With more moderate winds over Southern California, a fleet of helicopters and air tankers has been able to drop in the last two days hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and fire retardant from the skies to help ground crews battle the infernos below.
The fight from above is critical in giving firefighters a chance to get some semblance of control over the fires, said Orange County Fire Authority Chief Brian Fennessy, who has at least 300 firefighters on 10 strike teams helping battle what he calls the worst fires he’s seen in his more than 40 years in the service and likely the “greatest structure loss ever.”
On Thursday, Jan. 9, he was up in a helicopter over the Palisades and Eaton fires with other fire officials doing intelligence gathering.
“Everything was completely wiped out; nothing was standing,” he said. “Looking down, it was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
How aerial resources are used in the plan to fight a wildfire is critical. Water drops, Fennessy said, are used to directly attack flames to cool them down so crews on the ground can battle them. He said retardant is used in indirect attacks, so when it gets into the brush or vegetation, it slows the speed of the fire. The chemicals will coat the leaves and the brush. Even when it’s dry, it has retarding capabilities.
“The idea is to give us time to get the road crew to it,” he said.
Map: See where the major fires are burning in Los Angeles County
But on the first day of the Palisades and Eaton fires, fixed-wing tankers couldn’t fly at night when the winds were high – or hit their targets.
“They can only fly so low, and when the retardant is dropped, it just blows away,” Fennessy said. “Even if the aircraft can fly in these windy conditions, there are just some times, where the retardant or the water is not hitting the targets, where you need to shut down the air operation. Not because it’s unsafe, but in those kind of winds, it will disintegrate and go all over the place.”
Though some media footage, showed the colored, gel-like substance on homes, Fennessy said retardant is not typically used on burning structures, partly because it is messy to clean up later. Sometimes, though, he said the retardant can drift onto structures, cars and people because it isn’t an exact science.
“Can they drop retardant directly on a fire? Absolutely,” he said. “And, sometimes, they do. But most of the time, they’re laying this pink retardant in advance, on a ridgetop. (Or) below where a fire is backing down into a canyon, you’ll see them drop it below it. The idea is to give us time.”
“Dropping water and retardant on homes and properties, it doesn’t work,” he said. “If you’ve got homes on fire like we’ve seen and you drop a large volume of retardant or water on that structure, you’re not going to put it out, and it will still require firefighters to go into those structures and fully extinguish those fires.”
And, he said, if there are people in those structures, dropping the retardant is dangerous because firefighters can get hurt.