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Everyone is talking out of their ass including me. I live in a wildfire area, know lots of wildland firefighters, private crew owner, I've been hanging out at the cabin as black needles fall out of the sky, yada yada never played one on TV.
The scale just seems way off. I was seeing takes along the lines of "they had 3 million gallons on standby, with 4x demand blew through it in 15 hours. What more could you ask for?" Like what? The reservoirs around me have hundreds of billions of gallons of capacity. We can run a continual stream of planes none stop. We've got Dozens of tanker trucks that can be sent out to fight fires. Granted we're not southern California we've got a lot more water, but 3 million gallons is nothing.
I looked up and a a fire boat can move 50,000 gallons a minute. So an an hour worth for one fire boat.
Turns out the closest reservoir with a capacity of 117 million gallons has been empty for months because they've been working on the cover. So this thing is going to cost 50 billion dollars? I bet you can move and store a lot of water for 10% of that.
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