From Idaho

We're out scouting for interviews from people affected by the forest fires and we stopped along the way.

Our planes are out dropping fire retardant in Oregon and Nevada. We were in a meeting today where all the agencies coordinate all the fires for whole country. Interesting.


I only had my phone with me so I used the built in camera for these.

We're having some trouble getting clearance to get very close to the fires. We'll have to work on that. Does anyone have a match?
Tomorrow we're shooting all the ground crews that turn each aircraft around many times a day. They refuel, refill the planes with "slurry", go through all the checklists as fast as possible, and guide the plane through take off again. It is very tough work for the ground crews and the flight crews. Many have flown in Iraq and they say this is tougher because the mountains create crazy air currents, then you get close to the fire and it gets worse. So your plane is getting boxed around all over the place, your loaded down to the max so it's as tough as it gets to fly, then you're flying low (dangerous) over very bad terrain, being very careful but trying to hit a very specific target, and then dumping your whole payload in a matter of seconds right in the most volatile airspace close to the fire and going from a heavy plane to a very light plane and keeping control the whole time. Then they fly back as fast as they can and do it again and again and again.

Today was a lot of foot work and hand shaking for us to prep the rest of the week. More pictures to come