Five U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighters were entrapped and died on the Esperanza fire near Cabazon, California on October 26, 2006. Killed were engine Capt. Mark Loutzenhiser, 44, of Idyllwild; engine operator Jess McLean, 27, of Beaumont; assistant engine operator Jason McKay, 27, of Phelan; and firefighter Daniel Hoover-Najera, 20, of San Jacinto. A fifth firefighter Pablo Cerda, 23, of Fountain Valley, who was injured along with the other four, passed away on October 31. The five firefighters comprised the crew of a wildland engine, Engine 57, from the San Bernardino National Forest. They were assigned to a state managed fire approximately 60 miles east of Los Angeles and were entrapped while protecting a structure.
The Mill Flat fire on the Dixie National Forest was a resource benefit fire that was managed for about 5 weeks before it burned into the community of New Harmony, Utah on August 29. The fire forced evacuations, destroyed three residences, and damaged another eight structures.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Salt Lake Tribune.
U.S. Forest Service administrator Bevan Killpack defends the choices made in fighting the Mill Flat fire in southern Utah this summer, but acknowledges that officials should have seen the fire growing quickly days before it reached New Harmony.
“We weren’t focusing on the acreage as much as where the fire was,” said Killpack, a Pine Valley District ranger who oversaw the benefit resource fire. “We were looking at 100 acres growing every day, but it was staying on the mountain.”
The resource benefit fire started small in July but began to consume 100 acres a day around Aug. 26, according to a fire behavior analyst who reviewed the forest service’s daily communications and papers in late September. The blaze was burning 40 acres or less a day prior to that, Killpack said.
“That should have told us something,” he said Thursday. “We should have realized 100 acres was substantial. That should have been a red flag and we missed it.”
An updated fire plan was put in place Aug. 26 and hand crews and engines were ordered to clear fuel breaks west of New Harmony “to hold the fire if it moves toward town,” according to U.S. State Department of Agriculture documents obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune .
Fire crews continued to herd the blaze, that was burning northeast, farther north. A helicopter also was brought in early to begin dropping water to slow the fire from spreading into Dam and Straight canyons. A hotshot crew from Logan was ordered to strengthen and extend fuel breaks.
On Aug. 27, A hotshot superintendent told a concerned homeowner that “there was no immediate threat,” the documents state.
But on Aug. 29, something nobody predicted happened.
Unexpectedly strong, cold winds dropped the blaze’s smoke column into the valley about 2 p.m. It was full of burning embers and jumped quickly over fire breaks to start new fires a mile or more down the hill in front of the original fire, Killpack said.
The blaze moved quickly as visibility was cut to near zero. Thick smoke forced fire crews in the air and on the ground to abandon their efforts. Embers flew into New Harmony.
“That’s why we had homes burn,” Killpack said. “We just felt helpless and sick.”
The 1,300-acre resource benefit blaze quickly grew into a 12,600-acre raging wildfire that forced the evacuation of 170 New Harmony residents, destroyed three homes and damaged eight buildings.
But Killpack said fire personnel had correctly monitored the resource benefit blaze by testing and measuring wind, temperatures, fuel moisture and other aspects of the blaze throughout July and August.
However, Killpack later admitted, “I was nervous with it the whole time.”
They made the best and most accurate decisions with the science they had available to them, he said.
“I was trying to protect the community and I ended up burning [it],” Killpack said. “It bit us, and dang it, I don’t want it ever to happen again.”
The widow of John Curry, who was killed during tree felling training in Florida on November 27, 2007, is suing the Volusia County Fire Services. Kristen Curry is claiming a “lack of training, instruction, preparation and warning” led to her husband’s death.
Wildfire Today covered this accident on April 7, 2009 when the report was issued:
Curry was 30 years old and had been a member of Volusia County Fire Services for 10 months. He was training to be a member of the elite Firewalker Wildland Team and left behind a wife and two children.
The incident occurred during a training class at the Volusia County Fire Training Center near Datona Beach, Florida.
According to the report the trainees watched only 2 hours of a 4 hour training video. Then during tree felling field training, the cuts on an [18-inch] pine tree were not completed properly, causing the tree to fall in an unexpected direction. It fell onto Curry’s escape route, killing him. The report said there was no one at the training site to keep him from running where the tree eventually fell.
The State Fire Marshal’s office issued a Notice of violation for:
Failure to provide adequate training to meet “Trained Commensurate to Duty” requirements.
Failure to provide a safe workplace.
The State Fire Marshal’s report is available on our Documents page.
Kristen Curry is seeking compensation for the loss of her husband’s future “support and services”, as well as compensatory damages for her and her son’s mental pain and suffering.
I didn’t know (or care) that my DIRECTV service included the “Fox Reality Channel” until I checked tonight, but on Saturday, October 24 they will carry the first of 10 one-hour episodes of a reality show that will follow 29 fire recruits as they go through the 18-week basic firefighter academy with the Orange County Fire Authority in southern California.
The series, titled “The Academy: Orange County Fire” will be one of the last on the Reality Channel, which announced last week that they will cease to exist next spring.
This is apparently the third season of The Academy. The first two focused on recruits of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as they participated in an 18-week training program.
Orange County has their fair share of wildland fires. Two of the more recent large ones include the Freeway fire of November, 2008 and the Santiago fire of October, 2007.
FDNNTV has a video report about the show.
(VIDEO NO LONGER AVAILABLE)
The first episode of the series will be aired on DIRECTV October 24 at 10 p.m. MT, 9 p.m. PT. It may appear at a different time on other systems.
Monday will be the third anniversary of the Esperanza fire in which five U. S. Forest Service firefighters died in southern California. Raymond Lee Oyler has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for setting this fire, but the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has still not completed its investigation.
One of the problems with this is that many people are waiting to hear if the OIG will recommend that criminal charges be filed against firefighters, as happened in two other fires, the Thirtymile and Cramer fires.
The Inspector General, Phyllis Fong, testified before Congress in March that the report would be issued by the end of the month. Now they are saying it will be done by the end of November.
John N. Maclean, the author of “The Thirtymile Fire”, is in southern California right now collecting additional information about the Esperanza fire for a book he is working on. Who knows, his book may be out before the OIG’s report is issued.
The Press Enterprise has an article about the OIG investigation. Here is an excerpt.
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… The delays have caused anxiety and frustration for both the firefighters who fought the 43,000-acre blaze and the families of those killed.
“We’re just waiting. We are surprised it has taken so long,” said Vivian Najera, aunt of firefighter Daniel Hoover-Najera, who was killed in the fire. “All of us have questioned when it is coming out, and we haven’t got any answers. We are anxious to find out what it has to say.”
The investigation is just the third of its kind and was required by a 2002 law mandating the office investigate deaths of federal firefighters killed in burnovers or entrapments.
The five killed in the Esperanza Fire were overrun by flames as they fought to save a lone, unoccupied home near Cabazon.
The two previous investigations led to charges against two fire commanders in the deaths of federal firefighters in Washington state and Idaho. The law was created after the 2001 Thirtymile Fire in Washington state, which killed four firefighters. U.S. Forest Service supervisor Ellreese N. Daniels was indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter and lying to investigators.
After the 2003 Cramer Fire in Idaho, in which two firefighters died, the U.S. attorney’s office filed charges against that fire’s incident commander, Alan Hackett, who was found to have been negligent in his management of the blaze. However, Cal Fire’s jurisdiction over the Esperanza Fire is a key difference from the previous two cases and one that presented a “unique challenge” to federal investigators,” Fong told members of the House Appropriation Committee during a March 11 briefing. “The fire occurred on non-federal land, and (the Forest Service) was assisting in the suppression effort as part of a cooperative agreement with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, an entity for which OIG has no oversight jurisdiction,” Fong said.
‘TYPICAL,’ ‘FRUSTRATING’
That question of jurisdiction and the relationship between state and federal agencies battling the same blaze is certain to be addressed in the report. The firefighting community, both locally and nationally, has long awaited the investigation’s findings, said Casey Judd, business manager for the Federal Wildland Fire Service Association, which represents federal firefighters around the country.
“It’s typical of the agency — typically frustrating,” Judd said. “I can’t for the life of me see why the OIG can’t get this out.”
In the aftermath of the fire, the U.S. Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration and a joint state-federal task force launched separate investigations of the fire. Not wishing to obstruct the latter, OIG investigators delayed their interviews, Feeney said Thursday.
“This was done to ensure that OIG’s inquiry did not interfere with theirs,” he said. “That decision significantly pushed back the start of OIG’s primary investigative work.”
Both of the earlier inquiries found fire personnel took unnecessary risks.
Killed in the fire were Engine 57 Capt. Mark Loutzenhiser, 43, of Idyllwild; Jason McKay, 27, of Apple Valley; Jess McLean, 27, of Beaumont; Pablo Cerda, 23, of Fountain Valley; and Hoover-Najera, 20, of San Jacinto.
Oyler was convicted of five counts of murder for setting the blaze and was sentenced in June to die.
Relatives of the firefighters and others will gather Monday at 11:30 a.m. at the Cabazon Fire Station, 50382 Irene St. in Cabazon, to memorialize the third anniversary of the fire and the deaths of the five men.
As Wildfire Today reported on October 20, Ricky Lee Fowler has been indicted for setting the Old fire which burned 91,000 acres in 2003 in southern California. He was charged with five counts of murder, one count of arson of an inhabited structure, and one count of aggravated arson with special circumstances. Five heart attack deaths have been linked to the fire which burned in the areas of Lake Arrowhead, Running Springs, and Big Bear.
The charges were filed just four days before the statue of limitations was due to expire. It could be difficult to prove that stress from the fire led to the heart attacks.
Here is an excerpt from a story by the AP:
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Proving that case, however, could be a challenge: all the victims had a history of heart disease, and prosecutors might be hard-pressed to get a jury to see murder in the medical mix.
Under state law, any death that occurs during the commission of a felony, including arson, can be charged as first-degree murder — but a conviction will hinge on how much time elapsed between the crime and the death and if any other factors contributed.
“There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting a felony murder conviction in this case,” said Robert Weisberg, director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford University. “But the judge could conceivably say I’m not even going to give this to the jury … because it’s too hard to say the fire actually caused the deaths.”
Prosecutors insist they have a strong case and are confident they can link the deaths to the arson.
Investigators pored over hundreds of tips, witness reports and other evidence over six years and were finally able to file charges Wednesday, just four days before the statute of limitations was to expire. Rickie Lee Fowler, a 28-year-old convict currently in prison for burglary, was indicted on five counts of murder, one count of aggravated arson and one count of arson of an inhabited structure.
He has not appeared in court and no attorney was listed in court records.
Following a phone tip, investigators interviewed Fowler several months after the fire, but didn’t have enough evidence to press charges. They went back to him in 2006 and 2008, when he finally provided additional information that helped detectives close the case, Supervising Deputy District Attorney Victor Stull said.
Stull would not say what he said, but defended the district attorney’s decision to charge Fowler in a potential death penalty case. He should have known that people could die — even from heart attacks — when he tossed a lighted roadside flare into the brush.
“You can anticipate someone having a heart attack every now and again, but (these were) three on the same day, within hours of each other and the others followed just days after,” Stull said. “The arsonist takes his victims as he finds them.”
Fowler’s case highlights a new determination to charge alleged arsonists with murder whenever possible in a region plagued by wildfires that repeatedly lead to firefighter and civilian deaths, said John Maclean, who has written four books on arson wildfire prosecutions.
Earlier this year, prosecutors in neighboring Riverside County won a death penalty conviction against Raymond Lee Oyler, an auto mechanic who set the 2006 Esperanza wildfire that killed five federal firefighters. Oyler is believed to be the first person in the U.S. to be convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in a wildland arson case.
Investigators are trying to determine who set the Station Fire, a wildfire north of Los Angeles that resulted in the deaths of two firefighters who drove off the road in thick smoke.
Maclean called the Oyler conviction a watershed moment for prosecutors seeking to stem arsons that ravage the region every fall.
“The lesson of the Esperanza Fire is that anyone who starts a fire deliberately is putting himself in jeopardy of the death penalty, even if there was no intent,” said Maclean, who is currently writing a book on Oyler’s case. “The cat’s out of the bag here. You don’t have to have an Oyler case anymore to go for first-degree murder or in fact to go for the death penalty.”
Like the other victims, McDermith had a history of heart disease, said his daughter-in-law, Lisa McDermith. He had a quadruple bypass in the early 1990s and was having trouble breathing in the thick smoke from the wildfire.
When he died, he was driving from his home in Highland to San Bernardino to retrieve his RV from a mobile home park so he could load it with clothing and camp out in a church parking lot during the evacuation. A crew checking electric wires nearby spotted him in distress and did CPR until an ambulance arrived, but McDermith was dead by the time he arrived at the hospital.
Another man, 93-year-old Charles Howard Cunningham, had a heart attack as he watched his home burn.
Lisa McDermith said because of the victims’ pre-existing conditions, she was surprised when a detective said Fowler would likely be charged with murder.
“Who knows how much longer these people would have lived? It was a very stressful situation with the fires, the smoke, they couldn’t breathe, they were starving for oxygen,” she said. “I think that exacerbated all of their health issues and I really believe that murder charges are justified.”
The Wenatchee World has an article that reviews two prescribed fires that escaped control on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington earlier this month, the Beehive and the Preston-Fox fires. Here is an excerpt.
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WENATCHEE In early October, when it seemed wildfire season had come to a close, two fires on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest burned out of control.
Intentionally ignited by the U.S. Forest Service as prescribed fires, parts of the Beehive Reservoir Fire southwest of Wenatchee, and the Preston-Fox Fire west of Entiat became uncontrolled wildfires. The agency called in helicopters, hotshot crews and other resources to get the fires under control.
The Forest Service is conducting more and larger controlled burns throughout the Pacific Northwest. In 2002 it burned a total of 34,300 acres in Washington and Oregon, and that figure had more than doubled to about 82,500 acres this year, said regional Forest Service spokesman Tom Knappenberger.
And with more acres to burn, and only short windows in the spring and fall to burn them, fire officials say it’s not a surprise that some of the fires get away.
“You can’t have large prescribed fires without expecting to lose a fire here and there,” said Bobbie Scopa, fire management officer for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.
She said the Forest Service is trying to burn more acres without spending more money and the only way to do that is to burn larger units.
“If you think about the forest being 3.8 million acres, and say we were burning 10,000 to 15,000 acres a year, we’re not going to make a big enough impact on the forest by doing that,” she said. “We’re trying to increase the size of our projects so we can make a difference.”
Forest spokeswoman Robin DeMario said it’s tough to determine exactly how much money the Forest Service spent to suppress these fires beyond what the agency was already spending to under-burn the areas.
Only about 45 acres of the 600 acres burned in Beehive, and about 100 acres of 1,400 acres burned in the Preston-Fox were not slated for prescribed fire, she said.
The cost of fighting those fires ranged from $600 to $800 per acre, compared with about $30 it costs to conduct a controlled burn, DeMario said.
“We try to be good stewards of the land. And we try to be cost-conscious with American tax dollars, which is why we try to do prescribed burning. It costs a lot less,” she said.
No homes were threatened by either blaze, but the Beehive fire did burn about 40 acres of Longview Timber Corp. property.
Company representative Steve Tift said much of the fire stayed on the ground, but climbed into some trees which now have orange needles. He said he won’t know until next spring if the trees will survive. “We hate to lose any timber,” he said. But added, “Fire in Eastern Washington is just part of life.”
The Preston-Fox Fire burned about 85 acres of the Entiat Experimental Forest, where Forest Service researchers are conducting ongoing studies. That 1,290-acre fire started as a 10-acre test plot that escaped.
Winds pushed both fires out of control.
Scopa said the Forest Service does all it can to get an accurate weather forecast, but the weather doesn’t always do what’s expected.
“We take weather readings on the site for a few days prior to when we’re burning,” she said. The readings include things like fuel moisture and humidity along with winds speed, wind direction, temperature and other factors. The information is sent to the National Weather Service in Spokane, which comes up with a forecast for the specific site before the controlled burn is ignited, Scopa said.
“Is it foolproof, every time you ignite a burn? No, it isn’t,” she said. “This is not an exact science.”
Scopa said it’s never a good thing to lose control of a prescribed burn, but in both fires, the blaze that escaped acted more like a controlled burn than a wildfire — burning out the understory without burning up into the crowns of trees, thereby leaving the larger, older trees in a healthier ecosystem.
“We’re not happy we weren’t able to keep it inside the line, but the area that burned outside the line was just as beneficial, from a resource-benefit standpoint,” she said.
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More information about the Preston-Fox fire can be found HERE.
The Baker River Hotshots Tweeted about both fires in early October.
Dust devils can be the bane of the wildland firefighter, sometimes throwing burning embers across the fireline or even turning into a little fire tornado if it involves flames from burning vegetation.
But as far as I know, the dust devils on Mars don’t cause any problems for firefighters.
NASA describes the photo above this way:
Who’s been marking up Mars? This portion of a recent high-resolution picture from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing light colored terrain on the martian surface. Newly formed trails like these had presented researchers with a tantalizing martian mystery but are now known to be the work of miniature wind vortices known to occur on the red planet – martian dust devils. Such spinning columns of rising air heated by the warm surface are also common in dry and desert areas onplanet Earth. Typically lasting only a few minutes, dust devils becoming visible as they pick up loose red-colored dust leaving the darker and heavier sand beneath intact. On Mars, dust devilscan be up to 8 kilometers high. Dust devils have been credited with unexpected cleanings of mars rover solar panels.
Howard Rayon, Laguna Hot Shots, 1975. Photo: Bill Gabbert
Howard Rayon, a firefighter’s firefighter, lost his battle with cancer on October 18. I first met Howard when we were charter members of the Laguna Hot Shots on the Cleveland National Forest in southern California in 1974. He moved from Hot Shots to engines, and then to the Santee Fire Department east of San Diego in 1977 working his way up to Deputy Chief where he is still shown on their web site in an old photo. He was a Safety Officer on one of the California Type 1 Incident Management Teams.
In his spare time he became a lawyer and specialized in labor law and firefighter litigation and also became well known around the state for the fire courses he instructed. The California State Firefighters’ Association annual conference earlier this year was named in his honor. Howard retired from Santee FD in 2006.
Jerry Brown, Attorney General of California, with Howard Rayon
Howard was a true professional, and everyone around him benefited from his knowledge and devotion to the fire service. He will be missed.
When the details for the final services have been worked out I will post them here.
UPDATE on October 31:
Here is a video that T. Staffel told us about. It was filmed at a “celebration of Howard’s life” at the Irish Pub in La Mesa, Calif. It includes playing of the pipes and some comments by those in attendance.
Some folks in Minnesota are very skilled at applying for FEMA grants. St. Louis County in Minnesota has received a grant for $1.1 million to help 126 private homeowners and business buy outdoor sprinkler systems to protect their property from wildfires. The program will cover 75 percent of the costs of installing the systems.
As Wildfire Today reported on November 12, 2008, Cook County in Minnesota has already received $3 million in FEMA grants for sprinkler systems for homes and businesses. As we stated then, grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be used for something other than adding sprinklers to private property.
Dust devils can be the bane of the wildland firefighter, sometimes throwing burning embers across the fireline or even turning into a little fire tornado if it involves flames from burning vegetation.
