On Day 3, It Went to Hell

BOISE, Idaho —  The war against 1.4 million acres of wildland fires starts here at the National Interagency Fire Center, where the nation’s top fire commanders sit in air-conditioned briefing rooms and a bustling dispatch center, where the nearest fire is 60 miles away on the edge of the Sawtooth Wilderness, deep inside the Boise National Forest.

Here, it’s easy to forget, to pretend it’s happening somewhere else. But then they step outside. They get a blast of that dry, 90-degree air in their face, smell the smoke hanging like a bass note under the still air.

It’s easy to get distracted, thinking about shipping chain saws to Montana and getting relief fire crews in Utah, and there it is--in the time it takes to draw a breath--the smell that inspires the same primordial notion of fear and flight in anything that walks.

Back inside, back at their desks, the phones ring. They forget the rolling death nearby. An e-mail from a fire management team in Wyoming begs for a “hotshot crew,” the federal government’s top firefighting team. But there aren’t any more hotshot crews. They’re all out in other mountains, hacking away at fire lines. They’re tired. They’ve been working with sun and fire in their faces since May, some of them. Another e-mail pops up: Another crew is needed, this one in Darby, Mont.

“I wouldn’t say we’re at the wall, but we’re kind of dancing around pretty close to where the wall is,” Jim Stires, the command center’s director, told the morning briefing at midweek. “It could be an interesting next five days.”

With 84 major wildfires burning in an arc that stretches from 10 Western states across Texas and into Florida, the national center that deploys people, aircraft and equipment is operating 24 hours a day from a 57-acre compound in central Idaho.

This fire season has been unprecedented in its furious intensity: heavy brush in the Western forests has combined with an early summer drought and waves of dry lightning to ignite fires earlier, hotter and faster than any time in the last two decades.

A day in the life of a fire begins with a weather forecast.

This week, on Wednesday, the forecast for the weekend was unsettling: unstable air likely to spark thunderstorms across Northern California and the Pacific Northwest before moving into Idaho and Montana, where the worst fires already were burning. Then, the trailing edge of a cold front was expected to bring wind gusts of 30 to 40 mph in the Great Basin and the northern Rockies. It would be a firefighter’s nightmare.

At Trail Creek fire camp in the Boise National Forest, the morning weather briefing this day is particularly ominous. Every engine, bulldozer, helicopter, plane and crew that could be scratched up already is out battling a blaze that has spread from a single lightning strike 11 days ago to more than 26,000 acres. If there’s more lightning, there’s only a small local crew left to go stamp out the new blaze.

Seeking to Extend Crews’ Field Time

Incident commander Jim Shell at Trail Creek can only imagine what 40 mph gusts will do to the swift-moving dragon that almost consumed the small town of Atlanta, Idaho, last week and now is threatening a major ridgeline to the west--with more towns on the other side of it. He’s got to get a bulldozer line in, and get it in fast, before that front moves through.

“If we don’t contain this thing now, it’s going to go over that ridge into James Creek and we’ll probably be chasing it until the snow flies--and that could be October,” Shell says.

By 9 a.m., the morning briefing in Boise is over, and the top commanders of the seven federal firefighting agencies--the Multi-Agency Coordinating, or MAC, group--are meeting behind closed doors. At the top of their agenda: how to find a way around the federal policy that requires firefighters to have two or three days of rest after 14 days in the field.

Most years, the crews drawn from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and other agencies work about 600 hours a year on fire duty. This year, the fire season began so early and burned so hot that many crews already are at more than 1,000 hours--and there’s still a month or more to go.

At peak demand are Type-1 Interagency Management Teams--the crack, 30-member supervisory units with the most highly trained and experienced managers on the federal firefighting force. These teams are the ones with the know-how to manage a fire that has grown into what is known as a “complex”: a fire burning over a huge area in multiple locations, threatening several fronts at once, perhaps with lives and entire towns at risk.

A Type-1 firefighting line crew brings similar qualifications and experience; Type-2 and Type-3 crews bring slightly lower levels of capability. Crews of all types have all been fully deployed since late spring, with reinforcements called in from the military, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Some teams are on their fifth major fire--and at the brink of exhaustion.

A single Type-1 management team, the 30-member Great Basin group headed by BLM fire manager Paul Hefner out of Boise, is coming on line at midnight, a few days after rotating off the 177,984-acre Clear Creek fire in central Idaho.

Already, there are three requests for Hefner’s team: the Clear Creek fire they just left, the Blind Trail complex near Jackson Hole, Wyo.--which at one point shut down the southern entrance to Yellowstone National Park--and the fledgling Beaver Creek fire near Big Sky, Mont. Beaver Creek is burning only 10,000 acres now, but it’s closing in on ranches in an area where property owners have included media mogul Ted Turner and the late newscaster Chet Huntley.

Famous ranch owners are people who might let coordination chief Neal Hitchcock know about it if the fire doesn’t get put down fast.

“We get this political [pressure] stuff, but to me it’s just one of the nuisance things: It’s like bugs you have to brush away,” Hitchcock says.

A Fire Like None Seen Here Before

At Trail Creek, where Shell heads a Type-2 management team, there are fears that the fire could grow fast enough and dangerous enough to join the queue of fires bringing requests to Boise for a Type-1 team.

Already, Trail Creek has acted like no fire anybody here has seen before, and many of them have been in the business for two decades or more.

It started, like almost all of them did, with a lightning strike in the middle of nowhere. Lookouts posted on watchtowers at Jackson Peak and Sunset Peak called in the first puff of smoke at the same time on Aug. 15, and U.S. Forest Service firefighters from the Boise National Forest’s ranger district in Idaho City responded, dispatching a helicopter crew.

By the time they got to the scene, the fire already was 15 acres--big enough that they started dropping full loads of fire retardant from air tankers. A second helicopter attack crew was called in, and things were looking relatively good, even though the fire was just six miles from the old mining town of Atlanta, a community of historic houses and lavish summer homes tucked in a nook of the Middle Fork of the Boise River.

By nightfall, the fire had jumped to the other side of the canyon, way too deep and dangerous for firefighters. The next day, the fire had grown to 800 acres. A Type-3 management team was culled out of local firefighters, and a Type-1 ground crew dug in a firebreak line near Sawmill Creek.

Helpless to Do Anything But Watch

On Day Three, everything went to hell. It started in the morning, when the wind shifted 180 degrees and started blowing southwest, down the canyon. At dawn--a time when fires are usually lolling quietly under moist, misty air--this fire was raging through the crowns of the trees, spotting a mile or more ahead of the fire lines established to stop it.

Shortly after noon, fire manager Terry Leatherman pulled all the crews out. All they could do was watch something they’d never seen before: a fire roaring down into a canyon. Fires normally travel uphill, preheating the brush and tinder above them as they go. This fire made a nine-mile run down two creeks in a matter of hours--straight toward Atlanta.

The crews raced into town, setting up a desperate line of defense. They managed to keep the fire about a mile away up on the hill all that day. Incredibly, by nightfall, the wind switched again, carrying the fire parallel to the town and toward a wilderness area.

Exhausted from three days without sleep, Leatherman and his men left three engines patrolling Atlanta and retreated to their tents. “We tried to get some sleep, but the local [citizens] wouldn’t allow that to happen,” Terry Teeter, assistant fire officer, recalls. “About every hour, they were in there getting one of us up.”

The fire was burning eerily above the town. People were scared.

By Day Four, it had expanded to 13,000 acres, and a day after that, was again at Atlanta’s door. By this time, Boise had sent in Shell’s Type-2 management team, and the entire force had grown to 562 firefighters and support staff. The crew launched a second heroic house-by-house effort to save Atlanta, with fire in some cases burning within 20 feet of back doors. Finally, the flames retreated back up to a ridgeline over town, where they still burn fitfully.

By this week, the bulk of the fire had swept out across the wilderness, consuming 26,854 acres, and was threatening a ridgeline to the northwest. Should it cross that ridgeline this weekend, it will hit the heavy timber down in James Creek and become virtually unstoppable as it plunges toward the communities of Featherville and Rocky Bar.

As the MAC meeting was concluding in Boise, Dave Rittenhouse, the Boise National Forest supervisor, pulled in to the Trail Creek fire camp at late morning and was accosted almost immediately. Shell told him he must put in a bulldozer line on the ridge above James Creek or risk having the fire move outside any reasonable containment bounds by this weekend.

But the forest management plan--the plan Rittenhouse and his staff spent years putting together, negotiating precariously with conservation groups and the timber industry--says that ridge is in an area without roads. The plan specifically forbids the use of heavy equipment that could send suffocating sediment plunging into creeks that are key habitat for the threatened bull trout.

Rittenhouse knows there will be hell to pay if he allows a bulldozer up on the ridge. Shell tells him there will be worse hell to pay if he doesn’t.

Rittenhouse consults his fisheries biologist and his archeologist. “You’ve got to give me an idea of what I’m buying here,” he says.

Biologist Mike McGee advises him to plow the fire line. The fire could do worse damage to bull trout on the other side of the ridge if it gets across, McGee reasons. OK, Rittenhouse says finally, but only a 10-foot line, and keep it away from the pristine lakes near the end of the ridge.

It’s a gamble. If the fire gets hot enough, if the front moving through this weekend blows hard enough, the line may not hold anyway.

Shell gets on the radio and dispatches the bulldozer crews. Rittenhouse quietly signs a series of findings for the environmental lawyers who most likely will sue him for what he is doing.

“If I lose this fire, I got no more resources to go get. We got what we got. We got tired people,” Rittenhouse says.

Of the controversy likely to result, he shrugs. “I guess this whole thing goes to show you what I’ve always said: The difference between being a hero and being a goat in this business is measured in nano-inches.”

*

Back at the command center, the Salt Lake City regional office is calling in to Boise with bad news. A prison firefighting crew on Stansbury Mountain in Utah has been hit by lightning, a single bolt, down low below a ridge top where it was supposed to be safe. Two men are dead, three more are injured.

A hush falls over the information center, and Jack Sept, chief spokesman for the interagency fire center, puts out the order: Nobody in Boise talks about the deaths. Calls are referred to the regional office in Salt Lake City, which is putting out its own briefing.

Hitchcock, who oversees the central coordinating center that handles all crew and equipment dispatches, is trying to figure out what to do about the forecast for new dry lightning.

With rain finally falling in the Southwest United States, five extra crews--100 people--now are available.

“The choice today is: Should we send a booster load of smoke jumpers to Colorado--where they already have lightning, but it’s likely to be wet--or to Redmond [Ore.]--where there’s no lightning yet, but it’s likely to be dry?” Hitchcock says. “They’ll probably leave for Redmond today out of Missoula [Mont.]”

Starbucks Coffee has offered free coffee to the fire camps, but logistics officers can’t figure out how to get it all out there. Lorraine Buck, the Interior Department representative who is deputy chief this week, tells someone to see if Starbucks will ship it out to the camps themselves.

“Anything you put in a truck displaces something else,” Buck explains. “We get all kinds of stuff like this. A lady from Tyson Chicken called and said, ‘We want to donate some chicken.’ And I said, ‘Raw chicken? Whoa!’ ”

The afternoon briefing throws a new wrinkle into the weather picture: Hurricane Debby. Even though it has been downgraded to a tropical storm, high winds could blow up two major fires burning in Florida, meteorologist Rick Ochoa advises. Those fires would compete for emergency management resources already stretched thin.

Other news: a 2,600-acre chicken complex in Texas has gone up in smoke. There’s a new start on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, and the little Lost Horse fire has become worrisome enough that they’re asking for a Type-2 management team.

Stires closes his briefing notes. “We’re expecting a pretty active weather evening here,” he says. “We’ll just have to see how we do.”

Up at Trail Creek, Shell gathers his team at the fire camp and tells them not to worry. The fire’s burning right where they thought it would, he says, and so long as they get that bulldozer line in on time, they’ll be in good shape by the time the winds pick up.

With any luck, crews on the top of the ridge should be able to light some small backfires to slow the big fire down before it gets to them; make it less likely it will storm right over them when it hits.

The unspoken question around the room is on everybody’s face as Shell walks away: What makes anyone think, they wonder, that this fire should start acting like it’s supposed to?

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Who’s Battling the Wildfires

About 25,000 firefighters and support staff are currently taking part in the effort to battle U.S. wildfires.