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#Huey helicopter fire fighting upgrade
Evacuations had already been ordered for the town, but Hawkins radioed to upgrade the urgency level. Then Hawkins saw something that made his stomach plummet: fires breaking out along the west branch of the Feather River-the only thing separating the flaming ridge from Paradise, a community of 26,000 people. A few hundred feet above the ground, knocked around in the sky by gusts so powerful that his head was ringing, he began to wonder: How much more can this plane take? As he rounded the heel of the blaze to attempt a drop, the wind, eddying up fiercely off the ridgeline, blew him sideways toward the communications tower he was supposed to protect. The billowing clouds quickly filled up the entirety of Kelly’s windshield.īy this time, Kelly, flying lower and closer to the fire, was hitting nasty turbulence. In just 20 minutes, the fire had boiled up angrily, producing a different kind of smoke column: one with a sheared-off anvil shape that was pinned low to the ground by howling 70-mile-an-hour winds. It was 7:45 in the morning, and he was the first into the fire.Īs soon as Kelly got up in the air, he knew it was trouble.
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Kelly quickly got his plane ready and lifted off, heading 19 miles east to the forested canyons above the mountain town of Paradise, where he’d seen the smoke. At the Chico base, though, the air was strangely calm. The forecast for that day in November included high winds, so Kelly and Hawkins were up earlier than usual for their shift, expecting some fire activity. He called Shem Hawkins, his battalion chief at Chico and the air tactical group supervisor on duty that day, and both men sped to the base. In the dawn light, he could just make out the feathery wisp of a fire starting to the east. A veteran air tanker pilot with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, Kelly was driving to the department’s Chico air base, about 95 miles north of Sacramento. In the early hours of November 8, 2018, David Kelly saw the smoke column.