Fire (7 page)

The new approach showed results, but the West was still vulnerable to large-scale conflagration. The next big round of tactical changes came, not surprisingly, after the next big catastrophe, the Tillamook burn in 1933 that laid waste to half a billion board feet of Douglas fir in Oregon. Like the Big Blowup, Tillamook was merely the flagship of an armada of fires—Matilija, Selway, and others—that pummeled the West for three years. They prompted the Forest Service to adopt its famous 10:00
A.M
. control policy, which meant that all fires were to be brought under control, if possible, by 10:00 the next morning. The policy would have been complete hubris were it not for a growing arsenal of fire-fighting tools: bulldozers that did the work of fifty men; airplanes that dropped thousands of gallons of retardant at a time; smoke jumpers who hit remote fires that would have taken men days to reach by foot. The idea was to get into the mountains fast and control the fires while they were still small; if a fire got away from the initial attack crews, thousands of lesser-trained men could be brought in to take over. As a tactic it made sense; as a public relations ploy it was unparalleled. Funding from Washington became effectively unlimited and remains so to this day.

As weather forecasting and communications improved, the loss of life declined, but mass tragedies still occurred. In 1937 a Civilian Conservation Corps crew of fourteen on the Blackwater fire were trapped between a spot fire and the main fire; they decided to turn and fight the spot rather than run, and they all died. In 1943 eleven marines died and seventy-two were injured when Santa Ana winds changed abruptly on the Hauser Creek fire in Southern California. In 1949 thirteen smoke jumpers and another man died in knee-high grass during a blowup on the Mann Gulch fire in Montana. In 1956 eleven convicts died on the Inaja fire in Southern California, and ten years later a hotshot crew lost twelve men in nearly identical circumstances on the Loop fire in the Angeles National Forest. A spot fire started at the bottom of a canyon, blew up unexpectedly, and ran twenty-two hundred feet of the canyon in less than a minute. That's twenty-five miles an hour. The crew didn't have a chance.

By the 1970s fire crews had portable fire shelters and Nomex clothing and could theoretically survive some burnovers. Fire shelters start to disintegrate at around six hundred degrees, though, and a fire run in heavy timber can hit temperatures three times that high. The only thing that will save a crew in the face of such an inferno is to get out of the way before it hits, and to that end researchers at the Intermountain Fire Science Laboratory in Missoula, Montana, have developed mathematical models that predict—given certain fuel conditions, terrain type, and meteorological conditions—what a fire will do. These models have been programmed into computers and can be used in conjunction with satellite data to project fire growth on any fire anywhere in the United States. The incident command team on a fire can punch its location into a computer, along with topographical and meteorological information, and receive very specific information about likely fire behavior the following day: which canyons will burn out; which ridgelines will hold.

Still, no amount of computing power can predict exactly what a fire will do.

“Nothing we're doing today is more important than a human life,” one incident commander said at a 6:00
A.M
. briefing.

That sentence—more than fire behavior models, lightweight fire shelters, or advanced meteorology—explains why people no longer die in the terrible numbers they used to on wildfires in the United States.

 

I
n the middle of the afternoon we moved down off the ridgetops toward H-6. Helicopters were to lift us and the three crews down to the fire camp for the night. I was in no hurry to leave the mountains, but the Union, Negrito, and Smokey Bear crews were being replaced by type two outfits that hadn't spent the last two nights spiked out. We clustered around the helispot and then piled onto the helicopters with our line packs and were shuttled back to camp.

That night I heard that a fire had just leaped the huge Salmon River Canyon up by McCall; a fire had started north of the river and a backburn had been set by dropping flaming Ping-Pong balls from a helicopter. (The Ping-Pong balls are filled with potassium permanganate and ignited by antifreeze. A needle injects the antifreeze at the moment of release and they ignite after thirty seconds, usually after they hit the ground. The helicopter pilot had circled to check his work, and one of the balls had accidentally released over the south side of the river. That was all it took. Within hours the new fire was fifty acres in size and crowning through heavy timber.

I drove up to McCall the next morning to see if I could get on the fire, but by then it was so far out of control that no one was allowed near it. Crews were cutting indirect line miles ahead of the fire and cold-trailing their way southward from the river, but that was it. The town of Riggins was filled with smoke; there was a mushroom cloud of smoke pumping out of the canyon; the airfield at McCall was crammed with reserve helicopters. But I wanted to see real flame. I slept on a sandbar along the North Folk of the Salmon River and drove back to Boise the next day. There was another fire north of town, I was told. It was racing through the dead-brown hills, and hotshots were getting pulled off Foothills to deal with it. It was bad, and it was moving fast.

There's a little river that runs through Boise, and from the cafés that line the river walk, I could look up and watch the mountains burn. A big head of smoke was pumping out of the hills to the north, and retardant-streaked air tankers were making nonstop runs to and from the tanker base at the Boise airport, south of town. According to dispatch, bulldozers were trying to save a subdivision off Highway 21, wind-driven flames were racing through the terrifically dry sagebrush and cheatgrass around Lucky Peak Reservoir, and fifty crews left over from the Foothills fire were waiting to go in. I picked up a pass for the roadblock and headed north up Highway 21, toward the smoke.

Manpower was so short that the roadblock was guarded by a middle-aged couple in lawn chairs. I showed them my letter, and they waved me through. Soon I was alone on the dirt road that led into the burn zone. A line of flame hung like a necklace along the parched flanks of the hills. Smoke had turned the sunset blood-red. After three or four miles there was a hand-written cardboard sign that read:
AREA CLEARED
@ 19:30
HOURS
9/2—
U.S.F.S
. Just beyond that was the fire. It had reached the road and was swirling around a utility line that continued on up into the hills. I stopped the car and got out, completely alone with the fire and the mountains and the huge dead sky. Ten-foot tongues of flame licked the guardrails and shot into the sky. The vegetation died loudly, as if in pain, popping and exploding in the thickening dusk.

I took a few photographs and then went back to my car. The fire was about to jump the road. It would eventually move up into some timber and end up torching over thirteen thousand acres. A house would burn down. The beautiful Leonard ranch would be saved—barely—by ground and dozer crews backed up by massive air attack. It was called the Dunnigan Creek fire. It was one of roughly one hundred thousand wildfires during the summer of 1992, and if you ask a hotshot if he's ever heard of it, chances are he'll say no. Rain put it out after a couple of days.

Author's Note

T
his essay was written in 1992, and since then there have been many changes in the way wildfire is fought in the United States. I wanted to alter the original work as little as possible, so it should be noted that—among other changes—the Boise Interagency Fire Center is now called the National Interagency Fire Center; fire fighters are paid more than $8.50 an hour; and portable computers are in common use for predicting fire behavior.

Most significant, however, the fatality statistics have changed. When I was in Idaho, it had been twenty-six years since more than half a crew had died in a single incident—the Loop fire in southern California, where twelve hotshots were overrun in a matter of minutes. Tragically, in 1994, fourteen hotshots and smoke jumpers were overrun in similar circumstances on the South Canyon fire outside Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The South Canyon fire is now the deadliest fire since 1937. My account of that incident appears as “Blowup,” the second essay in this collection.

Many hotshots I spoke with attributed the increasing danger of their job to severe drought conditions in the northern Rockies, as well as to decades of rigorous fire suppression. Both have contributed to a huge buildup of dead fuel in our nation's forests—fuel that ordinarily would have been cleared out by the small fires that regularly flare up in an unmanaged ecosystem. A disastrous fire season was inevitable, and in 2000 it finally happened. Eighty-five thousand wildfires burned nearly seven million acres across the United States. Sixteen people died, and fire suppression cost over one billion dollars.

It was the worst season ever. With the western drought continuing unabated and huge amounts of deadwood still choking many forests, fire behavior experts don't expect conditions to get better anytime soon.

1994

T
he main thing Brad Haugh remembers about his escape was the thunderous sound of his own heart. It was beating two hundred times a minute, and by the time he and the two smoke jumpers running with him had crested a steep ridge in Colorado, everyone behind them was dead.

Their coworkers on the slope at their backs had been overrun by flames that Haugh guessed were three hundred feet high. The fire raced a quarter mile up the mountain in about two minutes, hitting speeds of eighteen miles an hour. Tools dropped in its path were completely incinerated. Temperatures reached two thousand degrees—hot enough to melt gold or fire clay.

“The fire blew up behind a little ridge below me,” Haugh said later. “People were yelling into their radios, ‘Run! Run! Run!' I was roughly one hundred and fifty feet from the top of the hill, and the fire got there in ten or twelve seconds. I made it over the top and just tumbled and rolled down the other side, and when I turned around, there was just this incredible wall of flame.”

Haugh was one of forty-nine firefighters caught in a wildfire that stunned the nation with its swiftness and its fury. Fourteen elite fire fighters perished on a spine of Storm King Mountain, seven miles west of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. They died on a steep, rocky slope in a fire initially so small that the crews had not taken it seriously. They died while cars passed within sight on the interstate below and people in the valley aimed their camcorders at the fire from garage roofs.

There were many other fire fighters on Storm King when Brad Haugh crested the ridge, yet he feared that he and the two men with him were the only ones on the mountain left alive. That thought—not the flames—caused him to panic. He ran blindly and nearly knocked himself unconscious against a tree. Fires were spotting all around him as the front of flames chased him. The roar was deafening; “a tornado on fire” was how he later described it. The light, he remembered, was a weird blood-red that fascinated him even as he ran.

The two smoke jumpers with him were Eric Hipke and Kevin Erickson. Hipke had been so badly burned the flesh was hanging off his hands in strips. Haugh paused briefly to collect himself, then led the two men about a hundred yards down the mountain, stopping only long enough to wrap Hipke's hands in wet T-shirts. As they started down again, the fire was spreading behind them at a thousand acres an hour, oak, pinyon, and juniper spontaneously combusting in the heat.

“I didn't have any nightmares about it later,” said Haugh. “But I did keep waking up in the night very disoriented. Once I had to ask my girlfriend who she was.”

 

T
he South Canyon fire, as it was called, ignited on Saturday, July 2, as a lightning strike in the steep hills outside Glenwood Springs. At first people paid it little mind because dry lightning had already triggered thirty or forty fires across the drought-plagued state that day; another wisp of smoke was no big deal. But this blaze continued to grow, prompting the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) district office in Grand Junction to dispatch a seven-member crew on the morning of July 5 to prepare a helicopter landing site, designated H-1, and start cutting a fire line along a ridge of Storm King. At this point the blaze was cooking slowly through the sparse pinyon and juniper covering the steep drainage below. Glenwood Springs was visible to the east, and a pricey development called Canyon Creek Estates was a mile to the west. Interstate 70 followed the Colorado River one thousand feet below, and occasionally the fire fighters could see rafters in brightly colored life jackets bumping through the rapids.

The BLM crew worked all day, until chain saw problems forced them to hike down to make repairs. Replacing them were eight smoke jumpers from Idaho and Montana (eight more would be added the next morning) who parachuted onto the ridgetop to continue cutting fire line. They worked until midnight and then claimed a few hours' sleep on the rocky ground.

Just before dawn, on the morning of July 6, Incident Commander Butch Blanco led the BLM crew back up the steep slope. Arriving at the top, Blanco discussed strategy with the smoke jumper in charge, Don Mackey. At about the same time, the BLM office in Grand Junction dispatched one additional crew to the fire, the twenty-member Prineville Hotshots, a crack interagency unit from Oregon whose helmet emblem is a coyote dancing over orange flame.

The smoke jumpers had cleared another landing spot, H-2, on the main ridge, and around twelve-thirty in the afternoon, a transport helicopter settled onto it. The first contingent of the Prineville crew ran through the rotor wash and crouched behind rocks as the chopper lifted off to pick up the rest of the unit from below. They'd been chosen alphabetically for the first flight in: Beck, Bickett, Blecha, Brinkley, Dunbar, Hagen, Holtby, Johnson, and Kelso. Rather than wait for their crew mates, these nine hotshots started downslope into the burning valley.

The layout of Storm King Mountain is roughly north-south, with a central spine running from the 8,793-foot summit to H-2. Another half mile south along this ridge was the larger site, H-1. The fire had started on a steep slope below these cleared safe areas and was spreading slowly.

The strategy was to cut a wide firebreak along the ridgetop and a smaller line down the slope to contain the blaze on the southwestern flank of the ridge. Flare-ups would be attacked with retardant drops from choppers. If there were problems, crews could easily reach H-1 in five or ten minutes and crawl under their fire shelters—light foil sheets that resemble space blankets and deflect heat of up to six hundred degrees.

“It was just an ugly little creeper,” the BLM's Brad Haugh said of the early stages of the fire. Every summer, fire fighters like Haugh put out thousands of blazes like this one all over Colorado; at this point there was no reason to think South Canyon would be any different.

The second half of the Prineville crew dropped onto H-2 around 3:00
P.M
. and began widening the primary fire line. Two hundred feet below, Haugh was clearing brush with his chain saw on a 33 percent slope. That meant the ground rose one foot for every yard climbed, roughly the steepness of a sand dune. The grade near the top was closer to 50 percent. He wore bulky Kevlar sawyer's chaps and a rucksack loaded with two gallons of water weighing fifteen pounds, a folding knife, freeze-dried rations, and some toilet articles. He also carried a folding fire shelter and a Stihl 056 chain saw that weighed ten or twelve pounds. Even loaded down as he was, Haugh could probably have reached the ridgetop in less than one minute if he had pushed it, and H-1 in five or ten minutes. Wildfires rarely spread faster than one or two miles an hour, and the vast majority of fire fighters are never compelled to outrun them—much less fight to survive them. By conventional fire evaluation standards, Haugh was considered safe.

About three-thirty Haugh took his second break of the day. It was so hot he had already consumed a gallon of the water he carried. The fire was burning slowly in the drainage floor, and the crews fighting it—nine from the Prineville unit and twelve smoke jumpers—were several hundred feet below him in thick Gambel oak, some of the most flammable wood in the West.

Around 3:50 Haugh and his swamper—a sawyer's helper who flings the cut brush off the fire line—were finishing their break when their crew boss announced they were pulling out. Winds were picking up from a cold front that had moved in a half hour earlier, and the fire was snapping to life. They were ordered to climb to the ridgetop and wait it out.

It's rare for an entire mountainside to ignite suddenly, but it's not unheard of. If you stand near H-2 and look several miles to the west, you can see a mountain called Battlement Mesa. In 1976, three men died there in a wildfire later re-created in a training video called
Situation #
8. Every crew member on Storm King would certainly have seen it. In
Situation #
8, a crew is working upslope of a small fire in extremely dry conditions. Flames ignite Gambel oak and race up the hill, encouraged by winds. The steep terrain funnels the flames upward, and fire intensity careens off the chart, a classic blowup. Four men are overrun, three die. The survivor, who suffered horrible burns, says they were never alerted to the critical wind shift—an accusation the BLM denied at the time. “It's a hell zone, really,” said one Forest Service expert on Colorado's oak-and pinyon-covered hills. “It's one dangerous son of a bitch.”

At about 4:00
P.M
. high winds hit the mountain and pushed a wall of flames north, up the west side of the drainage. Along the ridge, the BLM crew and the upper Prineville unit began moving to the safety of H-1. Below them, Don Mackey ordered his eight jumpers to retreat up to a burned-over area beneath H-1. He then started cross-slope to join three other smoke jumpers deployed with the Prineville nine. Apparently, no one had advised them that the situation was becoming desperate. In the few minutes it took Mackey to join the twelve fire fighters, the fire jumped east across the drainage. “I radioed that in,” said Haugh. “And then another order came to evacuate.” That order came from Butch Blanco on the ridgeline, who was hurriedly conducting the evacuation. “This was a much stronger warning than the previous one,” recalled Haugh. “I sent my swamper to the ridgetop with the saw and radioed that as soon as the lower Prineville contingent came into sight below me, I would bump up to the safe zone.”

Suddenly, fierce westerly winds drove the fire dangerously close—though still hidden behind the thick brush—to the unsuspecting fire fighters. “The crew was unaware of what was behind them,” said Haugh. “They were walking at a slow pace, tools still in hand and packs in place.” As Haugh watched them, a smoke jumper appeared at his side. “He said that his brother-in-law was down in the drainage, and he wanted to take his picture.”

That fellow was Kevin Erickson, and Don Mackey was his brother-in-law, now in serious trouble below. As Erickson aimed his camera, everything below him seemed to explode. “Through the viewfinder, I saw them beginning to run, with fire everywhere behind them,” Erickson said. “As I took the picture, Brad grabbed me and turned me around. I took one more look back and saw a wall of fire coming uphill.” Closing in on Haugh and Erickson were smoke jumper James Thrash and the twelve other fire fighters in a ragged line behind him. Though Blanco and others were now screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” on the radio, Thrash chose to stop and deploy the fire shelter he would die in. Eric Hipke ran around him and followed Haugh and Erickson up the hill. The three-hundred-foot-high flames chasing them sounded like a river thundering over a waterfall.

 

I
n his book
Young Men and Fire,
Norman Maclean writes that dying in a forest fire is actually like experiencing three deaths: first the failure of your legs as you run, then the scorching of your lungs, finally the burning of your body. That, roughly, is what happens to wood when it burns. Water is driven out by the heat; then gases are superheated inside the wood and ignited; finally, the cellulose is consumed. In the end nothing is left but carbon.

This process is usually a slow one, and fires that burn more than a few acres per hour are rare. The South Canyon fire, for example, only burned fifty acres in the first three days. So why did it suddenly rip through two thousand acres in a couple of hours? Why did one hillside explode in a chain reaction that was fast enough to catch birds in midair?

Fire typically spreads by slowly heating the fuel in front of it—first drying it, then igniting it. Usually, a walking pace will easily keep fire fighters ahead of this process. But sometimes a combination of wind, fuel, and terrain conspires to produce a blowup in which the fire explodes out of control. One explanation for why South Canyon blew up—and the one most popular in Glenwood Springs—was that it was just so damn steep and dry up there and the wind blew so hard that the mountain was swept with flame. That's plausible; similar conditions in other fires have certainly produced extreme fire behavior. The other explanation turns on a rare phenomenon called super-heating.

Normally, radiant heat drives volatile gases—called turpines—out of the pinyon and juniper just minutes before they are consumed. But sometimes hot air rises up a steep slope from a blaze and drives turpines out of a whole hillside full of timber. The gases lie heavily along the contours of the slopes, and when the right combination of wind and flame reaches them, they explode. It's like leaving your gas stove burners on for a few hours and then setting a match to your kitchen.

A mountainside on the verge of combustion is a subtle but not necessarily undetectable thing; there are stories of crews pulling out of a creepy-feeling canyon and then watching it blow up behind them. Turpines have an odor, and that's possibly why some of the Prineville survivors said that something had “seemed wrong.” The westward-facing hillside had been drying all afternoon in the summer sun. Hot air was sucked up the drainage as if it were an open flue. The powerful winds that hit around 4:00
P.M
. blew the fire up the drainage at the hottest time of day. And turpines, having baked for hours, could conceivably have lit the whole hillside practically at once.

When Storm King blew, Haugh had to run 150 feet straight up a fire line with poor footing. Despite rigorous conditioning—he is a runner and a bodybuilder—his heart rate shot through the roof and his adrenal glands dumped enough epinephrine into his system to kill a house cat. Behind him, sheets of flame were laid flat against the hillside by 50 mph winds. The inferno roared through inherently combustible vegetation that had been desiccated, first by drought, then by hot-air convection, finally by a small grass fire that flashed through a few days earlier. The moisture content of the fine dead fuels was later estimated to be as low as 2 or 3 percent—absolutely explosive. As Haugh ran, panicked shouts came over the tiny radio clipped to his vest for people to drop their equipment and flee. One brief thought flashed through his mind—“So this is what it's like to run for your life”—and he didn't think again until he'd reached the ridgetop.