February 25, 2020 Operation Haylift

The Liberty Gazette

February 25, 2020

Ely Air Lines
By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

The small town of Ely, Nevada has a newspaper called The Ely Times. Occasionally, we read it, just for fun. Last week, writer Dennis Cassinelli retold a story. significant to his audience, of a situation that occurred over seven decades ago: a snowstorm of unrelenting and historical proportions. A snowstorm to end all snowstorms—except that obviously it didn’t. But it is still on record as one of the worst they’ve had.

Here, we deal with floods and droughts, gale–force winds, and extreme heat and humidity. The little bit of snow we get the winters after hurricanes doesn’t qualify as blizzard experience. Not to someone from Ely, Nevada. But it brings thoughts of the time of Harvey, when citizens pulled together to save Liberty from becoming part of an enlarged Trinity River Bottom. This story from back in January and February of 1949 is kind of like that.

Livestock were stranded, scattered throughout remote areas of Ely and Elko. And they were getting hungry. Ranchers and government officials made a plan. The U.S. Air Force had C-82 “Packet” cargo planes they could fly from their base in Tacoma, Washington, down to Sacramento to pick up hay bales and deliver hay by air.

The first day’s work succeeded, with several C-82s making multiple trips, dropping a total of 75 tons of hay to hungry cattle and sheep.

Local ranchers familiar with the area rode along to help find stranded animals. In the back of the airplanes, harnessed crew members stood near the open bay door and tossed out bales. And boy did those cows and bulls and sheep devour the food before the airplanes came back around for a second swoop.

Just as the Liberty Municipal Airport has been a critical part of saving lives and property during Harvey and other natural disasters, the Ely Airport became the base of rescue operations locally. It was their own local airport where ranchers climbed in with Air Force crew members and directed them to cold and starving animals. It was their own local airport where the airplanes fueled up to make dozens of flights over rough terrain in sub-zero temperatures, when there was no other way to feed livestock.

And in an emergency, who pays for these things to happen? During that arctic freeze, the Ely National Bank funded the operation without even asking if ranchers could pay them back for it. One of the bank executives, Gordon Lathrop, is quoted as having said, “The ranchers will pay us back when they can, if not this year, perhaps next year. I know them all.”

In the end, pilots of “Operation Haylift” flew 28 aircraft 270,000 miles, dropping 2,000 tons of hay to over 300,000 head of livestock in Ely and surrounding areas.

And that’s the goodness you find in small towns. Like James Poitevent at the dam, looking like Mel Gibson in the middle of the firefight in “We Were Soldiers,” raising up a mighty army to face down Harvey’s attack.

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