POL troops fuel massive air campaign

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Scott Elliott
  • Air Force Print News
Equipped with not much more than grit and determination, deployed airmen have dispensed jet fuel at a pace up to nine times faster than their stateside counterparts.

According to Col. Duane A. Jones, chief of logistics for the Combined Forces Air Component Command, three bare-base airfields supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom have issued more than a million gallons of JP-8 per day, with one unit pumping 1.8 million gallons in a single day.

A typical large Air Force fighter base will issue about 200,000 gallons a day, Jones said during a telephone interview from his deployed location.

Since mid-February, American airmen have built and supported 12 new air bases in the area, including five in Iraq. Setting up petroleum, oil and lubricants, or POL, operations at those bare bases was not an easy feat, Jones said.

Fuel farms on bare bases consist of fuel bladders -- immense bags made of synthetic, rubber-like material -- that store the fuel until it is issued to aircraft. The bladders, which come in 10,000-, 50,000- and 210,000-gallon sizes, are placed atop liners and inside of large earthen berms.

“It takes a lot of pure sweat, blood and muscle to get that going,” Jones said.

The next challenge for POL airmen is finding fuel to fill the bags. Oftentimes, that fuel is purchased from the host nation through the Defense Energy Support Center, part of the Defense Logistics Agency. At times, however, bases are so remote they are forced to find creative ways to fill up.

“One of the more interesting ways of doing that involves flying fuel in,” Jones said. “Fuel is brought in bladders in the back of aircraft (such as C-130 Hercules or C-17 Globemaster IIIs). It’s not particularly efficient, but efficiency isn’t always what we go for -- it’s effectiveness.”

The operation has been very effective, he said.

“The biggest challenge is that the magnitude is just so huge,” he said. “One of the POL guys here called back to (his home station at) Nellis Air Force Base, Nev., and asked what they did on a typical day. A typical day at Nellis is pumping 200,000 gallons. A very busy day during a Red Flag exercise was 500,000 gallons -- all pumped through a very modern, very robust system.

“Compared to that, we had expeditionary fuels professionals pumping as much as 1.8 million gallons a day, which is more than three times (the amount) during Red Flag, and they’re doing it out of synthetic bags, hoses and connectors,” Jones said.

Rather than the modern, fixed-place hydrant system used at stateside Air Force bases, Jones said the expeditionary fuel farms look like “a big kid’s erector set.”

“We’re really proud of (the deployed POL airmen) because they’ve done some truly magnificent things with some old technology,” Jones said. “Most of the technology for these bags, pumps and hoses is mid-1960s.”