Every year the damage and cost of these wild fires grows. As suburban sprawl enroaches into terrain ideally suited for fire, the suburban-wildlands interface, what used to be a wild lands fire problem increasingly becomes a private property catastrophe.
On the other hand, we are desperate to find ways to stimulate the economy with win win projects.
Why not create a new branch of the forest service or BLM that can launch a military sized response to these fire disasters?
Building a fleet of large, fast, jet powered slurry bombers would provide thousands of jobs year round. Imagine if you will dozens of 747 sized aircraft slurry bombing a fire line one after the other for hours on end.
Todays fire is only 25 miles from LAX. You can see on the maps that LAX is right next to a really large source of water, the Pacific ocean. I know the arguments against large aircraft fire fighting, lack of manuverability, can't fly low enough, need a long runway etc. Please, there are thousands of brilliant aero space engineers who can solve these challenges, look at the safety record of carrier based landings and takeoffs now compared to just 30 years ago.
What will all these aircraft, flight crews and ground support do in the off season you ask. Controlled burns. Ever since the Los Alamos disaster, when a controlled burn got out of control and turned into a large catastrophe, fire officials are very reluctant to start controlled burns. Especially where the controlled burns are needed most, in the wild lands around suburban areas. But controlled burns are exactly what is needed to prevent these catastrophic fires in the firs place. If a fire official had a dozen 747 sized slurry bombers to work with, a robust containment line could be laid down before the controlled burn. Of course having the same dozen slurry bombers standing by to tamp down the fire if it started to expand would make the controlled burns much safer.
The economic benefits of this new fleet would be spread over many areas. Seattle, Wichita, Denver all would benefit. A dozen or more airports would have to have facilities in place for the fleet to reload and refuel. This would provide jobs at airports just as the airline business contracts.
There is a foreign policy benefit also. Remember the terrible fires in Australia, Greece, Spain and other countries? Imagine the good will a fleet of a hundred slurry bombers would generate if they had USA in 50 foot tall letters on the tails.
I believe this a national project that could replace some of our military budget and yet we get a huge return on our investment.
Update:
To all the comments that preach various techniques that would prevent fires by going back in time and changing the past, I am interested in the future, reality. No one with a firefighting background will dipute that letting fires burn for the last hundred years would have prevented the large scale wild fires we are now experiencing. In the next 20 years, unless the pace of prescribed burns are drastically accelerated, every year there will be more loss of property and life. What is so wrong with diverting a fraction of the military budget to fight a domestic enemy we know.