Santa Maria Air Tanker Base providing valuable support in battling Lake Fire

SANTA MARIA, Calif. - Firefighting efforts battling the Lake Fire in Santa Barbara County are receiving significant assistance with aerial operations from nearby Santa Maria Air Tanker Base.

"Over the last three days since this fire started, we've been loading tankers here out of Santa Maria Tanker Base," said Feliz Quiz, Santa Maria Air Tanker Base Manager. "We've had a multitude of tankers at one time, probably up to about 10 to 12 aircraft coming in and out at one time."

Since the fire broke out Friday afternoon, Quiz indicated tankers have dropped a massive amount of retardant on the blaze that's located in the rugged backcountry in the Los Padres National Forest.

"So far in the last few days, we've pumped over a little over 300,000 gallons," said Quiz. "In the last few years we've been pumping about 300,000 gallons of retardant within one season, so to pump 300,000 gallons within three days kind of puts it in perspective. We've done that in three days. We've done the amount in three days that we did all season last year, so it's been really busy here the last few days and we're anticipating it to stay this way until the fire gets out."

With the fire burning in such a remote location, having an aerial operation is a critical to helping the ongoing difficult firefighting operation.

"Whenever we have a backcountry vegetation fire with very little in ingress and egress routes, we were unable to really move our heavy fire equipment to the fire line, the importance of retardant dropping aircraft is super huge," said Andrew Madsen, Los Padres National Forest Public Affairs Officer. "Right now we've been using a lot of retardant along ridge lines to try to hold the fire in place until we can get to a point where we can get crews on the ground in place to go direct. It's the ground crews that put fires out, but it's the air crews that help hold that and buy some time for crews to get in place to go direct."

After a busy weekend, traffic at the air tanker base was much slower on Monday due to visibility issues in the fire zone, preventing fixed-wing aircraft from attacking the flames.

However, the base was still active due to support it was providing to other wildfires in the region, including the Vista Fire in San Bernardino County.

"We're also supporting other fires," said Quiz. "There's fires in Southern California, so when the Lake Fires is maybe at a point where it might be too smoked in to get aircraft out there, the other fires need aircraft, so we're able to send a few of our aircraft from here to go support them, and then as it's needed, once they're done with them, they'll bring them. They send them back to us and then we get them back in the rotation going back to the Lake Fire."