San Jose Mercury News report
Grounded crew escapes fire as flames skirt crippled helicopter
RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif.
- Helicopter pilot Mike Roederer and his crew fight fires from the sky, but on Thursday night they were on the ground with their disabled chopper in the path of a wildfire.
Roederer, 46, who was sleeping in a nearby trailer to safeguard the aircraft, awoke to the sight of flames coming down a mountain toward him.
He quickly grabbed his cell phone and called his crew.
"Hurry up and get over here. The fire's coming and I've got to get this helicopter out of here," he told them.
A day earlier, the men had been hauling water in the Bell 214-B1 heavy-lifter. But a blown hydraulic line forced them to land on a rise in an open field.
As thousands of people fled the flames that night, Roederer and his crew went to work trying to save the helicopter.
The first thing Roederer had to do was move a 4,000-gallon fuel truck parked nearby. It had been brought in as part of the maintenance effort on the disabled chopper.
"I got in it and drove it out to the freeway" about a mile away, he said.
Roederer's fellow crew members - co-pilots Greg Smith and mechanic A.J. Massei - arrived and gave him a lift back in a pickup truck.
"We drove past all the fire trucks and firefighters. They kept telling us to stop. but we had to get to the helicopter," said Massei, 32, of Ureka.
Smith, 35, of Pine Grove, said they parked as close as they could then ran to the aircraft. They got within 20 feet.
"The flames were coming over the road, covering it," Smith said. "At that point we knew we weren't going to get it started and we had to get out of there."
Massei said the three men, clad only in T-shirts and shorts, turned and ran toward the pickup, passing Roederer's trailer, which was engulfed in flames.
"The smoke was so bad, we couldn't breathe too good," he said. "We had to get out of there."
The three watched the flames burn from the safety of a fire line.
"We were frustrated and heartbroken," Massei said. "I have two kids, but this my baby."
As the smoke started to clear, Massei said, they could still see the blades of the helicopter. "The fire came through, the smoke cleared and here it was sitting. It made it through," said Smith, shaking his head.
Its exterior was blackened by the heat, but the chopper was still in one piece and would fly again.
"If we had landed it anywhere else out here, it would be gone," Roederer said about the open landing area.
Smith said he hopes to stay in the air the next time he encounters such a blaze. "The fire is not supposed to be this close to us," he said.
The Jackson-based Helimax Corp. helicopter was under contract with the U.S. Forestry Service to fight wildfires.
