Lawmaker takes action
Republican U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray was among the lawmakers who learned late Tuesday night in a briefing with state officials that 19 military helicopters were not in use because there were no spotters.

Alarmed, he quickly helped broker an agreement to waive the spotter requirement, allowing flights to begin Wednesday.

“We told them, ’You don’t want the public to be asking why these units weren’t flying while we had houses burning,”’ Bilbray told the AP.

The criticism helped prompt the forestry department’s director, Ruben Grijalva, to abandon the state’s long-standing policy to have a spotter aboard each aircraft and instead let one spotter orchestrate drops for a squadron of three helicopters.

“I directed them to do whatever was necessary to get those other military assets into operation,” Grijalva said.

He said he could not explain why more spotters were not deployed before the flames spread to ensure that every aircraft ready to fly could take off.

Padilla said state spotters do training exercises with the Navy and National Guard and are used to working with them on fires. That’s not the case with the Marines, so when helicopters from that branch were made available, the state was caught off guard and had no spotters available.

Regardless, he said, safety — not availability of spotters — was the overriding concern in determining when to allow aircraft into the skies.

“I’m not going to risk people’s lives for a bunch of vegetation,” Padilla said. “We know you have lives and property at stake, but you don’t throw away firefighter lives like that.”

'Design difficulties' plague upgrades
The C-130 saga is a much different story.

More than a decade ago, Congress ordered replacement of the aging removable tanks for the military planes because of safety concerns and worries that they wouldn’t fit with new-model aircraft. California’s firefighting C-130 unit is one of four the Pentagon has positioned across the country to respond to fire disasters.

New tanks were designed, but they failed to fit into the latest C-130s. Designers were ordered back to the drawing board. Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly said Congress was assured the new tanks would be ready by 2003.

Four years later, the U.S. Forest Service and Air Force have yet to approve the revised design. Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Paula Kurtz said “technical and design difficulties” have delayed the program.

Rohrabacher and Gallegly are angered by the delay, which has left no C-130s capable of fighting fires on the West Coast. The last of the older-model C-130s with an original tank was retired by the California National Guard last year.

“It’s an absolute tragedy, an unacceptable tragedy,” Gallegly said.

The situation meant that rather than deploying C-130s from inside the state, Schwarzenegger was forced to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to call in the six remaining older C-130s from other states as far away as North Carolina.

None of them began fighting the fires until Wednesday afternoon.

Big difference in aircraft's ability
In the meantime, the state relied mostly on smaller retardant tankers that carry about a third of the C-130’s 3,000-gallon capacity.

Gallegly said such firepower was sorely needed earlier.

“I have actually flown in one and pressed the button,” he said. “I know what they can do.”