Freezeout Ridge Fire, September 15, 2014. InciWeb photo.
KTVZ is reporting that a 51-year old member of the Winema Interagency Hotshot Crew was seriously injured by a falling snag while working on the 3,558-acre Freezeout Ridge Fire in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area in western Idaho.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
…Richard (Wally) Ochoa Jr., 51, a member of the Winema Interagency Hotshot Crew, suffered a fractured skull, two broken arms, a broken jaw, a broken thumb and numerous cuts when he was struck by a snag while brushing fire line on the Freezeout Ridge Fire.
Winema IHC crew members and other nearby fire personnel began immediate first aid while others worked to clear an area for a helicopter to take Ochoa to a hospital in Boise. Officials said he was in stable condition in the intensive care unit late Monday, with family and several crew members on hand.
John Kidd, incident commander for the Freezeout Ridge Fire, credited those on scene for their swift actions and reliance on emergency response training and medical evacuation protocols.
“I, along with the members of my staff, am grateful for those who assisted Mr. Ochoa by providing timely and appropriate care,” Kidd said.”The coordination and professional actions of our firefighters, both on the ground and flying overhead, very likely reduced the potential magnitude of his injuries.”
Black Forest Fire, Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 15, 2013. Photo by Bill Gabbert.
One of the most dangerous things wildland firefighters do is simply being under trees. Frequently firefighters are injured or killed after being hit by limbs or entire trees that fall. And it is not just fallers cutting down trees that are exposed to the hazards. Just last week a visitor in Yellowstone National Park was killed by a falling tree that had been a standing, dead lodgepole pine, fire-killed 26 years earlier during the park’s 1988 fires.
When I was a chain saw operator and faller on the El Cariso Hot Shots, three limbs, all about four feet long and four inches in diameter, fell out of a 36-inch diameter snag I was falling. One hit me square on the top of my aluminum hard hat, putting a sizable dent in it as I was making the final cut. I was stunned for a couple of seconds, but after I collected myself I realized that the swamper had been hit on his back by two of the limbs as he was bent over. It turned out to be a serious injury that affected him for a long time. We were lucky that the limbs were not any larger; it could have been a lot worse.
Just to illustrate the point of the danger faced by firefighters from trees, burning or not, here are some accidents we found with a quick search on Wildfire Today. This is just a partial list.
The National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Risk Management Committee compiled a list of the fatalities, entrapments, burn-overs and other life-threatening accidents and injuries associated with wildfires in the United States in calendar year 2012.
One firefighter has died and another was injured by a falling snag in the Deschutes National Forest near Sisters, Oregon on Thursday, August 1. The incident occurred on a new lightning-caused fire, named 398, north of Highway 242 near Dugout Lake. The two firefighters were contract personnel working as a tree falling team employed by R&K Water Services out of Bonney Lake, Washington. The names have not been released. The Deschutes County Sheriff’s Department is in charge of the accident..
The incident was reported at 9:13 a.m. Thursday, according to Jean Nelson-Dean, a spokesperson for the Deschutes National Forest.
A rappel crew responded in a helicopter to the accident and called for an ambulance. One of the firefighters died at the scene. The other was taken to St. Charles Medical Center in Bend. A water-dropping helicopter wet down the area to make it safer for other firefighters to assist with the incident.
An early morning lightning storm started dozens of wildfires in the Cascade Range of Oregon on Thursday.
Our sincere condolences go out to the families and coworkers of these firefighters.
The U.S. Forest Service has released their Serious Accident Investigation Report on the fatality of Anne Veseth, which occurred on the Steep Corner Fire 56 miles northeast of Orofino, Idaho August 12, 2012. The fire was on private property and was being managed by the Clearwater‐Potlatch Timber Protective Association (CPTPA). Ms. Veseth, in her second season working as a firefighter for the USFS, was killed when she was struck by a falling 150-foot tall fire-weakened green cedar tree. The tree fell on its own and was 13 inches in diameter where it struck her.
Here is an excerpt from the just-released USFS report:
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“Analysis and Conclusion
“The cause of this accident was that a green cedar tree, weakened by fire, fell and struck a firefighter in the head. It fell with a force far greater than the design limits of any hardhat could withstand. This tragedy resulted from the chance alignment of certain conditions: an emergency response to control a wildland fire, which required the presence of firefighters in an area where fire‐weakened trees could fall on their own with little or no warning. The SAI team concluded that the convergence of these events – in a very specific way and with very specific timing – resulted in a fatal accident. Slight differences in any number of factors could have led to drastically different results.
“Firefighters faced the same choice on this fire as they do on almost every fire: engage the fire and expose firefighters to a certain set of risks in order to control the fire, or don’t engage the fire and don’t control it, knowing that such a decision often poses a wider range of risks to firefighters and the public. Firefighters made the same basic risk decision on the Steep Corner Fire as they do routinely on most fires: to engage the fire and attempt to control it, knowing that firefighters would be exposed to hazards during suppression efforts.
“On the day of the accident, after the implementation of safety mitigation measures, the firefighting professionals involved in the Steep Corner Fire reasoned the risks of engaging and suppressing the fire to be acceptable. After considerable review of the incident, including the leadership, qualifications, interagency cooperation, fuels, weather, incident management organization, and local policies, the SAI Team concluded that the judgments and decisions of the firefighters involved in the Steep Corner Fire were appropriate. Firefighters all performed within the leaders’ intent and scope of duty, as defined by their respective organizations. The team did not find any reckless actions or violations of policy or protocol.
“On August 11, the day before the fatal accident, two Forest Service resources decided to limit their acceptance of risk on the Steep Corner Fire. Both the IHC and the E‐31 crew identified necessary safety mitigations. The IHC chose not to engage. The E‐31 crew disengaged and indicated they would not return to the fire until mitigation measures were implemented.
“C‐PTPA took these events seriously and subsequently addressed the recommended mitigation measures. Personnel became the “adapters” that allowed C‐PTPA and the Forest Service, two organizations with very different natural resource management mandates, to functiontogether. Mitigation measures included ordering more firefighting resources, adding line overhead and a radio repeater, and using contract fallers to fell hazard trees ahead of those digging fireline. The morning of August 12, the E‐31 crew decided to re‐engage when it became clear C‐PTPA was addressing their safety concerns. The IHC was already reassigned to anotherfire and did not return. In general, firefighters expressed their impressions that Saturday was a bad day but Sunday (before the accident) was much better, in terms of organization of the fire and mitigation of the hazards.”
(end of excerpt)
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The 38-page report only has two recommendations. One is to introduce the LCES (Lookouts, Communications, Escape Routes, Safety Zones) concept into the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s curriculum for use in disciplines other than fire management. The other is: “Occupational Safety and Health Office should develop a methodology for effectively teaching non‐fire workers the concepts related to hazard tree identification, scouting an area, and determining escape routes and safety zones for overhead hazards”.
An opinion
Several things about the incident and the report are troubling, but one item in the report stood out (emphasis added):
This tragedy resulted from the chance alignment of certain conditions: an emergency response to control a wildland fire, which required the presence of firefighters in an area where fire‐weakened trees could fall on their own with little or no warning.
Perhaps it is just an unfortunate choice of words chosen by the primary author which somehow was missed by the large number of people who probably reviewed the report before it was released. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they didn’t really mean to imply that firefighters are REQUIRED to perform an action on a fire simply because the fire is uncontrolled, even “where fire‐weakened trees could fall on their own with little or no warning”.
Someone might say that trees could fall during suppression action on most timber fires. Right. However on this fire, the large number of falling trees was identified the previous day, when a Hotshot crew refused to be assigned to the fire because of falling trees and many other unmitigated hazards, saying in a SAFENET report filed three days later that they “had huge concerns about the number of snags burning”. An engine crew left the fire for similar reasons that afternoon, but returned the next day after being assured that the hazards had been mitigated.
Firefighters are not REQUIRED to perform a task on a fire if there are known extraordinary hazards that cannot mitigated. We are talking about trees, grass, brush, or houses…. that will all grow back. Firefighters can’t.
A firefighter working for Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in northwest Indiana was injured February 7 when a tree uprooted and fell while he was operating a chain saw, limbing or bucking another tree. Here is an excerpt from the 72-hour report:
…An initial estimate of accident tree was 7.5” DBH and approximately 50 – 60 feet tall. Firefighter A was bent over cutting when he was struck across the shoulders by the tree, knocking him to the ground. The force of the impact drove his face onto the motor housing of thechainsaw. His injuries included a severely broken nose, fractured right eye orbit and fractured T-1 vertebrae. Despite his injuries, he had the presence of mind to shut the chainsaw off to prevent further injury. Firefighter A is an experienced sawyer; he was wearing proper safety gear to include eye and ear protection, as well as a hard hat and chaps. Firefighter A was also working with a partner (Firefighter B) and was able to call out to him for help. Examination of the hard hat shows no indication that it was not contacted by the tree. An initial investigation revealed that the accident tree was poorly rooted into soft soil. Winds were calm at the time of the accident and the soil was thawing after recent freezing rain and snow.
Local EMS resources responded to the scene and transported Firefighter A to the local Regional Hospital. Firefighter A was treated for his injuries, which included plastic surgery to repair his facial injuries. Firefighter A was released from the hospital and did not stay overnight. At this time there is a safety stand-down for the project until a more thorough assessment is completed.
