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8B Wednesday, May 11, 2011 Bulletin, Progressive, Record, Reporter
Two loaders work at the same time in the largest landing, keeping the logs organized and ready
to load quickly onto trucks. It takes about 16 minutes from the time the truck driver backs into
position until he or she pulls out with a full 10ad. ,
Then and now, it's important to keep fuel tankers right at the landings for fast and easy fill-ups
of helicopters that guzzle hundreds of gallons per hour.Photos by Alicia Knadler
Darrin Hay pauses for a moment in the midst of cleaning and in-
specting the tail rotor and blades, a small portion of the 65,000
acres burnt in the 2007 Moonlight Fire visible beyond him.
LOG, from page 1B
averaged about 8,000 pounds
-- the payload size needed to
make the job profitable.
Brown described how a
sling was used, and woods
workers told him about the
chokers, "special Wire rope
nooses," they used to attach
logs to the sling.
They also told Wiley that
they couldn't wear their hard
hats -- they had to wear
bright orange caps and gloves
instead, so they would be
more visible to pilots and so
their hard hats wouldn't turn
into missiles blown by the
70-mph rotor wash from the
helicopter.
Workers today find that
hardhat story hard to believe,
but then hard hats have been
improved and adapted to
better fit the jobs, just like
Erickson adapted his first old
military helicopter with a
vantage point, now a bubble,
off the left side for the pilot
to look down out of.
Today, the size of the
payloads and the time it
takes to get them from the
sale area to the landing are
important to the success or
failure of a job.
The job is more dangerous
today, too, because the logs
have been standing dead for
almost four years.
Huge chunks of bark and
wood debris can be seen
falling from the logs while
they are aloft between pickup
and delivery.
"That can kill someone,"
said Joe Smailes, Ecosystem
Operations team leader on
the Mt. Hough Ranger
District.
He drove this reporter out
for a tour of the main service
landing about two weeks
after work started on the
Cairn Multi Product Fire
Salvage Sale.
Pew Forest Products owner
Randy Pew said that it was
his son, Jared, who figured
out how to make this job
profitable.
Many details that seem
small to others are what
made it possible.
Cedar 10gs, for example,
are taken to Oroville and
Lincoln for the best process
by truckers who live down
there.
The same goes for some top
grade logs that are taken up
to southern Oregon.
And the people at Collins
Pine pitched in too by offer-
ing a higher price to make it
work.
Safety is another huge
• concern, and Jared Pew spent
some time trying to find
a company that could do
the grapple-style helicopter
logging.
With the wood being dead
so long, it is more dangerous
to work with, and he did not
want choker setters working
underneath airborne logs.
Instead, loggers place a
different sort of line on the
tree that the pilot can see and.
hook with a grapple.
And the trees are color-
coded with tags so the pilot
knows if he can pick up more
than.one tree at a time.
It takes only seconds for
the pilot to hover over the
trees and hook onto them,
and back at the landing one
can see the cable wiggle in
the split second it takes for
See Log, page 9B
To make the job economical, the pilot must be able to get the
logs, deliver them to the landing and turn around to head back
for more in less than two minutes. When the pilot picks up
more than one smaller log at a time, the copter looks like an
orange bee flitting around the treetops, gathering as much as it
can in one trip.
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