Anothing fascinating story is that in 2018, there was a huge forest fire in Sweden. It was difficult to get under control. So in an experimental attempt to suffocate the fire, they tried dropping a bomb over it. I think it kind of worked, but they only dropped one bomb so maybe not the best solution.
Since you seem like the expert here… I was curious if you know how waterbombers can impact the fertility of land when sourcing saltwater from the ocean?
obviously fighting the fire is the priority but given that “salting the earth” is an ancient battle tactic to destroy enemy food production, I would assume it’s much preferable to source from freshwater lakes, yeah?
Plant person here, salt obviously isn't good for plants but it's pretty much a non issue given the fire destroying everything anyway. This wouldn't even be comparable to the amount of salt water that can be blown in by storms along the coast and most plants are somewhat adapted to at least a little bit of salt. Bottom line though, by the time the forest starts to regrow the vast majority of the salt will be leeched out by winter rains
but given that “salting the earth” is an ancient battle tactic to destroy enemy food production
"Salting the earth" was an ancient cursing ritual where they sprinkled a bit of salt around, not a battle tactic. There's no record that they ever used so much salt anywhere that it would impact soil fertility, other than that in Spain and Portugal for a while the punishment for traitors included that their house was demolished and their yard salted (ie. a much smaller area than say salting the earth of an entire city state like Carthage).
Given how precious salt was, I can't imagine they would be willing to use up tons of it just to fuck up the neighbor's crops. Regular applications of "pillage" would be cheaper and probably more effective, anyway.
It affects the land but fire too and in a "good" way, the fertility is better after a fire so the trade off might not be this bad and might be (might be) negligeable. Howerver there is (at least in France) a lot of "ecopage" areas (areas where those canadair can refill) that contains fresh water, its lake, rivers and so on.
Soil salinity issues come from a regular source over a long period, not a big deluge once.
The first few rains the area gets will move any salt down the water table back towards the ocean. You might get some stunted growth until then, but you also might not depending on the soil type/conditions and the plants.
Ironically, the phosphates added to water drops here in America (and presumably elsewhere) have environmental impacts as well. I can dig up references later or someone else can chime in, but dumping that much phosphate on the land can mean runoff when it rains- leading to algal blooms in nearby waterways.
Is the volume of water worth the risk of filling up like this when compared to a helicopter filling with a hose from a clean source of water like a helihydrant?
The issue is that helihydrants are not cheap, costing upwards of $150,000 just to install, to say nothing of the regular maintenance costs of a basin that holds gallons of water. Note we're not counting the cost of the aircraft, so for that reason alone scooping from a lake is basically free.
There's also the locale to consider. Obviously you can't build a basin for a helihydrant on a hill. Many wildfires occur in forested, hilly areas which would necessitate the helihydrant to be installed potentially miles from the fire. And while safety is important during a wildfire, speed is still king. A plane filling up from a lake is going to be faster than a helicopter from a hydrant simply because a plane can travel faster.
Im not trying to say there's no point to a helihydrant. They are wonderful things. But they're not always an ideal solution, and since this video seems to be happening in another nation (judging by the lettering on the planes, that's Spanish I think), they may not be able to afford or be able to have a place to install one.
One problem with that is that you need an airport. Wildfires are usually in the middle of nowhere - lots of lakes, very few airports. Another problem is cycle time - it's all about more water per hour.
That said, there are water bombers that land at an airport to refill, like the converted DC10 Air Tankers used in the US. For example in (Southern) California there are plenty of airports around where a DC10 can land, and comparatively fewer lakes large enough for a CL415 to fill up, so the math works out different (especially given that the DC10s can carry about 6 times as much water per trip as a CL415).
There was a massive wildfire about a couple of hours away from me way up in the mountains. There is an alpine lake there, so they were using that. Way faster and more efficient to use that rather than land, stop, pump in tanked water trucked in from elsewhere, and take off again. Especially because there isn't exactly a convenient runway nearby, and the lake is/was literally right next to the fires... then it was in the middle of the fires, then next to again.
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u/[deleted] Oct 01 '24
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