The fire threatening the Upper McKenzie is the Separation Fire which is one of four that the Type 1 overhead team is managing.  The total resources assigned to these fires are 4 hand crews and 13 engines (all fires are in the wilderness or started in wilderness).  https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/5523/   Supertanker, not likely.  They don't have any aircraft assigned to the fire.  Standing on a paved road (242) and clearing a little brush, hoping it will stop a potentially wind-driven fire is an interesting strategy.  The real question is not the supertanker, but should the FS have taken more aggressive action on some of the wilderness fires when they were small enough to take aggressive action action on?  At some point you need to realize that the strategy of letting a wilderness fire burn in hopes it stays in the wilderness may not be a good strategy when you have 10+ of these fires in a region and it is only early August.