Firefighter Crushed to Death as Part of Tree Topples

As a firefighter in the tinder-dry forests of the West, Daniel Holmes stood toe-to-toe with flames for much of his adult life. He died standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Holmes, 26, was killed as the top of a teetering 100-foot-high white fir tree broke off and crushed him during a controlled burn at Kings Canyon National Park in Central California, authorities said Monday. Several of his colleagues with the Arrowhead Hotshots, an elite firefighting team based at the park, managed to get out of harm’s way.

Members of the team, which fights fires throughout the western United States, provided first aid and carried Holmes to a waiting ambulance after the accident Saturday. But he died en route to a LifeFlight helicopter-landing zone at the park.

Marty O’Toole, the park’s fire information spokesman, said Monday that Holmes never regained consciousness.

It was the first firefighter fatality in the park’s history, O’Toole said, but the second this season in the drought-plagued Sierra Nevada. Eva Schicke, 24, died Sept. 12 in Stanislaus National Forest when flames overran her in a steep canyon.

Holmes, bearded and strapping, had nearly completed his rookie season with the Hotshots after four years as a firefighter at Mt. Rainier National Park near his off-season home in Bellingham, Wash.

“People are taking it very hard,” O’Toole said. “By this time of the season, even though it was his first year, everyone had worked together long enough to become a very tight-knit crew.”

The Department of Interior dispatched a three-member investigation team, but O’Toole said all safety precautions were followed. The death occurred during the most routine of firefighting exercises -- a controlled burn to thin out undergrowth.

The burn had consumed four acres when Holmes and a few other team members approached a tree known in forestry parlance as a “snag” -- dead or dying timber that poses a threat of falling. O’Toole said Holmes and the others had decided to cut down the tree with a chain saw. Before they could begin, a chunk of the top broke off and plummeted to the ground.