July 2007

Bambi Buckets Prove Their Worth In Georgia Wildfires

By Lyn Bixby

On April 16 in drought-stricken south Georgia a tree fell on a power line, sparking a wildfire that consumed an estimated 18,000 acres in less than 24 hours. It continued to spread for two weeks, raging into the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and Wilderness Area. Then a lightning strike ignited another fire in Okefenokee that roared into north Florida.

The fires joined and burned through the month of May, consuming more than 600,000 acres of timberland and swamp, defying massive containment efforts using 1,500 firefighters and equipment from 33 states.

Fire breaks were cleared with tractor plow units – bulldozers pulling fire plows – while brush trucks worked on perimeter hot spots and air tankers and helicopters dumped millions of gallons of retardant, water and foam, much of it from helicopters equipped with Bambi Buckets – collapsible, portable containers ranging in size from 72 gallons to more than 2,000 gallons.

Six weeks after it started, the fire was finally tamed in early June – but only by the forces of nature. The second tropical storm of the young hurricane season dumped as much as six inches of rain in the area, stopping the spread of the largest wildfire in the history of Georgia and one of the largest in the lower 48 states in the past 100 years.

Nobody died, and only about two dozen buildings were destroyed, but the damage to timberland was costly.

While firefighters were frustrated in their struggle to contain the fire, they were able to manage it to some degree, directing it to certain areas and protecting homes and buildings. One critical piece of equipment in their arsenal was the Bambi Bucket, known for its ability to perform in tight places and its quick turnaround time because it can be filled in seconds from water sources close to a fire.

Georgia National Guard officials estimated their helicopters alone dumped more than 3 million gallons of water on the wildfires using Bambi Buckets.

Lt. Col. John Till, the Georgia National Guard’s helicopter operations officer, recalled one mission on an afternoon when the fire was being fanned by high winds and was leaping fire breaks.

“There were probably 30 bulldozers down on the ground,” he said, “and we looked at one fire that was going up to the top of the trees and there’s a bulldozer and he has no place to go, it looked like to meC9 Between us and the other Black Hawk that was with us, we got two drops on that fire that was probably 40 feet in the air at least, and we turned around and the fire’s nothing but steam. At least it didn’t overrun him while he was on the bulldozer.”

Because the bulldozer was so close to the fire, he said, accuracy was paramount. “You can’t drop 700 gallons of water directly on top of one of those bulldozers,” he said. “It’ll kill the guy in it.”

Till, who first worked with Bambi Buckets in 1999, and others who fought this spring’s wildfires had high praise for the devices. “It seems like they’ve worked all the kinks out,” he said. “Sometimes we drag it across the ground or drag it through the tops of the trees, but that thing is so sturdy, it’s amazing. They’re very well built.”

The Bambi Bucket was developed in the early 1980s by a Canadian, Don Arney, who was working in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the time.

“He came up with the idea of using industrial fabric to manufacture this bucket that could collapse and be transported inside the helicopter and then opened up like a giant upside down umbrella to hold the water to drop on the fire,” said Brenda Phillips, the global sales manager for SEI Industries Ltd., the company Arney created that manufactures the Bambi Bucket.

The original model had a weight system on one side of the inverted umbrella so gravity would dip it into a water source for fast filling. “The weight is taken off the suspension lines when it touches the surface of the water, and the ballast on one side of the bucket immediately tips it over to one side, and the bucket starts filling,” she said. “They can be filled from salt water, fresh water, lakes, rivers, creeks, swimming pools, farmer’s ponds, all sorts of things.

Naming The Bucket

The bucket got its name from a dinner discussion with a journalist who knew Arney and wanted to write about his invention. The journalist asked Arney what he was going to call the device, according to Phillips, “and somebody at the dinner table said a Bambi Bucket.” By the end of the evening, she said, they decided that would be the name because “it saves the Bambis in the forest.”

Arney has done very well by his invention. He has a personal Web site with a photograph of his mountaintop estate, from which he commutes to work in a helicopter. On the Web site, he attributes his achievements to Transcendental Meditation and says his company sells its products in 115 countries, controlling 95 percent of the world market.

SEI’s largest Bambi Bucket, which can hold 2,600 gallons, is so big that it can only be used with one heavy transport helicopter, a Russian Mi-26, according to Phillips. That bucket costs $44,000, and with recommended accessories the price increases to about $75,000, she said. The smallest Bambi Bucket at 72 gallons was designed specifically for a light helicopter, the Robinson R-44, and is priced at $5,740.

PowerFill And Torrentula

The buckets, according to Phillips, have evolved considerably over the past 25 years, from the sizes offered to the materials used to make them to a range of accessories that allow them to operate more effectively. She said the accessories include:

• A “FireSock,” which has slits cut into it and attaches to the bottom of a bucket. “It acts as a wonderful diffuser and has increased the coverage of the water to a much wider path.”

• A “PowerFill System,” which uses a pump or pumps to allow the bucket to be filled from shallow water at depths as low as 12 inches. “That makes the Bambi Bucket a fierce weapon.”

• A “Torrentula Valve,” a dump valve that allows the operator to vary the flow rate and make multiple water drops from a single bucket load. “A great big Torrentula bucket with a PowerFill unit in it, they can bottom fill from anywhere and they can drop partial loads anywhere.”

• Three types of foam systems. “All those foam bubbles spread the water a lot farther, much more effective in knocking down a fire.”

• A “Marine Recovery Device,” a float that deploys when a bucket is dropped into water to aid in recovering it. “Fighting fire is a lot of pandemonium. You can drop a bucket, you could possibly get it snagged on something or you could hit the wrong button. Different things happen.”

A dropped empty bucket usually survives with very little damage, Phillips said, but “if a bucket is dropped when it’s full, it kind of explodes when it hits the ground or the water.”

SEI is almost always able to repair even seriously damaged dropped buckets, she said, usually at its manufacturing plant in British Columbia. For routine repairs in the United States, the company has an overhaul facility in Atlanta, which she said has been quite busy this spring because of the wildfires in Georgia and Florida, particularly working on buckets used by various National Guard units. She said the biggest focus of her office is customer service.

SEI’s customers around the world are primarily government agencies. In the U.S., the company sells to the National Guard, the military, state and federal forestry agencies, and about 125 private companies that fight fires. Some of the companies are small, with one or two helicopters, and others operate internationally. She said SEI sold some big buckets this spring to the Florida Division of Forestry.

The Bambi Buckets used by the Georgia National Guard were purchased by the Georgia Forestry Commission and, until this spring, had not been used in several years in their home state.

“In most of the southeast, the first line of defense in wildland fires is a trained forest ranger with a tractor plow unit,” said Devon Dartnell, who works for the Georgia Forestry Commission and served for a time this spring as a spokesman at a joint information center set up specifically for the wildfires.

“Air strikes are very expensive,” he said. “We’ve used a lot of water drops from helicopters and air tankers dropping water or retardant. That’s not the norm here, but it’s not the norm to have a fire burn 600,000 acres.”

Bob Seigler, the air operations director for one section of the Georgia wildfires, called the Bambi Buckets an excellent tool. “We have numerous dip sites in the area. From the time they drop the water after they get on scene, go pick up another bucket and drop again, it’s about three minutes,” he said. “It’s a pretty impressive deal.’’

A number of different kinds of helicopters were used against the wildfires, including helicopters outfitted with tanks and snorkels for filling them. Like helicopters armed with Bambi Buckets, the tanked helicopters can operate with quick turnaround times, but can also be limited in their choice of water sources.

“Some terrain is just not suitable for tanked aircraft,” Phillips said. “If you’re in the mountains or in a high canopy forest, sometimes you can’t get the helicopter down low enough safely to get to the water supply. If you’re using a creek in a canyon, you can’t get down into the canyon for fear of a rotor strike.”

A helicopter with a Bambi Bucket, however, can get to those kinds of water sources, she said, because the buckets are suspended on lines that range from 50 feet to 200 feet.

“They can lower that bucket into a ravine or through a tall canopy of trees and fill it with no danger to the helicopter,” she said. “A tanked helicopter can’t do that.”

During this spring’s wildfires, the Georgia National Guard used Black Hawk helicopters with 65-foot lines and two sizes of Bambi Buckets – 660-gallon and 780-gallon – and Chinook helicopters with 90-foot lines and 2,000-gallon Bambi Buckets. 

Col. Till, the guard’s helicopter operations officer, said he prefers short lines because the operator can work with more precision. “If you’re in an area where there’s a lot of fire, a lot of smoke and a water source is close by, you’re trying to make turns as fast as possible and if you have to adjust while you’re heading out to a drop, you’ll oscillate that bucket more if it’s on a long line,” he said.

Pilot skill and experience are very important in the operation of Bambi Buckets, he said. “A lot also has to do with knowing the capabilities of the aircraft and not being scared to get close enough to the fire to put it out,” he said. “We don’t do this for a living. That’s why we have to work on our crew mix. I don’t want to put two junior guys in there who only have a couple of dozen Bambi Bucket drops collectively.”

For Till, one of the most memorable and rewarding missions this spring was trying to protect a historic church in a rural area with the National Guard’s Chinooks.

The wildfire had jumped several fire breaks, he said, and ground crews were unable to get to the area in time to put in more breaks, leaving the Chinooks as the church’s only defense.

“For about four hours our Chinooks did nothing but dump water to protect that church, and sure enough they saved it,” he recalled. “You could see the little circle around the church where the ground was so wet the fire didn’t go into it. We know for sure that church would have burned down if they hadn’t have been out there doing that non-stop.”

A Georgia National Guard Black Hawk helicopter drops water from a 660-gallon Bambi Bucket on one of the fires burning near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in south Georgia.              (Photo By Georgia National Guard)