'We need to have well-trained responders': Colorado pilots prepare for wildfire season
LONGMONT — As the fog cleared up Sunday morning, four helicopters landed at Vance Brand Airport, where the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control and the Colorado National Guard held a wildfire simulation as part of an annual training.
“Knowing that with the continuation and the chance of wildland fires in the region in Colorado, we need to have well-trained responders,” said Erin Doyle, a wildfire operations specialist for the City of Boulder Fire Rescue.
Doyle, who’s been a firefighter for 21 years, has been doing this training for the past 10.
“What this training is all about is creating a simulated fire environment for the National Guard to practice the very basic things such as deploying the bucket from the aircraft, getting actual water and dropping it on simulated fire,” Doyle said. “Then we add layers of complexity like talking to firefighters on the ground.”
Other partners involved included the Longmont Fire Department, U.S. Forest Service, city of Longmont and the Bureau of Land Management.
For the Sunday training, there were two UH-72 Lakota helicopters and two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. Brendan Young, with the Colorado National Guard, piloted one of the Black Hawks that carried the water and talked about his first fire experience.
“It’s the same thing if you see a fire from your house, or from the road you’re driving, and you can see this huge plume of smoke and it’s really intimidating,” Young said. But after training, “it’s pretty calm.”
National Guard Chief Warrant Officer 3 Daniel Bentley said the annual training is the most important one they do. His first fire, near Pueblo in 2019, was during a previous training.
“The exact same training we do here helped immediately with the real fire that we did in Pueblo,” Bentley said.
“Everything is as real as it can be except actual fire on the ground,” Doyle said, adding that communication on these interagency operations is key.
During the training exercise, Doyle flew on one of the Lakota helicopters, helping coordinate seven different audio frequencies between pilots and other members.
“Boots are really what put fires out, the people on the ground. You can get all the help we can from the sky, but until you go in and you actually remove burning material, that still has to be done by hand,” Doyle said.
He estimated between the two Black Hawks, they performed around 60 drops carrying approximately 64,000 gallons of water from Ralph Price Reservoir, Longmont's main drinking water supply.
According to Colorado State University, “Over the past 20 to 40 years, the Western U.S. has experienced several linked trends in wildfires: large increases in annual area burned, number of very large fires (>10,000 acres), fraction of fire area burned at high severity, and length of the fire season.”
Although these trends are also affected by other factors like forest and land management and variability in precipitation, the report said “a critical common thread is the role of increasing temperatures,” fueled by human-made climate change.
In Colorado, model projections show a “substantially worsened wildfire risk for Colorado by the mid-21st century compared to the late 20th century, as additional warming further increases fuel dryness and enhances fire ignition and spread," according to the CSU report.
More: From temperatures to wildfire risk, here are takeaways from new Colorado climate report
See other training flights
Additional water drop training flights are scheduled Wednesday and Thursday.
A Tuesday flight is pending confirmation.
The flights will depart from Vance Brand Airport, 229 Airport Road in Longmont, around 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. People can also watch the aircrafts from the reservoir dam accessible from the Button Rock Trail.
This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado helicopter pilots prepare for wildfire season