But critics say that the air war with wildfire kills far more than fish.
“If we killed ground-based firefighters at the rate we kill aerial firefighters, we’d kill 200 a year,” Stahl said, repeating math cited by the 2002 blue-ribbon panel that investigated the safety of firefighting aircraft.
When the Waldo Canyon Fire blew into Colorado Springs, it crossed two wide lines of retardant, he noted. That highlights yet another irony in aerial firefighting. Wildfires are wind-driven events. The conditions that blow up a blaze also make it exceedingly dangerous to fly over them. And as the winds increase, fire retardant and water are less effective, often blowing away before they reach their targets. So when the public and policy makers most want to see aircraft battling a fire is when their efforts are the least effective and the most dangerous.
In less extreme conditions, however, Forest Service officials believe retardant works, and many homeowners and firefighters say they’ve seen it make a difference. I’ve seen retardant drops that appeared to slow fires enough for ground crews to stop their spread.
“Actual firefighters of different levels said that’s what held this line. That’s what allowed them to get the crews in in time. It’s making our life a lot easier,” said Cecilia Johnson. “I have to believe what they’re saying.”
THAT DOESN’T MEAN AIRCRAFT ARE USED in the right place at the right time. Often politicians with no firefighting experience push incident commanders to use aircraft they normally wouldn’t.
When the U.S. Forest Service’s regional aviation chief Ray Quintanar refused to have C-130s drop retardant on California’s Cedar Fire in 2003 due to high winds and poor visibility, Representative Duncan L. Hunter, a Republican from San Diego County whose house was threatened by the fire, called his friend General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C. Myers arranged for military tankers to fly from North Carolina, Wyoming, and Colorado to the California blaze, despite Quintanar’s insistence that they wouldn’t help. When the planes arrived, the weather grounded them. Hunter’s house burned. Yet he remained unapologetic about going over the chief’s head and noted that the military tankers fought other fires in California during their western swing.26
And, of course, the stress incident commanders endure when being pressured to put planes in the air pales in comparison to the grief and guilt they bear when one of their aircraft goes down.
A MONTH AFTER THE MAFFS CRASH in Edgemont, South Dakota, Anne Veseth, a 20-year-old seasonal wildland firefighter, was excited to take her first helicopter ride—a short jaunt to the Black Mountain Lookout in the Clearwater National Forest, about 100 miles from her home in Moscow, Idaho.27 She landed safely, but the fire business brings death from the sky in other forms.
A week later I stood with nearly 300 U.S. government firefighters watching bagpipers and an honor guard lead her family into the Church of the Nazarene in Moscow. The colors of mourning were the yellow and green hues of the firefighters’ clothes, although some were so coated with soot and ash that they looked gray.
Veseth’s family urged firefighters to dress for her funeral the same way they would if they were showing up to fight a fire with Anne.
At her funeral, eyes accustomed to tearing up from smoke and sweat wept. Many also seethed with anger, after seeing a report from a hotshot crew that had refused to engage in the firefight the day before Veseth’s death because they deemed the operation “extremely unsafe” and had warned the leaders of the firefight of the very thing that killed her. The leaders of the fight against the Steep Corner Fire, however, weren’t part of the federal firefighting effort, but instead were fighting the blaze on behalf of the timber companies that owned the land where it had started.
While Veseth was enjoying her chopper ride, loggers about five and a half miles from the lookout she was resupplying noticed a fire in slash from their timber harvest.28 The site, 56 miles northeast of Orofino, Idaho, belonged to the Potlatch Corporation, a timber company, but it was just above national forest land dense with conifers. The loggers contacted the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association, a private group that puts out fires in logging company forests. But because the fire threatened public land, Veseth’s crew—Engine 31 of the Clearwater National Forest’s North Fork Ranger District fire crew—was also assigned. Her crewmates picked her up when her helicopter landed.
It’s unusual, but not unheard-of, for federal firefighters to work fires on private timber operations. The last time government firefighters worked on a C-PTPA fire had been 16 years earlier. Over the previous two decades, the C-PTPA had fought about 1,850 fires, but only about 1,600 acres had burned, a reflection of its aggressive initial attacks to protect valuable timber.
Veseth’s crew arrived around four in the afternoon and moved fast through the uncut forest on the southern flank of the fire, but slowed when they got to felled timber up to eight feet deep. That, and slopes so steep the loggers had to use cables to haul out logs, prompted the incident commander to keep the firefighters off the line in the dark.
In the morning the leaders ordered Veseth’s crew to move past areas threatened by teetering trees, leaving gaps in the fire line. Her crew’s engine boss complained to the division supervisor about the gaps: digging an “unanchored” fire line violates basic firefighting safety training.
Montana’s Flathead Hotshots arrived at the fire at 2 p.m., and their supervisor and foreman hiked different sides of the fire line. The hotshots noticed that many of the firefighters on the scene, including the commander, were wearing jeans rather than the fire-retardant clothing government rules require. Some weren’t carrying fire shelters, another required piece of personal protective equipment (PPE). Others were running chainsaws without safety gear.29
The hotshots’ report, which they posted on SAFENET, a website where wildland firefighters can report safety concerns, describes a “hodge-podge” of firefighters isolated by poor communication, weak direction, and areas deemed too dangerous to work due to falling trees and flames. There was no site for evacuating injured firefighters and no medical plan.30
A fire crew made up of prison inmates was repeatedly chased uphill by the fire and forced to dodge trees and boulders that rolled down on them from above. “A huge snag came down above us and started rolling down through the standing trees,” the report states. “The prison [crew boss] commented, ‘That is the sound of the day.’ ”
The hotshots repeatedly requested that helicopters drop water on the fire threatening the prison crew, but to no avail, while elsewhere water was dropped on firefighters rather than flames.
“We had heard multiple people asking, ‘are you ok’ after helicopter drops,” the report notes. “The people directing helicopter drops had no or little experience utilizing helicopters and were having the helicopters drop water without clearing the line of personnel.”
One sawyer shut down his saw and asked himself, “What are we doing here?” after a helicopter nearly hit his crew with a water drop. When the prison crew finally withdrew from the fire-threatened drainage, injured firefighters slowed their retreat.
The hotshots noted violations of 8 of the 10 basic safety rules for federal wildland firefighters. In addition, 12 of the 18 Watchout Situations that firefighters are required to mitigate went ignored.
The incident commander requested that the hotshots fill in the gaps in the fire line that were deemed unsafe for the other firefighters, but the hotshots wouldn’t engage the fire until their safety issues were addressed and gave him a written list of their concerns. Chief among them was the number of dead and fire-weakened trees—snags—that were falling around firefighters.
The commander responded that his team “had a different set of values and do things differently,” according to the hotshots’ report.
“We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got,” another C-PTPA firefighter told them.
The hotshots declined the assignment and left.
A
ccording to the Serious Accident Investigation Report filed six months later, leaders on the fire attempted to mitigate the hazards.31 They put together an Incident Action Plan with two objectives—ensuring firefighter safety and minimizing the loss of timber resources.
Veseth’s crew also disengaged from the fire that night due to safety concerns, but they returned the following day after leaders assured them that the hazards would be taken care of. More crews were on the way, they were told, and two professional tree fallers were dropping hazardous trees. “All the things we wanted,” a crew member told investigators.
They stopped for lunch along Steep Creek. Veseth was watching one of the tree fallers cut down a snag when a colleague standing with her saw another tree coming down toward them from across the creek.
“Snag falling!” he shouted.
“Everyone scatters,” the Serious Accident Investigation Report recounts. “Some firefighters run downhill while Kerry [an alias used in the report] and Anne run uphill.”
The falling snag knocked over another tree, like a domino.
“Down!” the other firefighter yelled, turning to run downhill away from the second falling tree.
“With his fists and teeth clenched, he expects to be hit. He hears a tremendous sound as the trees crash downward and feels the whip of limbs on each side of him. He falls down but, upon realizing he is uninjured, quickly gets up and looks for Anne who he thought had been right behind him. He finds her three or four strides uphill under the tree branches. After quickly clearing them away, he determines she did not survive.”
Where it hit her, the cedar was 13 inches in diameter and 123 feet from the stump it had broken off of.
WHEN VESETH DIED, the Forest Service’s $948 million firefighting budget was nearly exhausted, but the fire season still had months to go and was projected to cost as much as $1.4 billion.
The National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy states that “safe aggressive initial attack is often the best suppression strategy to keep unwanted wildfires small and costs down.” But that philosophy, regardless of how safe the initial attack is, puts more people in harm’s way. Most fire line deaths occur in the early “initial attack” or “transition” phases of firefighting operations, when teams or individuals may take on blazes without adequate management, communication, or knowledge of the terrain and weather.32 Initial attacks are often made up of firefighters from a variety of jurisdictions who can prove difficult to coordinate and may have differing philosophies of firefighting.
In his memo three months before Veseth’s death, James E. Hubbard, the Forest Service’s deputy chief for state and private forestry, said the service’s dwindling budget required fast attacks on even the most remote fires to save money. Many firefighters, however, questioned the cost savings of putting out every fire in extreme fire years. “It’s externalizing long-term costs, including the highest cost—firefighters’ lives,” said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of the watchdog group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
After Veseth’s funeral, at a meeting of the Idaho Land Board, state attorney general Lawrence Wasden grilled the Idaho state forester, David Groeschl, about firefighter safety.33 Yet despite the SAFENET list of safety violations, the Serious Accident Investigation Report concluded that the “judgments and decisions of the firefighters involved in the Steep Corner Fire were appropriate” and that there were no “reckless actions or violations of policy or protocol.”34
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued citations against the C-PTPA and fined it $10,500 for the safety violations noted in the SAFENET report.35 That OSHA issued citations and fines for safety violations and broken rules in fighting the fire that killed Anne Veseth, while the Serious Accident Investigation Report downplayed them, foreshadowed the investigations into the tragedy on Yarnell Hill in Arizona a year later. But rather than one fatality for which nobody was assigned blame, there would be 19.
VESETH’S FAMILY RESERVED JUDGMENT on the circumstances of her death. That wasn’t surprising, given the family’s devotion to public service. Veseth’s mother, Claire, was a nurse; her oldest sister, Rachel Tiegs, a paramedic; and her brother, Brian, a firefighter.
In 2010 Anne approached her brother about getting a job as a wildland firefighter.36 The previous year she had completed an auto mechanics degree at Lewis-Clark State College, although she had never shown an interest in working on cars before enrolling in the program. That same year she was second runner-up in the Moscow Junior Miss competition.
“She picked breakdancing as her talent and mom informed her that she didn’t know how to breakdance,” her brother, Brian, told the crowd at her funeral. “But she took lessons and she nailed it.”
She was in her second season with the North Fork Ranger District fire crew in the Clearwater National Forest, just a couple of hours’ drive from her home, and had eagerly signed on with teams sent to fight fires in Colorado (the High Park Fire) and Arizona earlier in the year.
When she arrived at the Steep Corner Fire, she was 10 days away from starting another degree program, this one focusing on forestry and fire ecology. She finally seemed to have found her path in life.
Outside her funeral, after the bagpipes and bells, Anne Veseth’s family walked through two rows of firefighters, climbed into her brother’s fire truck, and slowly drove around the church. Firefighters lined the road, then climbed into their trucks to join the short procession.
With 95-degree temperatures driving scores of blazes in Idaho, Washington, and California, some of those who hadn’t washed their firefighting clothes for the funeral would not be changing out of them before they were back on a fire line.
23
Never Winter
Rocky Mountain National Park—October 9, 2012
BY THE TIME OF ANNE VESETH’S DEATH in August, fires were on track to burn a record amount of U.S. land in 2012, surpassing the 9.8 million acres burned in 2006. The nearly 7 million acres that had burned by the middle of the month was 22 percent higher than the 10-year average, but the number of fires reported was 25 percent below the average. The disparity showed that the fires were getting bigger.1
Evidence in tree rings and lake sediments indicates that there were actually seasons with bigger fires that burned even more western acres before U.S. agencies started keeping such records. But, of course, that was also before the expanding nation cut, paved, and developed much of the West, and before it started spending billions of dollars trying to eradicate wildfires.
During the Hayman Fire a decade earlier, Colorado governor Bill Owens drew heat for saying that it seemed like “all of Colorado [was] on fire.” In 2012 it seemed like the whole nation was burning.
In Idaho, where Anne Veseth lived and died, National Guard troops joined the fight against at least nine large fires burning in the state during the week after her accident. One burned over 100 square miles and threatened to overrun Pine and Featherville. Another stranded 250 rafters for days on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. A few weeks later a wildfire burned over closed uranium mines, threatening to add radioactivity to the fire’s smoke.2
With parching drought and 113-degree temperatures not seen since the 1930s Dust Bowl, Oklahoma faced at least 11 large wildfires in a single day. Residents grabbed their children and ran as fire raced through their neighbors’ yards, destroying 25 homes near Norman and 40 outside Tulsa. Authorities were hunting for a man seen throwing flaming newspapers from his pickup truck onto the grass.3 A football player for Emporia State University missed the first day of training after surviving one of the Oklahoma fires by driving his car into a farm pond.4
In central Washington’s Kittitas County, a crew barely outran a wind-driven blowup as they drove out of the Taylor Bridge Fire. The fire, about 75 miles east of Seattle, burned 22,000 acres and some 60 homes. The fire came within 100 feet of the Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, near Cle Elum, but the seven chimps there survived.5
In Utah a li
ghtning-sparked fire threatened a herd of wild horses and closed the Pony Express Road in the state’s western desert.6 In California some 8,000 firefighters battled nearly a dozen large fires. One 66-square-mile blaze in the Plumas National Forest threatened a clothing-optional resort and 900 homes. A brutal heat wave drove flames through more than 24 square miles of brush in a day.7
Three days after Anne Veseth died, a jury in San Bernardino, California, convicted Rickie Lee Fowler of five counts of murder for the fatal heart attacks that occurred during the Old Fire, which destroyed more than 1,000 buildings in 2003 and which prosecutors claimed Fowler intentionally set in dry grass. The judge sentenced Fowler to death. The second sentence of capital punishment for a wildland arsonist in U.S. history, it came just three years after the first.8
Meteorologists warned that drought would extend the western fire season by two weeks. They underestimated.
Colorado finished the year as it had started it, with a wildfire burning not just a couple of weeks outside the normal fire season, but in winter. Unlike the Heartstrong Fire, which the previous winter had raced across the plains and died out within hours of igniting, this one would burn from autumn until spring among the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park.
“If you called me up and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a fire. You guess where it is,’ it’s the last place I would have guessed,” Jason Sibold, a wildfire researcher at Colorado State University, said in an interview.
An illegal campfire on October 9 ignited Forest Canyon, a remote gorge filled with trees and dead timber that hadn’t burned in some 800 years. November stayed warm with little precipitation. When the snow did come, the ground was cold enough that it didn’t melt to wet down the fuels.
On Thanksgiving, Mike Lewelling, the fire management officer for the park, found the blaze burning under a foot of snow. Early on the morning of December 1, winds gusting to 70 miles per hour pushed the fire more than three miles in 35 minutes, forcing evacuations of more than 1,500 people from homes around the park and burning down a cabin. Much of the terrain where the fire was burning was so steep and dense with fallen trees that firefighters couldn’t confront the blaze there.9 Even if they could, there were hardly enough of them available.
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