DENVER — The destination is usually somewhere in between a wall of smoke and a spreading fire line.
Armed with up to 3,000 gallons of fire retardant at a time, the army of planes and helicopters based in Broomfield have already gone to battle with 45 fires this season from Colorado to Wyoming to South Dakota to New Mexico.
"We don’t put the fire out. We just slow it down," said Scott Headrick with the United States Forest Service. "They’re fast and they can get to anywhere in the geographical area in Colorado fairly quickly."
It’s been a busy couple of months for Headrick and the rest of the U.S. Forest Service team at the air tanker base at the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County, too.
"We had up to six large air tankers working out of here," said Headrick. "Fifteen minutes is how long it takes us to load them, fuel them, and send them off to the fire."
That’s six air tankers on one day. It's a carefully choreographed, all-out aerial attack on fires from Glenwood Springs to Grand County.
Small airports like Rocky Mountain Metropolitan play a vital role in providing bases where the planes can launch from as soon as a new fire sparks.
"This year has been particularly busy with aerial firefighting," said Ben Miller with Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport. "It seems like starting at around noon and going almost until dusk it seems like they’re doing turns very quickly."
The planes are strategically positioned at four airports across the state that have runways long enough and strong enough.
The air tanker base can be operational within just a couple hours at any point in the year, but is staffed full time from April through the first of October. Depending on how the next month goes, they could extend the time they’re operational as long as they need to fight the fires here in Colorado.
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