Cal Fire preps Sonoma County air attack base for 2019 wildfire season

The future of fighting fires in California touched down in Sonoma County this week, where fire crews are prepping for the upcoming wildfire season.

A black-and-red C-130 air tanker emblazoned with the name Zeus gleamed under the afternoon sun Wednesday at the Cal Fire air attack base, on the north side of Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport. The 150,000-pound, four-engine behemoth can be anywhere in the state in about 1½ hours to drop a 4,000-gallon payload of fire retardant and help firefighters battling blazes on the ground.

“Pretty big machine, yeah?” said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Jake Serrano. “Fires have dramatically changed in California, so we’re now going with the bigger ones. It’s nice to get some heavier air tankers with more fire retardant delivery.”

The massive aircraft, based in Sacramento, was brought to Sonoma County for training exercises. During an afternoon session, firefighter Ryan Anderson, 25, wheeled over a hose capable of delivering 500 gallons of retardant per minute, dropped to one knee and connected the nozzle to the tanker with a clean seal as some of the reddish goo dribbled out the end of the feeding line onto the hot cement.

“Textbook, textbook,” said Bryan Baker, a visiting pilot contracted for Cal Fire and lead training captain on the C-130. “It’s like you’ve done that before. You’re ready.”

The Cal Fire airbase is one of 13 across the state that house and refill tankers battling the rising number of large-scale wildfires that have come to define dry California summers. Each base is gearing up to be fully operational next week, at the ready to guide in tankers and send them back airborne to limit losses of life and homes throughout the state.

Once up and running, the local unit will patiently wait from dawn to dusk for the first word of embers near dried-out grasslands that could be spread by seasonal winds and develop into one of the massive fires that have ravaged the region the past few years.

“It’s a firehouse. We just get there a different way,” said Air Attack Capt. Nick Welch, a 20-year veteran of Cal Fire, the last three at the Sonoma County airbase that opened in 1964. The site of the base makes it one of the busiest in the state, working in collaboration with another location in Hollister to cover 4,000 square miles of territory across eight counties.

The base is staffed by about a dozen crew members who guide planes to the ground, load them with retardant and maintain Cal Fire’s critical air fleet. Normally, they oversee two Grumman S-2 air tankers and a scout plane stationed at the Sonoma County base.

The unit, which can host 10 tankers at a time, works with the efficiency of a Formula 1 pit crew to receive and reload an S-2 within 4 minutes - 18 minutes of total ground time - while spitting out as much as 50,000 gallons of mixed retardant in a single day on big fires.

The smaller, two-engine tankers take on about ?1,000 gallons of retardant per trip and are the standard among the state fire agency’s fleet, used on initial air attack during a fire’s early days. They’re known for being agile, granting pilots the ability to maneuver in and out of hilly canyons where fires can spark in the North Bay.

“These are huge assets for Cal Fire,” said Will Powers, a spokesman for the agency. “They’re stout little planes. They’re for quick attacks, and get a lot done.”

The evolving landscape of fire protection in California, however, has forced Cal Fire to rethink how it goes on the offensive against major fires. Seven of the state’s 10 most destructive wildfires have occurred since 2015, including the October 2017 firestorm that killed 24 people and destroyed more than 5,300 homes in Sonoma County. Those fires took another 20 lives and leveled 600 more homes across the rest of the North Bay.

The annual retardant numbers out of the Sonoma County airbase tell a similar story. Since 2011 - the last slow fire year Serrano could recall - the totals have continued to climb, from about ?100,000 gallons dispensed that year to more than 800,000 gallons in 2015. Spurred on by support efforts on the Mendocino Complex, County and Pawnee fires, the Sonoma County airbase again surpassed that total in 2018.

In a heavy fire year, the Sonoma County site could exceed 1 million gallons, Serrano said. The wet spring has postponed the need to launch base operations like it did in April last year, however.

“With the late rains, it’s delayed the fire season, which we can’t be fooled by,” said Serrano, who has led the station for five years in a 25-year Cal Fire career.

The growing need to plan has led Cal Fire to acquire five C-130s in the next three years from the U.S. Coast Guard and retrofit them with retardant tanks. For the past few seasons, a Sikorsky Skycrane helitanker that can slurp up and drop 1,600 gallons of water on fires in under a minute has also been contracted and parked at the local airstrip when needed. That assignment brings another eight staff to the airbase.

Shortly after crews wrapped up afternoon training on the C-130 and its pilots waited in line out on the airport tarmac behind a commercial Alaska Airlines jet, the tanker’s turbo-propeller engines powered up and roared with a boom as its wheels left the ground. It’s almost certainly not the last time this fire season a C-130 will drop by the Sonoma County airbase to be loaded with slurry for a bombing run.

“We’re hoping for a ‘normal year’ - whatever that means,” said Welch. “We’re here till maybe December.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin Fixler at 707-521-5336 or kevin.fixler@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @kfixler.