Chapter 4: Season of Fire

Thirtymile

y early July I am anxious for some fires to start – a perverse thought, but one that I really can’t help. June has been pretty quiet, plus I’d been busy getting my firefighter training and watching smokejumpers fall out of airplanes. By July 8, a dozen large fires of 500 acres or more are burning in California, Montana, Washington, Oregon and Colorado. One of the worst fires of the season is one called the Martis Fire, which started June 17 in a forested, mountainous area southwest of Reno, Nevada. The fire had burned briskly through stands of pinõn juniper and Ponderosa pine, and within a week had torched more than 14,000 acres. But without much else going on, fire managers were able to mount an all-out assault. At the peak of their attack, 50 firefighting crews – or about 1,000 firefighters – were grubbing out a line around the fire, backed up by 61 fire engines, a dozen bulldozers and a dozen heavy helicopters. The tone for an expensive fire season is set early, with more than $11 million spent on what is at worst a moderate fire. Still, fire managers continue to act wary, with severe drought persisting. Talking to reporters when the Martis Fire was about 75 percent contained, incident commander Pat Murphy sounds a note of caution. “I've been involved in wildland firefighting for nearly 35 years, and I can't remember a summer where I've seen vegetation so dry,” Murphy tells reporters covering the fire. 

Fire managers also are sweating it out in Oregon and Washington, two states that had largely escaped the big fires of 2000 through dumb luck more than anything else. Although these states are best known nationally for the wet weather experienced in Seattle and Portland, much of their terrain actually is typical of forested areas found as far away as Arizona and New Mexico. The Ponderosa pine is the dominant tree, and like Ponderosa pine forests elsewhere, most of the pine timberland here had become overgrown and dog-haired in the past 50 years. Century-old photos taken from Leavenworth, in the central part of the Washington, show a mosaic of tree groves and wide grassy meadows on the steep hills around the town. By the 1990s those meadows had filled in with trees, creating volatile fire conditions. In July of 1994, for instance, fires dubbed the Hatchery Fire and Rat Creek fires almost swept down into Leavenworth, jumping Highway 2 and several rivers as they burned a combined 60,000 acres and destroyed a number of homes in the scenic Icicle Canyon outside of Leavenworth. A good friend of mine, who owned a weekend home in Leavenworth, had stood on his back porch and watched the ridge crest above his home glow orange against the black night sky. He was lucky; the fire had not run downhill, as a fire so often can by tossing burning pine cones or embers down the hill in front of it.

s July progresses, things begin to pick up. In the Naches Ranger District, a Forest Service district in central Washington, just east of Mount Rainier,  a fire crew that Karen FitzPatrick, Rebecca Welch and Jessica Johnson have been assigned to is stationed in a barracks-like camp not far from Mount Rainier. For a week, they are kept busy clearing brush from parking lots, thinning overgrown woodlands from near roads and sawing out fallen logs over trails in addition to training in preparation for their first fire. Then their first real fire broke out, on July 2.  For Jessica Johnson, a slender 22-year-old who had worked as a volunteer and part-time employee at a fire department in Yakima before seeking better money in forest fires, the 250-acre Woodshed Fire was no big deal. But some of the newcomers, including Rebecca Welch, are thrilled. Her crew responds at 2 p.m. to the lightning-set fire, then patrols the fire lines all night. The next evening Welch excitedly calls her parents in Lancaster, California. “This was the coolest thing!” she tells them about fighting the fire. “I want to fight fires forever.”

A week later, Washington state sees its first “project fire” of the years. A project fire is a blaze that escapes from initial attack crews and begins to march across woodland. It becomes a project – with command teams brought in, resources such as helicopters and extra fire engines ordered, perhaps a call to the regional fire center in Portland, Oregon for extra firefighting crews. This new fire is called Libby South, and burns across wooded ridges a few miles from the Columbia River, in the northern part of Washington.

It is a human-caused fire – although not one that got its start due to a careless match. Instead, a Washington State Department of Natural Resources truck, with a crew that was working to clear debris from a logging road – in order, ironically, to improve fire access – had driven across dry grass. The truck’s catalytic converter, hot from the drive and probably topping 600 degrees, ignited the grass, and the fire had quickly grown. Air temperatures were well into the 90s and humidity around 10 percent, resulting in a fire that burns hot and fast. By 8 p.m. on July 9 the fire has ripped through 800 acres of Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir growing in steep, rough terrain, and it keeps going even as night fell and temperatures cooled. By the next morning the Libby South has spread to 1,400 acres. Fire crews scramble into action from around the eastern portion of the state, and by early July 10 some 400 firefighters are digging line around the blaze, supported by two helicopters and 40 fire engines.

Still, it is clear that more firefighters are needed if the fire is to be held; conditions are more like August than July, and fire managers intent on keeping in check as many early season fires as possible. Phone calls go out to Forest Service stations in a wide area, including to the fire crews in Naches, Leavenworth and Lake Wenatchee. The phones begin to ring shortly after midnight, awakening sleeping crews. They tripped over boots scattered around the floor and lined up for the bathrooms before climbing into trucks and heading for the little town Twisp, where the Libby fire base is set up in a high school athletic field.

 hear about the Libby fire from TV news and radio reports, and am considering heading over there on July 11. I walk out on my driveway that morning to collect the daily papers, and shake the Seattle Post-Intelligencer open as I walk back inside, looking forward to the Art Thiel column about the previous night’s All-Star baseball game, played in Seattle. Instead, my eyes catch a page 1 headline. “Four killed fighting raging wildfire,” it reads.

An hour later I’m speeding east toward Twisp on a circuitous route over Snoqualmie Pass on Interstate 90, north over Blewett Pass, then past Wenatchee and up the Columbia River. By then, I know little more from morning television and radio – a fire had blown up, trapping a team of firefighters and killing four. A Forest Service team is heading in from Washington, D.C. to investigate. And now two big fires, not just one, are burning in the Methow Valley area.

As I near Twisp, a small town in the Methow Valley where the attack on the South Libby fire is based, I see smoke rising from ridges to my left, and helicopters darting here and there dropping buckets of water. I figure that’s the fire that caught the crew. But I soon learn I’m wrong. In Twisp, inside the ranger station, I run into Ron DeHart, a Forest Service public information officer whom I knew from my earlier efforts to get into a Forest Service Fire Guard class. I ask him, stupidly, how things are going. DeHart, an affable man with neatly coiffed hair, puffed his cheeks and blows air out in a “whoosh.” “Rough,” he says, shaking his head. “This is unbelievable. It was supposed to be a little mop-up operation.” DeHart pointed out the location of the catastrophe on a large map of the area hanging on a wall. “That’s where the Thirtymile Fire is burning,” he said. It was the first time I’d heard the name – it wasn’t the Libby South fire that had caused the tragedy.

By then, TV and newspaper reporters are swarming into the Libby South fire base, a few miles north of Twisp, overwhelming media contacts and then fanning out to talk with the wary firefighters who are beginning to pour into the area from across the Pacific Northwest. The Thirtymile Fire  burned nearly 8,000 acres the previous day, and that – combined with the fact it has killed four firefighters – has pushed it to the top of the national priority list. No longer a “mop up,” the full weight of America’s firefighting elite is now going to fall upon this fire and kick the living hell out of it. Even then, not 20 hours after the tragedy, a strange air of catharsis is building – a sense of punishing this fire for the awful thing it had done.

Gary Locke, the governor of Washington state, flies in on a helicopter that afternoon, tours Libby South fire base and gets a briefing from fire managers who are focusing now on the Thirtymile. “Everybody is shaken up over the tragedy that occurred,” says Locke, a compact, black-haired man, the only governor of Asian descent in the United States, as reporters cluster around. “Firefighters are a very tight-knit group of people. The ones that we lost were really just in the prime of their life, graduates of high school, going off to college, people in college looking forward to studying, getting a degree and actually joining the fire service or the local fire departments, so this is quite a tragedy.” Then he says something I think utterly inane – something about how he hopes it would rain soon and end the drought, but not on a weekend, when Washington residents want to get out of town and enjoy the outdoors.

I drive over to the smokejumper base at Winthrop, hoping to bump into someone I might know. In the office I see Troy Corn, a fire manager with the Wenatchee National Forest who had been at Fire Guard School. He looks glassy-eyed and stunned. Gabe Jasso, who also had taught a class, bustles by. I introduce myself, but nobody wants to talk. Outside, though, I run into a bearded man who is a psychologist from the town of Omak, 30 miles away. He’s been talking to the survivors, he tells me, helping them come to grips with what had happened. “They’ve seen death,” he says. “They’re pretty rattled.” That night, in a Winthrop hotel room, I’m kept awake by the constant rumble of trucks moving through town en route to Eight-Mile Camp, a rancher’s field designated as the fire base for the more than 1,000 firefighters heading this way.

he next morning, at a press briefing in Twisp, we meet Jim Furnish, who has arrived from Washington, D.C. the day before to lead the investigation. Furnish is an instantly credible source in what has been a sea of confusion. Tall, balding, with deeply set eyes under a broad, high forehead, Furnish was a 34-year veteran of the Forest Service, and at the time is a deputy chief for the agency. He and other investigators already have been to the scene where the four were killed, and he says it could have been worse had the crew not stopped there, in a spot where the road and the river afforded some shelter from the flames. It was, says Furnish, “a perfect place,” to make a stand. And Furnish adds this astonishing detail: Two campers had been trapped by the fire as well, driving down the Chewuch River Road to find 14 firefighters awaiting a wall of flame. They had jumped into a fire shelter with one of the firefighters, Rebecca Welch, and survived. “Where’s Rebecca?” a half-dozen reporters shout. “Can we talk with her?”

Two days after the fire I return to Seattle. I have a rather pressing social engagement (my stepdaughter’s wedding) and weigh what little I was learning in Twisp against that event and made an easy choice. A week later, though, I’m back in Twisp. The effort against the Thirtymile Fire continues, with Eight-mile Camp filled with weary firefighters in the evening, with others “spiked out” overnight in remote wilderness camps.  From the Twisp ranger station I call Furnish, who is holed up in a hotel in Omak along with a dozen other Forest Service fire experts – specialists in fuels, weather, crew management and fire suppression tactics – to begin sifting through their reports on the fire. “Come on over,” he tells me. “I could use some lunch.”

I meet him in a conference room in the basement of the hotel, its walls plastered with maps and photos of the fire scene, a small TV monitor in the corner playing a taped interview of one of the crew members. We get into my Subaru wagon and drive into town, to a quiet restaurant called the Breadline Café that serves a surprisingly cosmopolitan array of salads and sandwiches for such a remote place. It’s surprising as well to notice the narrow gap between fortune and failure. Winthrop, like Omak a one-time logging and mining center, is flourishing under a crush of tourists. Omak, just one mountain ridge further east, is a dusty, hard-bitten town, with hardly a hotel in sight.

urnish is a career Forest Service guy, who had worked in a half-dozen national forests, held desk jobs and field jobs, and was a self-admitted veteran of the “old” Forest Service that saw its job as pulling as many logs out of the national forests as possible. In recent years, however, he’s had a change of heart, even writing an article for Forest Magazine, the house magazine for the Eugene, Oregon-based Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, an organization comprised of current and former agency employees who took a dim view of its common forestry practices. He senses that his assignment to head the investigation was almost ordained, a chance to bring to bear his decades of experience. “It seems fitting that I do this now,” he says to me as we drive under a leaden overcast, the remnants of a wet front that has largely stalled the Thirtymile Fire a few days before. “I think I can bring some perspective to this investigation. Plus, I’m retiring soon, so I feel like I can speak my mind.”

Furnish drops few thunderbolts during a long lunch in a quiet corner of The Breadline. But on a sheet of yellow paper torn from my legal pad, he begins to sketch out what took place in that terrible hour between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., July 10, on a remote stretch of road along the Chewuch River. He is appalled at not only the loss of life, but at the way in which those deaths had occurred. “It is not,” he says, “a rosy scenario.” We talk for more than an hour, as I urgently take notes. I had hoped for a big fire soon, and now feel awful about doing so.