Was just woken at 11:30 our mountain is burning and has gotten worse.
Biden has the National guard on stand by for the white house after the election. so they are not available for us.
Local people have been evacuated west of my house the fire is slowly coming east. Hoping for no wind. Our government sucks.
Thanks for sharing Steve continued well wishes for you guys! WTF is it with with no gov support?? 2 hurricanes and now this, from what I've read on here.
Be well!
Without turning this into a political shitshow, it's pretty apparent neither of you understand firefighting or firefighting resources, most people don't.
You can't just deploy any old National Guard units to a fire. The Guard trains certain units in fire suppression, and it's usually not very many. This takes weeks. So more than likely, not a single member of the National Guard that's doing security duty at the moment is qualified to fight fire. The same is true for National Guard air tankers. The firefighting units have to be fitted to the aircraft, and of course they have to be available to do that. And then the air crew requires substantial training to be able to properly use the aircraft that way.
Air tankers at the federal level are a very scarce resource. Most of the air tankers here in California are either directly CalFire or contracted by CalFire, at the state level. There are some federal tankers, but typically not very many. And because there hasn't been a ton of rain in SoCal most of them are located there at the moment, because they're having wind events there too. Being "denied" air tankers is more likely a lack of availability, and the word "denied" is not something used at the fire service level, so someone has politicized that for you.
I don't know specifically about PA, but many fire departments on the east coast are not particularly well equipped, or trained, for large wildland fires as they don't happen that often. Currently that fire is only listed at 200 acres if I'm looking at the right one, which really isn't a large fire at all. My department handles 200 acre fires regularly, and typically does so without any federal resources at all. Sometimes without state resources, depending on the day. Obviously that's not much of a comfort if your property is being threatened because that's more than big enough to destroy houses. But my point is that it's not really a fire that should require resources beyond the local level at all.