Fire (2 page)

1992

L
ate in the afternoon of July 26, 1989, a dry lightning storm swept through the mountains north of Boise, Idaho, and lit what seemed like the whole world on fire.

A dry lightning storm is a storm where the rain never reaches the ground. It evaporates in midair, trailing down from swollen cumulus clouds in long, graceful strands called virga. The electrical charges from a dry storm do not trail off before they hit the ground, however; they rip into the mountains like artillery. On July 26, 1989, lightning was hitting the upper ridges of the Boise National Forest at the rate of a hundred strikes an hour. Automatic lightning detectors at the Boise Interagency Fire Center were registering, all over the western states, rates up around two thousand an hour. By nightfall 120 fires had caught and held north of Boise, little one-acre blazes that eventually converged into a single unstoppable, unapproachable front known as the Lowman fire.

For the first three days Lowman was simply one among hundreds of fires that were cooking slowly through the parched Idaho forests. Around four o'clock in the afternoon of July 29, however, the flames reached some dead timber in a place called Steep Creek, just east of the town of Lowman, and the fire changed radically. The timber was from a blowdown two years earlier and was so dry that when the flames touched it, the entire drainage went up. The fire created its own convection winds, making the fire burn hotter and hotter until the fire behavior spiraled completely out of control. Temperatures at the heart of the blaze reached two thousand degrees. A column of smoke and ash rose eight miles up into the atmosphere. Trees were snapped in half by the force of the convection winds.

The fire rolled across Highway 21 and right through the eastern edge of town, detonating propane tanks and burning twenty-six buildings to the ground. A pumper crew was trapped at the Haven Lodge, and they hid behind their truck and finally stumbled out of the blaze an hour later, safe but nearly blind. The fire had attained a critical mass and was reinforcing itself with its own heat and flames, a feedback loop known as a fire storm. The only thing people can do, in the face of such power, is get out of the way and hope the weather changes.

Which they did, and which it did, but not until a month later, after forty-six thousand acres of heavy timber had been turned to ash.

I saw the site of the Lowman fire in 1992, three years afterward, when the ponderosa seedlings were already greening the hillsides. A roadside plaque said that eight million ponderosa and Douglas fir would be hand-planted by the mid-1990s. The plaque went on to describe how the land had been treated with enzymes so that water and microorganisms could penetrate soil that was now seared to the consistency of hard plastic. Thousands of flame-killed trees had been dropped laterally along the slopes to keep the land from washing away, and thirty thousand acres had been planted with grass and fast-growing bitterbrush. In a hundred years, more or less, the area would again look the way it once had.

I was driving a big, painfully beautiful loop from Ketchum, Idaho, around the Sawtooth Mountains and down the South Fork of the Payette River toward Boise. It was late afternoon when I drove through the Lowman burn, and the quiet darkness of the dead valleys depressed me. The West was well into one of the worst droughts of the century, and I was out there to see the wildfires that it was sure to produce. My idea was to go to Boise—where all the fire-fighting resources were coordinated—tell them I was a writer, and hope they let me on afire.

I pulled off down an old logging road and pitched my tent in a clear-cut. It seemed to get dark very quickly that night, and I cooked spaghetti on my camping stove and went to sleep listening to the weekend traffic die down on Highway 21. The Lowman fire, I'd heard, had burned so hot that Highway 21 had melted. There were places, I'd heard, where fire trucks had left their tread marks as they rushed from Boise to fight the flames.

 

I
n 1965 the U.S. government established the Boise Interagency Fire Center to coordinate the three federal agencies—the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Forest Service, and what was then known as the Weather Bureau—that were engaged in fighting wildfire in America. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service were added later, and the name was ultimately changed to the National Interagency Fire Center. Two years after BIFC was established, the Northern Rockies were hit with a catastrophically bad season that culminated in the Sundance fire in northern Idaho. BIFC managed to deploy thirteen thousand men and thousands of tons of supplies, prompting a study by the Office of Civil Defense, which was trying to figure out how to handle a similar crisis in the event of a nuclear war.

BIFC is located next to the Boise airport, across the interstate, south of town. The lobby is filled with the sort of display that, were you even vaguely inclined toward a job fighting fire, would make you move out west on the spot. There is a smoke jumper mannequin in full jump gear, including a wire face mask for when the jumper goes crashing into the treetops. There is a board with everything—food, medical supplies, tools—a jumper needs for forty-eight hours on a fire. There are color photos of air tankers dropping retardant and sheets of flame rising from stands of trees. One photo shows a fire in dense forest on the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon. “The total-timber jump spot,” the caption reads, “trees in this photo are between 80 and 125 feet tall. Five of six smokejumpers committed to this fire ‘hung up' in trees, thus the rope carried in the leg pocket for a ‘let-down.' The fire was stopped at a quarter-acre.”

A short, powerful man named Ken Franz—one of the Boise smoke jumpers, as it turned out—spotted me loitering in the lobby and came over to investigate. I told him I was interested in wildfire, and he motioned me into a cluttered conference room and sat me down at a long table to tell me the basics. Behind Franz was a map of the western United States that covered most of one wall. There were seven red circles on it around seven towns: McCall, Idaho; Boise, Idaho; Missoula, Montana; Redmond, Oregon; Redding, California; Silver City, New Mexico; and Winthrop, Washington. Franz turned and pointed to them.

“Those are the smoke jumper bases,” he said. “We are constantly getting sent from one place to another; you never know where you're going to be the next day, or the next week. They just shift resources around to wherever the hazard is greatest.”

That shifting of resources, Franz explained, is what BIFC is designed for. Everything from government-issue paper sleeping bags to food to foam fire retardant to Ken Franz himself is shipped around the country, following fires, following thunderstorms, even following droughts. There are 410 smoke jumpers and perhaps 20,000 active and on-call fire fighters in the United States. Should a smoke jumper's father die, say, or his house burn down, BIFC would know what state, what fire, what division, and what 20-person crew he was on. Should an air tanker go down en route from Denver to Missoula—one of hundreds of flights during a busy day fighting fires out west—BIFC would know what route it was taking and when it was supposed to arrive. The immense task of keeping track of all these things is accomplished at the logistics center on the top floor of the main BIFC building, across the parking lot. Across one wall of the room is a huge map of the country. Cardboard cutouts representing airplanes are moved around on it; cards representing fire crews are switched from “available” to “unavailable” slots. More detailed information is stored on a computer. In late August 1987 lightning started two thousand fires across the West that burned almost a million acres. In ten days 22,500 fire fighters and forty-five tons of supplies were deployed to fight the fires. BIFC accounted for every chain saw, every hard hat, every gallon of retardant.

“Smoke jumpers are considered an initial attack force,” Franz went on. “That's a generic term for the first response to a fire. The classic situation would be a lightning-struck tree in a remote area where two guys jump in, fell it, buck it up—put out what amounts to a small campfire. Basically, the whole world's a jump spot; within a mile of any fire you can usually find a very acceptable place to land in. On a big fire you have to start somewhere, so you jump a whole planeload and establish an anchor point, at the tail of the fire. You clear helispots for landing supplies, and you work your way around the sides of the fire.”

Smoke jumpers land with eighty pounds' worth of gear, including two parachutes, puncture-proof Kevlar suits, freeze-dried food, fire shelters, and a few personal effects. Following them in cardboard boxes heaved out of the airplane with cargo chutes are chain saws, shovels, ax-hoe hybrids called Pulaskis, sleeping bags, plastic cubitainers of water, and dozens of other things needed on a fire. If there's an injured jumper, a medical emergency pack comes out of the plane. If it's a fast-moving fire, the crew can call for boxes of explosives that can blast an instant fire line in the forest duff. The list of what can be thrown at a fire is endless—and expensive. A more cynical view, popular among many, is that the government puts fires out by throwing money on them until it starts to rain.

Not much of the money, however, goes to the fire crews. A jumper makes about $8.50 an hour. If the fire is uncontrolled, as, since smoke jumpers are initial attack, it almost always is, the crews get another 25 percent hazard pay. If they work overtime—again, almost a sure bet—they get time and a half. The jump itself has been ruled as simply another way of getting to the fire, like a bus or a pickup truck, so jumpers get straight pay when they leave the airplane and time and a quarter when they hit the ground. If they are injured on the jump, however, and don't make it to the fire, the hazard pay does not kick in. From fifteen hundred feet it takes about a minute and a half to reach the ground with a parachute. At $8.50 an hour, that's about 21 cents.

“In a good year you can make almost thirty thousand dollars,” said Franz. (As with all fire fighters, a “good” year is a year with a lot of fires; a “good” fire is a fire that isn't brought under control too quickly.) “Under twenty thousand is more typical. That's for six months. The rest of the year we sew.”

They sew everything: harnesses, fire line packs, jump bags, even little duffels with the BIFC flame logo on the side. They do it to save the government money, they do it because they're better sewers than most manufacturers, and they do it to keep themselves employed. The only thing they don't sew are the parachutes. Some jumpers are certified to make repairs, but the chutes themselves are bought from a manufacturer. The parachutes the BLM uses cost a thousand dollars apiece and are expected, with upkeep, to last at least ten years. They were of a design invented by a French kite maker in the early 1900s. They are called Quantum Q5 Ram Air parachutes.

“Ram air
means there are cells that fill with air,” said Franz. “They make the canopy so rigid you could walk across it. You could also put a line on it and fly it like a kite; in Alaska, jumpers fly their chutes like kites. You steer with toggles and have a forward speed of twenty miles an hour. It's a very high tech delivery system for a very low tech job; once we hit the ground we're just fire fighters. Afterward we have to pack ten miles or more, to the nearest helispot. Our gear weighs over one hundred pounds, and usually we're not even on trails; it's harder work than fighting fires. It keeps you honest.”

Honest means capable of enduring a training regimen that used to weed out 30 percent of the preselected men at the training camp (overwhelmingly men, but not entirely). Rookies are considered the fittest and most perfectly trained because they have endured boot camp most recently: three hours of workouts a day, a jump simulator called the Mutilator, an array of courses and tests that virtually guarantee you'll pull your ripcord after jumping out of the plane. Overwhelmingly, it works, though not always. In 1991 a jumper in Montana was killed because he didn't reach for his ripcord until “ground rush,” when it was too late. The entire thing was caught on video because it was a training jump. The consensus was he froze.

“The biggest hazard is probably the fire itself,” Franz told me. “Felling burning snags, logs rolling down hillsides. Jumping is usually a relief. It's hot in the airplane, and sometimes you feel sick; then suddenly you're totally focused on what you're doing. It's a little dreamlike.”

After our talk Franz took me for a quick tour of the jump loft. He showed me the rigging room where the chutes are packed, and the sewing room, and the weight room. Afterward we returned to the conference table, and he popped a short tape into the VCR. It was quick and unprofessional but highly dramatic. It showed a jump crew working a fire at night, right on the line. At one point a sawyer was cutting down a huge ponderosa, and his saw was halfway through the trunk when flames started pouring out like liquid. The tree was hollowed out by fire, it turned out, and was drawing like a chimney. The sawyer kept cutting; the flames kept spurting; eventually the tree fell.

As I left, I asked Franz—against all hope—if there were any fires around for me to see. He told me I'd just missed a good one. An older couple from Pennsylvania had been towing a car behind their RV, and the car got a flat tire; sparks started a fire front two miles wide. Six thousand acres, a million dollars to put out.

“I suspect the government will try to collect too,” he said. “Try the dispatch office; they'll know what's going on.”