Acrylic flames and LED lights snake along the artificial forest fire while action figures of Powell High School teacher Sean Munger and school board trustee Dustin Paul figure out how to fight the blaze.

Powell High School art students who are known for their yearly, large-scale art displays captained by art teacher Jim Gilman are constructing a slurry bomber and wildfire display. 

“I started this semester and I knew that the plane did get dropped at one point,” art student Logan Jensen said. “So just dealing with damage is kind of a pain, but I mean, we’re pulling it together.”

The slurry bomber project is a child of necessity due to space being rapidly filled yearly by large scale art projects. 

“When we were working on the room that we have, we have a bunch of taxidermy that’s been in there that students have done in the last decade or so and so we have to somehow make that room into our new display area,” Gilman said.

A slurry bomber is a plane used to fight fires by dropping fire retardant mixtures onto the blaze. This project was suggested because of Powell’s proximity to Hawkins and Powers Aviation, one of the pioneers of aerial firefighting. A video from Our Wyoming noted Hawkins and Powers is no longer in the aerial firefighting business but there is still a museum in Greybull where patrons can see examples of the aircrafts used. 

Gilman and his students are also weighing  other nods to both Wyoming and firefighting history. This includes building a replica fugu bomb, which were secretly deployed by the Japanese during World War II to start wildfires. In order to avoid panic their existence was kept quiet by the U.S. government. One of these unconventional incendiary devices even landed outside of Thermopolis. 

Other details include a small model of hotshots climbing a scorched hill with one foot in the black — a technique to help firefighters avoid burning up. Gilman is also considering referencing the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a famous group of Arizona firefighters who died on duty. 

“We’ve talked about referencing the Blackwater Fire up the North Fork. So we’ll probably incorporate something there,” Gilman said. “We haven’t quite gotten there yet, but that’s on the list of things that still need to go into this place.”

Adding details will become a recurring task in the years to come as Gilman and his ambitious art classes run out of space. Next year, Gilman is eyeing the Viking themed breakout where a longship and dragon skeleton have hung dormant for many years.

“We’ll figure something out, we have some other areas we’re probably going to go back and rework on so the area with the dragon and the Viking ship is what’s next. We’ll rework that a little bit, we’ll add to it. I want to go back and rework on the dragon a little bit, add a little more detail to it. We’ll add a castle in there and some other fun stuff.”