FREDERICKSBURG - With fires scorching thousands of acres all across Texas, the Texas Forest Service has called in pilots from across the country to help.
Dick Stiliha was called in from California to be the air attack supervisor out of the Fredericksburg Airport.
His job is to coordinate all the planes and helicopters at a fire scene.
"I'm kind of the eye in the sky, if you will,” he said.
Stiliha, who has been fighting fires either on the ground or in the air for the past fifty years, said these past few weeks in Texas have been “chaotic”.
"Everything is just burning,” he explained. “You go to one fire and you look around and there's four or five more."
Stiliha said the fire near Camp Bullis earlier this month was especially chaotic.
"I thought, 'Oh, Lord, we are going to burn a lot of structures with this fire," he said.
Every aircraft available that day, including four planes and a helicopter from the Texas Forest Service was sent to build a perimeter around the fire.
The planes dropped 800 gallons of retardant with each load, before racing back to the Fredericksburg Airport to fill-up and return.
"It's never routine," explained pilot Robert Hanneman, from Denver City, Texas. "Your adrenalin gets going when you start building a line, and then the fire hits it, changes direction, and starts shifting around the house.”
It took twenty drops, more than 16,000 gallons of retardant, before the fire near Camp Bullis was contained.
No homes were lost that the fire which Stiliha said would have been an impossible feat without air support.
However nearly as soon as that fire was out, another fire popped-up in the county and then another.
"It can be a borderline nightmare just to keep up with everything," said pilot Taylor Scott from Arkansas.
For most the pilots, this is their second job.
"I'm actually a corporate jet pilot,” explained Scott. “That's what I do for my day job."
The Texas Forest Service schedules these pilots in 12-day increments, but several of them said they’re making plans to remain in Texas until the end of the year.
“I don't see any end in sight,” said Stiliha. “It's just one of those years."
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