Word: tankers
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Last month, Taliban fighters in Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan, hijacked two NATO fuel tankers. The robbery escalated into an international incident because NATO aircraft, following a German request, bombed the two stranded tankers while civilians were siphoning free fuel. The death toll - more than 125 Afghans perished, nearly half of them civilians - overshadowed the gruesome fact that the Taliban had beheaded one of the tanker drivers. Beheadings and killings of NATO supply drivers are a common occurrence, according to several private security contractors. (See pictures of the U.S. military's cat-and-mouse game with the Taliban...
Mission Creep Nowhere is the task less clear to the average voter than in Germany. Successive German leaders have sold the country's troop deployment as nation-building, not combat. But as the oil-tanker episode proved, mission creep is hard to avoid when the enemy starts attacking you. German involvement in Afghanistan was snuck "past people," Jurgen Trittin, the foreign policy spokesman for the Greens, recently argued. Now, with the Taliban moving into the once peaceful north, where most of Germany's troops are stationed, Germans have to face the fact that their military - a force that...
Slurry is dyed bright red to aid in visibility and help tanker pilots drop a seamless line of retardant. "Basically, they're trying to box in the fire," says Janet Upton of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), which is helping to battle the giant Station fire near Los Angeles. Another advantage of slurry is that unlike water, fertilizer doesn't evaporate. (It offers still another bonus for farmers, who have requested that unused slurry be dropped onto their fields as aircraft make their way home.) (Read a 1977 essay: "What Ever Happened to California...
...Forest Service spent nearly $300 million battling blazes from the sky in 2007. According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, it cost $368,645 to operate a single heavy-lift helicopter for one week during a recent fire (though choppers have a smaller capacity than large tanker planes, they're more maneuverable and can also ferry personnel and equipment). The cost of the retardant itself adds up as well; the Phos-Chek slurry used by Cal Fire costs about $2 per gallon, Upton says. Tankers can dump 1,200 gallons during each pass...
Aerial firefighting is also risky, as it often requires flying at low altitude through poor visibility. Nine people died in a helicopter crash during the Buckhorn fire in northern California last year, and last month a pilot died in the crash of a single-engine tanker near Reno, Nevada. (The Station fire has so far claimed the lives of two ground-based firefighters after their fire truck fell down a hillside.) Yet, as we're again reminded this year, tanker flights are favorite action shot of television news shows - California fire officials have dubbed them "CNN drops" - and that makes...