It was the worst disaster in the history of forest fire protection in Maine, resulting in heavy property losses and human privation.

The tragic results were: 215,000 acres of fields, pastures and forests burned, of which 180,000 acres were forested; the death of 16 people due to indirect causes brought about by the fires, but no loss of life in actual fire fighting; nine communities leveled or completely wiped out; 2,500 made homeless. Property losses were estimated at $30,000,000 of which $7,000,000 included millions of feet of mature timber, thousands of cords of cut and uncut pulpwood, and millions of board feet of sawed lumber stored in lumberyards. Suppression costs came to $300,000. It was heart-warming that many fire departments canceled fire bills for services and equipment to towns that were stricken by the fires.

And this quote particularly impresses me:

There were witnesses of crown fires racing through dry and shriveled hardwood leaf foliage.

Which I interpret as being the heat wave ahead of the main fire was so intense as to dry out the leaves on the already drought stressed hardwoods…then ignite them as it passed.

The Angeles National Forest Fire Lookout Association is currently seeking individuals for its volunteer Fire Lookout Program. The group works to restore, maintain and staff historic fire lookout towers in the San Gabriel Mountains. Volunteers interpret the natural and cultural history of fire lookouts and the surrounding Forest lands for visitors and help disseminate information on current fire conditions.

Fire lookout towers, one of the primary means by which forest fires were reported in the early 1900s, were closed on the Angeles National Forest in the 1980s. However, Vetter Mountain Lookout, off Highway 2, was reopened by the U.S. Forest Service and Fire Lookout Association in 1998, as part of a historical preservation project. Slide Mountain Lookout, located above Pyramid Lake off Interstate 5, was reopened in 2003.

Despite newer technologies being used by the U.S. Forest Service to detect fires, volunteers at these lookouts continue to practice vigilance and provide a valuable contribution to the conservation of National Forest lands.

Do you have to take a second thought I’d be all over that if (God forbid) I lived in L.A.?

Linking this back to New England, there is an active volunteer fire tower program in southern Maine, operating the towers at Mount Agamenticus, Mount Hope and Ossipee Hill.  Here’s an article from the Press Herald (archive).  Maine closed their state fire tower network in 1991, deciding aircraft were more cost effective.  This year, as covered in this post, they further reduced their aircraft coverage replacing the contractors with the Civil Air Patrol.

New Hampshire was vigorously defending their still state staffed towers in the 2004 Concord Monitor article (archive), but in 2009 they reduced the staffing by laying off the full time fire tower staff and offering them part-time positions to manage the towers on high danger days as detailed here (archive).

In addition to the 16 state towers in New Hampshire, a 17th is municipally manned by a career firefighter from Moultonborough, which in 1987 re-opened a tower the state had closed in 1981.  Ironically, in 1988 Moultonborough had a 316 acre forest fire, the largest in New Hampshire since a 1952 fire in Moultonborough covered 2,500 acres.

Massachusetts has, by far, the largest and most active fire tower system in use in New England.  You can see a nice video here on the Ludlow fire tower (archive).   Although the Massachusetts Bureau of Forest Fire Control does not staff all their towers all the time, they have some 43 towers available to staff as local fire conditions dictate.

Rhode Island doesn’t currently use their towers, although at least one is opened up from time to time for open houses (archive).  The others, from a casual observation driving by, are slowly rusting away.  Connecticut has removed all their purpose built forest fire towers, although some facilities (such as the observatory on top of the UConn water tower) that weren’t fire specific remain. While I don’t believe any Vermont towers remain in service, many still stand and unlike those in southern New England are open to the public to climb:
(I do have that archived as VT_Fire_Tower_Hike_WCAX_200806261758015082_3647538.flv in case the video disappears).

Civil Air Patrol pilots on wildfire patrols

By Terry Karkos , Staff Writer
Sunday, April 19, 2009

AUGUSTA – One of the nation’s best-kept secrets is getting some air time in Maine this year.

In a brand-new program starting this month, prompted by substantial budget cuts, the Maine Forest Service has contracted with the Civil Air Patrol to conduct fire-watch patrol flights on five statewide routes.

“We’re excited about this,” said Kent Nelson, the service’s fire prevention specialist. “This is really going to help out both our agencies and hopefully reduce the amount of wildfires.”

With more than 56,000 members nationwide, the nonprofit Civil Air Patrol is the official auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force. Founded in 1941, the air patrol originally assisted the War Department by defending the nation’s coastline during World War II.

Its volunteers perform homeland security, disaster relief and counter-drug missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies, according to Civil Air Patrol Web sites.

Members also play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to the nearly 22,000 young people participating in its cadet programs.

“Certainly, the Civil Air Patrol is going to do a good job,” said Maine Forest Service chief pilot John Knight of Old Town. “We have no doubt about that.”

Nelson said Knight got the idea last year to use the resources of the air patrol after learning that other states have been using it for smoke- and air-detection flights.

Maine Wing Civil Air Patrol Lt. Mary Storey of Auburn agrees it’s a timely idea.

“It will be cost-effective and save Maine a lot of money,” Storey said. “Maine says they’re broke and we fly free. Whereas in the past, (the Forest Service) used to take a big plane up at $1,000 an hour, with us, it’s $100 an hour.”

Knight figured using Maine’s Civil Air Patrol on a call-when-needed basis as opposed to a general contract would save, on average, $57,000 a year. That’s based on the average flight time through private contracting in the past decade.

Civil Air Patrol flights will be frequent in the spring when fire danger is high, with fewer in the summer when lush grasses reduce the fire risk. Flights will increase again in the fall, as the fire danger rises.

Prior to using aircraft starting in the 1930s to find wildfires, for many years the Forest Service relied on a network of triangulating fire towers across the state.

“The beauty of the fire patrol over that system, of course, is that you can fly right over the fire and give the exact latitude and longitude and also help direct whoever’s responding – whether it be a fire department or one of our rangers – to exactly where the fire is and which road to take and where the closest water source is,” Knight said.

Savings-wise, Knight said, the last 17 towers closed by the service were costing $450,000 a year to staff and maintain.

In 1991 or 1992, three airplane fire patrol contracts for the same area cost $45,000 in the first year, he said.

An even greater savings is expected to be realized by using Civil Air Patrol planes and pilots instead of private contractors to fly five 250-mile routes instead of nine shorter routes to cover the whole state.

When Maine has any kind of high fire danger, air patrol pilots and planes will be used in tandem with state aircraft and those from other state agencies, such as state police, marine patrol, and fish and wildlife, officials said.

Maine’s Civil Air Patrol has 17 volunteer mission pilots who fly the small red, white and blue airplanes.

“We’re often called the best-kept secret,” pilot Warren King of New Auburn said, as he examined one of two Cessna 282 planes tied to the tarmac at the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport.

“We’re trying to let the public know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it,” Storey said. “It’s all for them.”

Article from the Sun Journal.  There’s also this companion piece which  interviews a CAP pilot.

If I’m reading the article right, the Maine Fire Service has replaced 9 contract aircraft with 5 Civil Air Patrol aircraft, which fly longer routes.

I was able to pull some ballpark figures out of it though which seem reasonable:

Per-tower cost, 1991:  $26,470.
Figure for staffing, electricty, telephone, maintenance, etc that doesn’t sound unreasonable.  I’m assuming that’s paying someone to work fulltime for six months or so, say April 1 — Nov 1, not sure what you do with them when it’s raining.  But it’s not like you’ll find many people who are healthy enough to climb an 80′ tower but will agree to only work part of the year, and then only as needed, for may fifteen bucks an hour, and won’t go batshit crazy looking at the woods all day long.
3% inflation gets you to $43,750/tower/year in 2009.

Aircraft cost, 1992:  $45,000.
One aircraft replaces about 6 fire towers.  (You can read the article as saying all three planes together only cost $45,000 but I think that has to be a grammatical mistake.)
3% inflation gets you to $74,400/aircraft/year in 2010.

That inflation adjustment I made is pretty close to the low end of Ontario’s cost, which in 2006 was $87,750 Canadian ($325/hour x 270 hours/year — http://fire.feric.ca/36502006/DetectionWorkshop/McAlpineDetection.ppt)

Doing the math another way, they also say the CAP will save $57,000 a year, and the CAP charge to the state is $100/hour.  270 hours x $100/hour = $27,000… $27,000 + $57,000 = $84,000…right in the ballpark of what Ontario spends.

The purpose to towers and aircraft are to find fires faster so they’re kept smaller — using less manhours, fuel, etc to control and consuming less resources like timber or homes.

We know we don’t typically have fires in Connecticut that threaten many buildings (not that it can’t happen), and we know we don’t normally have fires that truly threaten timber.  So we can’t realistically talk about “losses prevented” in Connecticut today.

So we’re talking about having to save marginal extra expenses — Overtime for DEP guys out on the fire line, payments to volunteer fire companies for assisting DEP, fuel, etc.

That would mean a fire tower saving about $45,000 a year in extra costs, or an aircraft saving about $84,000 (private) or $27,000 (CAP) in a year.  We’d need about 15 towers to cover Connecticut, or one aircraft.

I wish the math wasn’t so stark, ’cause I really do think fire towers are cool.

But we’d need to return to a day of a much more persistent, much more serious forest fire problem then we have today to make them worthwhile.

More on fire tower economics from Ontario:
http://fire.feric.ca/36152002/WorkshopPresentation/Economics.ppt

http://www.forestry.utoronto.ca/courses/jfg475f/detectnotes.pdf

http://fire.feric.ca/36502006/DetectionWorkshop/McAlpineDetection.ppt