Air tanker crashes fighting Yosemite
National Park wildfire
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[October 08, 2014]
By Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - An air tanker
plane being used to fight a wildfire in Yosemite National Park crashed
in flames on Tuesday, killing the pilot, officials for the park and the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
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Emergency workers reached the crash site near the so-called Dog
Rock Fire on Tuesday evening and determined that the pilot, who has
not been identified, had been killed, Cal Fire said in a statement.
Witnesses saw the plane slam into the wall of a cliff above Highway
140 near the Arch Rock entrance to Yosemite on the western edge of
the park, "and yes, there was a lot of fire," park spokeswoman Kari
Cobb told Reuters by telephone.
She said crews were just reaching the site of the wreckage several
hours after the accident. There was no word on what caused the
crash.
Cal Fire spokeswoman Alyssa Smith said the pilot was the only person
on board at the time of the crash.
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Authorities began searching for the tanker, a two-engine Grumman
S-2T, after it lost radio contact with spotter planes that had been
flying with it, Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff said.
The Dog Rock Fire, which erupted at about 2:45 p.m. local time near
Arch Rock, prompted the evacuation of about 60 homes in the nearby
community of Foresta and the closure of the Highway 140 entrance
into the park, Cobb said.
State officials have said this year's California fire season, which
traditionally runs from May to October, was on track to be the most
destructive on record, intensified at least in part by record
drought.
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Cal Fire has responded to more than 5,150 wildfires already, and
typically the largest blazes occur in October. The Dog Rock fire
marks the third major fire to erupt in Yosemite this year, Cobb
said.
The accident came about two years after an air tanker plane crashed
on a forested mountainside in southwestern Utah in June 2012 while
on a mission to drop chemical fire retardant on an 8,000-acre
(3,238-hectare) blaze near the Nevada border.
Two crew members from Idaho were killed in that crash.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman, Dan Whitcomb and Curtis Skinner; Editing
by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)
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