New guide for wildfire accident reports requires conclusions and recommendations to be kept secret, intended for internal agency use only.
Continue readingControversy surrounds the Yarnell Hill Fire fatalities
It is enough of a tragedy that 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots died while fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30. But several issues continue to pour salt into the wounds of the grieving families and others that mourn their deaths. Some issues will hopefully diminish when the two reports become public. Or, in a worse case, they could be made worse, or new ones could be unearthed.
The Serious Accident Investigation which was commissioned by the Arizona State Forestry Division is expected to be public within the next week or so, but only after it is distributed first to the families of the 19 victims.
The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health, a state version of federal OSHA, is also working on a report. It is required to be complete no later than six months after their investigation was announced, which would make it due around the first part of 2014.
The controversy about the the large differences in the survivor benefits for the families of the full time and seasonal firefighters on the Granite Mountain Hotshots has been festering for weeks and is now being discussed in the Arizona legislature.
Another issue that came to light recently is the refusal of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s and Medical Examiner’s offices to release the autopsy reports for the 19 firefighters. This has escalated to the point where the Arizona Republic and 12 News have filed suit against the agencies. The Arizona Republic and 12 News realize that certain photographs of the bodies and perhaps other evidence may not be appropriate to be released, but they are adamant that the remaining records should be released and feel their demands are backed by state law.
Still another issue that will be debated was published by the Arizona Republic and picked up by the USA Today. It relates to the reports prepared by the Serious Accident Investigation team. The latest Serious Accident Investigation Guide, revised August, 2013, recommends that two reports be prepared. One, the Factual Report, would be made public, and the other, the Management Evaluation Report, would be kept confidential, intended for internal agency use only. The public report would not include any conclusions or recommendations. This would result in a public report that is much different from many of the reports we have seen in recent years.
UPDATE: we wrote more about these changes to the Serious Accident Investigation reports.
Wildfire briefing, July 31, 2013
Two reports released about air tankers
The U.S. Forest Service recently released two reports about firefighting aircraft, the products of contracts issued by the agency. The details are over at Fire Aviation, but here is a summary:
- AVID, a Virginia-based company that employed a crew of retired and current aviation professionals, produced a report “…to build analytical data that can be used to estimate the requirement for airtankers in the future.” The Fire Aviation article about the report can be found here.
- The U.S. Forest Service has released a study on how the C-27J could be used by the agency if the Air Force gives them seven of the aircraft as expected.
Summary of fire stats
The National Park Service’s Morning Report written by Bill Halainen has a table that tracks some of the statistics about fires over the last five days. Here is an example from today’s report:
Judge rejects California’s lawsuit over 2007 fire
A judge has thrown out a lawsuit brought by the state of California against the state’s largest timber company over liability for the 2007 Moonlight Fire which burned more than 65,000 acres in Northern California. The state was hoping to recoup some of the $22.5 million spent fighting the fire.
Last year the company, Sierra Pacific, agreed to pay nearly $50 million and donate 22,500 acres of land to settle a federal government lawsuit over the Moonlight fire.
Congressional Task Force Links Worsening Wildfires to Climate Change
On Tuesday the Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change convened a panel of experts on climate and wildland fire to discuss the impacts of climate change on wildfires. Below is an excerpt from an article at the National Journal:
…Panelists cited a number of reasons for wildfire flare-ups, including land-use patterns and insect activity. But the discussion kept circling back to climate change.
“Scientists tell us these changes are not just random variability,” Waxman said. “Bigger and more-intense fires are one of the red flags of climate change.”
Climate-change expert William Sommers, a researcher at George Mason University’s EastFIRE Laboratory, agreed. Sommers cautioned that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide will only worsen wildfires in decades to come. “If current greenhouse-gas emission trends are not sharply reversed in the immediate future, we will see observed trends in wildfire risk accelerate,” he warned.
Waxman and Whitehouse asked firefighting and forestry experts for policy recommendations to help mitigate the situation.
Panelists, including Santa Fe, N.M., Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg and Rick Swan, director of supervisory personnel and health and safety for the California Department of Forestry Firefighters, cited budget cuts as a major stumbling block in efforts to combat wildfires, and called for increased funding for park services and firefighters.
“We are seeing a dramatic increase in the number of fires, especially in California,” Swan said. “But we are not seeing the same increase in staffing levels and funding.”
Report issued about resources deployed on Yarnell Hill Fire
The Arizona State Forestry Division has issued a report that summarizes information about some of the major events and the firefighting resources that were deployed for the Yarnell Hill Fire on which 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew were killed.
A very quick summary: according to the report, 24 hours after the Yarnell Hill Fire was reported, it had burned only 6 acres — 23 hours after that 19 firefighters were dead. It seems too unlikely to believe.
Below are some highlights of the report, but you can read the entire report HERE.
Friday, June 28, 2013
The fire, caused by lightning, was reported at 5:40 p.m. The Yarnell Volunteer Fire Department responded, but they were not sure they could access it. The fire was not staffed at night for safety and lack of access reasons. The last reported size that day was one acre. Air Attack flew over the fire but there was no mention of any helicopters or air tankers being used. There were multiple lightning-caused fires in that part of the state.
A spot weather forecast from the National Weather Service predicted for Saturday, hot (102-104 degrees), dry (10-11% relative humidity), winds light (W-SW 6-10 gusts to 14 m.p.h.), very little relative humidity recovery at night, and the possibility of high based showers or thunderstorms with a slight chance of moisture. If thunderstorms developed, the fire area could experience gusty winds.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Six firefighters were flown in to the fire and began work. They estimated the fire had burned two to four acres.
Continue reading
A fresh look at the tragic Dude Fire
A journalist, who is also an editor at Time, Inc., has taken a fresh look at the Dude Fire, 23 years after 6 firefighters were entrapped and killed in Walk Moore Canyon north of Payson, Arizona, June 23, 1990 — a day when the temperature in Phoenix reached 122 degrees, grounding jetliners because there was no reliable data confirming that fully loaded commercial aircraft could operate in that kind of heat.
Jaime Joyce conducted extensive research about the fire, talking to firefighters who survived, families that had to bury their sons, investigators who determined what happened and how the equipment functioned, and yes, attorneys who dealt with legal issues long after the funerals. She unearthed facts, stories, and perspectives that never made it into the official reports.
Firefighters can learn many lessons from reading the investigation report which was completed less than a month after the accident by Dick Mangan, Ted Putnum, Patricia Andrews, and six others.
Reading articles like the one written by Ms. Joyce can also impress upon a firefighter, especially those in the early part of their careers, that things CAN go wrong, horribly wrong, and how important it is to be responsible for your own safety (if you SEE something, SAY something) and to maintain situational awareness.
Ms. Joyce’s account, published at The Big Roundtable, brings to light details that would not normally be found in government reports — it shines a light on the accident from a different perspective. It also covers the battles fought by survivors and the victims’ families for various forms of restitution, largely futile, that persisted for years after the smoke cleared.
Below is an excerpt from the article:
****
“…The burnover lasted about 15 minutes. [Fire] shelters are designed to withstand temperatures up to 1,200 degrees. It must have been hotter in the heart of the flame front, since some of the shelters started to delaminate, the aluminum exterior separating from the fiberglass lining.
Davenport, Love, and LaTour stayed put. They waited inside their shelters until the area cooled down. LaTour used his radio to call for help but no one answered on any of the channels. Through the chatter, he heard someone say that help was coming. When the men finally emerged about 45 minutes later, shaky and weak, they followed the dozer line toward Control Road, their tattered shelters wrapped around their bodies like capes. As they walked, LaTour told the men not to look at the devastation that surrounded them. “We have to get out,” he said.
On the way down, they met Hoke, who was still inside his shelter. He emerged from his cocoon and joined the survivors. Ellis appeared next. As he walked toward the men, with his shelter tied around his forehead, his skin and clothing burned, the life drained out of him. “I’m dead,” Ellis told the others, and then he sat down on a log and died.
No one was waiting for the men at Control Road. Again, LaTour radioed for help and got no response. He headed west with his men about 200 yards, which is where a Forest Service truck met them. The men climbed into the bed of the pickup and were taken to a clearing, where they were given first aid. They were brought to the base camp next and flown by helicopter to Maricopa Medical Center, in Phoenix.
Before the flame front hit, the Alpine Hotshots foreman, Jim “J.P.” Mattingly, and his men had been conducting a burnout in Walk Moore Canyon just north of Perryville, using gasoline-filled drip torches to light small fires in order to clear vegetation and stop the spread of the blaze. When Mattingly saw the fire approaching, he had ordered his men to run north up the canyon, in the opposite direction of Perryville and Navajo. He had stepped away from the safety zone to take in his surroundings when he came across Paul Gleason, superintendent of the Zigzag Hotshots, and Paul Linse, superintendent of Flathead. Mattingly told the men that Perryville and Navajo had gone back toward Control Road, and that nobody else should be heading north up the canyon. But Gleason wanted to make sure no one was left. “Do you mind if we go back that way?” he asked. No one objected.
Their actions defied human instinct…”
(end of excerpt)
****
We contacted Ms. Joyce to ask her how she became interested in the Dude Fire. In addition to granting us permission to publish an excerpt, she was kind enough to provide the following answers to our inquiry:
Continue reading
Report: The Rising Cost of Wildfire Protection
Headwaters Economics has released a report titled “The Rising Cost of Wildfire Protection”, written by Ross Gorte, Ph.D., a retired Senior Policy Analyst with the Congressional Research Service. It is an effort to better understand and address why wildfires are becoming more severe and expensive and it describes how the protection of homes in the Wildland-Urban Interface has added to these costs.
Below are some excerpts:
****
Fuel Reduction on Federal Lands
Programs to protect the WUI also affect fuel reduction on other federal lands. First, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act directed that half of federal fuel reduction funds were to be used in the WUI. As a result, the proportion of fuel treatments in the WUI increased after FY2001 (the first year for which such data are available), from 37 percent (45% for the FS, 22% for DOI) to about 60 percent from FY2003 to FY2006 (73% for the FS, 42% for DOI), and 70 percent in FY2008 (83% for the FS, 47% for DOI).
More recent comparable data are not available, because the FS has modified the way fuel treatments are reported and has proposed shifting non-WUI fuel treatment funding to land and resource management accounts (instead of wildfire protection accounts).
This shift in fuel treatments to the WUI has two effects on federal fuel reduction efforts:
- It raises the average costs of reducing fuels on an acre of land. Treatments in the WUI are closer and more visible to humans and thus the public involvement process commonly takes longer and costs more. Mechanical treatments may require additional steps to reduce the visual impacts of removing biomass. Also, prescribed burning is, in many ways, the most effective means of reducing fuels, but the higher values and closer proximity of humans necessitate more personnel and more oversight to try to prevent the prescribed fires from becoming wildfires.23 One study found per-acre fuel reduction in the WUI costs 43 percent more for prescribed burning and nearly three times more for mechanical fuel reduction than in non-WUI areas.24
- It results in less fuel reduction on other lands. The level of fuel reduction over the past decade has remained relatively stable—averaging about 3 million acres annually according to the agency budget justifications. Because efforts are increasingly being focused on the WUI, the level of fuel reduction on non-WUI lands is probably declining. Furthermore, as discussed in more detail in other reports, 25 the 3 million-acre effort is insufficient to treat the 230 million acres of federal lands at high or moderate risk of ecological damage from wildfires in a timely manner. Thus, wildfire fuel levels are currently increasing, and shifting more fuel reduction to the WUI will exacerbate the current situation. This is likely to lead to more severe wildfire seasons in the future.
Summary of reviews of escaped prescribed fires in 2012
The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center conducted a review of prescribed fires that escaped in 2012. Here is an excerpt:
During the course of the 2012 season, the National Interagency Fire Center reports that 16,626 prescribed fires treated 1,971,834 acres. At the end of 2012, the Lessons Learned Center (LLC) received reviews on seven escaped prescribed fires (housed in the LLC Incident Review Database [IRDB]). In addition, other agency notifications and media reports indicated seven additional escaped prescribed fires occurred in 2012. (Reviews from these seven events were not submitted to the LLC. Factors associated with these seven escapes are not considered in the detailed analysis that follows.)
When viewed as a whole, 14 escapes out of more than 16,600 prescribed fires represent a very small percentage: 0.08 %. While this might seem to be an insignificant number, it’s only part of the story.
The Lessons Learned Center looked for common themes. They are listed below, but are not necessarily the causes of the escapes.
- Are you ready for an escape on Day 1? Are you still vigilant two weeks later?
- How do you deal with issues related to unburned fuels inside your project area?
- Are your Mop-up Plans adaptable to burn results and forecasted weather?
- How familiar are you and your burn organization with your fuels and your unit?
- Can you pay for your contingency resources?
- Be careful what you ask your prescribed fire organizations to do. They’ll find a way to do it, even if conditions are less than ideal.
NTSB report: EMS helicopter crashed after running out of fuel and failure to autorotate
(Updated at 1:51 p.m. MT, April 10, 2013)
The NTSB report mentions that the pilot was texting on his cell phone the day of the accident, including “during the accident flight”. An article at Bloomberg.com has more details about the texting, including:
…The NTSB documented at least 240 texts sent and received by the pilot during his shift the day of the accident, according to records cited by Bill Bramble, an NTSB investigator. There were 20 such texts with a coworker before and during the accident, the safety board found.
Freudenbert received four texts, three of them from a friend at work, and sent three others during the flight, according to NTSB records. He was planning to have dinner with the coworker, according to the records.
Another 13 texts were logged on his phone in the 71 minutes before the flight, including two during a previous flight, according to NTSB records.
****
(Originally published April 9, 2013)
The National Transportation Safety Board has released the cause of the crash of an EMS helicopter August 26, 2011 near Mosby, Missouri. The agency’s report concludes the crash, which killed the pilot, flight nurse, flight paramedic and patient, occurred because the helicopter ran out of fuel and the failure of the pilot to execute a successful autorotation.
The finding about the possible reason for the autorotation failure after the engine failure at cruise speed may have implications for other pilots.
Below is the NTSB’s announcement:
****
“April 9, 2013
NTSB DETERMINES FATAL MISSOURI HELICOPTER ACCIDENT WAS CAUSED BY FUEL EXHAUSTION, POOR DECISION MAKING AND INABILITY TO PERFORM CRITICAL FLIGHT MANEUVER
WASHINGTON — A pilot’s decision to depart on a mission despite a critically low fuel level as well as his inability to perform a crucial flight maneuver following the engine flameout from fuel exhaustion was the probable cause of an emergency medical services helicopter accident that killed four in Missouri, the National Transportation Safety Board said today.
Continue reading
Another report released for Colorado Springs’ Waldo Canyon Fire
(Originally published at 2:07 p.m. MT, April 5, 2013; updated at 4:30 p.m. MT, April 5, 2013)
The City of Colorado Springs has released a second report about the disastrous Waldo Canyon fire that in June, 2012 killed two people, destroyed 347 homes, and burned 18,247 acres. The first report can be found HERE, and was called an “Initial After Action Report” considered preliminary. Wildfire Today covered that report on October 23, 2012. This new report on the City’s web site is described as the “Final After Action Report”. Unlike the first version, this one provides more information about what went well and what didn’t, and includes many recommendations along with the reasons for each one.
As a firefighter who worked on the 1975 Pacoima Fire where the Incident Command System was used for the first time, it is difficult to understand why 37 years later a large city with an extensive wildland/urban interface in a wildfire-prone area had not fully adopted the ICS by 2012. In reviewing these two reports, and an excellent exposé written for the Colorado Independent by Pam Zubeck, which in my mind deserves a Pulitzer Prize, roughly 75 percent of the problems identified could have been avoided if Colorado Springs had fully implemented the ICS.
The City’s reports claim ICS training has been conducted for some of their employees, but it is clear from the problems encountered during the Waldo Canyon Fire that it was poorly, if at all, implemented.
Even if extensive ICS training is given within the City, that is not enough. The system needs to be used daily. No one can receive the training and then instantly be qualified as a Logistics Section Chief, for example. Under the best of circumstances, it takes years, sometimes decades of experience and training to advance from an entry level ICS position to the highest ranks, so Colorado Springs needs to develop an aggressive mentoring program. Trainees need to be assigned on large incidents outside the City to shadow someone who can show them the ropes. Their freshly trained employees may not qualify for a Trainee position at the Unit Leader or Section Chief level, but I doubt if the City will worry much about qualifications for ICS positions, or how to move up the chain of command from position to position. The 310-1 Wildland Fire Qualification System Guide might only be a pipe dream for Colorado Springs.
This in no way should be considered as criticism of the Colorado Springs firefighters. Many of them are highly trained and some have had multiple assignments with Type 1 incident management teams on large wildfires. The organizational and policy problems rest with the city administrators and the leaders within the fire department.
The Colorado Springs Gazette published an article about the report on April 3, pulling no punches. Here is an excerpt:
“Obviously, going forward we need to learn from this. If this fire had started on Cheyenne Mountain we would have lost thousands of homes and probably many more people,” [Mayor Steve Bach] said Wednesday. “This is going to happen again.”
The report focused largely on the afternoon and night of June 26, when the fire destroyed 347 homes and killed two residents.
Colorado Springs firefighters raced into Mountain Shadows without plans to ensure they had food, water or rest breaks, the report said.
Capt. Steve Riker, the department’s incident commander on June 26, said he initially had his firefighters “well under control.” However, he said that control began to slip as units from neighboring fire departments rushed to help.
Supervisors operated under organizational charts that weren’t fully developed, the report said, and emergency plans were “underutilized.”
Communication lagged between city officials and first responders in the field — leading firefighters and police officers to work without full situational awareness.
The Colorado Springs city administration has been sensitive to criticism about they way they managed the fire. In a video that was shot at a press conference, Chief Rich Brown said:
The hypercritical view by some at times just gets a little old. Because of the fact that they weren’t there. They didn’t see what the decision maker at the time saw. Any public safety professional worth anything is always going to come back and say I would have done this differently if I had the same thing to do over again.
Thanks go out to Dick
Multiple reports released about New Mexico megafires
U.S. Representative Steve Pearce has assembled five reports about two huge wildfires, megafires, that burned hundreds of thousands of acres and destroyed many homes in New Mexico in 2012. The Whitewater Baldy Complex blackened over 297,000 acres and destroyed 12 summer homes, while the Little Bear Fire burned 44,000 acres and 254 structures.
In June, 2012, Representative Pearce was extremely critical of the way the U.S. Forest Service was managing the fires, mentioning the name of Tom Tidwell, Chief of the Forest Service, many times during a 22-minute speech on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The five reports, plus one bonus article from the 1940s, can be found on Representative Pearce’s web site, and include the following:
- William A. Derr, retired as Special Agent in Charge of the Law Enforcement and Investigative program in California. Mr. Derr was asked by Rep. Pearce to evaluate the management of the two fires, and was given the title of Legislative Fellow during his fact finding mission. It was an unpaid assignment, and Mr. Derr told Wildfire Today that he is not even sure if he will ask to be reimbursed for his travel expenses.
- Roger Seewald, retired from the U.S. Forest Service, began his career in wildland fire on the El Cariso Hot Shots in California, and after a decade or two switched over to law enforcement. At one point late in his career he worked out of the Washington office as Deputy Director, Law Enforcement and Investigations. In his report he stated he was representing the U.S. Forest Service. In Mr. Derr’s report he was described as “representing the Chief of the Forest Service”.
- Doug Boykin, Socorro District Forester, New Mexico – Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, Socorro District. Mr. Boykin was the Type 3 Incident Commander during one of the early stages of the Whitewater Baldy Complex. He wrote a 17-page report packed with details and photographs. One of those details that is surprising for an objective report by a government employee about a disastrous wildfire, is that he apparently thinks God controlled the fire, and wrote: “But, given what we know now, I feel this was the perfect set up by a higher power that had grown tired of our inability to use common since [sic] in forest management and chose to set things right in his own way.”
- Allen Campbell, a local resident and rancher who spent his early years “guiding clients”. His report covers the legacy and the environmental impacts of the fire, and is critical of the USFS fire management policy.
- Impact DataSource, is an economic consulting, research, and analysis firm working out of Austin, Texas. Their report is titled “The Full Cost of New Mexico Wildfires”. The purpose of the report was to “…estimate the full impact of wildfires in New Mexico both during and after the wildfire occurs.” And, “…additional environmental,societal, economic and fiscal impacts are typically not tracked by any federal, state or local government or organization making the full impact of wildfires difficult to quantify.”
- Earl W. Loveridge, formerly the Assistant Chief of the USFS, and before that the Assistant Chief of it’s Division of Operation and Fire Control. This reprint of a Journal of Forestry article appears to have been written in the mid-1940s. Chief Loveridge covered fire management policy, was critical of a “let burn” strategy, and pointed out the “importance of speed of control”. He also covered the 1935 origin of the “10 a.m. policy”, in which “Forester” F. A. Silcox stated, in part:
- “The approved protection policy on the National Forests calls for fast, energetic and thorough suppression of all fires in all locations, during possibly dangerous fire weather. When immediate control is not thus attained, the policy then calls for promptly calculating of the problems of the existing situation and probabilities of spread, and organizing to control every such fire within the first work period. Failing in this effort the attack each succeeding day will be planned and executed with the aim, without reservation, of obtaining control before ten o’clock of the next morning…. No fixed rule can be given to meet every situation; the spirit implied in the policy itself will determine the action to be taken in doubtful situations.”
The management of both fires, the Whitewater Baldy and the Little Bear, has been criticized. The Whitewater Baldy began as two fires, the Whitewater and the Baldy fires, which burned together. The Baldy was a “modified suppression” fire and was monitored, but the Whitewater was managed under a suppression strategy.
Much of the criticism of the Little Bear fire, including from Wildfire Today, was focused on what appeared from a distance to be less than aggressive suppression tactics, even though it was a suppression fire. Two firefighters worked the fire on the first day, and from day two through day five, while the fire was only four acres, a hotshot crew was assigned, but they had very, very little aerial firefighting support; limited use of one helicopter and no air tankers. On the fifth day the wind increased, a tree in the interior of the fire torched, and spot fires took off. The fire grew from 4 acres to 44,000 acres and destroyed 254 structures.
Mr. Derr’s report does not dig into the tactics of the fires, but concentrates primarily on the fire management policy of the USFS. He is critical of less than aggressive strategies, and regrets the abandonment of the 10 a.m. policy.
Mr. Seewald visited the four-acre site that comprised the Little Bear Fire for the first 5 days and cited steep slopes, heavy downed fuel, tree canopy, and rolling rocks as issues that made aerial support inadvisable, and for any more than one crew of firefighters to work the fire. He concluded that the USFS “…made every reasonable effort to extinguish the Little Bear Fire and used acceptable methods and strategies to control the fire.” He found very little to criticize other than suggesting that the USFS could “revisit” the methods used for communicating with the public and cooperators.
The Seewald report said the strong winds that caused the spot fires to take off were not predicted in the spot weather forecasts provided to the firefighters.
Doug Boykin, the Incident Commander on the Whitewater Baldy Fire, believes that the decisions about management of the Whitewater and the Baldy fires were appropriate, after taking into consideration the firefighting resources available, weather, fuels, and topography. Mr. Seewald, while he did not say so explicitly, seemed to agree with that assessment.