Our final major project of the season was aerial mulching of the Pleasant Fire. For this we had to apply, via helicopter, 100 tons of wood straw to an 80 acre area of the fire that had not yet recovered since it burned back in 2003. Normally, on BAER projects like this, a certified weed free straw is used. However, on this project, the forest decided to use a material made from wood, but cut in such a way (into strands) that it still had the soil stabilizing characteristics of straw. The major benefit being – no seeds whatsoever. Even weed free straw has some seeds in it.
We started the project using 6148U. Aerial mulching requires rigging the net in such a way that when released, the contents (bales) are dropped but the net is still attached to the remote hook. The net is then flown back to the helibase, manually released by crewmembers and a new load is attached. This process works quite well – with real straw. With wood straw, however, it was discovered that when dropped, the bales would not disperse in the air like they were supposed to. It turned out that the strands of wood were too long and so well interwoven, that there was no way they were going to break apart while airborne. In fact, they barely broke apart even after impact with the ground. The solution to this was to manually separate the strands of every single bale. This was a very labor intensive and highly undesirable solution that was successful only because the turn-around time for the helicopter was around 15 min. This allowed time to separate the 20-30 bales that went into each net.
6148U went off contract at the end of the first day and the remainder of the job was completed by 4040P, a Bell UH-1F from Tamarack Air Services. A huge effort was put forth by the team to get the job done in a timely manner. They went through about 2 pairs of leather gloves per person and about a dozen knives for cutting baling twine.
