Between flames and the sky are America’s aerial firefighters
Lily Roby
(CN) — The Burdoin Fire moved like it knew the land.
The hot, red mass spread unpredictably along the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, which separates the state from Oregon. Fueled by summer heat and the Gorge’s notorious winds, the blaze scorched grasses and melted homes down to their foundations.
Overhead, aerial firefighter Colby Smith banked his single-engine amphibious air tanker over a burning ridge near the town of White Salmon, Washington.
He dived toward the Columbia River, scooping 800 gallons of water into the plane’s floats as he expertly skimmed its surface. Then he lifted again, flying back into the inferno and disappearing into a haze of smoke.
Smith repeated that cycle for days on end, emptying his tanks and returning to the Columbia to scoop more water. It’s hard work, but Smith has good humor about it. His plane, he joked, was his “company pickup.”
Climate change is making wildfires more intense and frequent, and 2025 is shaping out to be a particularly fiery year.
Across the country, fire season is starting early and running late. There have already been more than 43,000 wildfires in the United States, which have together burned more than 3.5 million acres, according to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center.
Aerial firefighting is a key part of efforts to suppress these blazes. That’s translated into busy schedules for firefighting pilots like Smith, but it’s left local and state governments stretched increasingly thin. While experts recommend a coordinated approach to wildfires, the Trump administration is taking the opposite approach as it works to scale back federal disaster relief.
Smith has worked for aerial firefighting company Coastal Air Strike for around five years. The company has seen tremendous growth in its two decades in operation, winning government contracts in Colorado, Minnesota, Montana and Oregon.
Smith spent the first half of the year extinguishing flames in Texas and Florida. While both states are better known for extreme precipitation events, wildfires are also becoming a bigger risk. Texas had its worst fire in recorded history last year, which killed two people and burned more than 1 million acres. This year marks the first time Smith has seen Texas keep firefighting aircraft on-call year round.
As climate change makes wildfires more ferocious and frequent, Smith says his job has gotten busier. These days, he’s away fighting fires nearly 250 days a year.
“Twelve months out of the year, I’m chasing the fire seasons,” Smith said. “It’s turned into a 12-month deal where there’s always fire potential somewhere.”
Just as Texas burned late into its season, Oregon’s fire season was starting early.
It was early June when Oregon officials summoned Coastal Air Strike to the state. Ordinarily, Smith wouldn’t be called to the Pacific Northwest until July or later.
He left his home in Arkansas, where he lives in a fly-in community with his wife and two golden retrievers, and headed for The Dalles, a riverside town famous as a landing place for many Oregon Trail migrants.
When Smith arrived, the Rowena Fire was already in full force.
It was burning only minutes away from his base. A passing train’s sparks had combined with the Gorge’s aggressive winds to light dry brush afire. Though aerial and ground crews fought hard, the blaze destroyed more than 50 homes after starting June 11.
“Conditions were already primed up for wildfires,” Smith said. “A big fire like that usually doesn’t happen until late July or August, so for that to happen in June was a pretty big eye-opener.”
But fire season was just getting started, and Smith has responded to more than a dozen fires since arriving.
On July 14, sparks from an exploded transformer ignited the CRAM Fire near Madras in Central Oregon. It grew rapidly to 95,000 acres, almost earning megafire status and momentarily becoming the largest fire in the country.
The Burdoin Fire sparked on June 18 and quickly expanded past 11,000 acres.
Its location along the breathtaking Columbia River Gorge made firefighting efforts particularly changing. Winds here not only made it hard for planes to scoop water but also turned the Burdoin into a so-called “running” fire — fast, hungry and hard to stop. At press time, the blaze is more 90% contained, and officials have lifted evacuation orders.
“Every fire is different,” Smith said. “Each one requires a different approach.” He keeps flying even on the hard days, even when smoke fills his cockpit. As climate change makes blazes like this more frequent, there will only be more work for him to do.
As firefighters like Smith soar overhead, tragedy and devastation can be unfolding below.
After the Burdoin Fire ignited, residents from nearby towns came to the Columbia Gorge Regional Airport in Dallesport, Washington. They described their homes, hoping that pilots could tell them if they were still standing or not.
Among the first responders was Darren Leacock. A 23-year volunteer, Leacock has worked hundreds of wildfires and fought more than 2,000 structure fires.
“Because we are a volunteer agency, there’s no time clock we punch,” he said. “We go whenever a call comes in, and it’s really a thankless job.”
Leacock was sitting in the airport’s conference room, where he manages operations for aerial firefighters like Smith.
He recounted some of his worst infernos, including a tanker fire that melted the shield on his helmet. He said, “You’re risking your life doing the same job a paid department guy is doing, but not getting paid.”
Across the country, volunteer departments like Leacock’s are short-staffed and underfunded.
After a wildfire killed a farmer in 2018, Leacock wrote to Oregon state representatives and even testified at local meetings. He believes the tragedy could have been prevented with better resources and planning.
“We saw smoke but had to wait hours to launch aircraft,” he said, shaking his head. “It turned into, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’”
In his testimony, Leacock stressed to lawmakers the concept of a golden hour.
“In the medical and fire services, the golden hour is when I can save your life,” Leacock explained to Courthouse News. He says the same logic applies to blazes. “If there’s smoke, there’s fire and there should be an aircraft going,” he said. “After we’re all said and done, we can figure out who will pay for it — but let’s launch the aircraft and put the fire out.”
Leacock’s advocacy helped secure $9 million in federal funding for firefighting groups across the state. Still, he still worries that red tape and apathy cost communities precious time. “In thirty minutes,” he said, “a ten-acre fire in my district can become an 87,000-acre fire.”
Among those to lose everything in the Burdoin Fire was Audrey Bruce, 79, a longtime White Salmon resident and beloved community member who ran a horse sanctuary on her property. She escaped but lost her home, farm, livestock and two dogs.
“Audrey was one of, if not the first, person to lose her home in the Burdoin Fire,” said Angelina Guier, a former White Salmon resident with family in the area. “The home was completely reduced to ash.”
Guier and others returned to the land where Bruce’s home once stood, using hand-held water pumps to extinguish spot fires that were smoldering in the brush.
“Everything she had burnt up,” Guier said. “There’s nothing even recognizable left of the house. It’s insane. I’ve never seen a worse structure fire.”
After decades as a wildland firefighter, Timothy Ingalsbee co-founded the nonprofit FUSEE, short for “Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology,” in 2004. Based in Eugene, Oregon, the organization is at the forefront of a shift in how wildfire is fought.
“We need to tell the whole story about fire — not just the sensationalist war-reporting stuff of acres burned, homes destroyed, firefighters killed,” Ingalsbee said. “We want to provide reporters with a wider context of policy, history, ecology and fire management.”
To Ingalsbee, the real issue is not that fire happens, but how we respond to it.
He emphasizes that fire can be part of a forest’s ecology, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Many trees need fire to regenerate. Ingalsbee says prescribed burns and thinning can prevent catastrophic fires.
“The unfortunate thing is, we’re burning too much of the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff,” he said, sounding exasperated.
He recalled how this philosophy played out in his firefighting career. “More times than I can count, we were sent to put out a small fire earlier in the year, and we put those out because we could,” he said. “Later on, summer rolls around, and the entire area burns even hotter than it would have burned in early spring. It’s ridiculous and counterproductive.”
Ingalsbee dreams of a world with more year-round fire management. In the Pacific Northwest, firefighters would be out conducting prescribed burns and clearing debris well before fire danger peaked in the summer.
“We have a historic fire deficit compared to the geologic past,” Ingalsbee said. There’s “too much of the wrong kinds of fire in the wrong times, places and conditions, because of the fires we’re putting out and failing to put in.” His message? Stop fighting every fire, and start managing fires intelligently instead.
“Anyone who is in this occupation for some time is not in it because they fear fire, hate fire or want to kill fire,” Ingalsbee said. “They love fire, and the greatest joy is being as close to the dancing flames as possible, working hard [and] with a crew.”
For all his hours in the sky, Smith defers on policy.
“It’s not the airplanes that put out the fires,” he said — though on that front, he’s maybe being a bit modest. “We’re just here to support the guys on the ground.”
At press time, Smith remains stationed in the Gorge. Though demand for fire services can be unpredictable, he said he’d likely stay through September before being deployed to the next location. He doesn’t know where he’s going next; so it goes in the life of a wildland firefighter. And so the 2025 fire season continues, relentless and roaring red.