Oregon Dept. of Forestry holds annual Burn Boss training for fire season preps
PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) – It’s only the first week of July, and fire season is already well underway in the Pacific Northwest.
The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) held its annual fire boss training on Tuesday with local employees and firefighters to make sure resources on both the air and the ground are prepared for the coming days.
Ground crews made up of employees from ODF and the Hillsboro and Clackamas Fire Departments got the chance to practice communicating with planes about where exactly to drop water on fires.
A pair of Air Tractor 802′s, normally used for agriculture purposes, flew over Hagg Lake to demonstrate scooping up the hundreds of gallons of water–normally about 600 gallons for each plane.
“More so now than at any time in my career, the wildland fire environment is changing,” said long-time ODF employee Wally Waible, who participated in the training.
“We require various resources, and aviation is becoming more and more important for us in what we do…we’re here to learn how to call in drops and how to communicate with them best,” he said. “We have to put ourselves in their shoes and try to describe it in the best way possible for them to understand what it is that we want.”
Pilot Aaron Vince said it’s a satisfying feeling to drop water exactly where the ground crews were hoping. But sometimes, it’s difficult to communicate.
“Sometimes you have to interpret what they’re saying as, ‘I think he really wants this’, and you go and give him a drop and see if you’re on the same page,” he said.
A number of elements make it harder every year for these crews to do their jobs.
“Increase in fire activity and decrease in personnel,” Vince said. “It’s like really hard to find pilots right now and I also understand it’s the same for ground resources.”
“With record high temperatures in early July, just continue to compound, and as we get into later in the summer, things are going to get hot and dry and continue to elevate in fire danger,” said Neal Laugle, the State Aviation Manager with the Oregon Department of Forestry.
ODF employees said they are not expecting this fire season to be worse than years past, but they know flames are unpredictable.
“My boss always says, ‘ask me in October, and I’ll tell you how fire season went,’” Waible said.
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