106th Rescue Wing: How a drill became a real battle to defend their base from Westhampton wildfire

Master Sgt. Barry Wood was onboard a military helicopter flying 2,000 feet above Long Island Sound when he recognized his destination — the New York Air National Guard 106th Rescue Wing in Westhampton Beach — where hundreds of his fellow airmen were training was in imminent danger.

"We saw the fire from our altitude and realized a pretty serious situation was developing at that moment," Wood said, referring to the March 8 blaze that scorched more than 400 acres of pine barrens parallel to Sunrise Highway. "We saw a giant plume. ... It was way above our altitude."

Wood was one of several hundred Air National Guard reserve members of the 106th Rescue Wing participating in the base’s monthly drill weekend on Saturday, March 8. While he was flying back to the base from upstate during a training assignment that afternoon, several Long Island fire departments had already begun battling a string of fires.

The fire was fully knocked down the following morning and the air base was unscathed, but that outcome was "the luck of the draw," according to Col. Jeffrey Cannet, commander of the rescue wing.

Hundreds of hands happened to be on deck for scheduled training the day of the fire, including those who joined Wood on his helicopter once it returned to the wing and airdropped 14,000 gallons of water on the Westhampton fire. That action, which Cannet said "accelerated containing" the fire, would have been delayed several hours if it were an ordinary day when only one or two dozen reserve members are present at the wing.

"If we weren’t working that day, I’m not so sure the rest of this base might not have burned to the ground, I don’t know," Cannet said. "I don’t know how much they would have been able to stop it with ... winds blowing the fires. And we all saw what happened in California. Those fires can spread real quick. I think we were very fortunate that day that we had everybody here."

Following the fire, Senior Master Sgt. Michael Gadman, chief of the rescue wing’s fire department, has been coordinating with the New York State Forest Rangers to send some of his firefighters upstate this summer for that agency’s "refresher training for wild land firefighting" in case another fire emergency happens, he said.

The wooded areas around Francis S. Gabreski Airport, the location of the rescue wing, that did not burn last month certainly could catch fire, especially when high winds blow through parched bark. While he added that he wants his department to perform "almost identical" to their actions on March 8, which were "exactly the way they were trained," the courses will ensure the department is well-versed in communications procedures.

"One of the biggest things I want everyone to learn is command and control between ground forces and aviation assets," Gadman said.

Not a drill

Everyone participating in an ordinary drill weekend began to realize the 106th Rescue Wing was in the line of fire.

"The strong winds that day were kind of blowing the flames and the embers towards our installation so we felt directly threatened," Cannet said.

Around a quarter of the people at the base were ordered to evacuate, according to the colonel, while several hundred reserve members remained to aid in one of two efforts: the evacuation of people and aircraft from the base and fighting the fire.

The HH-60W Jolly Green II helicopter that brought Wood back to the rescue wing was the same bird used to drop water on the fire. A second one equipped with a necessary cargo hook for a bright orange water dropping device known as a Bambi bucket was flown to MacArthur Airport along with a crew to keep it safe and in working order "in case the firefighting went long and continued into the next day," Master Sgt. Clifford Bould said.

"It was a little bit chaotic at first, but it was nothing that we don’t train for," he added. "We’re always prepared to do whatever the mission requires."

Fire 'just turned orange'

While Bould and other reserve members were readying and protecting birds, Gadman was leading boots on the ground, first to areas along Sunrise Highway west of Old Riverhead Road around 1 p.m.

Winds exceeding 30 mph blew the flames southeast through the dry wooded area towards Old Riverhead Road. The firefighters relocated to that roadway to keep the fire from crossing over towards the rescue Wing. The sign along the road recognizing the efforts of the firefighters who battled the notorious pine barrens wildfire of 1995 was surely invisible, as the fire crept 40 feet per minute, according to Gadman, reducing lush, full-bodied greenery to acres of charred stick figures.

"We just fought the fire all the way down the road as it was burning," Gadman said. "The fire actually went over our fire vehicles ... It just completely went blackout and just turned orange."

The base’s firefighters were forced to retreat farther south, Gadman said. Around 2:30 p.m., they established a defensive line on North Perimeter Road, between the Long Island Practical Shooters Association to the north and Gabreski Airport hangars that house both civilian and Suffolk County Police Department aircraft to the south. Within the hour, firefighters were dealing with fires at the shooting range and the airport.

The shooting range stores ammunition, but the base’s fire department identified other areas they needed to defend beyond the airport they knew would exacerbate the situation if they caught fire. As the wind shifted to a northeasterly direction around 4 p.m., firefighters headed east to the airfield’s taxiway.

"The major concern in this area ... was a fireworks storage area with what we heard was 20,000 pounds of fireworks, and also a pool chemical storage facility with chlorine," Gadman said.

This was running through Wood’s mind as he sat in the back of the wing’s HH-60W.

"They could add more fuel sources and now send projectiles to residential areas, making this a lot worse," Wood said. "Luckily that didn’t happen, but that was my primary concern ... We need to get to all this quickly so we can prevent this from becoming a catastrophic event."

When Wood returned to the base from training upstate at around 2 p.m., Lt. Col. James "Sunny" Liston, a pilot with the base’s 101st Rescue Squadron, which operates the HH-60Ws, was waiting for him. Along with other reserve members, they took to the sky in the helicopter armed with a Bambi bucket, which the base had not used in a mission capacity since the 1995 pine barrens fire.

Fighting fire from the sky

"When we first took off, you could see the smoke was basically covering the northeastern side of the base ... just a solid wall of smoke," Liston said. "It does kind of create its own environment, the turbulence, the heat, all kind of combines, plus the 30, 40 knot winds that we were dealing with already, that made for a pretty dynamic environment."

With each dive to around 10 feet above the Wildwood Lake in Northampton to scoop up around 500 gallons of water, Wood, wearing just a military, olive-green, zip-up flight suit, felt the wind and the splash back of the cold water, and with each assault on the fire, he felt the heat.

"It’s a good shock to your system," he said.

With limited visibility, Wood, who had his hands on the trigger that dropped the water, needed help coordinating each attack.

"I told my left ... my counterpart, give me a three second countdown and say ‘drop, drop, drop.’"

After around five hours, the HH-60W made 28 trips from Wildwood Lake to the Westhampton blaze. In total, the air guard crew dumped more than 14,000 gallons of water on the fire. The New York Army National Guard also launched three UH-60M Blackhawks from the Army Aviation Support Facility in Ronkonkoma, which charted a similar course and dropped an extra 28,380 gallons of water on the Westhampton fire.

Last week, reserve members who stand by for rescue missions across the country or even the world, were thankful their mission was successful and that they were able to help their local community.

"We work on these things everyday, and a lot of times it’s just training," said Tech. Sgt. Nicholas Creedon. "But to actually be a part of ... a real mission in our backyard rather than in a deployed location ... it's awesome."