As some of you are probably aware, Tasmania has had some nasty fires over the last few months. Due to this, work has been quite busy with water bombing the fires (not me in particular, but the work aircraft have). Here are some photos of recent activity at my work.
You probably can't see it in that photo, but the fire (actually smoke) is visible just behind the blue helicopter with the guy holding down the blade. It was really close to Hobart.
That is of a "Cross leased" Bell 214 lifting an empty bucket after refuelling back at base. The bucket itself can hold about 2800 litres of water. "Kiwi" Dave the pilot said he dropped about 500,000 litres of water on the fire that day.
That was my helicopter after doing some fire mapping out near Maydena. I had to wait on the ground for a few hours so the Forestry team could get an idea of how much the fire was advancing. This fire was the one that forced the Tree Sitter out of the tree that she had been in for over 450 days. (It wasn't that close to her).
On the way back to Hobart after the Fire Mapping exercise.
The fire that I attended wasn't threatening any life or property, so they planned to let it burn. As the timber that was on fire was over 70m tall, they didn't want to send in ground crews to put it out as the threat of falling trees was too great, and they didn't want to water bomb it as it wasn't threatening life or property.
