A thunderstorm swept through our area early Sunday morning and one of the lightning strikes started a small fire on a steep and rugged mountainside.
The fire is only 20-some acres in size but practically inaccessible except by air and is being fought by a couple of helicopters which are scooping up buckets of water from the near-by river and dumping them on the fire perimeter and hot spots to contain it. The planes being used are fairly small and they are using different size and style of buckets, each sized (by volume of water) to the size and power of the helicopter.
(After closer inspection of the previous photo I cropped it to better show an osprey who seemed to be supervising the bucket filling activity, possibly to assure that no fish got scooped up into the buckets.)
The pilots are highly skilled at operating in adverse conditions and close proximity to trees, power lines and bridges, as can be seen in the following photos of the bucket-filling operation.
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