These are from the Rockhouse and Wildcat fires, Trans Pecos Complex, west Texas.





I didn't take the pics.
I wish I had the chance to though. Instead I'm stuck being part of the incident management team for the complex.

5/6/2011 1:44:05 AM

Atrium?

5/6/2011 1:44:52 AM

5/6/2011 1:50:22 AM

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee saluuuuuuuuuuuuute youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

5/6/2011 1:50:29 AM

Quote :

"FIRE IN THE TACO BELL"

5/6/2011 1:59:40 AM

hey fumbler, Did NC forestry service sell its water scooper recently?

5/10/2011 8:46:01 AM

I thought you worked at Bojangles

5/10/2011 8:46:54 AM

Quote :

"Atrium?"

lol

5/10/2011 10:04:08 AM

it's forest service. not forestry service. that really gets on his nerves (and therefore mine also). all the news outlets do it regardless of what they're told during the interview.


bojangles? wat?


they sold the cl-215 a while back, yes. the state wouldn't pay to fix it & it was too dangerous to fly, iirc.

5/10/2011 10:54:38 AM

I'm just now looking at my old posts.

Yes, we sold the CL-215 a while back. It went for around $400k on eBay, a lot more than most people thought it'd fetch.
The ship cost over 3 million when we bought it. We'd contract it out to the USFS during slow summers here in NC. The problem is the money it earned went back into the state's general fund, not back to the NCFS. On the Tower Ridge Fire 3 years ago they busted a sponson on a stump in the lake they were drafting from. We couldn't afford to replace the parts and the ship also came up on its c check at the same time (which is apparently expensive).
So...we sold it at a loss.

The funny thing is right now we've contracted a CL-215 just like what we had from Minnesota through the USFS to work on the big fires we've got. We've also contracted two Kaman K-Maxes, an Astar, and an Air Tractor Fire Boss.

To summarize, state government's got some problems.
We sold the CL-215 at a loss (we can't have nice things), only have one helicopter pilot for our 4 helicopters because the rest walked off the job (poor management), and are spending an assload on contract ships (an exclusive use contract for one K-max is around $30k PER DAY).


To top it off, I'm stuck on my third incident management team dispatch this year (not actually fighting fire). I've got two supervisors. One works about 25% of the time, the other one just plays angry birds and barks orders every once in a while. I do the rest of the work, which at this point in the fire amounts to about 5-6 hours of working wide open. The other 8-10 hours I put down on my time sheet is spent sitting here watching the gross waste of state funds and looking at camera lenses in case this we get a federal fire grant that will pay us overtime. They wont let me leave during the middle of the day when I'm not doing anything.

We've moved the NC Forest Service from the Dept of Environment and Natural Resources to the Dept of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Hopefully this change will allow us to manage our junk with a little more common sense.

Thanks for letting me vent, tww.

[Edited on July 6, 2011 at 1:47 PM. Reason : All I want is to go home... ]

7/6/2011 1:28:11 PM

Quote :

"Atrium?"

I FEEL YOUNG AGAIN!

7/6/2011 1:39:19 PM

I thought this thread was about duck season

7/6/2011 1:39:38 PM

Quote :

"common sense"

in nc state govt?

LOL

7/6/2011 1:40:25 PM

7/6/2011 1:47:06 PM

Quote :

"a little more common sense"

Just a little more. I'm not expecting a lot.

7/6/2011 1:48:46 PM

Yea I looked up the price that the CL-215 went for and the parts on the NC Liquidation eBay account. I honestly was not surprised it fetched that much though. If you watch Ice Pilots those guys deal in CL-215s and were discussing that the scarcity of airframes make them all valuable as long as they are in good shape structurally (no major structural corrosion). They went and salvaged one that had been sitting on a ramp in Venezuela for years and most folks thought had been lost in the rainforest. They purchased it from the government and fixed the thing to bring back to Canada, so the market is pretty robust for them if they are that serious about salvaging airframes. At the beginning of the series they sold two to Turkey and followed the crew ferrying them across the Atlantic. Sucks that NC couldn't get their shit together about the 215. Didn't they also fuck up building the hangar for it? To make it big enough for it they had to go higher than the standard hangars and they did not get the proper fire suppression system for the height of the building and rather than retrofitting the right system in they just said screw it and left the thing sitting outside and did not use the hangar?

Found the story. They tried to notch the hangar to make the tail tall enough but never got a permit to do the modification. The extra foot of height is a breakpoint for a fire suppression system requirement, so they just left it outside instead of pursuing the permit.

[Edited on July 6, 2011 at 3:44 PM. Reason : ]

7/6/2011 3:41:39 PM

0118 999 881 99 911 8725 3

7/6/2011 3:51:03 PM

house around the corner from mine apparently caught fire today. My coworker came in from lunch and was all "YOUR JUNK IS BURNING DOWN" and had me freaking out... Not cool.

7/6/2011 5:05:54 PM

Quote :

"Found the story. They tried to notch the hangar to make the tail tall enough but never got a permit to do the modification. The extra foot of height is a breakpoint for a fire suppression system requirement, so they just left it outside instead of pursuing the permit."

Yeah. They also didn't have adequate security for it. Since they had to leave it outside they were supposed to have a security guard around the clock.

The market for CL-215s and 415s can be crappy or really good. We got lucky because a contractor who runs a fleet of Canadairs wanted ours for parts.

DENR did an air fleet assessment. That was done by some group that compared our ships to commercial use. Their findings were basically that our fleet was too big and DENR could save 1.5 million if we sold like 9 various airships and it wouldn't impact our capabilities. So...we got rid of all the ones we got through federal excess (we paid $0 for those) and a couple of old beaters that haven't run in years to meet their 9 aircraft mandate. It didn't save any money lol.

7/6/2011 5:27:17 PM

Well yea the most wasteful stuff is in Commerce and other places. They own planes that they use to fly business people around to court them to come to NC. They have 3 aircraft at the Governor's beck and call. For an announcement in Halifax County about 2 years ago she flew the Citation jet from RDU to the new Halifax County airport. That cost more money and time than just driving in a motorcade to Halifax County. And then that fancy and expensive to operate S-76. Meanwhile she never takes the "lowly" King Air, even though it would be far more efficient for most trips around the state.

I still say sell all of them and just charter when necessary. The flight hours on those aircraft bear out that they are barely ever used, yet we are paying for all of that hangar space (and building an addition) at RDU, all the pilots and support personnel. Just charter when necessary. That would be a true testament to her making some cuts that might not save megabucks, but would be far better suited than making the state liquidate planes that we got for free.

7/6/2011 6:43:27 PM

Quote :

""

that plane appears to be on it's period.

7/6/2011 7:12:09 PM

Quote :

"0118 999 881 99 911 8725 3"

lol now i have that song stuck in my head

thanks

7/6/2011 7:48:52 PM

7/6/2011 7:49:11 PM

^^^^that is true of the governor, but not the nc forest service fleet. We don't use our airships for travel. We use them for fire patrol, as scouts on running fires, for water/retardant drops, and to move supplies and firefighters while firefighting. In the off season we use the scout planes for taking aerial photos for land measurement. We also sometimes use scout planes and helicopters for search and rescue/recovery. It's very difficult to put a value on all of that to see if it's financially viable. From our perspective it's worth it. There's no telling how many houses have been saved, how many times an air drop has kept ground forces from getting overrun, or how many lives a scout pilot has saved because he can see guys when the smoke or vegetation is too thick to see on the ground. In case you didn't catch that $30k/day figure, firefighting aircraft are expensive when contracted and during times of high fire occurrence they may not even be available if we didn't own them. Taking all of that into account, I'd say we at least break even on the investment. If we'd contract or aircraft to other agencies and manage the income correctly then it'd be a no brainer.
The governor does suck. She flies in fancy new helicopters while we're running surplus Vietnam era hueys with bullet holes.

^^^lol. Retardant is red so you can see where it was dropped.

7/7/2011 12:08:32 AM

herb?

7/7/2011 12:13:50 AM

^^Yes that was my point, contract out her fancy ass expensive rides. That helo cost more than probably the combined fleet for DENR. We have a pretty decent sized fleet of planes at UNC for flying the doctors around but our planes had more hours than just about anybody else and showed they were being utilized properly. Obviously the 215 was a boondoggle and a clusterfuck, but it was not the planes fault, it was mismanaged and then made the rest of the department look like a bunch of idiots.

7/8/2011 9:22:21 AM