Wildfire Crews Broke All of the Rules, With Fatal Outcome, Forest Service Says

In a scathing assessment of its own performance, the U.S. Forest Service said Wednesday that its crews broke every basic firefighting rule and suffered a series of equipment and management failures that resulted in the July deaths of four firefighters in a remote northern Washington canyon.

The Thirty Mile wildfire was the nation’s deadliest since 1994 and came early in a season that so far has consumed 2.84 million acres across the West and left 15 people dead.

A 2 1/2-month internal investigation revealed:

* A near-complete breakdown in procedures that left a small number of fatigued crew members battling an out-of-control blaze with water pumps that malfunctioned.

* A helicopter had delayed its water drops because of concerns over endangered salmon in the nearby river.

* Communications and command were so fractured that the doomed firefighters did not seem to realize the danger they faced until it was too late; they wasted precious moments talking, watching, even snapping photos, until the fire suddenly blew over them “like a snowstorm,” one of them said.

“The Thirty Mile Fire tragedy could have been prevented,” Deputy Forest Service Chief Jim Furnish said grimly. “At several points in the fire, decisions could have been made and actions could have been taken that could have prevented this. . . . But tragically, all 10 of 10 standard fire orders were overlooked, ignored or violated.”

The Thirty Mile wildfire was the nation’s deadliest since 1994 and came early in a season that so far has consumed 2.84 million acres across the West and left 15 people dead. Forest Service officials said the tragedy points out--especially alongside the deaths of hundreds of firefighters, police officers and paramedics at the World Trade Center--the risks faced by emergency crews from the nation’s cities to the distant edges of the wilderness.

“I’d like to remind everyone that firefighting is a very dangerous occupation, whether you’re fighting a wild-land fire or are called in to respond to an urban terrorism situation,” Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth said in releasing the report Wednesday. “Sometimes, no matter how much safety is stressed, accidents do occur--with tragic results.”

Ten firefighters who became trapped in the canyon July 10 survived the onrushing flames, most by huddling in aluminum-and-fiberglass shelters pitched on a road near the river. Four others who erected their shelters on a rocky slope above the road--against the orders of the incident commander--perished.

Tom Craven, 30; Devin Weaver, 21; Jessica Johnson, 19; and 18-year-old Karen FitzPatrick all died from inhaling superheated air, investigators said.

The high level of firefighter fatigue was a central theme of the report; it repeatedly depicted fire managers struggling to find snatches of sleep time for crew members in the campgrounds amid the fire.

The Thirty Mile blaze started at an abandoned campsite at a time when most resources in the Okanogan National Forest were focused on a major fire several miles south. A specially trained “hot-shot” crew--working on half an hour’s sleep--arrived and worked all night trying to put the blaze down. Then they rested while the 21-member Northwest Regulars crew took over.

Most of that group were rookies who had undergone only the basic 32-hour Forest Service training course. Their mission was to attack hot spots of the fire, which had burned only about 25 acres along the river the night before. Investigators said the crew had no access to detailed weather reports for the area, which was experiencing temperatures approaching 100 degrees, with very low humidity and moderate wind. A lengthy drought, officials said, had created conditions of “near historic” potential fire intensity.

From top to bottom, the internal report says, fire managers seemed to lack “situational awareness.” They also “consistently underestimated” the potential danger of the situation, because of the fire’s relatively mild behavior in its initial stages.

And an inability to get water on the blaze made things worse. Two pumps that normally would have drawn large amounts of water out of the river kept failing, investigators said, possibly due to improper use of the valves and the crew’s lack of experience with pumps and hoses. “Several hoses burst. Some [firefighters] felt that the hoses were old and the pump was ‘picky,’ ” the report says. “At least four [fire ax/shovels] broke during operations on the east side of the river.”

While trying to make do with the equipment they had, the Northwest Regulars called for helicopter water drops. They were told at noon that a copter was nearby; but about 30 minutes later, a dispatcher told fire officials that they needed permission under the Endangered Species Act to dip water out of the Chewuch River, which is a habitat for dwindling salmon populations. The permission did not come until two hours later and the helicopter didn’t arrive until shortly before 3 p.m. It worked until 4 or 4:15 p.m., when it needed to refuel.

(Investigators downplayed the role the helicopter delay played in the tragedy. The two pumps--had they been working--would have been able to deliver far more water than a helicopter, which can only dump a couple of bathtubs’ worth at a time.)

By late afternoon, the Northwest Regulars had awakened the exhausted hot-shot crew--and determined that the blaze had grown beyond their capability to wipe it out quickly.

After stopping briefly to rest and eat, three Northwest Regulars squads then were called farther up the road to help two firetruck crews trying to stamp out hot spots.

That, investigators said, is when the real makings of the disaster were put into place: crew members were working without a reliable escape route, in a situation with confused chains of command, against a fire with deadly potential that they did not fully grasp.

As soon as Squad 3 arrived at one hot spot, they realized the fire was advancing on the only road out. They quickly drove back down the road and called to Squads 1 and 2, positioned about a quarter-mile farther up, to warn them of the impending danger.

Ellrese Daniels, the incident commander at that location, saw a “wall of flames” coming, saw they would be unable to escape, got everyone into a van and drove about a mile back up the canyon, scouting for safety zones.

He settled on a site on the road with a broad rock slope and a sandbar alongside it. Not long thereafter, two campers showed up--fire officials had failed to close off the road until midafternoon.

Confusion and indecision seemed to reign among the 14 crew members assembled on the road. There was no briefing about the possible need to deploy tent shelters. “Several of the firefighters were worried that there was not a collective sense of urgency to prepare for an impending crisis,” Furnish said.

At 5:24 p.m., “the behavior of the fire changed dramatically,” the report says. Even without trees or brush nearby, “the immensity of the fire overwhelmed the area and the crew.” With the fire “coming very fast, roaring,” as one survivor described it, “shelter deployment was no longer optional, but essential if any were to survive.”

Daniels yelled at his squad members to deploy their tents on the relative safety of the road, but those orders were “disregarded” by at least six crew members, who pitched their shelters up on the rocks. Two of them later abandoned their positions in the midst of the firestorm and ran for the river--which apparently saved their lives.

All four of those who remained on the slope died. The two civilians survived because firefighter Rebecca Welch pulled them into her own tent.

In the end, the report says, the fire crews and management violated every one of the 10 standard fire orders that Furnish said are “drummed into” every firefighter--rules such as “fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first,” “ensure that instructions are given and understood,” “determine safety zones and escape routes” and “stay alert, keep calm, think clearly, act decisively.”

“Leadership was fragmented and ineffective at all levels during the afternoon of July 10th,” the report says.

The report did not sit well with the widow of one of the firefighters.

“Oh, my gosh, I’m so mad,” Evelyn Craven told Associated Press.

“It just sounded like they were trying to pin the blame on insubordination, or negligence, or disregard,” she said. “We do not appreciate that.

“When they said orders were given and disregarded, it sounded like Tom disregarded an order,” Craven said. He was not one to do that, she said.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said the report raises a number of questions about the quality of fire management and training in the agency.

“To prevent future deaths, we must answer those questions fully, but we must also take immediate action to ensure that these same questions never again lie at the heart of such a tragedy,” she said.

“We owe it to the families of the victims and the citizens of Washington state to understand what went wrong in the Thirty Mile fire and to ensure the safety of all firefighters in the future.”

Bosworth said Forest Service officials are committed to implementing the investigative team’s recommendations.

“What we have here is an investigative report that looked at what happened and why it happened,” he said. “The next step is to look at what we can do in the future, and accountability.”