Can you please introduce yourself in what you do?

Yeah, my name is Francis Gill.

I'm the fire chief for the Copco Lake Volunteer Fire Department,

which is the next lake up above Iron Gate here.

It's one of the dams that's slated to be removed.

So what's the fire situation like here in the county?

This time of year it's always extremely dangerous. Luckily the weather and

time has allowed the firefighters to wrap up most of the large fires in the county,

but we had two really devastating ones again this year.

The McKinney Fire, which was Down River, which destroyed a lot of homes and businesses and the Klamath River area and

further down river into the Scott River area. And then we also just had the mill fire

and weed that destroyed several neighborhoods in the weed area and Lake Shastina area lost several homes and thousands of people were evacuated again this year.

So when the fire like that breaks out, how do you fight it?

Like where do you get the water to fight the fire?

Well, in this area in particular in Siski County,

the terrain is typically so steep everywhere that most fires are fought from the air with helicopters and large fixed-wing tankers.

The helicopters get all their water from lakes and rivers in the area and whenever there's a fire in this area,

Iron Gate Lake and Cockco Lake are definitely two of the most utilized lakes, even to fight fire in Oregon sometimes over the border.

And then the large fixed wing tankers usually have air bases at airports nearby or sometimes you know they fly in from

further distances. So maybe for somebody who's never seen this kind of thing play

out is it the case that the helicopter has a robe attached to it with a giant bucket essentially and they come out to the lake and fill it up. Is that how it works?

So that is one type of helicopter, firefighting helicopter. They have a large bucket underneath that just dips in the water and it fills up and they can usually hold between 600 and 2,000 gallons and those types of bags.

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