With the recent wildfires in Northern California reaching historic proportions, the human toll rose as a helicopter ferrying an 11-member firefighting crew from the front lines crashed on August 5, resulting in nine fatalities (see story on facing page).
The helicopter, owned by Pennsylvania-based Carson Helicopters, was one of the company’s 12 Sikorsky S-61s contracted to fight the fires that ravaged the region for more than a month. The accident raised to 12 the death toll from this latest firestorm.
On June 20, lightning from a rainless thunderstorm moving over the northern part of the state sparked more than 2,000 fires in the region. “These were lightning strikes that created a widespread area of fire. They started out small and then a lot of them merged in inaccessible areas; many of them had to go unmanned for a while just because of the resource requirements,” said Mike Padilla, chief of aviation for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (Cal Fire). “We relied heavily on air power to hold a lot of these fires in check until crews could get in, and even then there wasn’t enough to go around, so we tapped just about every aviation resource we could.”
