Copter Crash Halts Angeles Test Blaze

A long-planned test burn in the Angeles National Forest was abruptly halted this morning, moments after a small “heli-torch” helicopter that was igniting a preliminary blaze tripped on a power line and crashed into a canyon, firefighters said.

The accident forced an indefinite postponement of the test fire, which is designed to facilitate the study of assorted scientific phenomena.

The lone pilot of the Bell 500 copter apparently “walked away from the crash” unharmed, said Wade Wells, a U.S. Forest Service scientist. The pilot, who was not named, was taken to a nearby hospital for observation.

“He had just lit the test fire that we light before every prescribed burn to check conditions,” Wells said. “Apparently the cables holding the torch suspended beneath the helicopter became entangled in a power line and that caused the crash.”

Pilot Experienced

Wade said the pilot was “very experienced, so we’re not sure if there was a malfunction in the helicopter.”

County fire officials, who were monitoring the experimental blaze along with the U.S. Forest Service and the state Department of Forestry, said the operation, in the Lodi Canyon area, would be postponed. But it was not immediately clear for how long.

“The operation is closed because the helicopter is lying in an area of the burn,” county Fire Department spokesman Terry Dillman said. “It will be restarted, but not today.”

(U.S. Forest Service spokesman Bob Swinford said the test burn was canceled at least for today as a result of the crash. Gordon Rowley, fire management specialist for the Forest Service, said it would probably be rescheduled next June. But Philip Riggan, the Forest Service’s scientist-in-charge of the experiment, told the Associated Press that a decision would be made late this afternoon on whether to proceed Thursday with the experimental burn.)

Nuclear War Simulation

Scientists had hoped that the 1,000-acre fire, two years in the planning, would provide them with information on whether smoke from a nuclear war would block sunlight enough to chill the earth and lead to a “nuclear winter.”

In addition, other scientists were to study such phenomena as fire-caused erosion and air pollution resulting from the massive blaze.

First conceived in 1984 as a simple controlled burn of overgrown brush, the project had grown into a many-layered, $750,000 scientific experiment. Once it was under way, research planes from throughout the West were to converge over the canyon and chart information from the smoke and flames.