Joseph Bolles Ely

Upon joining the Forest Service in 1935, Ely spent three years at a tree nursery in Keosauqua, Iowa. Ely directed men from the Civilian Conservation Corps is growing trees for the plan by the federal government to buy and reforest submarginal land in southern Iowa to create the Hawkeye National Forest.[1] That plan never came to fruition. Ely transferred to the tree nursery at the Lassen National Forest Headquarters in Susanville, California in 1938.[2] In 1943 he became a District Ranger in the Foresthill District of the Tahoe National Forest. Ely was exempt from military service during the World War II as forest rangers were critical to protecting the forests in case of Japanese incendiary balloon attacks.

During his 14 years with the Forest Service, Ely led a number of firefighting efforts so, in 1948, he was promoted to the Fire Control Officer in the Mendocino National Forest. Situated in the North Coast Mountain Range, the Mendocino NF was one of the most active for fires. The national forest of over 900,000 acres (360,000 ha) more than 6,000 feet (1,800 m) of change in elevation, is made up of mixed evergreen forest, oak woodlands and heavy chaparral woodland ecosystems. California chaparral is the densest brush in the world, consisting of trees and plants with waxy leaves and a high oil content enabling it to survive dry summers. Facing that challenge, Joe Ely moved his family of five to Willows, California.

On July 9, 1953, 24 men were in a canyon 28 miles (45 km) northwest of Willows, in the Alder Springs area of the Mendocino National Forest, fighting the Rattlesnake Fire. At 10:00 PM they went down the canyon to put out a spot fire. Thinking it was out, they sat down to eat and to give thanks. The wind suddenly reappeared, coming from the opposite direction, causing a rapid flare-up in the thick chaparral brush. Nine of the men used a rope to ascend the steep canyon, while the others ran down the slope. The flames raced down the canyon at 15 miles per hour (24 km/h) overtaking, and killing, the trapped men. Many of the bodies were found next to shallow trenches the men tried to dig in the rocky ground. One of the dead was Robert Powers, a Forest Service Ranger. The other fourteen men, most in their 20s, were missionaries from a nearby training camp of the evangelical New Tribes Mission.[3]

Although Ely was in Southern California during the Rattlesnake Fire, his son, Frank, said that his father was highly motivated by the loss of life in the Rattlesnake Fire to find better methods to fight fires. According to Frank, “Once my father started a project, he was totally focused on finding a solution.”

Dropping water from airplanes was thought of in the 1920s but no methods were tried. After World War II, the Forest Service and the military tried dropping barrels of water from a bomber. The barrels broke upon impact, but it was decided that a falling barrel endangered people on the ground. Another method was a rubber water-filled bladder loaded in a Grumman TBM Avenger. None of the methods worked.

In 1954, the Forest Service and other agencies established Operation Firestop, a program in which any workable idea would be adopted to help fight fires. At a Zone Fire Meeting in Redding, California in the spring of 1955, Neal Rahm, the Supervisor of the Modoc National Forest suggested the use of local pilots to try water drops. Thinking of the agriculture pilots in Willows, Ely received permission from his boss to follow up on his idea.

According to Ely's own handwritten notes, “I took the air tanker proposition first to Lee Sherwood, the Airport Manager, and perhaps some others, but they were looking out the window. Anyhow Floyd Nolta, of the Willows Flying Service caught fire real fast. All I had to do was remark that he sure had a lot of experience dropping materials out of airplanes onto farms and did he think he could do the same thing on a forest fire? He said to come back in a week.”

A week later Al Edwards, the Mendocino NF warehouseman, went to Nolta's airstrip. Nolta had cut a hole in the bottom of his Boeing-Stearman Model 75 Caydet biplane, added a gate with hinges and a snap, and a pull rope and filled it with water. Vance Nolta flew the plane while Edwards and Floyd lit the dry grass along the airstrip on fire. Ely wrote, “…Vance came over low and pulled the rope and put out the fire. The air tanker was born.”

On August 13, 1955, Vance Nolta among the first pilots to make a free-fall water drop on a fire when he assisted a crew on the west side of the Mendocino NF. After making several drops on that fire, he was directed to another fire in the same forest.

The next year, Ely assembled the Mendocino Air Tanker Squad, the first aerial tanker unit in the U.S. It was made up of local ag pilots and was based at the Willows-Glenn County Airport but some of the pilots operated from other nearby airstrips. The squad consisted of: Floyd, Vance and Dale Nolta who operated Planes #1 and #2 from their airstrip just north of Willows; Ray Varney in Plane #3 in Artois; Frank Prentice in Plane #4, owned by Lee Sherwood at the Willows Airport; Harold Hendrickson in Plane #5, also based at the Willows Airport; L. H. McCurley in Plane #6 from Corning; and Warren Bullock in Plane #7 from Red Bluff. In addition to the Nolta's Stearman, the others flew N3N Navy biplane trainers. Lee Sherwood flew a Tri-Pacer monoplane with a Forest Service observer.[4]