Two firefighters and a pilot have reportedly been killed after a mid-air collision involving two helicopters tackling a fire in California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emergency officials said the aircrafts were fighting a blaze in Riverside County, in the south of the US state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cal Fire Southern Region Chief David Fulcher said fire crews had been attending a building fire in the community of Cabazon which had extended into the vegetation around it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A full wildland fire dispatch was initiated, which included fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, and this is when the collision happened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sheriff’s deputies responded to the air emergency in the area of Pipeline Road and Apache trail at 7.20pm, according to a post by the Riverside County Sheriff’s office on X, formerly known as Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Unfortunately, the second helicopter crashed and tragically all three members perished which included one Cal Fire Division chief, one Cal Fire captain and one contract client pilot,” Chief Fulcher said during a news conference early on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other helicopter landed safely and no one on board was hurt but the crash caused an additional 4-acre (1.6-hectare) fire, which was extinguished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The helicopter which crashed was performing work under contract with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, fire captain and spokesman Richard Cordova said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two firefighters and a pilot have reportedly been killed after a mid-air collision involving two helicopters tackling a fire in California. Emergency officials said the aircrafts were fighting a blaze in Riverside County, in the south of the US state. Cal Fire Southern Region Chief David Fulcher said fire crews had been attending a building […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220],"tags":[1340,2884,2883,193,2882,1276],"class_list":["post-7147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-california","tag-collision","tag-mid-air","tag-news","tag-two-firefighters","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7149,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7147\/revisions\/7149"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miaminewsnetwork.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}