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Wino - why assume the negative? Don't you and others realize the FIre Department chopper is red and yellow? If I am ever lost or stranded I hope they dispatch a chopper and if you don't like the noise (royall) - too bad. Someone's life is worth more than a little inconvenience to you. Carol - your comment as to having man power on the ground be more effective - not really. A chopper can cover a lot more ground. Plus there is not enough available manpower to go door to door and street by street in HPP. When people criticize stuff like this it is often because they are only looking at a small part of the picture and not the overall larger picture that authorities have to consider.
I saw the chopper flying low and close to shore as I walked my dogs. I, for one, instantly knew that it was Air i (with the Fire Dept.). The Fire Department does not dispatch choppers willy nilly and always has probable cause.
It's mind boggling to me that people would complain about the chopper noise. It is supposed to fly low to look for people! Duh! Does no one remember when the young man (twin of a visiting college basketball player) and his girlfriend got swept out to sea at the end of Makuu? It took the chopper a couple days to find his body. They had a Coast Guard C130 too.
Good grief people. Yet if you were the one lost and/or stranded you would be hollering if a chopper WEREN"T dispatched. No pleasing some people!
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Spunky,
Maybe you should read what is actually written before criticizing.
My suggestion was that Hawaii county make use of all the people who are on the CD notification system to be on the outlook for a lost person, not that county manpower be used to go door to door. When I lived in a mountainous rural area where city hunters tended to get lost, shoot each other, or sometimes do both, when we heard helicopter overflights we assumed it was search and rescue, and would never think of complaining. We also got phone notification from the sheriff's office to keep an eye out for the lost hunters; once we actually found the guy who had been shot and wounded by his buddy, who then panicked and ran away, in our back pasture (which was well posted NO HUNTING because we had livestock). So my suggesting is not absurd, and is in fact used in many rural places as a way to augment manpower when doing search and rescue. On open territory a helicopter may be more efficient, but when there is thick albizia canopy they cannot see much on the ground, just try looking at HPP on Google earth sometime, you can't even see some of the houses through the canopy, much less a person on foot.
No one was complaining about the fact that a search and rescue was disturbing us, once I knew that's what it was I acknowledged that fact right away. For you to accuse people of knowingly complaining about search and rescue flights is dishonest, no one here did that once we knew what the real deal was.
If we were not so constantly bombarded with tour and green harvest helicopters here in HPP we would probably assume that low flying helicopters are search and rescue, but virtually all of the time we are having our peace and quiet destroyed it is either Green Harvest, or tour companies out to make a buck off tourists at the expense of residents of Puna. You do not have to be a dope grower to hate Green Harvest, all you have to be is a night worker trying to sleep, an ill person trying to recover, the parent who just got their baby to go to sleep, owner of a noise sensitive dog, or someone suffering from military action caused PTSD, to hate the overflights. That Orange Chopper came on the heels of several days of constant overflights that started up as soon as lava returned to Pu'u O'o, it was not plainly marked as being Hawaii County Fire Department, and there was no announcement on the radio that there was a search and rescue going on. Maybe you are a chopper expert, but not everyone is, and considering that the vast majority of the overflights are not search and rescue, but Green Harvest or tour companies, it is unreasonable to expect people being overflown to know on the rare occasion the overflight is actually serving a public good.
Carol
Carol
Every time you feel yourself getting pulled into other people's nonsense, repeat these words: Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Polish Proverb
Everyone on Punaweb appreciates the work of Search and Rescue, Police, Fire, Coast Guard.
The complaints are about tours and Green Harvest and their disruption of peace, that is all. There is no need to make something out of this topic that isn't there.
I didn't know about the red choppers. Now we know there is a new color in the array of "good" chopper activity. Thank you wino for bringing it to my attention!
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quote:
Originally posted by csgray...
My suggestion was that Hawaii county make use of all the people who are on the CD notification system to be on the outlook for a lost person...
A "grandma amber" alert? Actually a very good idea Carol!
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quote:
Originally posted by csgray
Spunky,
Maybe you should read what is actually written before criticizing.
Carol
Thank you Carlo. I've been here many years. Never seen a red fire chopper. Only yellow. What ever happened to the old Punaweb?
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I've been here for many years also. I've never seen a yellow fire helicopter. Only red. They've been flying a red one for over 10 years. Wino, I think the yellow ones you've been seeing were something else. I know "green harvest" does use a bright yellow Hughes chopper.
Also why would a civilian fire department helicopter have the words "MILITARY" written on it as a poster claimed?
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I did read the posts. Wino AND Royall both complained about the choppers before knowing their actual intent. Carol I am not trying to be dishonest - if you feel that way then it has more to do with you than with me.
My point is that people complain about stuff and pick their favorite scapegoat before finding out the facts. Because the Fire dept choppers have been pictured in the paper many times and are on display at several community events throughout the year (fire prevention week festivities in downtown Hilo in October) I would think a lot of people would recognize them as rescue choppers not green harvest.
Carol - I guess you have not signed up for the police department's NIxle alerts. It's free. CD notification is for disaster related issues. Nixle is for traffic accidents, lost persons, and police related issues. They send out notices when they are looking for missing people. I still say aerial tours are more effective in search and rescue ops. And yes, I have done aerial tours over HPP and know what the canopy looks like.
quote:
Originally posted by wino
quote:
Originally posted by csgray
Spunky,
Maybe you should read what is actually written before criticizing.
Carol
Thank you Carlo. I've been here many years. Never seen a red fire chopper. Only yellow. What ever happened to the old Punaweb?
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"[...] are not the kind to scream "Green Harvest" for no reason"
And yet here they are, doing exactly that.
The sound of chopper blades in HPP is quickly drowned out these days by the sound of people stampeding to their laptops to complain about Green Harvest. 5 minutes is the winning time this round.
Is this hysteria going to continue until someone shoots down a Fire Department helicopter?
I'm sure the Search and Rescue people know how to conduct a search and rescue. There aren't that many people walking around HPP in the afternoon, a chopper would have a much better chance of finding a missing Alzheimers patient than 50 well-meaning people checking their yards. In fact, mobilizing people would probably make it more difficult for the choppers.
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I wanted to point out that Wino although believing that this was a Green Harvest chopper was asking a question more than making an accusatory statement. Seems to me that this site is a very appropriate place to query such things. Maybe some of the folks accusing Wino of jumping to conclusions can pass us some useful links/contacts to determine the facts better as opposed to making further unwarranted accusations thereselves. Just saying.
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