Control Tower at Ramona on FAA list of ATC Towers to be closed

I posted a short article on  March 16 about the then possible closure of the Air Traffic Control Tower at Ramona Air Attack Base linking to a letter that Walt Darran of the Associated Aerial Firefighters wrote to the FAA urging them to keep the Tower at Ramona open for the safety of aerial firefighters and other aviation interests. Well, as I am sure that some of you already know by now, the FAA released a list of 149 Contract ATC Towers to be closed this past Friday.

The tower at Ramona is on the list of towers to be closed, according to a March 21st article from the Ramona Sentinel, the FAA will begin to close these towers starting April 7 over a four week period. The Ramona Sentinel article has a nice quote from San Diego County Supervisor Dianne Jacob giving voice to local concerns about the closure:

This is so critical. We will continue to make the FAA aware it is a wrong-headed decision. …. We want to prevent another mid-air collision, another disaster. Lives are at stake. (Supervisor Jacob, Ramona Sentinal, March 21, 2013).

Added on October 12, 2015. The March 21, 2013 article from the Ramona Sentinal is no longer available on line, I have removed direct links.

I don't know how many towers at Air Attack/Tanker Bases are on the FAA list of closures. I do know that Fox Field (CA) is on the closure list, as is Klamath Falls (OR) are on the list, and I am pretty certain that both are tanker bases. Bill Gabbert of Fire Aviation posted the list of California towers that are on the closure list, in an article he posted on March 22. One of his commenters remarked that both Ramona and Fox Field are Tanker Bases. NBC San Diego reported on the closure of the tower at Ramona and a tower at Brown Field in San Diego (not a tanker base) in a March 22 report.

Mike Archer of Fire Bombers Publications provided a link to a March 24 article from KPIC on the five ATC Towers in OR due to close, including the tower at Klamath Falls. 

I am not exactly in a position to state with any certainty whether or not other ATC towers at other air attack/tanker bases in the U.S. are on the FAA list of 149 Contract ATC Towers to be closed. If I should become aware of additional ATC towers at air attack/tank bases that are due to close, I'll report back here.

Update on March 26, 2013: Just today I revisited a March 22 article from the AOPA regarding the 149 Towers that the FAA is planning to close starting on April 7. In the course of reading the article from the AOPA I came across a link to an FAA list of 24 FAA Contract Towers that will remain open; it seems that the tower at Klamath Falls OR is included on this list of towers that will remain open.