Plastic
AS 350 B3 will pick up a tonne ( 1000kg ) bag of ballast. It would be way quicker and cheaper than the RAF. To be fair RAF pilots are not really trained to do repeat lifting like this hours at a time. Would be better on a long line. Normal lift cycle for us would be 1nm a minute including hooking up the load and placing within a ft of the required location.
Last time I saw a quote for a Chinnok it was £ 20k an hour, As350 is around £ 1k an hour plus ground crew and pilot
We attended the fires last year in Derbyshire, we arrived within 6 hours of being called out, took the military over 2 days to turn up. So would suggest that a civilian operator would be more on call, with better equipment and much more experience