDFR has tested other innovative fire aviation firefighting efforts. In conjunction with its SEAT program, for a number of years NCDFR included a DC-3 aircraft that deployed with them and acted as their mother ship. The DC-3 would land on a remote grass landing strip near a fire's location while the SEATs headed over to the fire to drop their first retardant loads. The DC-3 carried heavy-duty water pumps that its crew would place near a water source to draft water in order to refill the SEATs on their arrival. The SEATs could be refueled by transferring fuel from the DC-3's wing fuel tanks — allowing them to continue to operate from that strip — coming and going to drop on the fire as needed.
Fast roping into forest fires and dropping cargo from helicopters by parachute was another of NCDFR's innovative experiments, from 1992 to 2003. Several six-person BRIDGE helitack crews were selected to be “ropers” and were trained — first on a tower at 20 and 40 feet and then from a hovering UH1H Huey at 60 feet. Sixteen jumps from varying heights were required for graduation, and certified Fast Rope Masters oversaw all training and operations.
The qualified BRIDGE fast rope team members were assigned to an NCDFR leader and placed on stand-by, ready to be inserted from helicopter by rope into wildfires for various missions. Their assignments could include actually fighting the fire, building a helicopter landing pad to support larger incoming troop shuttles or assisting an injured person in a remote, rugged location.
During a typical team deployment, the team and the helicopter would be configured for the coming fast rope mission. They would load up and fly to the scene of the incident. Arriving overhead, the helicopter pilot would conduct a single, high-level recon orbit to evaluate the jump spot below them, looking for possible deadly wires or other ground hazards that could affect the arriving firefighters. If all seemed okay, the pilot would drop the helicopter to a quick hover 100 to 120 feet above the selected jump spot.
A military duffel bag containing the team's food, water, tools and gas to operate their chainsaws and pumps — cushioned with layers of thick cardboard honeycomb padding placed inside — would be thrown from the Huey with a 12-foot, static line parachute attached. The parachute's static line hook was clipped to the helicopter's specially modified fast rope arm attachment, and the tension and weight from its fall would deploy the parachute as it fell away from the hovering aircraft to pop open just above the ground, bringing the duffle bag down safety.
Thick, dark ropes would be uncoiled afterward from either side of the helicopter, and the roper team (as directed by the Fast Rope Master seated onboard with them) would move from their seats to sit over both open doorways with their boots resting on the Huey's skids below. The pilot would bring the helicopter down into a lower hover at least 60 feet above the jump spot location. When all was ready, the signal would be given, and the ropers would grab onto either rope in their assigned order and slide down using their hands and boots to control their decent. This whole operation, from the first of the six people mounting the rope until the last was down safely, would only take up to 10 seconds in total.
In its time, NCDFR's Fast Rope program proved very effective in quickly moving personnel from hovering helicopters onto incidents, greatly reducing the time helicopter flight crews needed to spend in potentially dangerous hovers during support operations. The program was a success, but in 2003 it was discontinued due to increased development across North Carolina. By then, expanding road systems statewide had made it possible to drive to within 1-1/2 mile of any potential wildfire location, and the program's unique insertion abilities into remote locations was no longer necessary.
Michael Hill is a wildland firefighter and an aviation military contractor specializing in managing helicopter projects in Afghanistan. In the United States, he worked 18 summers for the U.S. Forest Service as a hot shot, rappeller and smoke jumper; in Australia, he served as an aircraft specialist and remote-area helicopter hoist specialist.
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