Hamstrung heroes?

THE WEST HAS BEEN CATCHING fire for months. More than 350,000 acres in Montana. At least 85,000 acres in Arizona. National fire-alert status at its highest level. In September, when lightning sparked a small blaze in northern Utah, the Logan Hotshots hit it fast, chain-sawing through pone trees, hacking through brush with their Pulaskis, shoveling away flammable duff. One hard push, they figured, and the small but hot fire would be out.

Hotshots are tough hombres, and just a few years back the Logans would have cut line around the backcountry fire until they had it surrounded, whether it took eight hours or 48. But after a 16-hour shift, they hiked an hour down the mountain to sack out for eight hours. Those are the rules.

“Rather than knock the fire out in one shift, you have to hike back to your personal gear, sleep for a while, then hike back in and go to work,” says John Platt, a wiry 31-year-old Logan Hotshot.

Wildland firefighting used to be war, an all-out assault until the enemy either died or surrendered. Lately, some veterans say, it’s more of a job than a mission. Society’s increasingly low tolerance for wartime-like loss of life is transforming the profession.

The risks either way

This was not a subject a cautious person would have brought up Saturday evening in the Del Rosa area of San Bernardino.

A fire as fierce as anyone can remember had swirled down through the chaparral-clotted foothills. Above the wind’s shriek came the thunder of toppling walls, the roar of gas pipes shooting flames 12 feet into the darkness and the kaboom of propane tanks exploding. Now, as if the dozens of homes destroyed on its first run through these neighborhoods had merely whetted an appetite, the fire seemed to be working itself into a new rage, sending a tall hedge of flame rearing up on a steep unburned hillside to the east.

Most living things had logically fled. But through the blacked-out streets rumbled a parade of fire engines from agencies as far away as Hesperia and La Habra. Red lights flashing, headlamp beams brown in the soot, they pushed resolutely into the wind, toward the fire. The already tired and dirty people inside the trucks were charging forward, doing what they became firefighters to do -- what firefighters have been doing on front lines across Southern California for days now.

Yet after the adrenaline settles and the crews return to their stations to debrief and tell war tales, at least some will return to a simmering debate.

The current conflagrations in Southern California involve both city and wildland firefighters, but it’s the issue of wildland firefighters losing their edge that has singed the grapevine for several years now, discussed among firefighters and argued on the pages of their professional journals. The charge is that wildland firefighters -- from the elite smoke jumpers to the novice “Type 2s” -- lack the gung-ho spirit of 20 years ago. They don’t work as hard on the fire line. They don’t go after fires as aggressively.

Whereas crews used to spend days in the sticks eating only what they carried or what helicopters could sling in, they now return after each shift to fire camps that are sometimes more like summer camp, with catered steak dinners, laundry service and hot showers instead of soot-caked bodies and C rations.

Larry Humphrey, an outspoken 30-year veteran and the commander at the Summerhaven fire that destroyed more than 250 Arizona homes in June, sees increasing caution. “We’re becoming less aggressive when we fight fire,” says Humphrey, who works for the Bureau of Land Management in Arizona. “There’s a trigger point for engagement, and a trigger point for disengagement.” And fire teams yo-yo between attack and retreat. To Humphrey, it’s an aggressive crew that stays alert and safe.

Dan Buckley, a mustached 45-year-old who manages fires in Yosemite, says teams just quit the fire line while battling the 500,000-acre Biscuit fire in Oregon in summer 2002. “Even if they were doing critical work, they’d just get up and leave,” he recalls. “It was crazy.”

Doubts among the elite arise at a bad time. The West is in its fourth straight severe fire year, with at least $1 billion spent each year to suppress fires burning across 4 million, 5 million, even 6 million acres. Persistent drought is a factor. So is the success in extinguishing past fires. Young trees and brush fuel big, hot fires that destroy watersheds or overrun towns unless someone cuts off their fuel source.

Wildland firefighters work fiendishly hard doing that, clearing fuel from a fire’s path in rugged terrain, in 90-degree temperatures or hotter, surrounded by rattlesnakes or grizzlies or fire-weakened trees that silently collapse.

The fires themselves are up to 100,000 acres and more -- and awesome. Marching at the pace of a brisk walk, devil’s dreadlocks of flame shooting 400 feet, temperature a hellish 2,000 degrees, a fire needs only a firm tailwind to run down a firefighting crew.

The risk is real and pervasive, but still a turn-on to the thousands of mostly young men and women who already know the call of the backcountry as hikers and climbers and skiers, and who crisscross the West to whiff danger. Earning $20,000-plus during a hot fire season, they can pay for college, even a few ski trips. For some, firefighting taps an idealistic streak. Eric Dinger, a rangy 26-year-old Logan Hotshot, watched his first firefight on TV. “I just had to do that,” he says. But for many, it’s an adrenaline-charged extreme adventure, a chance to take down something big with a chain saw. “As a Hotshot, you’re really out there on the pointy end of the spear,” Dinger says.

In other words, burnover will take you out.

Examples: Mann Gulch, 1949; 13 smoke jumpers die when a fire races up a Montana hillside and envelops them.

South Canyon, 1994; a Colorado fire burning in bone-dry pinon juniper erupts in high winds, again forcing firefighters into a desperate uphill retreat, catching and killing 14.

Thirty Mile, 2001; in Washington, a team of firefighters cut off from its escape road hunkers down, hoping the blaze will skirt them. Instead, it blazes ahead, smothering four as they lie in tent-like aluminum fire shelters.

These incidents and others led to a spate of new equipment to improve safety: Fire-retardant Nomex clothing in place of denim. Radios on every person. Belt-pack fire shelters, which, despite design flaws, save lives.

It’s the layers of new rules hammered out in a big bureaucratic tangle involving the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and others that some believe have declawed firefighting.

Trouble is, the rules still get broken and the tragic results beget still more rules. “We’ve known how to kill firefighters for 75 years,” Humphrey says. “What we haven’t figured out is how to learn from our mistakes.”

Case in point: The Thirty Mile fire, the July 2001 blaze in northern Washington, in which a crew of inexperienced firefighters, as well as their veteran leaders, ignored virtually every firefighting “rule.” The rising temperatures and dropping humidity; the aggressive nature of the fire; the dead-end “escape route” -- all conspired to kill four young people, including three teenagers just weeks into the job. Investigators blamed the tragedy on fatigue.

Still, the Thirty Mile fire -- as the South Canyon fire had seven years before -- resulted in a flurry of regulations, including the capping of shifts at 16 hours, new briefing procedures for fresh arrivals and clarifications on the chain of command. These edicts hit in 2001 and charged incident commanders, the “field generals” at a fire, with tracking the hours logged by every firefighter on the line. When the task proved impossible, subordinates took it on.

Confusion cropped up elsewhere. Guidelines for determining when to back off rather than advance on a blaze devolved into an ad-hoc formula. Some crews arbitrarily bailed if conditions met two of these three thresholds: temperature over 85, wind exceeding 25 mph and relative humidity below 10%.

Firefighting at night, once standard because cooler temperatures and higher humidity help the campaign, is now considered too dangerous by many fire managers. A snag might fall unseen. A firefighter might step off a cliff. Night operations still occur, but wildland firefighting is mostly a day job, with crews punching in after a 7 a.m. breakfast and out 12 hours later, before dinner and a shower.

Drawn to danger

Paul BROYLES, director of the National Park Service’s fire efforts from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, approves of the safety push. “Some people say we’re not risking ourselves like we did in the past,” he says, “and my reply is: That’s an extremely appropriate response.” Tragedies such as Thirty Mile notwithstanding, he adds, entrapments and other serious accidents have declined. But Broyles concedes that rules don’t always corral young crew members. “It’s just awfully difficult to get kids to wake up ... and extract themselves from dangerous fire behavior,” Broyles says.

In the wake of 2000’s disastrous season, thousands of new firefighters were hired. Now relatively few 20-person fire crews can match the collective experience of the same groups a decade ago. And it shows. In July, two firefighters rappelled from a helicopter to stop a fast-moving fire in central Idaho. Within minutes, the fire ran over Jeff Allen, 23, and Shane Heath, 22. An investigation is underway, with a report due out soon.

Southern Californians can only hope and pray that firefighters in the current battles escape serious injury. What is certain is that fire managers will analyze every nuance of these latest fights, that new rules will follow and that those, too, will stir contention among the people drawn to flames.

Douglas Gantenbein is the Seattle correspondent for the Economist and the author of “A Season of Fire: Four Months on the Firelines in America’s Forests” (Tarcher/Putnam).