Russia to the Rescue in Thomas Fire?

At 4 a.m. on Friday, December 8, as the Thomas Fire bore down on Ventura and four other wildfires ripped through the state, David Baskett, a Santa Maria Public Airport District director, got a call from a Russian Federation official offering the services of his country’s giant firefighting airplanes to augment Cal Fire’s busy fleet of helicopters and tankers. Minister of Trade and Industry Denis Manturov had also sent a letter to Governor Jerry Brown’s office and, the Russian official said, opened lines of communication with FEMA, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We in Russia are worrying about [the] situation with the extensive forest fires occurring in California,” Manturov wrote in his letter to Brown, a copy of which Baskett provided to the Independent. “To fight such disasters in Russia we use the Be-200 [amphibious] aircraft manufactured by Taganrog-based Beriev Aircraft Company. These aircraft proved to be effective for fighting fires of various complexity worldwide, and in terms of flight/technical performance, the Be-200 aircraft has no equivalents in the world.”

The offer didn’t come completely out of the blue. Baskett, who also operates the private aviation consulting firm International Emergency Services, has worked for the better part of a decade to bring the water-scooping Russian Be-200s to the Santa Maria Public Airport, a Central Coast base for firefighting aircraft. Similar proposals have been made over the years, Baskett said, but this one came with a greater sense of urgency as the Thomas Fire was actively consuming hundreds of homes and quickly growing to become the second-largest fire in modern California history.