A CANADIAN AERIAL FIRE TANKER CRASHED last night (Saturday)
in British Columbia killing both crewmen on board.
This AP file photo shows a Conair water bomber
that is similar to the one that crashed Saturday night.
CBC News is reporting:
The company that owns a water bomber that crashed while battling wildfires in B.C.’s Fraser Canyon confirmed Sunday that the pilot and co-pilot of the plane are dead. Crews can see the crash site, south of Lytton, but conditions are still too dangerous to reach the wreckage. They got within 500 metres of the scene Saturday night, Conair said. There are reports the crash of the Convair 580, based in Abbotsford, sparked a new wildfire.
The water bomber went down just before 9 p.m. local time Saturday, about 15 kilometres south of Lytton, said Capt. Marguerite Dodds-Lepinski, the public affairs officer for the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria.
About 1,000 firefighters are on the front lines across B.C., supported by air tankers, helicopters and heavy machinery, to battle more than 300 forest fires in the province.
In a press statement released early Sunday morning, RCMP spokesman Cpl. Dan Moskaluk said that two crew members were on the Conair-owned aircraft contracted out to the B.C. Ministry of Forest and Lands as it dropped water on a new fire near Siwash Rd. in the Lytton area.
Witnesses reported seeing the plane fall from the sky. A second Conair aircraft that was shadowing the air tanker pinpointed the location of the crash site for crews on the ground.
“The Lytton RCMP and first response rescue crews were able to locate the crash location,” Moskaluk said, “However crews were not able to get to the crash site due to steep terrain and fire condition. We can confirm that the crash site had erupted into flames and was fully engulfed sparking a wildfire itself.”
Paramedics and officers with the Lytton RCMP detachment were able to get within 500 metres of the crash site on Saturday, but the fire forced them to turn back, according to Moskaluk. Firefighters, police, search-and-rescue crews and aircraft will fight the new fire and attempt to reach the crash site Sunday morning, he said.
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