In New England, western wildfires seemed remote, but burning federal land presented opportunities for firefighters across the country. The winter before the fire, I’d signed on for a week’s worth of training and joined a crew organized by the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.
By early July 2003, 28,000 people—all the civilian resources available—had been called into the battle by the federal government. They were joined by U.S. Army troops and foreign firefighters from as far away as New Zealand. That month I bounced from fire camp to fire camp over hundreds of miles of Rocky Mountain roads in a school bus. I knew that my weeks working on the fire line would educate me, but I didn’t anticipate that schooling would be as much in economics and politics as it was in fuels and fire weather.
I arrived to fight my first forest fire with a crew that subscribed to the message of Smokey Bear, which had been around since before any of us were born: wildfires are a scourge that will destroy our forests if we don’t stop them. I left believing that most forests in the West were sick and overcrowded because we’d put out the fires that functioned as their immune systems and gardening crews. In both cases I was subscribing more to mythology than to science.
“What’s this?” our normally quiet crew boss shouted on the first fire line I would cut in the Rockies.
A few skeletal trees burned behind him, but most of the fire scene was hidden behind clouds of white smoke.
“The safety zone?” one of his huddled crew questioned.
“That’s right,” he yelled. “The black is the safety zone.”
In wildfires people live by embracing death. The blackened earth—land that the fire has already burned—is often the only place where a person can escape the flames.
Like all wildland firefighters, we learned 10 Standard Firefighting Orders and 18 Watchout Situations in the classroom, but remembering them when a fire goes bad is like trying to recite the Bill of Rights in a hurricane.
And the list of perils is far longer than those.
Snags—trees weakened by fire or disease—can fall at any time. “They’ll drive you into the ground like a tent stake,” one of the veterans on my crew warned me.
Junipers split and twist when they fall, launching shards of wood and branches in all directions. Stumps burn into the ground, leaving ash-covered pits of embers that can swallow a firefighter’s foot like burning quicksand. Hot ash runs like water, sometimes delaminating boots and blistering feet.
A slight drop in relative humidity, a jump in temperature, or an increase in wind speed can rouse smoldering embers into a racing wall of flame that can easily overrun a firefighter standing in the wrong place. Smartphones, satellites, handheld electronic weather meters, and portable weather stations give firefighters the most technologically advanced weather prediction capability. Still, our squad bosses “spun weather”—measuring relative humidity with glass bulbs hanging from chains they swung through the air. They tested wind speed with anemometers they held above their heads, and monitored thermometers hanging from their packs. Their wariness of tech was akin to the skepticism many had toward the federal bureaucracy. It often proved to be well-placed.
Just as we finished our safety briefing on that first fire line, a slurry bomber unexpectedly rose into view and dropped its load of retardant before the crew could get out of the way. The red mud splashed over us, stinging our skin and staining our clothes. A more direct hit would have knocked us down, or worse, but most of the firefighters relished the red blotches on their clothes and the thrilling sight of the bomber.
“You got the red badge of courage,” one told me as he slapped my back. “Some guys come out three or four times before they get that.”
Our three squads lined up like centipedes that crawled slowly along the edge of the burning land to “hit and lick” a line around the blaze. With every step, each man chopped the vegetated ground with an axe, hoe, or rake, then moved up the line. By the time 20 firefighters had passed, there was an 18-inch ribbon of mineral soil between the black of the fire and the green of the forest.
Water is a luxury when fighting wildfires. Dirt is the suppressant of choice. We shoveled it onto flames to smother them and stirred it into embers to cool them.
Sweat and smoke stung my eyes, and after a few hours my back and shoulders ached. But swinging an axe into wood and dirt, and walking back along the fire line we’d cut through the woods, left a tangible sense of athletic accomplishment. I considered the disappointment so many crews feel when a fire burns over a line they spent days cutting, and their backbreaking work vanishes in a charred forest. But for the moment, as I stood with my crew between the fire and the forest, I felt proud, like I was a piece of something both particular to that small mountaintop and part of a massive, nationwide effort.
I learned more about fire in my first hour on the line than in all my training, although even my weeks on the fire line wouldn’t turn me into a forest firefighting expert. And during those weeks, many of my lessons had little to do with combustion and fuel.
When the crew arrived in Langlas Draw, after a long ride from Buffalo, Wyoming, to Meeker, Colorado, rumors circulated that we were putting out the blaze because Vice President Dick Cheney had a weekend fishing trip planned nearby. No mobile dining facilities were available to cater the fire camp, so the firefighters rode to the Sleepy Cat, a local lodge, for breakfast and a morning briefing.
“My people have gone a week without washing,” one crew boss noted.
Portable shower facilities were committed to other fires, but the dirtiest crews could bathe in a nearby cabin.
“Jane and Mike Witt are really thankful that you saved their wedding site,” said a member of the management crew, changing the subject. He held up a snapshot of the tuxedoed groom and his white-gowned bride in front of the firefighters.
Three hours later my crew stood at what we were told was the Witts’ cabin, which looked like a set from a Ralph Lauren catalog—except for the foil firefighters had wrapped it in. For three days my crew hiked from the cabin to the pine and aspen forest above to mop up the fire.
Meanwhile, Secret Service agents arrived to prepare for the vice president’s arrival and announced plans to ground the firefighting operation’s helicopters.
“I’m not going to not be able to medevac a firefighter because the vice president’s going fishing,” the incident commander told me. He then pointed out to the agents how bad the publicity might be if that should occur, and they arranged to keep choppers working the fire. That Sunday three Black Hawk helicopters landed a mile and a half east of the fire camp to drop off Cheney and his fishing gear.
A few days later, at another lodge where fire crews dined, a boy stood on a picnic table and sang his thanks to firefighters for saving his home. When I commented on the boy’s heartwarming song, a squad boss beside me scoffed. “He sang it better last year,” he said, explaining that the boy’s home had never been threatened by a fire, but his family owned a local lodge that counted on the “fire tourism” dollars the government spent on room, board, and supplies for wildfire crews.
My crew’s most important lessons came on Storm King Mountain, where we hiked to a fire line stretched below what is known as Hell’s Gate Ridge. Marble crosses marked the spot where each of the 14 firefighters who had died there fell. Skis, tools, toy fire trucks, crucifixes, yellowed photos, and sunbaked flowers decorated their bases. On top were coins and beer bottle caps from firefighters who, upon reaching the monuments, realized they had nothing else with which to pay their respects.
On July 6, 1994, 49 firefighters, including 16 smokejumpers and a 20-person team of Oregon hotshots, were on the mountain. To contain the puny but stubborn blaze, they built the fire line downhill toward a gulch—a dangerous practice when there’s a fire on a facing slope. When a dry cold front blasted wind into western Colorado, the flames leapt onto a steep slope filled with highly combustible Gambel oak below the firefighters, who had never received the weather
report predicting the wind shift.
The flames, ravenous for fuel, rolled up the 55-degree slope in waves. At its peak the blowup was running 35 feet a second up terrain so steep that the firefighters could hardly run at all. Chainsaws and gasoline cans exploded. Blasts of radiant heat seared skin, and superheated gases scorched lungs. The rocket-engine roar drowned out all but the closest shouts and screams.
Twelve smokejumpers and hotshots—America’s firefighter athletes—perished. Two helicopter crewmen died trying to outrun the fire on the ridgeline where their chopper landed. The flames claimed 9 of the 20 Prineville Hotshots, from a town of 5,300 in the pine forests of central Oregon. For the first time America saw a tiny fire in the Rocky Mountains as a national problem. If this “nothing” of a blaze could cut the young heart out of a small town a full thousand miles away, the same could happen to any town in the country.
In the weeks that I was on the fire line, five firefighters died in western forest fires. Later in August a bus crash killed eight Oregon firefighters—bringing another tragedy to the land of the Prineville Hotshots.
Four days after I arrived home from my first firefighting trip west, another Connecticut crew was called up for a fire, this one in Montana. The national wildfire situation had hit Level 5, the highest federal preparedness level, drawing in all available resources. As the plane carrying the Connecticut crew approached Missoula, smoke from the burning forests obscured the airport. The flight was diverted to Great Falls, four hours away, where the crew boarded a school bus for the long ride to the Bitterroot Mountains.
7
The Bigger Blowup
IT WAS IN AN ALMOST INVISIBLE HOLE in the Bitterroots that America’s war with wildfire was born. There, on August 20, 1910, “Big Ed” Pulaski, a ranger with the U.S. Forest Service, led 45 scruffy, untrained firefighters to shelter in the Nicholson mine above the West Fork of Placer Creek when the “Big Blowup,” a fire the size of Connecticut, threatened to incinerate them.
“The forests staggered, rocked, exploded and then shriveled under the holocaust,” Betty Goodwin Spencer, an Idaho historian, recalled of the blaze. “Great red balls of fire rolled up the mountainsides. Crown fires, from one to 10 miles wide, streaked with yellow and purple and scarlet, raced through treetops 150 feet from the ground. Bloated bubbles of gas burst murderously into forked and greedy flames . . . Fire brands the size of a man’s arm were blasted down in the streets of towns 50 miles from the nearest fire line. The sun was completely obscured in Billings, 500 miles away from the main path of the fire . . . A 42 mile-an-hour gale swept Denver, enveloping it in a pall of smoke from the Idaho-Montana fires, 800 miles distant . . . You can’t outrun wind and fire that are traveling 70 miles an hour. You can’t hide when you are entirely surrounded by red-hot color. You can’t see when it’s pitch black in the afternoon. There were men who went stark raving crazy, men who flung themselves into the on-rushing flames, men who shot themselves.”1
With Armageddon hot on his heals, Pulaski led his crew and two horses into the mine shaft to escape the inferno he described as having “the roar of a thousand freight trains.” He kept the fire out of the prospector’s hole with water he scooped from the shaft floor with his hat. When some of his panicked firefighters tried to bolt, he pulled his pistol. “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot,” he told them.2
They all eventually fell unconscious as the inferno sucked the oxygen from the cave. Five never woke up. One survivor, finding Pulaski lying limp at the front of the shaft, announced that he was dead. “Like Hell he is” was his now legendary response.
Today the ranger’s name rings out at every wildfire. The Pulaski, a combination axe and hoe that he invented after the ordeal, is the most common tool in the battle against forest fires, so even firefighters who don’t know his story shout out his name on the fire line.
The ranger’s legacy looms larger in the philosophy of firefighting that followed the blowup in the Bitterroots. Firefighters on the ground saw their efforts against the Big Blowup as a “complete failure.” The fire killed at least 78 of the men fighting it, reduced much of Wallace, Idaho, to ash, and torched parts of half a dozen other towns. Mining camps, farms, and more than 3 million acres of timber burned.
But the fledgling Forest Service, just five years old and already hated in much of the West, chose to focus on the firefighters’ heroic stand, rather than the futility of the battle. The American philosopher William James wrote of extinguishing wildfires as “the moral equivalent of war,” suggesting that American youth be conscripted into an “army enlisted against nature.”3
One of humanity’s greatest allies was suddenly one of America’s most reviled enemies.
Teddy Roosevelt was no longer president when the Big Blowup ignited, but he still led the nation’s embryonic conservation movement. To the great hunter and adventurer, conservation was a hands-on affair. For western forests to flourish, they needed human help. Forest fires were not a weather phenomenon, but a wild beast the nation could exterminate to protect its precious timber resources, most majestic landscapes, and development of the West.
Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s friend, the founder of Yale’s School of Forestry, and the first director of the U.S. Forest Service, had been pushed out of office by his political enemies when the great fire burned. But his philosophy of forestry, in which rangers actively managed the land for the good of both the timber industry and recreation, would continue to drive the agency. “Little G.P.s”—Pinchot’s protégés—trained at Yale, then spread out through the forests of the West, where they imposed his philosophy for the next half century.
Pinchot, however, learned most of his forestry skills in Europe. He developed his vision of what the vast, untrammeled forests of the western United States could be by studying woodlands that, for centuries, had been inhabited by villages, crossed by roads, and managed for timber harvests. The management techniques used in woods long controlled by royalty often didn’t fit in the vast, chaotic wildernesses of the West, or the messy democracy that controlled them.
Foresters debated two opposing options for managing fires in America’s timberland. They could put them out fast or learn to live with them. They chose the former.
The next four directors of the U.S. Forest Service were all veterans of the fight against the Big Blowup in 1910, had all studied at Yale, and were all mentored by Pinchot. In 1935 the last of the Little G.P.s to serve as chief of the Forest Service, Ferdinand Augustus Silcox, instituted the “10 a.m. policy,” under which the service was required to extinguish any wildfire by that hour of the morning after it was sighted. If they failed, the deadline was pushed back to 10 o’clock the next day.4 With Silcox also helping to oversee the employment of millions of young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, he had such great manpower that his goal of “full suppression” of forest fires might have seemed achievable.
And then came Smokey Bear, star of the longest-running public service advertising campaign in history and a character as well-known as Mickey Mouse.5 His message—“Only YOU can prevent forest fires”—brought the entire American public into the fight.
None of the firefighters with whom I clambered into a 40-foot school bus saw any connection between it and the mine shaft where Pulaski had held his own crew at gunpoint, despite their similar size and shape. But the Big Blowup started the war on wildfire in which we were foot soldiers a century later. It’s a campaign that foresters and firefighters now realize they could never win. In fact, many of the battles in which they prevailed would just bring greater losses in the future.
PART III
The Crowded Forest
8
Mansions in the Slums
A CENTURY AFTER THE BIG BLOWUP, America’s fight against wildfire seemed like a victim of its own success.
As a nation, Americans have proved to be very capable forest firefighters. We still put out more than 98 per
cent of the country’s wildfires during our initial attacks on them,1 but the ones we can’t snuff are bigger, hotter, faster, and more frequent than those we confronted before. By the time I was on the fire line, many foresters and firefighters believed that the blazes we couldn’t stop had grown out of the ones that we did. Their message, in fact, became almost as codified into the western mythology of the twenty-first century as those of Pulaski, Silcox, and Smokey Bear during the twentieth: putting out all those fires but leaving behind the wood, grass, and scrub that otherwise would have burned overloaded our forests with fuel that was driving increasingly explosive fires.
While that was disastrously true in some forests and regions, in others the belief that every western woodland was an overgrown firetrap filled with sick trees was almost as misguided as the Forest Service’s 10 a.m. policy. Sorting the reality from the myths required some walks deep into the woods, where the science was as nuanced as the landscape. Fortunately, I could find some of the answers in the parks and forests outside my own back door.
Historic photos and research by foresters show that before twentieth-century firefighters, foresters, miners, and ranchers changed the makeup of Colorado’s ponderosa pine forests below about 8,000 feet in elevation, they typically held between 5 and 50 trees per acre, with parklike meadows between the trunks and their lowest branches 10 or 20 feet above the ground.2 While some forests could be denser, in most ponderosa woodlands it was easy to get lost not because of how thick the forests were, but because they were so wide open a traveler could move unfettered in almost any direction.
Frequent fires creeping slow and low along the ground devoured scrub, deadfall, small trees, and low branches.3 Ponderosas develop a thick, corklike bark that insulates them from flames, and many large, old ones have “cat face” fire scars and blackened trunks. The flames that marked them didn’t hinder their growth into tall, majestic columns, but removed other vegetation that might have. I could still walk to a few ponderosa forests like that from my cabin in Colorado Chautauqua above Boulder.
Megafire Page 7