Crosses mark the site where fourteen firefighters perished battling the 1994 South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Photo © Allen Best
The slide show on forest fire issues ends, lingering on an image of the memorial to a young firefighter killed while fighting the 1999 La Jolla Fire in California. A heavy silence suddenly takes over the auditorium.
Rich Fairbanks, a retired U.S. Forest Service planner with twenty years of firefighting experience, breaks the silence. “You hear a lot about the escalating costs of fighting fires in the West, but the human cost is higher,” he says. “When you know that there is a better way to manage fire, this cost becomes unacceptable.”
Ever since the 1994 wildfire season, which took the lives of thirty–five firefighters and cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion, two of the hot–button issues in federal wildland fire management have been firefighter fatalities and suppression costs.
Numerous reports have attempted to analyze the causes of increased expenditures and have offered recommendations for controlling costs and ensuring greater fiscal accountability. Yet, in none of these reports has the issue of firefighter fatalities been raised as one of the primary costs of the federal government’s self–declared war on wildfire.
Several investigations have examined the multiple causes of fatal firefighter accidents (see sidebar, p. 23). Few reports, however, have analyzed the role that economics may have played in causing accidents, or have examined the role that firefighter fatalities played in the costs of suppression. Historically, money was no object in determining firefighting tactics, but this may change in the future as budget cuts result in staff or resource shortages that could cause otherwise preventable accidents. Although firefighter fatalities are recognized as huge personal and social losses, they were never factored in as “economic” losses that directly or indirectly affected suppression costs.
According to statistics compiled by the National Interagency Fire Center, from 1910 to 2006 a total of 945 wildland firefighters were killed on duty. Half of these deaths were caused by “burnovers” when firefighters were trapped, overrun and killed by flames. More than a third of all burnover incidents occurred during fires that caused multiple fatalities. These were the wildfires that literally burned themselves into the collective memory of firefighters—incidents such as the Big Blowup of 1910, which killed seventy–two firefighters; the 1933 Griffith Park Fire, which claimed twenty–five crew members; the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire, which killed thirteen smokejumpers; and the 1994 South Canyon Fire, which took the lives of fourteen firefighters.
Beginning in the 1980s there was a dramatic increase in motor vehicle accidents related to fighting fires. Driving in smoky conditions on steep slopes or on poorly maintained gravel logging roads caused several fatal rollovers. Many firefighters also died on the nation’s highways, far from the fireline, while traveling to or from assignments. In 2003, eight firefighters were killed when their van crashed while heading home from a fire dispatch. Agencies have responded with more defensive–driving training, but fatal vehicle accidents are becoming more frequent, mainly due to the increased number of miles firefighters are driving when large fires mobilize crews from across the country.
The number of fatal heart attacks experienced by firefighters is also on the rise, particularly among private contractors and volunteers. The first fatal heart attack suffered by a volunteer firefighter was in 1994; volunteers now account for a full third of all heart attacks. Volunteer firefighters are often the first responders to fires in the wildland–urban interface, but the rise in numbers of heart attacks may also be because volunteers tend to be older and less physically fit than their federal and state counterparts. Five individuals died when they suffered heart attacks while taking the work capacity test to determine their physical fitness for duty on the firelines.
In 1997, the National Interagency Fire Center began recording non–fatal burnovers and created a new incident category called entrapment, which occurs when firefighters are cut off from their escape routes and safety zones but are not necessarily burned over. A dozen firefighters have lost their lives in entrapments. Since 1997, three–quarters of burnovers and entrapments have not resulted in fatalities, which could be an indication that improved safety training has taught more firefighters how to survive those situations.
What is clear is that burnover incidents have an immediate impact in raising the amount of firefighting power available to contain the blaze. “Before a burnover, it may be difficult to get resources ordered from dispatch centers, especially on low–priority wildfires,” says Kent Maxwell, coordinator of Colorado Firecamp and an instructor of firefighter safety. “After a burnover, though—and especially one causing fatalities—you can get pretty much everything you want.”
Any time a firefighter is killed during a burnover, the suppression operation automatically elevates to a Type 1 incident that brings in thirty–five–member incident management teams composed of the most experienced (and most expensive) fire managers. These teams, in turn, can order up as many as twice their number of fireline supervisors, including several safety officers. Maxwell offers the example of the 2006 Devil’s Den Fire where a Bureau of Land Management assistant fire management officer was killed. Before the fatality, the fire was run by a Type 4 incident commander, with the incident costing an average of $40,000 per day. After the tragedy, suppression costs jumped to over $400,000 per day when the Type 1 team took over.
Maxwell points out that each fatal incident entails indirect costs, including death benefits to families, educational benefits to children, and judgments for personal loss in liability lawsuits that can add up to $3 million per firefighter. Some incidents lead to costly investigations. Maxwell speculates that the Forest Service spent millions of dollars to investigate Washington State’s 2001 Thirtymile Fire, in which four firefighters died, and to implement the Thirtymile Hazard Abatement Plan, a series of policy changes intended to prevent another such tragedy.
Current conditions in the nation’s forests are increasing the risk for firefighters.Global warming is altering vegetation and fuels, fostering longer wildfire seasons and more extreme fire behavior; continued fire suppression is causing hazardous fuels to accumulate; suburban sprawl in fire–prone wildlands is creating vulnerable homes and communities; and federal budget deficits are resulting in shortages of government resources. In short, wildland firefighters will have to do more with less, which makes the risk of fatalities even greater and further increases the ultimate cost of fighting fire.
When wildland firefighters are killed in the line of duty, they pay the ultimate price for the nation’s war on wildfire. “There is a ripple effect of heartache that runs through each victim’s families, friends, coworkers and communities that will last their lifetimes,” said Matthew Rutman, one of the survivors of the Thirtymile Fire burnover. “How can you quantify that pain in terms of dollars that makes any sense?”