New breed of firefighter takes flight

Stephen Curran

Friday, June 18, 2004 | 11:08 a.m.

At 53 years old Doug Hodges is part of a new breed of firefighter involved in dangerous efforts to protect the public from wildfires.

Like the pilot who crashed and died Thursday night while battling a fire near St. George, Utah, Hodges works to keep fires from destroying homes and businesses. When the fires are in Southern Nevada, as they have been this week near Bunkerville and at Desert Wetlands Park in southeast Las Vegas, Hodges gets called into action.

He is part of a new wave in aerial firefighting, after the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior terminated contracts for 33 larger, fixed-wing planes following crashes of the tankers. An April report by the National Transportation and Safety Board deemed the large tankers unsafe.

The job of dropping fire retardant on fires now falls to small, single-engine crop-duster type planes like Hodges'.

As this summer's fire season heats up, he and other pilots of small private planes could be Southern Nevada's first line of defense against wildfires that almost every year threaten to engulf anything in their path.

"It's a pretty satisfying job because you feel like you're saving property," said Hodges, a former crop-duster.

Hodges was on the front line -- from 10,000 feet up -- on the fire Sunday at Desert Wetlands Park. His $1.4 million single-engine Air Tractor 802 dropped slurry -- a rust-colored mixture of water, clay, gum resin and iron oxide -- to halt the flames as they approached homes along East Tropicana Avenue.

On Thursday Hodges and others were anxiously awaiting a chance to do it again, as fire threatened about 2,000 acres near Bunkerville outside Mesquite.

But he never left the Jean airport, as a near-constant drizzle kept the fire from spreading, said Lee Nelson, project administrator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Hodges works for Missoula, Mont.-based Minuteman Aviation, which in 2002 was awarded an as-needed contract, in which the government pays the company $1,600 per flight, according to the federal Office of Aircraft Services.

There are currently four Minuteman planes at different points in Nevada, Nelson said.

For most pilots it amounts to mostly seasonal work. They find much of their wages are eaten up as they stay at hotels in fire-prone areas, Hodges said.

"It's not a job that you do for the money," said Hodges, who estimated he pulls down about $25,000 per summer.

It's a far cry from Hodges' life the rest of the year, which he spends rebuilding airplane engines near his home in Missoula.

Fighting fires does provide him with "a certain amount of excitement, but you can't be gaga with excitement," he said Thursday. "You've got to pay attention to what you're doing."

Less than two hours after talking with the Sun on Thursday, the risks of Hodges' summer job became painfully clear, when a pilot fighting a fire near St. George was killed after his plane went down, according to Wendell Peacock, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management.

Investigators have not yet determined what caused that crash.

Hodges, who prefers not to talk about his personal close calls, did not want to talk about Thursday's accident when contacted this morning.

Dave Barajas, the regional manager for the firefighting planes program, said, "We're all a little sad about the loss of that pilot. It's a chancy job but someone's got to do it. These guys, once they take on the task, they all know the inherent dangers with this kind of business."

Neither Barajas nor Hodges knew the pilot who died, Barajas said.

Hodges said government regulations set high standards for pilots who battle blazes from the air. They have to begin as apprentices and participate in 25 drops that are supervised by another more experienced pilot in a nearby aircraft before becoming fully licensed, Hodges said.

It took Hodges, who had already been flying more than 20 years, two years to complete the training, he said.

"You can't just be a crop duster and be dropped in," Hodges said.

The two federal agencies earlier this month contracted with more than 100 aircraft for this fire season at a cost of about $66 million, including 36 single-engine air tankers like Hodges', according to a statement from the National Interagency Fire Center.

But the planes, which hold up to 800 gallons of water or fire retardant, are not without their limitations, as a smaller tank makes refilling the mixture more frequent, Hodges said.

The grounded larger aircraft, by comparison, can hold up to 3,000 gallons.