Lesson of ‘94’s Killer Inferno: Question Orders

By the time Eric Hipke and the other firefighters turned to run, the fire on Storm King Mountain had swept below them and was roaring through shrubs as if they had been soaked in gasoline.

Glowing orange embers swirled around the desperate men and women as they scrambled uphill, thick smoke blocking the sun and coloring the steep slopes an eerie red. Hipke sped past them and scrambled for the safety of a ridge. He let out a yell as a blast of super hot air knocked him down, then he picked himself up and escaped down a draw.

Later, as his scorched body was loaded onto a stretcher, Hipke saw gear from the firefighters he thought were right behind him.

“I looked at that and thought they took a different route,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Thank God, they made it out.’ ”

Hipke was wrong. Ten years ago Tuesday, 14 of his colleagues died in the Storm King inferno, a disaster that has changed the way thousands of wilderness firefighters do business around the world.

Poor tactics, miscommunication and a lack of air support contributed to the deaths. But investigators discovered something else -- a firefighting culture that may have prevented those who died from raising objections and refusing a dangerous assignment.

“Investigators felt that the ‘can do’ attitude did a part,” said Jim Cook, training projects coordinator at the National Fire Operations Safety Office in Boise, Idaho. “That cut to the chase, because that’s a huge part of what we take pride in, doing the hard jobs.”

U.S. wildfire disasters date back more than two centuries. The 1949 Mann Gulch fire near Helena, Mont., killed 13 people. The Rattlesnake blaze four years later claimed 15 firefighters in Southern California.

Fire managers responded with reviews and policy changes in how to fight flames so powerful they could change the weather and so unpredictable that they could roar back through miles of burned-out terrain.

By July 6, 1994, decades of wildfire suppression had forced firefighters to learn how fire behaves in rough terrain with thick vegetation acting as seemingly endless fuel. They had hours of training on how to avoid getting into trouble and where a fire shelter -- a lightweight, silver metallic tent -- might be needed.

Yet 12 of 18 warning signs taught to all firefighters were either ignored or not recognized on Storm King, investigators found. Eight of 10 standard orders issued to ensure safety were not followed. The flames came so quickly that only one of the victims had time to crawl inside a fire shelter, and even he did not survive.What happened here that day?

Federal fire, federal crew

The lightning-sparked fire had been burning for three days when the Hotshot crew from Prineville, Ore., was sent in to dig a fire line on the flanks of Storm King. The team was young but not unusually so, ranging from Bonnie Holtby, 21, to Terri Hagen, who was 28.

There had been several offers by members of the public to snuff out the so-called South Canyon fire early on. They had been rejected because only federal crews were authorized to fight the fire, which was now stubbornly marching through the shrub oak and sending smoke into the sky above Glenwood Springs, five miles away.

The team was below a ridge when crews farther up the mountain began to see warning signs. The weather had changed, winds whipping flames that now were burning below the group and threatening to sweep uphill.

The nine-member Hotshot crew turned toward safer ground, marching along a fire line uphill accompanied by Hipke and three other smokejumpers. The group paused to consider the options, but Hipke kept moving. A minute or two later, he was knocked to the ground.

By then, 12 colleagues were dead or dying. The flames soon caught up with two more firefighters trying to reach a helicopter landing area and killed both, half a mile from the others. In town, people were looking at a mushroom cloud that reminded many of an atomic bomb blast.

“There was no place to go,” Bryan Scholz, a crew boss from Prineville, said hours after his crew died in the flames. “We kept going up the ridge, and it kept going up the ridge.”

Thirty-five firefighters on the mountain that day survived.

Hipke recalls that one of the most experienced firefighters in the group, smokejumper Jim Thrash, 44, of McCall, Idaho, raised a warning as the group began cutting oak on the steep slopes.

“He stops and says, ‘Man, this is not a good idea,’ ” Hipke recalled recently as he led a group of firefighters to the site marked by 14 granite crosses, including one for Thrash.

Waving his badly scarred arms as the firefighters looked on, Hipke described how the fire line began looking more and more like a tunnel through shrubs 6 feet to 12 feet tall.

“We were nervous about it,” Hipke said. “The spider senses started tingling and you’re just going, ‘Oh, man, how are we going to get out of this?’ ”

But no one complained to supervisors, he said. “We didn’t really go up the ladder with that.”

Silence on misgivings

Cook, who trains firefighters in leadership and decision-making, said many in the group that day had misgivings about the assignment but really didn’t have a procedure to articulate it.

“They all knew they were doing something wrong, but they kept on working,” said Patrick Richardson, an 11-year firefighting veteran with Castle Rock Fire and Rescue. “It would have taken somebody incredibly strong to say, ‘You know what, it’s time to turn around.’

“I can’t say I would have been the guy to do it,” he said.

Hipke said part of what happened is that no one -- veteran or newbie -- wanted to look weak to the others by suggesting that they should step back from the flames.

“You’ve got to look like you’re working,” he said. “ ‘You’re going to jump in and then go sit on a ridge?’ I guess it’s that sort of thing. It’s not good, but it’s a human nature kind of thing.”

He laughed sheepishly: “You want to look good for everybody else.”

Getting around that attitude is now stressed in training through a new type of class developed after the Storm King deaths. The so-called “L” classes for leadership are intended to shatter the fire-line culture where no one wants to be the first to point out dangerous situations.

“When I started, you didn’t say anything,” said Jan Hendrick, an 18-year veteran who now helps write training manuals for firefighters. “The culture was that if you said something, you were showing weakness.”

Among the specific changes since the disaster is an added emphasis on dropping tools and heavy packs when trying to escape a fire, and making a sturdier fire shelter. Fire managers are also clarifying so-called safety and deployment zones to give crews a better chance at survival should things go bad.

Perhaps the biggest change is new training designed to avoid the same overconfidence that discouraged an experienced and knowledgeable crew from turning around before the fire started its run up the mountain.

“Prior to South Canyon, training was almost exclusively technically oriented,” Cook said. “What are good tactics, how does a fire burn. We considered that to be adequate.

“We’re now focusing on human behavior [rather] than focusing on just fire behavior,” he said.

Twenty-two firefighters have died in “burn-overs” since 1994, including four who died near Winthrop, Wash., in 2001. The toll has fire managers scrambling to make sure that the lessons from Storm King are passed down.

“From the timekeeper’s class to the basic firefighting class, questioning why we’re doing this or that is now part of it,” said Steve Ellis, who oversaw training for more than 1,100 firefighters in nearby Carbondale in early June.

“We’re teaching leaders to either accept somebody’s objection or explain their decision and then be able to move on with their business,” he said.

That system seems to be working.

At a fire near Republic, Wash., in 2001, a 20-person crew from Saguache, Colo., raised objections to an assignment deemed too dangerous. Chris Dupont and Erik Rodin were among those ordered into a basin filled with dead trees as a fire burned below them -- a clear sign of danger.

“I told the squad boss, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ ” said Dupont, who was a rookie on that fire. Others in the crew agreed, including the squad boss. The crew was assigned another task.

Such disagreements now happen all the time on fires and are documented only when there is an unresolved conflict, trainers say.

“If anything, you’re congratulated for bringing it up because it makes you aware of dangerous situations,” Rodin said.

For Hipke, describing the lessons of Storm King to young firefighters has been part of his recovery. As he led a group to the 14 crosses on the mountain, he said safety somehow took a backseat that day.

“We were supposed to save our own lives,” he said. “Once we got here, we should have been able to save our own lives.”