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Airborne Service Helicopters Sprinkled Water for Extinguishing A Forest Fire

In the afternoon on March 18, 2015, the 64^th forest block of Taichung Pahsien Mountain reported forest fire alarm. The Airborne Service Corp urgently dispatched helicopters that stationed at northern, central and southern parts to put out the fire. The 64^th forest block of Taichung Pahsien Mountain is about 5,800-foot over the sea level. It is suspected that the forest fire was caused by the careless construction of workers nearby. Within the fire scene, there was a natural Taiwanese Pinus forest surroundings. The branches and leaves of those trees contain of grease components which might ignite the forest fire. The ground firefighters had to walk over 4 hours in the mountainous area before reaching the fire-ground. Moreover, the gradient of the scene was more than 50 degrees. With several collapses, the terrain was extremely steep and the circumstances was vitally precipitous. Thus, they immediately informed the Airborne Service Corp and applied for helicopters to offer air support of fire extinction. After receiving the emergency task, the Airborne Service Corp immediately dispatched two helicopters with Type UH-1H (No. NA-516 and No. NA-519) from Group 3 (stationed at the Taichung Ching Chuang Kang Airport) of the 2^nd Service Battalion to sprinkle water for extinguishing the fire. On March 19, the Corp further dispatched crews of Type UH-1H (No. NA-519) from Ground 3 (stationed at Taipei Songshan) of the 1^st Service Battalion and crews of Type B-234 (No. NA-602) from Group 1 (stationed at the Tainan Airport) of the 3^rd Service Battalion to go the target area and jointly executed the water sprinkling and fire extinction mission. Nevertheless, the case once out of control for the wind facilitated the spread of fire. From March 20 to 23, helicopters flew several sorties to perform the mission and the fire was finally controlled after five-day jointly cooperative work between the ground and airborne crews. It is assessed that about 3.2 hectares of forest was buried in this accident. During this mission process, helicopters of the Airborne Service Corp totally flew 99 sorties for continually 6 days. The helicopters sprinkled totally 264 metric tons of water for 238 times and transported about 580 kilograms of goods and material.