Dr. Seeley Hits the Front Page
Dr. Brien Seeley’s editorial on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle’s opinion section July 14, is a well-reasoned appeal to try a radical new approach to fighting wildfires. It impressed an editorial board enough to make it their featured Op-ed leading their Sunday coverage. It’s the product of Dr. Seeley’s decades-long research into short-take-off and landing (STOL) aircraft and his drive to make small airplanes emissions-free. It’s also a challenge to American ingenuity and technology to help save us from the current plague of pollution and resulting wildfires. These don’t take place only in remote backwaters like Paradise, California, but now even in once-protected enclaves such as Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills.
Dr. Seeley makes three big points in his editorial. One, we have the technology to fight wildfires today, products of the high-tech industries in which California abounds. Two, carbon dioxide emissions from wildfires are more than twice those from our fossil-fuel-powered cars, and are contributing to an ever-worsening climate crisis. Three, despite reluctance to invest in automated aerial firefighting equipment and programs, Californians are already paying substantially higher rates for property insurance (if they can get it), energy, and firefighting equipment and crews.
Advanced Aerial Firefighting (AAF) aircraft would be quiet and capable of operating out of small, unimproved fields
In the first case, as we are documenting in this blog, myriad options exist for aerial attacks on wildfires. Airplanes and multi-rotor drones exist or are being developed that can fly to a fire, attack it, return to base, and renew the attack as needed. As Dr. Seeley points out, their cost will be far lower than the $24 million per aircraft for current vehicles – not to mention crew costs. We can build networks of automated vehicles, strategically located for greatest effect, for far less than that of maintaining an aging tanker fleet or building a new one.
Second, as shown in Dr. Seeley’s op-ed, wildfires now out-pollute the emissions from our cars, contributing to an ever-warmer, drier atmosphere and greater areas of tinder-dry fuel for future wildfires.
It leads to this hard-to-ignore fact: “After a wildfire, it takes over 20 years for a burned forest and four years for burned grasslands to recover 50% of their original photosynthetic capacity. A a result, the loss of carbon capture increases every year.”
We face that today in Oregon’s Wasco and Jefferson Counties, where the Cram Fire has devoured over 100,000 acres of prime farmland. The economics will become clear when prices for oatmeal or Wheaties rival those for prime rib at checkout. We see, also, that forests are not the only sites vulnerable to wildfires. Range land and large areas of crops are also in danger.
That brings us to the third point – the economics and politics of this ever-growing crisis. As noted, the fires themselves create additional greenhouse gases and destroy the natural means of restoring a natural balance. Dr. Seeley estimates an additional $679 for higher insurance premiums and $572 for increased costs of energy, home hardening, personnel and equipment to fight future fires – a total of $1,251 per household annually. 17 million taxpayers in the state could pony up $9.7 billion in taxes to help support such a program, given the willingness to do so. That would buy a great many drones, aircraft, and support systems.
How do we pay for the plan in a time of reduced incomes for families and municipalities? Dr. Seeley provides one possibility. “Developing a statewide pilotless transit/cargo system could potentially earn significant profits for an operating entity while removing car traffic from our state’s gridlocked freeways. Such profit could pay for building and maintaining an autonomous aerial firefighting system that could repurpose sky taxis as eTankers.”
Dr. Seeley’s editorial is an introduction to a potential solution for stopping wildfires before they destroy homes, neighborhoods and entire towns. The costs will be high initially, but lower in terms of lost structures and human lives. The technology is here now. Will we have the courage to use all our creativity and knowledge to fight an enemy as old as man?
For detailed information on how the Sustainable Aviation Foundation proposes to attack wildfires through AAF, see the link here.