ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
The wildfires in the Los Angeles area are almost totally contained. That means the massive air campaign by planes and helicopters against these fires is coming to an end. At the height of the fires, there were about 100 aircraft available around the region, one of the largest number of aircraft at a fire event ever. Kelly McEvers reports on how it worked.
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: It was Friday night, January 10, Day 4 of the fires. The wind changed direction, and the biggest fire, the Palisades Fire, started moving out of the hills and toward houses again. Darren Davies works for a private company called Coulson Aviation that was on call for the Orange County Fire Department. We're sitting in the cockpit of the Chinook helicopter he flew that night. Davies shows me videos of what he says was the most intense shift he flew in these fires.
(SOUNDBITE OF HELICOPTER)
DARREN DAVIES: This was just kind of a flyby to check out where we're going to drop.
MCEVERS: Wow. You're really close.
He's flying so close to the ground, it looks like he's inside the fire.
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DAVIES: See the tower right there?
MCEVERS: Yes, barely.
DAVIES: Yeah.
MCEVERS: The tower is a big pole that holds power lines. Davies says pilots die every year running into these lines, so they have to wear night vision goggles to be able to avoid the towers altogether.
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MCEVERS: In the next video, the fire is moving fast over the top of a ridge. A ground crew of firefighters is digging a line in the vegetation. Davies drops water right where the crew is working, so they don't get burned.
DAVIES: In the green side of the fire so that the fire couldn't come over. So we're dropping to keep it...
MCEVERS: Wow.
DAVIES: ...From coming up the hill.
MCEVERS: Davies flew close to six hours that night and did 45 drops. That's 45 times he flew over a reservoir, filled the Chinook with water, then dropped it on the fire.
DAVIES: I think we dropped 800,000 pounds of water that night.
MCEVERS: It's like good versus evil kind of.
DAVIES: It totally is. That's right. Yeah. We're there to put the wet stuff on the hot stuff, right?
MCEVERS: Fire officials say at least six different agencies contributed aircraft for these fires - city, county, state, federal.
PAUL KARPUS: I've never seen that many aircraft available at our disposal.
MCEVERS: Paul Karpas works for Cal Fire, the state fire agency, and was the air operations branch director for the Palisades Fire.
KARPUS: I think on this fire, the most we flew was probably about 20 helicopters at once.
MCEVERS: To do that, Karpus says it takes a lot of coordination. Each type of aircraft has to fly at a certain altitude so it doesn't collide with the others. An air traffic controller runs the whole thing from a helicopter that's up there, too. And airspace is closed to other aircraft, which doesn't always work. A few days into the Palisades Fire, a drone hit one of the few planes that can pull water from the ocean. It was grounded for days.
KARPUS: And these stinking drones are everywhere, and they're not supposed to be flying, but everyone wants to see. And everyone can buy one at Walmart or Costco and actually get some really cool footage to them, but not knowing that it shuts down our firefighting show.
MCEVERS: Karpus says the crews learned a lot from these fires, about coordinating so many aircraft and doing it at night, which up until now wasn't super common. Davies says even though it's harder, he would rather fly fires at night.
DAVIES: I don't have to see the destruction at night. I don't have to look at thousands of homes burnt to the ground. I'm working the edge of the fire. That's what I see. Just trying to keep it from moving - right? - keep it from spilling over another hill.
MCEVERS: Davies did a 12-day shift down here, then headed back to Canada, where he's from. Based on the number of fires he has flown in SoCal over the last five years, he figures he'll be back again soon.
For NPR News, I'm Kelly McEvers in Los Angeles.
(SOUNDBITE OF RIOPY'S "MEDITATION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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