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.
- 2007: a firefighter was killed in Florida during chain saw training.
- 2008: a firefighter was injured while falling a snag on the Rattle Fire near Toketee Falls, Oregon.
- 2011: a firefighter in New South Wales, Australia was killed by a falling tree.
- 2012: a firefighter was killed by a falling tree on the Steep Corner Fire in Idaho.
- 2013: One firefighter was killed and another was injured by a falling snag in the Deschutes National Forest near Sisters, Oregon.
- 2013: A smokejumper was killed by a falling limb while suppressing a wildfire on the Modoc National Forest in northeast California.
The U.S. Forest Service has produced a very good video titled “When a Tree Falls: Working Around Danger Trees”.
