Photos taken shortly after the Thirtymile Fire show an aerial view (upper left); the canyon after the burn (upper right); and the scene of entrapment (bottom photo). Photos courtesy Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program
In July 2001, an abandoned campfire in the Chewuch River Canyon in eastern Washington turned into a raging inferno that entrapped and killed four young firefighters. The fatalities led to unprecedented manslaughter charges against the fire incident commander, Ellreese Daniels.
The charges related to the Thirtymile Fire have roiled the wildland fire community. At the same time, it is coping with increasing fire intensity, declining budgets and greater public scrutiny as more homes burn and more lives are lost in the era of climate change-influenced wildfire.
John N. Maclean’s gripping The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, published in 2007, examines the conditions surrounding the fire in historical detail that reads like good fiction. He gets up close and personal with those involved in this fast-paced disaster, and explores the crime scene-type investigation and blame games that seem to dominate many federal fire investigations. The book also focuses on the politicization of the fire by Representative Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican, who inaccurately blamed helicopter dispatch delays on the Endangered Species Act.
The Thirtymile Fire presents a case study in inflexible policy, botched communications and failed leadership. The human-caused fire could have been contained quickly. Miscommunication between the initial attack crew and an available helicopter, along with the failure of two water pumps, allowed the escaped campfire to rapidly spread beyond control. While the helicopter dallied at its base less than ten miles away, and the broken water pumps sat idle, more exhausted firefighters arrived on the scene to confront a fast-growing fire in a dangerous setting—a canyon bottom with only one escape route.
Incident Commander (Type III) Daniels, while perhaps qualified for leading initial attack operations, soon found the fire had grown beyond his abilities. The initial decision—reached by consensus among the crew leaders—for everyone to pull back in the face of the conflagration was reversed in a haphazard way, without clear centralized leadership. During the heat of the afternoon, firefighters once again confronted the blaze. The arbitrary reengagement plan didn’t take topography into account and led to fourteen firefighters being cut off from the rest of crew, stranded with no exit and a plume-dominated firestorm raging up the canyon toward them.
Once trapped, the firefighters deployed fire shelters on the canyon floor and on a nearby rockslide. Fire intensity varied from spot to spot in the entrapment site. The four firefighters who had sheltered on the scree slope were fatally burned, while the remaining firefighters and two tourists were moderately burned or escaped injury.
The investigations that followed concluded at first that the fatalities were the fault of those killed. Outraged families forced a closer look that led to the eventual indictment of Daniels on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. He is also charged with seven counts of lying to investigators about his role in key decisions. Maclean points out that the investigations sidestepped the larger question of why the fire, located on the edge of a wilderness area in a “research natural area” with no “values at risk,” such as homes or facilities, was fought at all after it grew into a raging crown fire.
It seems the mandate to fight all human-caused fires overwhelmed the judgment of otherwise highly qualified firefighters on the scene of the Thirtymile Fire. Once it climbed out of the fuel-choked canyon and began to run up the sides, it grew rapidly, and was impossible to fight. It’s not clear whether, had the new emphasis on “appropriate management response” been in force in 2001, cooler thinking would have let the fire run in the canyon’s overgrown fuels and then spend itself in the wilderness up-canyon and on the ridges rather than risk lives on an out-of-control fire.
In a plea bargain negotiated in May 2008, the federal government dropped the manslaughter and felony charges against Daniels, who pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements. His sentencing is scheduled for June. Many firefighters feel it was inappropriate to bring criminal charges against a commander when he was operating in a stressful and complex situation in conjunction with other decision makers. For example, after the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire in New Mexico, which burned 250 homes, the burn boss and others received disciplinary action, but were shielded from criminal charges.
Maclean is no fire novice. His first book, Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire, published in 1999, detailed the fire in Colorado that killed fourteen firefighters. In his 2003 collection of essays, Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines of American Wildfire, he reexamined the Mann Gulch fire, territory covered by his father, Norman Maclean, in the book Young Men and Fire. Like his previous books, The Thirtymile Fire takes the reader behind the scenes at a major wildfire-fighting camp, where bad or uninformed decisions can have devastating consequences.