It burned over 6,000 acres and nearly 1,100 homes northwest of Denver, December 30, 2021
Conceptual model of a mountain wave. NWS.
The Denver office of the National Weather Service has released an analysis of the weather that created the conditions on December 30, 2021 that allowed the Marshall Fire southeast of Boulder, Colorado to be turned into a blast furnace that within a few hours ran five miles to the east burning 6,000 acres and destroying nearly 1,100 homes with a total value of more than $500 million.
The NWS described the winds the day of the fire:
High winds developed in the mid morning hours on Thursday, December 30th, 2021, the result of a mountain wave that developed as very strong westerly winds raced over the Front Range Mountains and Foothills and crashed down onto the plains. The mountain wave remained nearly unchanged through the rest of the day, resulting in very persistent and extremely high winds. Mountain waves are usually focused very close to the base of the foothills and adjacent plains. On this day, sustained winds of 50 to 60 mph with gusts of 80 to 100 mph were felt along Highway 93 and points east to around Superior and at times, Louisville.
On the map below, the final fire perimeter is outlined by light purple (upper center of the plot images), while the city of Boulder is located in the northwest corner. The black numbers are temperature (F), red numbers are wind gusts, and the wind barbs point to the direction the wind was from.
Wind gusts (in red), temperatures (in black) at noon, Dec. 30, 2021, Marshall Fire, NWS.
The surface plot for 12 PM MST above shows some of the strongest winds from this wind event. A peak gust of 115 mph was reported at the base of the foothills, just east of the intersection of Highway 93 and Highway 72. Note the 85 mph gust in south Boulder, and a 100 mph gust along Highway 93 (very bottom of the image below) at about noon.
Precipitation in the Denver area, 6 months before Marshall Fire, compared to previous dry periods. NWS.
After a very wet first half of the year that resulted in a lush, tall crop of grass, the six months leading up to the fire in late December were the driest in recorded history, by far. Drought affects moisture in the vegetation — the fuel moisture. The lower is it, the more easily and more intensely it burns in a wildfire. There were many areas in the fire with light vegetation, such as grass, that in December after it has cured would be more affected by recent rain (or the lack thereof) and relative humidity than long term drought. The relative humidity was in the mid-20s that day. But the National Weather Service said larger fuels such as shrubs and trees were plentiful in and around the affected subdivisions. Those fuels would be heavily affected by the historic drought and would have low fuel moistures in the live and dead vegetation.
Drought can also affect the home ignition zone. If gutters on homes are not kept clean of leaves, they can be ignited during an ember shower even if the fire is thousands of feet away. If the gutters have leaves during normal weather, especially in December near Boulder, they could also have water that is trapped by the leaves keeping them wet for weeks or months. But with historic drought, it is possible the water evaporated, making them susceptible for ignition by embers. A fire in a gutter can spread to the structure.
The lawns that in late December would often be covered by snow, were most likely brown and dry, making it possible for an ember to ignite the grass which could spread to homes. Mulch, such as bark or wood chips placed around ornamental plants and near structures would also be much drier than normal, making that fuel available. And remember, the winds were 50 to 60 mph with gusts of 80 to 100 mph.
As structures burned, millions of additional burning embers were lofted into the air with many of them igniting susceptible fuels out in front of the main fire. A burning home that in many cases was only 15 to 20 feet away from other houses could easily ignite through convective or radiant heat the neighboring residence.
C-130 aircraft to parachute drop drinking water and other emergency supplies for Tonga residents
Lightning at the Hunga Tonga volcano. Still image from video by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga.
The massive underwater Hunga Tonga volcano that erupted near Tonga in the South Pacific on January 14 triggered almost 7 hours of lightning as well as a tsunami. A ground-based lightning detection system recorded nearly 400,000 strikes with 200,000 occurring in a one-hour period. For comparison, a severe lightning bust in northern California might have hundreds or a few thousand strikes. The ash cloud reached at least 60,000 feet with some reports saying the initial plume reached 100,000 feet, three times the altitude of commercial airliners.
Below is a video showing part of the eruption recorded by Potungaue Koloa Fakaenatula / Servicio Geológico de #Tonga. A lightning strike or two can be seen at 29 seconds. Most of the lightning was probably inside the ash plume or higher in the column.
Entre vapor de agua, rayos y flujos piroclásticos, esta fue la pesadilla que se vivió en las cercanías del volcán #HungaTongaHungaHaapai después de su gigantesca erupción de ayer. pic.twitter.com/fvRuOYM1YY
The nearby island of Tonga was heavily affected by a four-foot tsunami followed by deposits of ash, which at least temporarily contaminated water supplies and shut off most utilities. A C-130 from New Zealand was scheduled to drop supplies by parachute.
The volcano is part of the highly active Tonga–Kermadec Islands volcanic arc, a subduction zone extending from New Zealand north-northeast to Fiji.
May, 2022 is the target date to issue the final policy for federal employees
OPM’s timeline for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.
The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has created an action plan for the development of a job series to more accurately reflect the work that is now being done by wildland firefighters (WLFF) employed by five federal agencies. For the last 50 or more years WLFFs working for the Departments of Agriculture (DoA) and Interior (DoI) have been pigeonholed into Forestry or Range Technician positions. Their pay is very different from firefighters who work for private industry, municipal departments, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, and private contractors who fight wildland fires for the DoA and DoI.
The timeline created by the OPM is very ambitious for a task to be completed by half a dozen federal agencies. It establishes May of this year as a target for issuing the final policy.
During those five months the OPM expects to:
Review the current situation and compare work done by firefighters inside and outside the agencies;
Survey the federal agencies for what work they need accomplished;
Create groups and subgroups to meet regularly for job classification;
Hold focus groups;
Obtain input from leadership of the agencies;
Meet with human resources subject matter experts and the leadership of the agencies to discuss findings and recommendations;
Draft policy, guidance, and/or tools for Wildland Firefighter (WLFF) work in the Federal government;
Receive comments and feedback from the agencies;
Issue the final policy in May, 2022.
OPM’s action plan for development of a Wildland Firefighter job series. OPM graphic.
After the new WLFF job series is developed, then the five agencies have to actually adopt it and convert their firefighters into Firefighter positions. If the series requires higher pay, that could become a stumbling block. But if there are as many vacant positions now as there were last May they probably have enough unspent salary money to take care of the difference. But I would be surprised if there are many working in the new series before the start of the fiscal year that begins October 1, 2022 at the very earliest.
In a perfect world the development of the WLFF job series would have been initiated decades ago by leadership of the five federal agencies that employ a total of about 15,000 of these firefighters (if all positions were filled): Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Forest Service. Instead, they and the OPM are being forced to do the right thing by bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed by Congress in November, 2021.
Federal WLFFs have been recommending a realistic job series for decades, but within the last year their voices have been louder than ever and members of Congress have noticed. A fairly new non-profit organization, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, has been one of those voices helping to raise awareness with the public and legislators.
Two other bills have been introduced in the last few months that address pay issues for federal WLFFs, H.R. 4274Wildland Firefighter Fair Pay Act, and H.R. 5631Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act. Brief descriptions of the bills are in the article we published October 26. The legislation has been introduced, referred to five committees, and one hearing was held by the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Ben and Matt.
Teams would be called “Complex Incident Management Teams”
File photo. Southern California Incident Management Team 3.
A decade after a similar concept was proposed, the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) is being asked again to change the way Incident Management Teams (IMT) are configured. Currently there are three levels, Types 1, 2 and 3, with Type 1 IMTs being the highest qualified. The idea is to combine Types 1 and 2 into just one type, which will be called Complex Incident Management Teams (CIMT).
The Incident Workforce Development Group (IWDG), a working group of IMT practitioners and subject matter experts jointly chartered by the Fire Management Board (FMB), crafted a memo to the FMB asking for the change, in order to address the following:
Reduced number of IMT participants to fill IMT rosters, impacting the total number of IMTs available nationally;
Inconsistent use of IMTs due to lack of national IMT rotation management and commitment approval;
Reliance on Administratively Determined (AD) employees, retirees, and cooperators to staff IMTs without commensurate trainee use; and
Standardization of the IMT mobilization processes and other criteria across Geographic Areas.
In 2010, recognizing that the workforce management and succession planning for wildfire response was not sustainable, the NWCG chartered an interagency team to develop a new organizational model for incident management. In October, 2011 the NWCG released a 51-page document, Evolving Incident Management — A Recommendation for the Future. (If they issued a companion report, a Recommendation for the Past, we were unable to find it.) The suggestion was to merge all federally sponsored type 1 and type 2 teams into one type of IMT. There would three response levels: Initial attack (type 4 and 5 incidents), extended attack (type 3 incidents managed by type 3 IMTs), and complex incidents managed by Complex IMTs. Wildfire Today’s last update on that proposal was in 2015.
Below is a copy of the memo about the current suggestion. It was signed January 10, 2022 by the two top fire guys in the US Forest Service and the Department of the Interior and sent to the Fire Management Board, NWCG, and the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group.
(Click on the document above to see at bottom-left how to zoom in or scroll to pages two and three.)
The recently released report about the 2020 fatality on the El Dorado Fire addressed many issues the investigators felt were related to the management of that incident, including the current system for configuring IMTs:
“The same concerns exist for Incident Management Teams (IMT). With the reduction of 39 percent of the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce since 2000, the “militia” available to assist in IMT duties is rapidly being reduced to a mythical entity, often spoken of but rarely seen. The 2020 fire year was simply the latest in a long string of years where we did not have enough IMTs, let alone general resources, to address suppressing fire in our current paradigm. On the El Dorado Fire, Region 5 took a creative approach to ensure Type 1 oversight by grafting a Type 1 incident commander onto a Type 2 team, when no Type 1 teams were available. While this met the need and policy requirements, one cannot help but wonder what the difference really is between a Type 1 and Type 2 team. Why not just create one national team typing system, and why not ensure that it is staffed to a holistic fire management response (see Theme 2) and not just a direct perimeter control response.”
Figure 1 from the research paper. Distribution of 166 US wildland firefighter entrapments that occurred within CONUS (1981–2017) by time of day (local time) and month of the year.
A reminder:
Five common denominators of fire behavior on fatal and near-fatal fires have been identified through studies of tragedy fires. It is important for firefighters to readily recognize them to prevent future disasters.
Such fires often occur:
On relatively small fires or deceptively quiet areas of large fires.
In relatively light fuels, such as grass, herbs, and light brush.
When there is an unexpected shift in wind direction or in wind speed.
When fire responds to topographic conditions and runs uphill.
Critical burn period between 1400 and 1700.
Alignment of topography and wind during the critical burning period should be considered a trigger point to reevaluate tactics.
Blowup to burnover conditions generally occur in less than 60 minutes and can be as little as 5 minutes.
Updated research
On October 9, 2019 a document was published that summarized the work of four researchers who sought to find commonalities that led to the entrapments of firefighters on wildland fires. The paper is titled, “A Classification of US Wildland Firefighter Entrapments Based on Coincident Fuels, Weather, and Topography.” Apparently they were hoping to confirm, fine tune, revise, or update the “Common Denominators of Fire Behavior on Tragedy Fires” defined by Carl C. Wilson after the 1976 Battlement Creek Fire where three firefighters were killed near Parachute, Colorado.
The researchers conducted an analysis of the environmental conditions at the times and locations of 166 firefighter entrapments involving 1,202 people and 117 fatalities that occurred between 1981 and 2017 in the conterminous United States. They identified one characteristic that was common for 91 percent of the entrapments — high fire danger — specifically, when the Energy Release Component and Burning Index are both above their historical 80th percentile.
They also generated an update of the time of day the entrapments occurred as seen in the figure at the top of this article. This has been done before, but it’s worthwhile to get an update. And, this version includes the month.
You can read the entire open access article here. If you’re thinking of quickly skimming it, the 7,000 words and the dozens of abbreviations and acronyms make that a challenge. There is no appendix which lists and defines the abbreviations and acronyms.
The authors of the paper are Wesley G. Page, Patrick H. Freeborn, Bret W. Butler, and W. Matt Jolly.
Below are excerpts from their research:
…Given the findings of this study and previously published firefighter safety guidelines, we have identified a few key practical implications for wildland firefighters:
The fire environment conditions or subsequent fire behavior, particularly rate of spread, at the time of the entrapment does not need to be extreme or unusual for an entrapment to occur; it only needs to be unexpected in the sense that the firefighters involved did not anticipate or could not adapt to the observed fire behavior in enough time to reach an adequate safety zone;
The site and regional-specific environmental conditions at the time and location of the entrapment are important; in other words, the set of environmental conditions common to firefighter entrapments in one region do not necessarily translate to other locations;
As noted by several authors, human factors or human behavior are a critical component of firefighter entrapments, so much so that while an analysis of the common environmental conditions associated with entrapments will yield a better understanding of the conditions that increase the likelihood of an entrapment, it will not produce models or define characteristics that predict where and when entrapments are likely to occur.
The factor that was common for the majority of entrapments (~91%) was high fire danger. As a general guideline, regardless of location, the data suggest that entrapment potential is highest when the fire danger indices (Energy Release Component and Burning Index) are both above their historical 80th percentile.
One thing that will be interesting to watch is if the historical three-hour window from 1 to 4 p.m. when many of the fatalities have occurred is going to be stretched as the earth warms and extreme fire behavior becomes more frequent.
3-D map of the north side of the El Dorado Fire, from infrared flight, 11:38 p.m. Sept. 17, 2020. Looking south.
About 15 months afterCharles ‘Charlie’ Morton was fatally burned on the El Dorado Fire on the San Bernardino National Forest in Southern California, the US Forest Service released a series of reports about the incident.
According to one of the documents, titled Narrative, Charlie, a squad leader on the Big Bear Interagency Hotshot Crew was scouting the fire alone around 7 p.m. September 17, 2020 when it overran his location. Crews had just stopped igniting a burnout. As the fire intensity increased, one of the crew captains asked him on the radio if he was going to be able to get out of the area. Charlie’s response was, “We’ll see.” Following that, the Captain called him several times with no response. He then heard Charlie call in desperation, “I’m in a corner.” It was the last time he transmitted on the radio.
Due to extreme fire behavior, including counter-rotating vortex pairs that formed at his exact location as a result of the burnout operation underway, it was hours before anyone could access Charlie’s location. During that time he was assumed to be missing and the Operations Section Chief assigned the Contingency Branch Director as the Incident-Within-an-Incident Commander to lead the search.
El Dorado Fire Progression map for September 5 to 17, 2020. The report covers activity in Divisions L and O.
For nearly two hours a sheriff’s helicopter utilized their loudspeaker to call out “If you are a lost hotshot firefighter, give us a signal. If you are a lost hotshot firefighter, give us a signal.” At that time firefighters were very busy attempting to suppress numerous spot fires. Some of them were not aware of the missing firefighter when they heard the announcement from the helicopter.
From the Learning Review Narrative, about the beginning of the search:
BR 5 [Branch Director 5] tried to gain access to the bulldozer line from the Camp Round Meadow area and was accompanied by Division L Medic. Although the medic had limited wildland fire experience, it was apparent that the situation was dangerous. He noted falling snags, extreme temperatures, and that fire flanking below them could cut off their egress back to Camp Round Meadow. He thought he was going to die in there and sent a pin of his location to the Division O Medic so that someone could locate Division L Medic if something bad happened.
Meanwhile, SBC Type 2 Initial Attack Crew tied in with Branch and was allowed to fly a small [CAL FIRE] drone equipped with an infrared camera down the bulldozer line to assist with the search. Drone footage showed significant heat along the line which rendered the infrared camera useless. They switched camera modes and flew a few more missions searching various areas.
The conditions were so dangerous that the Safety Officer decided to call off the ground search.
The time of day or night was not mentioned very often in the report, but some time later:
Big Bear captain 1B (who was filling the role of DIVS L trainee) arrived and announced that he was going to search at the bottom of the bulldozer line. BC#1 [Battalion Chief] didn’t want him to go into the area alone, so he decided to join. Big Bear Captain 1B searched the right side of the bulldozer line and BC#1 searched the left. Even with their big flashlights, it was difficult to see through the darkness, smoke, and flames. A quick reflection of light from an accordioned and undeployed fire shelter caught BC#1’s eye on the edge of the bulldozer line near a bend. They stopped 25 feet away and were able to determine that Charlie had not survived.
The yellow shirt marks the September 17, 2020 fatality site at the El Dorado Fire. From the report.
The area was still very hot and smoky, and the captain and BC#1 returned to the road below. A medic suggested that she could go to the scene to pronounce Charlie’s time of death, but the decision was made that it was too dangerous. The Safety Officer inserted guards at the bottom of the bulldozer line to keep people from going to view the scene and to prevent another fatality.
At the bottom of the bulldozer line, BR V blew past the guards and went up to the site to be with Charlie and stayed there with him. Some people said to just let him go, but after a period time people began to assume that BR V was fatally lost as well. A second search was organized for BR V. Searchers were unable to access the site due to the heat and falling trees. For approximately a two-hour period, nobody was able to reach BR V because his radio and his cell phone were left in the pickup. Division O Medic returned to stage at DP 45, now waiting to render aid if needed. About 0145, BR V returned down the hill and notifications were passed that he was safe. BR V came down the hill as soon as he realized he’d left his communication devices in his truck.
Charlie is survived by his fiancée, a daughter, parents, and two brothers.
The fire began at 10:23 a.m. September 5, 2020 in the El Dorado Ranch Park in Yucaipa. It was caused by the use of a smoke generating pyrotechnic device. The intent was to produce pink or blue smoke to inform bystanders about the gender of a fetus. A couple was charged with involuntary manslaughter and 29 other crimes.
Other reports
The information above came from the Narrative, a 29-page document that unlike recent facilitated learning analysis (FLA) documents, only covers the very, very detailed chronological facts of what happened on September 17 on the north side of the El Dorado Fire. It does not address, like the FLA for the Cameron Peak Fire for example, 250 Lessons Learned broken down into 14 types of resources (e.g. Finance Unit, Contractors) and 7 categories (e.g. COVID mitigations and testing/contact tracing).
But two other documents were also released about the fatality:
The latter, the Organization Learning Report, breaks with recent established practices, as the Narrative did.
It does not drill down into minutia of what occurred on the El Dorado Fire. It looks at it from 30,000 feet and extrapolates the significance on a much broader scale about the current state of wildland fire management.
It was led by Bill Avey who was appointed to the position of acting director for Fire and Aviation Management in Washington for five months in 2021. He retired December 31, 2021 as the Forest Supervisor of the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana.
Below are excerpts from the seven-page Organization Learning Report. It appears that much of the information came from interviews — not all of the topics are covered in the Narrative. For example, it suggests that perhaps firefighters (or forestry technicians) should be called “fire responders” so they don’t “view fire as an enemy.” Other than that many of their conclusions are very reasonable, even though most of them have been previously identified in various forms. But having so many of them listed in one fatality report is unique, and could be useful. Unless it just disappears into files like so many others.
In his September 24, 2020 testimony before Congress, John Phipps, the Forest Service’s Deputy Chief of State and Private Forestry, stated “the system is not designed for this,” to illustrate the misalignment between the design of the wildland fire system and the reality that wildland fire responders routinely experience.
…
The El Dorado Fire burned as an area ignition resulting from high accumulations of long-burning fuel materials present in the unhealthy forest conditions at the time of the fire. This type of fire behavior was once rarely seen among our wildland fire responders but is becoming increasingly more common because of the current condition of our forests and the influences of climate change. Our current paradigm of treating fire as an enemy that must be defeated contributed to the condition of the forest at the time of the fire. Until we figure out a way to form a new, sustainable relationship with fire, we can expect forest conditions to continue to deteriorate. This deterioration will continue to make situations like this fatality event more probable into the future. We need to see fire’s role on the landscape differently.
…
Viewing fire as the enemy also may have had an influence on local resources “trying to protect their home turf” against that enemy. We are trapped in the paradigm laid out by the philosopher William James’s “Fire is the moral equivalent of War” essays of the early 20th century. Calling our fire employees “firefighters” only contributes to the metaphor of declaring war on an enemy. Perhaps a shift in language (to say…fire responders) may prove beneficial.
…
We continue to ask our wildland fire responders to save communities that are becoming increasingly unsavable. At what point do we declare communities without any semblance of defensible space not worth the risk of trying to save under extreme fire behavior conditions?
…
Two common refrains were heard: “Why am I risking my life and losing time with my family for such futility?” and “The things we did ten years ago are no longer working.” Wildland fire responders feel increasingly isolated and misunderstood, with the expectations from the agency and society to “save the unsavable” while “managing risk.” This coupled with the pay, work-life balance, and hiring issues is eroding the trust and the implicit social contract among wildland fire responders, the Forest Service, and American society. This is another other factor that is quickly resulting in a lack of qualified (or any) applicants and the growing vacancies in fire response crews. On the El Dorado fire, due to a lack of resources, there were four Interagency Hotshot Crews on an incident that would normally have ten.
…
The wildland fire culture has developed in such a way as to defer to the expertise of IHC crews above most other resources on a fire. If the hotshots like the plan, then it must be a good plan…or so the thinking goes. While this heuristic has treated the fire service well in the past; it becomes more problematic if deference is given mistakenly to a resource without the level of expertise that is assumed. Over the course of the last several years, the experience levels of hotshot crews have become diluted. Long-tenured Interagency Hotshot Crew Superintendents seem to be becoming a thing of the past. The Big Bear Interagency Hotshot Crew (IHC), due to a lack of available experienced personnel and coupled by issues with the temporary hiring process, were staffed by a significant number of Administratively Determined (AD) hires, formerly unheard of for an Interagency Hotshot Crew.
…
As federal Interagency Hotshot Crews continue to train and then lose the next generation of leaders, the question must be asked: “At what point will our hotshot crews’ experience levels thin out too much to fill the role we have traditionally asked of them?” And once that occurs, how should we fill that void?
…
The same concerns exist for Incident Management Teams (IMT). With the reduction of 39 percent of the Forest Service’s non-fire workforce since 2000, the “militia” available to assist in IMT duties is rapidly being reduced to a mythical entity, often spoken of but rarely seen. The 2020 fire year was simply the latest in a long string of years where we did not have enough IMTs, let alone general resources, to address suppressing fire in our current paradigm. On the El Dorado Fire, Region 5 took a creative approach to ensure Type 1 oversight by grafting a Type 1 incident commander onto a Type 2 team, when no Type 1 teams were available. While this met the need and policy requirements, one cannot help but wonder what the difference really is between a Type 1 and Type 2 team. Why not just create one national team typing system, and why not ensure that it is staffed to a holistic fire management response (see Theme 2) and not just a direct perimeter control response.
…
Scouting fire lines has proven to be a dangerous task. What barriers prevent federal crews from being able to deploy drones to do the preliminary scouting, rather than having a person do it? How do we overcome those barriers? Note: CAL FIRE crews owned and operated drones on the very same piece of line during the search and rescue operation undertaken to find Charlie.
…
We have the technology to comply with the Dingell Act, shouldn’t the Forest Service mandate, just like we do eight-inch-high leather boots or Nomex, that wildland fire personnel have on a personal tracking device while on the fire line?
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What is the protocol to determine that a wildland fire responder is missing? What is the protocol to find a missing wildland fire responder? Should there be a national standard to follow to reduce confusion?
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What is the protocol to obtain notification information for our employees? What is the protocol for notifying fallen employees’ next of kin? Should there be a national standard to follow to minimize confusion and disorganization?
…
CAL FIRE and many other organizations have standard and required emergency notification forms that are available electronically to select individuals.
