Joseph Bolles Ely

Joseph Bolles Ely
Born	Joseph Bolles Ely (1911-05-22)May 22, 1911 Chicago, IL.
Died	March 20, 2006(2006-03-20) (aged 94) Chico, CA.
Occupation	{Forest Service Officer
Spouse	Katherine Tisdale
Children	4,

Joseph Bolles Ely (1911-2006) was the Fire Control Officer for the Mendocino National Forest who created the Mendocino Air Tanker Squad, the first such unit in the United States.

Early life and education

Joseph B. Ely, the son of a banker, was born on May 22, 1911, in Chicago. It was childhood summer trips to an aunt's house in Montana that established his interest in forests. After earning an undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College, he obtained his master's degree in botany at the Yale School of Forestry.

Career

Upon joining the Forest Service in 1935, Ely spent three years as a tree nursery in Iowa and then moved to the same position at the Lassen National Forest Headquarters in Susanville, CA. While still at the Lassen NF he became a District Ranger and then moved to the Tahoe National Forest in 1943. Ely was exempt from military service during the war as forest rangers were critical to protecting the forests in case of Japanese incendiary balloon attacks.

During his 14 years with the Forest Service, Ely led a number of firefighting efforts so, in 1948 he was promoted to the Fire Control Officer in the Mendocino National Forest. Situated in the North Coast Mountain Range, the Mendocino NF was one of the most active for fires. The national forest of over 900,000 acres more than 6000 feet of change in elevation, is made up of mixed evergreen forest, oak woodlands and heavy chapparal woodland ecosystems. California chaparral is the densest brush in the world, consisting of trees and plants with waxy leaves and a high oil content enabling it to survive dry summers. Facing that challenge, Joe Ely moved his family of five to Willows.

On July 9, 1953, 24 men were in a canyon 28 miles northwest of Willows, in the Alder Springs area of the Mendocino National Forest, fighting the Rattlesnake Fire. At 10:00 PM they went down the canyon to put out a spot fire. Thinking it was out, they sat down to eat and to give thanks. The wind suddenly reappeared, coming from the opposite direction, causing a rapid flare up in the thick chaparral brush. Nine of the men used a rope to ascend the steep canyon, while the others ran down the slope. The flames raced down the canyon at 15 MPH overtaking, and killing, the trapped men. Many of the bodies were found next to shallow trenches the men tried to dig in the rocky ground. One of the dead was Robert Powers, a Forest Service Ranger. The other fourteen men, most in their 20s, were missionaries from a nearby training camp of the evangelical New Tribes Mission.

Although Ely was in Southern California during the Rattlesnake Fire, his son, Frank, said that his father was highly motivated by the loss of life in the Rattlesnake Fire to find better methods to fight fires. According to Frank, “Once my father started a project, he was totally focused on finding a solution.”

Dropping water from airplanes was thought of in the 1920s but no methods were tried. After World War 2, the Forest Service and the military tried dropping barrels of water from a bomber. The barrels broke upon impact, but it was decided that a falling barrel endangered people on the ground. Another method was a rubber water-filled bladder loaded in a Grumman TBM Avenger. None of the methods worked.

In 1954 the Forest Service and other agencies established Operation Firestop, a program in which any workable idea would be adopted to help fight fires. At a Zone Fire Meeting in Redding, in the spring of 1955, Neal Rahm, the Supervisor of the Modoc National Forest suggested the use of local pilots to try water drops. Thinking of the agriculture pilots in Willows, Ely received permission from his boss to follow up on his idea.

According to Ely's own handwritten notes, “I took the air tanker proposition first to Lee Sherwood, the Airport Manager, and perhaps some others, but they were looking out the window. Anyhow Floyd Nolta, of the Willows Flying Service caught fire real fast. All I had to do was remark that he sure had a lot of experience dropping materials out of airplanes onto farms and did he think he could do the same thing on a forest fire? He said to come back in a week.”

A week later Al Edwards, the Mendocino NF warehouseman, went to Nolta's airstrip. Nolta had cut a hole in the bottom of his Boeing-Stearman 75 Caydet biplane, added a gate with hinges and a snap, and a pull rope and filled it with water. Vance Nolta flew the plane while Edwards and Floyd lit the dry grass along the airstrip on fire. Ely wrote, “…Vance came over low and pulled the rope and put out the fire. The air tanker was born.”

On August 13, 1955, Vance Nolta among the first pilots to make a free-fall water drop on a fire when he assisted a crew on the west side of the Mendocino NF. After making several drops on that fire, he was directed to another fire in the same forest.

The next year Ely assembled the Mendocino Air Tanker Squad, the first aerial tanker unit in the U.S. It was made up of local ag pilots and was based at the Willows-Glenn County Airport but some of the pilots operated from other nearby airstrips. The squad consisted of: Floyd, Vance and Dale Nolta who operated Planes #1 and #2 from their airstrip just north of Willows; Ray Varney in Plane #3 in Artois; Frank Prentice in Plane #4, owned by Lee Sherwood at the Willows Airport; Harold Hendrickson in Plane #5, also based at the Willows Airport; L. H. McCurley in Plane #6 from Corning; and Warren Bullock in Plane #7 from Red Bluff. In addition to the Nolta's Stearman, the others flew N3N Navy bi-plane trainers. Lee Sherwood flew a Tri-Pacer monoplane with a Forest Service observer.

Death

Joseph Ely died in Chico, CA on March 3, 2006.