With the exception of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, which killed 340 firefighters, Tuesday's helicopter crash would rank as one of the deadliest incidents in the U.S. for firefighters in the past 30 years.
Before the helicopter crash, three firefighters had been killed while on duty in California this year.
A heavy helicopter, a Sikorsky S-61, with thirteen aboard, being used to carry firefighters crashed and killed nine. 4 others received critically severe burns and or injuries.
The firefighters were part of a contract crew out of Oregon, from Grayback Forestry
Sheriff's officials would not begin recovering bodies from the wreckage until NTSB investigators had a chance to assess the scene. The four survivors — three firefighters and a pilot — were flown from the site to hospitals Tuesday night with severe injuries.
Authorities can confirm with "fair certainty" that all nine others — seven firefighters, a U.S. Forest Service employee and the helicopter's pilot — died, said Undersheriff Eric Palmer.
The Sikorsky S-61 helicopter crashed Tuesday night about 15 miles northwest of Junction City, California.
The Sikorsky S-61 helicopter, which was assigned to the Iron Complex fires, went down at the north end of the 15848-acre Buckhorn Fire, near its landing spot, .
The crash site is about 15 miles northwest of Junction City in Trinity County west of Redding, the Sikorsky S-61 chopper was destroyed by fire after crashing in the remote mountain location in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.
Forest Service spokeswoman, Daria Day said the crew was flying through the smoke filled skies northwest of Redding in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest on their way to battle the over 86 - thousand acre "Iron Complex" fire.
Of the 13 on board, 11 of them firefighters.
Only 4 found alive.
The LA Times has information from one of the survivors.
One of the survivors, Richard Schroeder, 42, said in a phone interview from his hospital room in Redding that it seemed that the helicopter's rotor hit a tree as it was taking off.Here is an excerpt of a Sacramento Bee story in which spokesman Bob Madden of Carson Helicopters in Grants Pass describes the accident and Tom Karroll of the U.S. Forest Service describe the accident.
A father of five from Medford, Ore., Schroeder said someone behind him screamed for everyone to put their heads under their legs. "He was looking out the window and saw something," Schroeder said.
Schroeder's stomach dropped as the helicopter pitched forward and plummeted. He blacked out on impact and came to with a body on him, he said. He shoved the body off and saw that the tail of the aircraft was on fire. His mouth was bleeding heavily and he could barely breathe. He said he thought, "I'm not dying here," and unbuckled himself and kicked out a partially broken window. He wiggled his way outside. Men above screamed at him to scramble up the slope.
The helicopter exploded as he watched from above. "I was totally shocked," he said. "I lost all my friends."
Schroeder sustained serious injuries to his neck, shoulder and back. He did not suffer any burns, he said.
Another crew on the ground waiting to be shuttled out alerted base camp about the crash, and rescue crews were immediately dispatched to the scene, authorities said.
Schroeder said the crew was being transported back for rest because clouds were rolling in and they expected heavy lightning strikes. He said they were the third group to go out from that spot on Tuesday.
The helicopter crashed near the north edge of the large wildland fire. The craft was taking 10 firefighters and the Forest Service official out of the fire zone.
Both pilots had at least 10,000 hours of experience, he said.
On Tuesday, the helicopter had shuttled crews in and out of the fire zone and landed several times at Helicopter Spot 44, where the crash occurred, said Forest Service spokesman Tom Karroll.
"It's at 1,800 feet (elevation) in very steep country, the Salmon Trinity Alps primitive area," he said. "As it loaded up and the people had put on their seat belts, it didn't have a successful liftoff."
The helicopter caught fire after hitting the ground, Madden said. "Two other company choppers responded to the mayday (emergency call) and dropped water on the ground around the burning aircraft."
From the The San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fire raging through rugged, dense terrain is complicating rescue crews' efforts to recover victims and evidence from the remote part of a Northern California forest where a firefighting helicopter crashed. Nine people were presumed dead.
The helicopter was carrying 11 firefighters and two crew members when it went down Tuesday night deep in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and was destroyed by fire, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Four people — three firefighters and a pilot — were flown to hospitals with severe burns after other firefighters who were waiting to be picked up helped tend to their injuries, said Jennifer Rabuck, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service. Eight firefighters and a pilot were feared dead.
The Forest Service and the Trinity County Sheriff's Department would not disclose Wednesday whether they had removed any bodies from the crash site or what the search effort entailed.
The National Transportation Safety Board said it had dispatched a team of investigators to survey the wreckage and to begin the long process of determining what caused the helicopter to crash.
Ten of the firefighters, including the three in the hospital, were employed by firefighting contractor Grayback Forestry, according to Kelli Matthews, a spokesman for the Merlin, Ore.-based company. Grayback's tally showed that seven of its employees were unaccounted for late Wednesday, and the company does not know whether any firefighters from other companies or government agencies also were on board, Matthews said.
She said the company was notifying families of the missing firefighters and fielding calls from anxious relatives asking whether their family members were among the injured or dead.
The firefighters had been working at the northern end of a fire burning on more than 27 square miles in the national forest, part of a larger complex of blazes that is mostly contained. Mike Wheelock, Grayback's founder and owner, said the company had two 20-person crews working the fire, a mix of young seasonal firefighters and professionals.
The crash was a painful reminder of the loss of four Grayback firefighters in July 2002, when a van ferrying its workers from Oregon to a wildfire in Colorado swerved off a highway and spun out of control, Wheelock said.
"We are just right now concentrating on all the families and our employees," he said while visiting the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, where two of his employees were being treated. "We are very concerned about them because we are very tight-knit."
Grayback firefighters Michael Brown, 20, and Jonathan Frohreich, 18, as well as one of the two pilots, were being treated at the UC Davis hospital, according to the contractor. Brown was upgraded to fair condition late Wednesday and Frohreich remained in critical condition, according to the hospital and fire officials.
A spokesman said the hospital was also treating a victim in critical condition named William Coultas, but he could not confirm whether the patient was the co-pilot.
Leora Frohreich, Jonathan Frohreich's grandmother, said that it was the young man's first work as a wildland firefighter and that he planned to attend mechanic school this fall.
He had worked on a fire near Williams, Ore., for three weeks and then was on the Shasta-Trinity fire for four days, the grandmother said. His crew was being flown out for some rest when the helicopter crashed, she said.
"I'm so thankful because he's just lucky to be alive," Frohreich said, adding that the firefighter's parents, sister and girlfriend had gone to Sacramento to be with him. "You can't be in a crash like that and not hurt."
Another Grayback employee, identified as Richard Schroeder, 42, was in serious condition at Mercy Medical Center in Redding, officials said.
The helicopter was owned and operated by Carson Helicopters Inc., a Pennsylvania company whose firefighting operations are based in Grants Pass, Ore. All 12 of the company's helicopters are being used for firefighting in Oregon and California, said Bob Madden, Carson's director of corporate affairs.
The helicopter's two co-pilots were Carson employees, Madden said; one was hospitalized and the other was among the missing.
Before Tuesday's helicopter crash, three firefighters had been killed while on duty in California this year, including one firefighter also assigned to battle the Shasta-Trinity blazes who was killed last month by a falling tree.
On July 2, a volunteer firefighter in Mendocino County died of a heart attack on the fire line. Another firefighter was killed July 26 in when he was burned while scouting a fire.----------------------------
Calif. crash survivor recalls helicopter's final minutes By Meredith May, John Koopman and Kelly Zito REDDING, Calif. — Authorities confirmed Thursday that nine people listed as missing in a fiery helicopter crash in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest are dead, and one of four survivors provided chilling details about the horrific moments of the crash. Firefighter Richard Schroeder told his mother that just before the copter went down, he heard the pilot say: "Duck! We're going down!" The accident Tuesday night in a remote forested area about 70 miles northwest of Redding took the life of a pilot of the helicopter and seven firefighters. The identity of the ninth victim was not released, but authorities said he was a U.S. Forest Service employee. "We are devastated by this," said Mike Wheelock, owner of Grayback Forestry, a private firefighting firm based in Merlin, Ore., that employed the 10 firefighters aboard the copter.
The San Francisco Chronicle - Source article
A fourth survivor remained at Mercy Hospital in Redding, where he was listed in fair condition. That man, Grayback employee Schroeder, 42, told his mother a harrowing tale of death and survival in the burning wreckage of the helicopter.
Linda Parks of Medford, Ore., said in an interview that her son told her he had chosen a seat behind the pilot.
It was at the end of a long day cutting firebreaks to try to stop a fire in a remote part of the National Forest.
The helicopter had just returned from ferrying 13 other firefighters back to the base camp, he said. Schroeder clicked his seat belt, and the helicopter started rising from a clearing.
Somewhere between 200 and 300 feet off the ground, he heard what no air passenger ever wants to hear — the pilot yelling in panic.
Schroeder looked out the window in the split second of freefall and thought he saw the craft crashing through branches. In a second, he was on the ground, trapped under burning metal and a body.
He was injured but was able to push away the body — which was on fire — and wriggle out of his seat belt. The only way out was through a broken window. He smashed the window to make more room and crawled out to escape the flames. Three others made it out.
"Whoever landed on top of him, that's what saved his life," Parks said.
"He didn't hear any sound before it happened — he said the whole thing was over in a flash of an eye," Parks said.
Doctors call mother
Doctors called Parks on Tuesday night to report that her son was injured but was going to make it. He suffered a cracked scapula, fractured vertebra, cuts and bruises and would require stitches in his lips.
Parks asked her son how the other three men survived. Schroeder told her he believes they also crawled out the window after he did.
She said her son talked about the copter hitting tree branches during the final moments, but it was unclear whether he thought the helicopter might have struck them on takeoff or during the crash.
On Wednesday, Schroeder's girlfriend and three children — Kayla, 18, Cody, 16 and 3-year-old Ruby — traveled from Medford to Redding to comfort Schroeder.
"He's doing OK," Parks said. "He used to love helicopter rides — he thought they were awesome. I don't think he's going to say that anymore."
At UC Davis Medical Center, Duane Nelson, 53, a 30-year Forest Service veteran, said firefighters from around the state have been going to the hospital to show support for their injured comrades.
"It's hard, grueling work, and when something like this happens, it sucks the life out of it," he said. "But we have to keep doing our job."
The crash occurred at about 7:45 p.m. Tuesday. The heavy firefighting helicopter, a Sikorsky S-61N owned by Carson Helicopters of Grants Pass, Ore., picked up 11 firefighters from a remote clearing deep in the forest and was about to take them at the end of their 12-hour shift to their base camp. Fire officials said the helicopter took off and then came right back down about 300 yards away.
Bob Madden, spokesman for Carson helicopters, said the chopper's angle changed within moments of takeoff, and it plummeted to earth, turning over as it rolled down the hill and burst into flames after a possible fuel line break.
Crew on ground help
About 20 firefighters still on the ground waiting to be ferried helped the injured firefighters until medical evacuation helicopters could arrive. The remoteness and the difficult terrain prevented a quick evacuation, however, and the injured were not moved until about 9:30 p.m.
Two other Carson helicopters also assigned to the fire responded to the crash and dropped water both on the encroaching wildland fire and the burning Sikorsky. Madden said the water helped cool down the chopper's hull, but the aircraft continued to burn into Thursday morning.
National Transportation Safety Board member Kitty Higgins said a small team of investigators has reached the site and is trying to assess what material, equipment and personnel will be needed to determine the cause of the crash.
One of their first missions will be to find the helicopter's voice recorder, which was stored in the nose of the aircraft. That will tell investigators what the crew said at the time of the accident. The helicopter does not have a data recorder, as do commercial airliners, that would indicate altitude, speed and pitch.
Investigators have begun talking to witnesses and going over records. Higgins said they would put together a timeline for events leading up to the crash and look at the maintenance records for the helicopter.
"We try to go about this very methodically," she said.
Some experts were already calling it the country's worst civilian helicopter crash.
"When you talk about nine people killed and four horribly injured, it's the most horrific non-military crash in U.S. history," said Gary Robb, a Kansas City attorney who has represented victims of helicopter crashes and their families for nearly three decades.
Robb said he had been contacted by some of the families of the crash victims, but he declined to identify them.
Given the pilots' qualifications — the company said they had 25,000 combined hours of operating helicopters — and the fact that weather and visibility did not appear to pose problems, Robb suggested that an equipment failure may have played a role in the crash.
Malfunction indicated
"I've been doing this 27 years, and every indication is of an in-flight mechanical malfunction," Robb said. "These are not the kind of pilots who are going to fly this helicopter into the ground. It could have been a tail rotor malfunction, a systems control problem, a linkage problem with the main rotor or engine failure. We're dealing with some kind of in-flight mechanical malfunction because there's no other logical explanation for what happened."
Robb said helicopters account for 10 to 12 percent of all aircraft flights in the United States, yet are responsible for almost 50 percent of all crashes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The crew in Tuesday's crash had been fighting the Buckhorn Fire, part of the Iron Complex fires in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The fires, caused by lightning strikes, have been burning since June 21 and are mostly contained. The Buckhorn Fire has burned more than 15,000 acres and is 25 percent contained, Overall, the Iron Complex fires have burned about 87,000 acres and are roughly 80 percent contained. There are three active fires in the complex, and full containment is not expected until Sept. 1.
Copyright 2008, The San Francisco Chronicle
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