Third C-130 tanker plane arrives to fight wildfires in western U.S.

July 7 (UPI) -- A third C-130 tanker plane arrived at McClellan Air Base, Calif., to aid in wildfire fighting efforts, the U.S. Air Force announced.

The help was requested by the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Agriculture Department, and the plane was dispatched from Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., the First Air Force Command said on Tuesday in a statement.

The plane made three drops of fire retardant on Tuesday, the statement added.

Multiple wildfires have collectively burned more than 33,000 acres of land in Northern California, state fire officials said last week, prompting evacuations in some mountainside communities.

Officials ordered evacuations in locations near and throughout the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, which comprises parts of Trinity, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama, Modoc and Humboldt counties.

The intergovernmental National Wildfire Coordinating Group noted over 30 separate wildfires burning across the United States on Wednesday.

The C-130s use the USDA Forest Service's Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System, or MAFFS, which drop fire retardant in wildfire suppression efforts.

MAFFS are portable fire retardant delivery systems that can be inserted into military C-130 aircraft without major structural modifications, a USDA statement said.

It is essentially a USDA-owned storage tank which "can drop up to 3,000 gallons of fire retardant through the rear aircraft nozzle in less than 10 seconds across a quarter-mile line," the First Air Force statement said.

The two C-130s previously sent to the California fire area are from National Guard units of western states.