Smoke Jumper Recalls Race Against Deadly Firestorm : Blaze: Injured survivor outran ‘explosion of heat and flames,’ but the rushing inferno overtook 12 comrades.

In the end, said firefighter Bradley Haugh, it came down to the simple fact that “Mother Nature didn’t want us up there.”

Haugh stiffened Thursday as he recounted trying to outrun “an explosion of heat and flames” when winds whipped a small wildfire out of control near this western Colorado resort town, killing at least 12 of his fellow crew members in one of the worst firefighting disasters in history.

His only chance, the 32-year-old federal firefighter figured, was to try to make it to a ridge opposite the cresting fire.

“It was coming fast, really fast . . . a firestorm that was unbelievably hot and intense,” said Haugh, one of four injured firefighters among the 38 who escaped the inferno Wednesday. Two firefighters remained missing late Thursday.

Haugh, seemingly oblivious to the gauze wrapping his burned left elbow, recalled Thursday that after reaching safety he looked back over his shoulder and saw other firefighters running while yanking at protective fire shields folded at their belts. But he now thinks that some were unable to unfurl the aluminum and fiberglass blankets and get under them before galloping flames overtook them.

“We did everything we could with the resources available,” said Haugh, of Gypsum, Colo., who has worked for two years as a seasonal member of a U.S. Bureau of Land Management firefighting team. “It was a freak microcosm of weather that kicked our butts.”

On Thursday, more than 250 fresh crew members tried to gain control of the 2,200-acre South Canyon fire, named for the area five miles west of Glenwood Springs where lightning sparked the blaze on July 4. Overhead, aerial tankers and helicopters dropped flame retardant and water on hot spots. And most of the 75 residents evacuated late Wednesday night were allowed to return home.

“The fire right now is about controlled, to the extent that there isn’t much wind and the slurry bombers have doused many of the hot spots,” Garfield County Sheriff Vern Soucie said.

Meanwhile, a separate federal fire investigation team had a grimmer mission: scouring the 7,000-foot-high blackened ridges of Storm King Mountain in search of the missing firefighters and identifying the bodies of the 12 known to have perished.

The team also was trying to determine how the fire crews were overrun by flames and whether their protective equipment, including the shields, operated correctly.

Several townsfolk grumbled that not enough crews and equipment were sent to the scene in the first two days of the fire. But U.S. Forest Service and BLM officials defended their actions, saying that larger fires raging elsewhere in nine Western states had a priority for limited manpower and resources until early Wednesday.

Some of the firefighters worried that a failure of equipment had contributed to the deaths.

Colorado Gov. Roy Romer said several of the surviving smoke jumpers--specially trained firefighters airlifted to fire lines with heavy equipment to create firebreaks--pleaded with him to ensure a full investigation. That’s the reason, Romer said, that the bodies remained on the mountainside until late Thursday afternoon.

“Could something have been done?” Romer asked. “An investigation will tell us. We’re supposed to fly airplanes without crashing. Sometimes things go wrong.”

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who rushed to Glenwood Springs from Idaho early Thursday, called the deaths a “terrible tragedy.” He predicted that it would be weeks before investigators would have any answers.

But Babbitt, a firefighter in his youth in Arizona, hailed the fire crews as highly trained young men and women of all races, many of them on seasonal summer jobs to help pay for college. They are, he said, “the face of the West.”

The deaths, Babbitt said, underscore the fact that “despite all the technology, all the new techniques . . . fighting a fire is still a solitary act. . . . It takes tremendous courage to face risks like this.”

More than 30 crew members on the fire lines Wednesday were smoke jumpers imported from federal firefighting training bases in Missoula, Mont., and McCall, Ida. Another 20 were members of a “hotshot crew” from Prineville, Ore. Nine of the dead or missing--including four women--were from the Prineville crew. The loss was unparalleled for the blue-collar, high desert town of 5,900 in central Oregon.

“This is going to be very painful for this town,” said Scott Cooper, Prineville’s Chamber of Commerce executive director, who went to high school with one of the lost firefighters.

“Everywhere we have a flag in town they are flying at half-staff. The entrance to the Forest Service headquarters is jammed. People are walking around in a daze because they knew most of these kids. This was the second or third fire for that crew this year.”

Members of the Prineville crew listed among the dead or missing were: Scott Blegha of Claskanie, Ore.; Jon Kelso of Prineville; Kathi Beck of Eugene, Ore.; Levi Brinkley, Burns, Ore.; Bonnie Holtby, Prineville; Rob Johnson, Redmond, Ore.; Tammi Bickett, Powell Butte, Ore.; Doug Dunbar, Redmond, Ore., and Terri Hagen, Prineville.

The other dead and missing were identified as: Donald Mackey of Hamilton, Mont.; Roger Roth and James Thrash of McCall, and Richard Tyler and Robert Browning of Grand Junction, Colo.

Authorities declined to identify which of the 14 names were those of the still-missing firefighters.

Already Thursday, relatives of the dead were expressing bitterness over their loss.

“I just see it as somebody making a big mistake by sending them there,” said Nadine Mackey, mother of Donald Mackey, a 32-year-old divorced father of a 4-year-old son and a daughter who turned 6 on Thursday. “If you’re a smoke jumper, you’re way back in there by yourself. You have no place to go.”

Mackey, in a telephone interview with ABC News, said she watched reports of the South Canyon fire Wednesday night from her Montana home, relieved that her son was supposed to be in Grand Junction, about 30 miles west of Glenwood Springs, and therefore not on the fire lines. She learned Thursday that she was wrong.

“He wasn’t supposed to be there,” Mackey said. “He was supposed to be coming home.”

Of the four injured firefighters, only Eric Hipke, 32, of Seattle, remained hospitalized Thursday. He was listed in stable condition with first- and second-degree burns.

Much of the talk in Glenwood Springs and elsewhere Thursday was about the resources available to the firefighters when the winds shifted so dramatically Wednesday afternoon.

Federal wildfire officials said firefighters were battling 31 major fires that had consumed more than 160,000 acres in nine Western states, including California, Montana, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Oregon and Texas. On those fire lines were more than 7,700 firefighters, 240 fire engines, 55 helicopters and 25 air tankers.

In Colorado alone, four other major fires burned Thursday. And until Wednesday morning, a blaze that burned at least five homes in the town of Paonia, about 60 miles southwest of Glenwood Springs, commanded more resources, they said.

Cindy McKee, a spokeswoman for the Colorado office of the BLM, rejected any suggestion that not enough crews were fighting the South Canyon blaze early enough.

“We put all the resources available out there when we knew the fire was growing,” she said. “When the wind got high and we had to pull the bombers back (about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday), that’s when we figured the crew must have died. It all happened simultaneously.”

Times staff writer Sahagun reported from Glenwood Springs. Special correspondent Kristina Lindgren reported from Denver. Times staff writer Tony Perry in Glenwood Springs and researcher Ann Rovin in Denver also contributed to this story.

Firefighter Deaths in the West

These are key dates when fire turned on the firefighters .

* 1910: 78 firefighters die battling blazes that burn 3 million acres in the Idaho panhandle and western Montana.

* 1933: A fire at Griffith Park engulfs and kills 29 workers on public relief who were attempting to put it out.

* 1937: Blackwater Creek fire east of Yellowstone National Park kills 17 firefighters.

* 1943: 11 firefighters perish in a blaze at Hauser Creek, Calif.

* 1949: 12 smoke jumpers with the U.S. Forestry Service and one forest ranger die in the Mann Gulch fire in Montana.

* 1953: A sudden wind change traps and kills 15 firefighters in the Mendocino National Forest in Northern California.

* 1956: Blaze in Cleveland National Forest kills 11 firefighters.

* 1959: Another Cleveland National Forest fire kills seven firefighters.

* 1966: 13 firefighters trapped and killed by fire in Angeles National Forest.

* 1971: 4 firefighters killed in Santa Barbara fire.

* 1972: 6 firefighters killed in helicopter crash in Los Padres wildfires.

* 1990: 6 firefighters killed in central Arizona wildfire.

* 1993: 2 firefighters killed in Altadena brush fire.

--Times Researcher D’Jamila Salem