{"id":54283,"date":"2013-04-16T22:18:30","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T04:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/state-wants-its-own-slurry-bombers-2\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T18:10:34","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T18:10:34","slug":"state-wants-its-own-slurry-bombers-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/state-wants-its-own-slurry-bombers-2\/","title":{"rendered":"State wants its own slurry bombers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Journal\/Sam Green<br><br><br><br>A slurry bomber dumps on Meneffee Mountain last year during the Weber fire.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The lack of planes could leave Colorado unprotected if there is another bad wildfire season, said Sen. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, sponsor of Senate Bill 245.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are one lightning strike \u2026 away from a catastrophic fire that could change Colorado forever,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n

King\u2019s fellow sponsor, Sen. Cheri Jahn, D-Wheat Ridge, said at first she thought the idea was crazy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he told me what he wanted to do, I said, \u2018You want to do what?'\u201d Jahn said.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for King and Jahn, they won\u2019t have to post an ad on Craigslist to find their airplanes. The state could get three 3,000-gallon tankers from a federal surplus property program for about $17.5 million \u2013 a bargain compared to the $80 million cost of a new air tanker, according to the Legislature\u2019s staff. Operating costs would be another $7.6 million a year.<\/p>\n

Their bill passed the Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday on a 5-0 vote, but that was the easy part.<\/p>\n

Now the bill has to go to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where seven senators hold the keys to the state vault. They will have to decide whether they want to shell out some $25 million just as the government is recovering from an epic economic crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my mind, it is such a clear and present danger to our state that this needs to be a priority,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n

As big and King and Jahn\u2019s dreams are, they were dwarfed by one of their allies, Tony Kern, the former head of the Forest Service\u2019s aviation program.<\/p>\n

The federal government has been studying its air tanker problem for a decade, but it isn\u2019t getting more planes in the air, Kern said. And the planes that are in service are old.<\/p>\n

Kern thinks federal failures create an opportunity for Colorado to position itself as an international hub for aerial firefighting technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can fly a smart bomb through Kim Jong-Il\u2019s window, but we\u2019re still throwing slurry down from 1950s technology into the wind over fires when our own citizens are at risk,\u201d he said.joeh@cortezjournal.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Journal\/Sam Green<br><br><br><br>A slurry bomber dumps on Meneffee Mountain last year during the Weber fire. The lack of planes could leave Colorado unprotected if there is another bad wildfire season, said Sen. Steve King, R-Grand Junction, sponsor of Senate Bill 245. \u201cWe are one lightning strike \u2026 away from a catastrophic fire that could change Colorado […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[350,918,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-54283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-fire","tag-forests","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54936,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54283\/revisions\/54936"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54283"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=54283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}