LOS ANGELES (AP) — A draft report obtained by The Associated Press discloses conflicting accounts of why an air tanker was not summoned in the early hours of what turned out to be the largest wildfire in Los Angeles County history.
The 2009 fire killed two firefighters and destroyed 89 homes on the edge of Los Angeles.
Critics have long said the U.S. Forest Service didn't bring in enough aircraft and firefighters to quickly put out the arson-set Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest. A nearby air tanker could have been called in shortly after the fire started, but the supervisor and the pilot provide different reasons why that didn't happen.
"It is not possible to know with certainty whether different decisions or actions would have resulted in a different outcome for the Station Fire," the draft U.S. Government Accountability Office report concludes.
The Forest Service summoned several powerful firefighting airplanes in the early stages of the wildfire, then canceled and reordered them, causing a two-hour delay in their arrival, according to government records released after the blaze. Recordings of calls between fire managers and dispatchers released last year showed the difficulty of communication in the mountainous region, and the problem of deploying aircraft as multiple fires burned in the state.
A federal review in 2009 found the fire slipped out of control because it jumped into steep, inaccessible terrain, not because the Forest Service scaled back firefighters and aircraft attacking the flames.
Critics have suggested that deploying waves of water-dropping helicopters could have slowed, or extinguished, the fire on its first night, before it raged out of control.
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