Fire (8 page)

Above him, the BLM and upper Prineville crews had abandoned hope of reaching H-1 and scrambled north toward H-2. When that route too was blocked, they turned and plunged over the ridge. Due south, one hundred feet below H-1, the eight smoke jumpers who had been ordered out by Don Mackey fifteen minutes earlier were crawling under their foil shelters to wait out the approaching fire storm. At Canyon Creek far below, a crew of fresh smoke jumpers who were preparing to hike in watched in horror as eight little silver squares appeared on the mountainside. Meanwhile, hidden from view by smoke, Mackey, the Prineville nine, and the three smoke jumpers were running a race only one of them, Hipke, would win.

In the end twelve of the dead were found along the lower fire line. Prineville hotshot Scott Blecha had also run past Thrash but lost his race a hundred feet from the ridgeline. The rest were in two main groups below a tree—
the
tree, as it came to be known, where Haugh had started his run—a few clumped so close together that their bodies were actually touching. Only smoke jumpers Thrash and Roger Roth had deployed their shelters, but the blistering heat disintegrated the foil. Kathi Beck died alongside Thrash, partly under his shelter. It seemed that in his last agony, Thrash may have tried to pull her in. In addition, Richard Tyler and Robert Browning, two fire fighters deployed earlier to direct helicopter operations, perished just north of H-2, only a few hundred feet from a rocky area that might have saved them.

The Prineville nine's dash for safety ended after three hundred feet. They were caught just three or four seconds before Haugh himself cleared the ridgetop, and he could hear their screams over his radio. Reconstructing the details of the victims' agonized last seconds would occupy many hours of professional counseling for the survivors.

Dying in a fire is often less a process of burning than of asphyxiation. Their suffering was probably intense but short-lived. Pathologists looked for carbon in their lungs and upper airways and found none, which meant the victims weren't breathing when the fire passed over them. Their lungs were filled with fluid, their throats were closed in laryngeal spasms—responses to superheated air—and their blood contained toxic levels of carbon monoxide. This gas, given off during incomplete combustion, displaces oxygen in the blood and kills very quickly.

“They died after a few breaths at most,” said Rob Kurtzman, a pathologist at the Grand Junction Community Hospital, “probably in less than thirty seconds. All the body changes—the charring, the muscle contractions, the bone fractures—happened after they were dead.”

 

A
bout four-thirty Haugh, Erickson, and Hipke staggered onto Interstate 70. Just an hour before, they had enjoyed a well-earned break on the mountain; now fourteen people were dead. But all they knew at that point was that Blanco, the incident commander, was calling out names on the radio and a lot of people weren't answering.

Haugh and Erickson laid Hipke in the shade of a police cruiser and doused him with water to lower his body temperature and prevent him from going into shock. Blanco climbed back up toward the fire to look for more survivors but found none. The eight smoke jumpers who'd deployed their shelters below H-1 emerged, shaken but unhurt. They were saved not by their shelters but by having deployed them on previously burned ground. The fire was still pumping at this point, and Glenwood Springs was now in danger. Flames were racing eastward along the upper ridges, and the BLM command post at nearby Canyon Creek had begun ordering residents to evacuate.

Haugh's BLM crew had survived. The other Prineville Hotshots—the upper placements—made it out as well. They had snaked their way down the east side of the ridge through a hellish maze of spot fires and exploding trees. Two of them had tried to deploy their shelters but were dragged onward by friends.

Word quickly filtered back to BLM officials in Grand Junction that something terrible had happened on Storm King. Mike Mottice, the agency's area manager, had driven past the blowup and arrived at his Glenwood Springs office around 5:00
P.M
. Minutes later crews began arriving from the mountain, and Mottice realized for the first time that there were people unaccounted for. “I hoped that the fire shelters would save them,” he said. “But that evening some smoke jumpers confirmed that there were deaths.”

The surviving Prineville crew members suspected that some had died, but they didn't know for sure until later that night. They were shuttled first to the Glenwood Springs office, then to Two Rivers Park at the center of town. An open-air concert was in progress, and they sat in their fire clothes while the mountains burned and local youths took in the music. Finally, around nine, a social worker named Carol Kramer arrived with Prineville crew boss Brian Scholz. Kramer was to take the crew back to the Ramada Inn. A conference room was quickly prepared where she could tell them privately that nine of their friends had died.

“When we reached the hotel, they started falling apart,” said Kramer. “At that point, they knew. They were begging us to tell them, to just get it over with. I told them it was bad, that twelve were dead and five were missing.”

The survivors' reaction was quick and violent. Some sobbed; others pounded tables. One fire fighter fled the room and threw up. Two crew members quickly left, followed by Scholz, who wanted to keep an eye on them. As a crew boss Scholz considered himself still on duty, and he refused to lose control in front of his men. Gradually a list of survivors was compiled.

“For a while there was a lot of being out of control,” said Kramer. “Then for a few hours the sobbing was only intermittent; finally, there were a lot of thousand-yard stares. They'd just sit together silently. The next morning they ate a little food. It was a small thing, but that's what you look for.”

Some of the most traumatized accepted individual counseling. One thing they needed was to describe the things they had experienced. One man relayed in excruciating detail the sounds of screams and shouts he had heard as he escaped over the hill. Within thirty-six hours, the eleven Prineville survivors were flown home to Oregon—in part to reunite them with their families, in part to protect them from being hounded by the national press corps. The Ramada Inn had become a shark pool of competing journalists, and the last thing survivors needed was TV cameras panning their faces for tears and anguish.

 

O
n Monday, July 11, a memorial service was held in Glenwood Springs. While Storm King Mountain smoldered in the background, helicopters flew in formation overhead and people wept to the strains of “Amazing Grace.” President Clinton called Governor Roy Romer from Air Force One, and flags on government buildings throughout the country were at half-mast. At dawn the next day, the bodies of the Prineville nine were driven to Walker Field in Grand Junction and then flown home in a Forest Service DC-3. The remains were delivered to four different airfields in Oregon while honor guards played taps and next of kin received the caskets on the tarmac.

Before the embers were even cold on Storm King Mountain, a ten-member investigation team was convened and given forty-five days to examine the site and deliver its findings. The team was composed of former fire fighters and experts in fire behavior, meteorology, and safety equipment. The question of specific blame, however, was not supposed to arise; it was to be a strictly analytical study of what had happened and when.

The preferred view among most federal fire personnel and even most South Canyon survivors was that the West was apocalyptically dry and huge fires were bound to happen. On such fires, people sometimes die; indeed, there are a few fatalities every year. “I would go out on a fire line again with any person who was there,” insisted the BLM's Mike Hayes. “We were doing the best we could with the resources we had. I mean, there were fifty fires in our district at the time.”

A siege mentality developed in Glenwood Springs. Questions of specific culpability were construed as lack of respect for the fire fighters and even for the dead. On Monday, July 11, the
Glenwood Post
ran an article titled “Glenwood Incident Commander: Plans for Escape Worked,” a daring stance to adopt concerning a fire in which fourteen people died. Butch Blanco had told the
Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
the day before that one smoke jumper (Hipke) who'd escaped had started his run behind the ill-fated Prineville crew. That suggested to him that there had been sufficient time to reach a safe area ahead of the fire. “Whether they [the Prineville nine] didn't take it seriously, I don't know,” he said.

The first people to see the dead were the smoke jumpers who had deployed fire shelters below H-1. “I walked straight to the lower group of bodies and called for a helicopter,” said smoke jumper Anthony Petrilli. “They asked if we needed medevac. I told him it was too late for that, and then I walked up the hill and found six more.”

An hour later twenty-six smoke jumpers helicoptered in to investigate further. It was an early, unnatural dusk on the mountain as they picked their way past the charred bodies. They reported eleven dead and three missing. Within an hour, Governor Romer was on the scene; he told the smoke jumpers he wanted to remove the bodies as quickly as possible. The jumpers objected, saying that this was no different from a crime scene and the bodies should be left until someone examined them. Romer abided by their wishes. The next morning investigators began to measure things, ponder the dynamics of the mountain, and coax secrets from the dead.

The first question was how fast the fire had moved, and Haugh's estimate—that the last three hundred feet were covered in about twelve seconds—turned out to be close. In the end, the investigators confirmed that the fire had covered the quarter-mile slope in about two minutes, hitting its top speed of 18 mph in the dried-out Gambel oak.

The next question was why it had done that. Fire behavior is determined by an incredibly complicated interaction of fuel, terrain, and wind, and there are mathematical models describing the interaction. (The models are programmed into hand-held calculators carried by most incident commanders these days.) The deadly hillside faced west at a 33 to 50 percent slope, and the vegetation on it possessed burning characteristics described in a formula called Fuel Model Number Four. The moisture content of the small dead fuels on Storm King Mountain was around 3 percent. And the live Gambel oak (which had only been partly burned earlier) was several times drier than normal. In a light wind, according to this model, those conditions would produce twenty-three-foot flames spreading at a maximum of seven hundred feet an hour.

That's a manageable fire, or at least one that can be outrun, but an increase in wind speed can change the situation dramatically. At 7:20
P.M
. on Tuesday (less than twenty-four hours before the blowup), the National Weather Service issued a “Red Flag” fire warning for the area around Glenwood Springs. Dry thunderstorms were expected the following morning, followed by southwest winds gusting up to 30 mph. A cold front would come through sometime that afternoon, swinging the winds to the northwest.

Gusts of 35 mph, plugged into Fuel Model Number Four, produce sixty-four-foot flames racing up the mountain at up to fifteen feet per second. In the superdry Gambel oak, the rate of spread would have been almost twice that—much faster than any human can run. The lessons of the Battlement Mesa fire (detailed in the
Situation #8
video) had not been learned: A small fire on steep ground covered with extremely dry vegetation had once more exploded in a mathematically predictable way—again, with tragic results.

The 226-page federal investigators' report concluded that just about everyone involved had been negligent in some way. Ground crews had been arrogant about the fire danger; supervisors had ignored local fuel and drought conditions; and the Western Slope Fire Coordination Center had failed to relay crucial weather information to the fire crews in the field. “Extreme fire behavior could have been predicted by using weather forecasts and information readily obtainable at the BLM Grand Junction District Office,” read one of many such findings.

The most horrifying conclusion of the report was that twelve of the victims could have easily escaped from the valley if they had started running when evidence of extreme danger first emerged. Instead, they began a slow walk, some of them dying with their tools in their hands. This meant two things: The order for an all-out retreat was given far too late, and the victims had an inherent reluctance to acknowledge the seriousness of their situation. “Putting down the saw jacked the pucker factor up one notch,” said smoke jumper Petrilli, who himself had not accepted the fact that he was running for his life until he put down his tools. The last thing fire fighters are supposed to do is give up a saw or shovel, so they are understandably loath to do so, since it means they are in a life-threatening situation.

“I know in my heart,” said Haugh, “that the twelve persons who died in that part of the fire were unaware of what was happening.” By the time the Prineville nine and the three smoke jumpers with them saw the horror coming—by the time great sheets of flame hit the dry Gambel oak and frantic voices over the radio screamed at them to run—they had only twenty seconds to live. They must have died in a state of bewilderment almost as great as their fear.