Riverside County contracts with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection ( CDF ) for fire protection. The Riverside Ranger Unit of the CDF is responsible for just over 1 million acres of wildland in Riverside County, in addition to 3.5 million acres of county and city land in the county.
To assist in the suppression of brush fires in Riverside and it's surrounding counties, the CDF operates an air tanker base at the Hemet Ryan Airport.
* until 1997 it was a joint base of USFS and CDF, the USFS has since moved to the San Bernardino Airport ( formerly Norton AFB )
Ryan Air Attack Base deploys two CDF air tankers, two air coordination aircraft and one CDF helicopter, Helitac 301. The CDF uses phoschek as a fire retardant in the air tankers, this is the red substance typically associated with air tanker drops.
The facilities located at the base include an 80,000 gallon storage tank for phoschek as well as dry storage for enough phoschek concentrate to make 140,000 gallons of mixed retardant.
The sequence of pictures animated on the top of this page were photographed on July 21, 1995 in Reche Canyon, Riverside County, CA, during the San Timeteo incident, a 2,500 acre brush fire.
This photo was taken from State highway 60 near Gilman Springs road and shows Helitac 301 just going over a ridge for a water drop. Another photo of this fire can be seen on my [ big fires ] page.
Hemet-Ryan Air Attack Base
36850 Stetson Ave.
Hemet, CA. 92543