Facing growing maintenance costs, SC Forestry Commission looks to replace 2 planes
COLUMBIA — After fighting three large fires earlier this year, the state's Forestry Commission is in the market to buy two airplanes that could help with future efforts.
With final approval Tuesday from the state's fiscal oversight board, the commission can use $1.4 million from its reserves to replace two of its 10 planes with newer, more dependable models, according to documents submitted to the State Fiscal Accountability Authority.
Those two planes, which are part of a decades-old fleet, have caused maintenance costs to climb and are more often out of commission, leading to the potential for gaps in firefighting during a year in which the commission has faced massive wildfires, Forester Scott Phillips wrote in a letter to the panel.
Altogether, between Jan. 1 and the end of May, more than 31,000 acres burned in the state, commission spokesman Doug Wood told the SC Daily Gazette. For comparison, an average of 8,000 acres burned during the five years prior, he said. None of the fires led to injuries or deaths, and no structures were damaged, Forestry Commission officials have said.
The commission's fleet of planes help spot and fight fires, as well as assess damage from storms, insects and diseases that affect trees, Phillips wrote in a letter seeking permission to spend an additional $1 million. That's on top of the $425,000 that legislators provided the agency in the 2022-23 state budget to buy two planes, which has gone unspent. Aircraft prices skyrocketed soon after, leaving the commission unable to find suitable planes for that price tag, he wrote.
SC replacing state planes amid growing maintenance costs
Typically, the commission leases its planes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through a program that loans federal hand-me-down planes, often originally used by the Department of Defense, to state foresters. Nearly the entire 10-plane fleet was manufactured in the 1960s, and two have mounting maintenance needs that make them more expensive and less effective, Wood said.
Because of the ages of the commission's existing planes, they are 'more costly to maintain and have more downtime, which results in canceled missions due to aircraft availability,' Phillips wrote.
The commission plans to buy two used four-seater Cessna 182T planes, produced between 2001 and 2013, which often sell for somewhere between $450,000 and $600,000. If none are available within the price range, the commission will pivot to buy the best plane that comes up on the market that the agency can afford, Phillips wrote.
The expense of flying in aircraft from other states to fight three major fires this spring led to another funding request. The commission needed approval to use $1.5 million meant for salaries this fiscal year — but unspent due to vacancies at the agency — to instead cover its 'unprecedented' wildfire fighting costs, according to committee documents.
The five-member oversight board approved the request Tuesday without discussion.
The Table Rock and Persimmon Ridge fires in the Upstate, coupled with the Covington Drive fire in Horry County's Carolina Forest, burned more than 18,000 acres at the end of March and into early April. Fighting those fires had cost the commission about $11.3 million by mid-April, when the commission made its request, Phillips wrote.
That number has likely grown, since the fires continued to burn long after they were contained. The total cost of fighting more than 1,500 fires that have burned across the state since the beginning of the year has not yet been calculated, since most of that comes from the agency's usual $55 million budget, Wood said.
Firefighting partners from Florida took over command of the Horry County fire in March to give the South Carolina firefighters time to rest. Outside contractors also helped contain, suppress and monitor all three major fires, Wood said.
Because of the large number of acres burned, especially during those three fires, those extra resources 'provided valuable assistance,' according to committee documents.
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