Smokejumpers take to the skies
Published Friday, April 4, 2008
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As the plane flies 4,000 feet overhead, a small dot of red white and blue appears in its trail against the clear blue sky.
A few seconds later, another dot not much bigger than a bird shows up where the plane had been flying.
Then, over the course of a minute or so, the real picture comes into view.
That’s not a bird, or a plane and, despite the appearance of the red and blue canopy flying through the sky, it’s not a superhero either. It’s a smokejumper from the Alaska Fire Service on the first day of training.
The first jumper of the season Thursday afternoon overshot the target, an orange and white tarp in the middle of a field on Fort Wainwright, by a few feet. That’s all right though, said Dave Baumgartner, deputy base manager of the Bureau of Land Management’s smokejumping unit.
Because it’s the unit’s first time jumping in six months for more than 30 veteran Alaskan smokejumpers, they’re aiming more at having a safe jump than being right on target. Besides, the second jumper hit the mark without much trouble.
“You kind of lose the feeling you’re in an outdoor job after six months,” said Chris Silks, who is in his 18th year with the jumpers. “But once you’re in the plane looking down at the land, jumping just comes back to you.”
Smokejumpers are usually the first on the scene as they fly to remote areas of Alaska dozens of times each summer to combat wild fires. The majority come from ground crews who knock down the fires, but jumper spots are competitive. As many as 40 percent of those who get into training, drop out of the program.
And while jumping out of a plane into a raging inferno below might be dangerous, jumpers believe they have the best job a firefighter could have.
“I gravitated to what seemed like the funnest job in fire,” Silks said. “I get the chance to travel around remote areas of Alaska, and the seasonal lifestyle is nice.”
Jumping out of a plane with 50 pounds of gear strapped to your back definitely isn’t for everyone, but Rick Thompson, a smokejumper for the past 20 years who has made more than 350 jumps, says it’s just another benefit to a firefighter’s dream job.
“It’s actually quite quiet and nice coming down,” he said.
Community Discussion
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Living out in a remote area of Alaska all I can say is thank you Smokejumpers. A brave group of public service people!!
Maybe the smokejumpers would get a kick outta this idea?
>>reposted from Feb24>> replay
On Air pollution concerns spark study, possible measures
Looking at the photo with this article you can see from the bend in the smoke plume from the big smokestack that there's some air movement to the West at about the 1000' level....
...ya know those advertising gizmos where they have a big colorful fabric tube mounted onto a blower pointed upwards??..The things are typically 30'tall and are often sewn into shapes looking like clowns or cowboys, or whatever..
It would be really fun to build a giant tall one of those..
..maybe 1000'tall and 100'inside diameter...
The thing would be mounted onto a smooth walled chimney base that would gather all of the collapsed fabric when the blowers were off.
The base would look like a small conical cooling tower with a ring of big gas-powered turbines at the base.. the turbines would be pushing even bigger fans and generating power simultaneously.
The top of the fabric chimney would have a big-donut shape that would actually be a balloon filled with helium [Alaska has a lotta helium in it's natural gas]..
The big cheap chimney would suck a lot of the stale cold air out of the city, warming and freshing things up a little.
The big fabric tube could be illuminated from the inside with high-efficiency sulfur-plasma lamps to make it a big tower-of-light.
Aviators would grow fond of the thing if it wasn't parked in the approach to any runways. City bound astronomers would hate it, but downtown in the winter is a really dumb place to go stargazing.
..Where to park it?? Maybe next to the Steese&Rich interchange? Off VanHorn near the airport? On an island in the Tanana River?...
...howzabout on the east end Salchaket directly in the path of the gunnery range????
...oh, and the other silly idea to do with this thing is you can use for parachute training...
..you, build launch platform inside where the upward wind is 80mph.
so, ya just stand there and pull the rip-cord.
Ya git launched with your parachute thru the chimney and land on the ground in the surrounding field, then you run back inside and do it again, and again.
Whee! I'd even try that at my old age...(;-P)
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