As Blaze Grows, Super Scoopers Still in Canada

As one of Los Angeles County’s worst wildfires in recent memory continued to churn out of control Wednesday, the county’s vaunted Super Scooper firefighting planes were nowhere to be found.

Because of predictions by county fire officials that the planes would only be needed for about two months, beginning in mid-October, they are still in Canada.

But late Wednesday, county Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said he now wants the planes as soon as they can be delivered by their owner, the province of Quebec.

Freeman said his decision had nothing to do with the severity of the so-called Marple Fire, but was based on concerns that this fire season potentially is the most hazardous in 15 years.

While they will not arrive in time to help control the Marple fire--named for the canyon near Castaic where the outbreak began Monday afternoon--the Super Scoopers are expected to be available by Sept. 6. That is the earliest they can be delivered, Freeman said. After two years of testing, county supervisors approved a five-year lease of the two Super Scoopers in late June, after Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Zev Yaroslavsky said the planes were critically important to the county’s firefighting effort. “It is June 25, fire season is not too far off,” Yaroslavsky said at the time. “We need to get moving.”

Some fire officials said the planes, officially known as CL-215Ys, might have helped contain the fire before it spread out of control.

“I believe honestly that any air support would have helped, yes,” said Darrell Higuchi, the department’s deputy chief of operations and project manager for the Super Scooper project.

The department and the U.S. Forest Service are fighting the blaze with other planes and helicopters. But some of these aircraft have much smaller tanks than the Super Scoopers and have to land to reload.

“It would have been great to have them,” fire Inspector Henry Rodriguez said of the Super Scoopers. “Civilian people are saying, ‘Hey, where are the Super Scoopers? Aren’t you going to have them?’ ”

County supervisors opted in June to lease the planes as a primary weapon in their wildfire-fighting arsenal, because they are capable of refilling 1,400-gallon tanks in just 10 seconds by skimming large bodies of water and then dousing blazes.

“Since we are leasing the Super Scoopers and they are our resources, we’d like to have them here,” Freeman said in a phone interview from the fire site. “We felt like it would be better to get them in earlier this year.”

The county is paying $1.2 million to lease the planes for two months this year and will pay a maximum of $1.5 million in successive years. Fire Department officials now plan to ask the Board of Supervisors for more money because they want to keep the planes through December.

Freeman said he decided to ask for early delivery of the planes after concluding that that this season is potentially the worst since 1981 due to high heat, dryness and other factors. “We try to monitor the long range [weather] forecast as best we can,” Freeman said. “It’s part science and part good old-fashioned luck when you are talking about the weather. Traditionally this time of year we do get fires, but they are not the wind-driven Santa Ana fires that go through population areas.”

Higuchi said that deciding when to lease the planes is “somewhat of a gamble. But it is a calculated gamble.”

Officials had previously concluded that the real danger would begin in October, when the Santa Ana winds fan flames into large-scale infernos that get too big for conventional firefighting means.

Even so, Higuchi said he had already been trying to determine if the planes could be delivered before October. However, he said, fire officials did not want to lease the planes for too long a period, the government of Quebec was still using them for fighting its own fires, and the tinder-dry conditions here had only become a factor in recent weeks.

Freeman said the Super Scoopers have worked wonders on some fires, but not so well on others. He would not speculate on how they would have worked on the Marple fire, saying he didn’t witness the blaze’s early stages. “All the best prognostication and extrapolation is great, and then you have a fire and see how it actually works,” he said.

Some officials, including Freeman, have questioned whether the planes are indeed a panacea, considering their inability to maneuver into tight canyons or in high winds where many fires occur.

But, Tom Silver, chief deputy to Antonovich, said: “I think it’s fair to say that whenever a major fire breaks out, you wish you had [the Super Scoopers] here. Just because you wish it was here, though, doesn’t mean it was a wrong decision by the chief to recommend that it come here Oct 1.”