Tag: Rim Fire

Today a Federal Grand Jury indicted 32-year-old Keith Matthew Emerald for starting the Rim Fire that eventually burned 257,000 acres in the Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park. He was charged with two felonies, “Timber set afire” and “False statement to a government agency”, plus two misdemeanors, “Fire left unattended and unextinguished” and “Violating a fire restriction order”.

The fire became the third largest in California recorded history.

According to court documents, Mr. Emerald was rescued by a CAL FIRE helicopter from the extremely remote Clavey River Canyon area of the Stanislaus National Forest near the origin of the Rim Fire about an hour after the fire was reported. He was carrying bow hunting equipment with him and advised authorities that he had been on a solo hunting trip.

The CAL FIRE crew turned Mr. Emerald over to a U.S. Forest Service Fire Prevention Technician, who was not a law enforcement officer. He was later given a ride out of the forest by a government employee, but no one asked him for any identification. Investigators believe they were able to overcome that oversight. Later they applied for a search warrant for Mr. Emerald’s house and his vehicle, expecting to possibly find evidence in his computer, cell phone, backpack he was carrying that day, or elsewhere on the premises. The documents we reviewed did not reveal the results of the search.

During the extensive investigation and multiple interviews with Mr. Emerald, he told investigators several different versions of how the fire started, including:

• Illegal pot growers;
• He inadvertently started a rock slide, causing rocks to collide, creating sparks, which started the fire;
• He said he started a campfire and burned some trash in it. The burning trash blew into vegetation, starting the fire which escaped.

Mr. Emerald later recanted the campfire story.

Investigators ruled out all possible fire causes other than “incendiary/intentional fire start by human”, the court documents revealed.

Mr. Emerald is expected to appear soon in the federal court in Fresno. If convicted of setting timber afire or of making false statements to a government agency, he faces a maximum statutory penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count. Leaving a fire unattended and violating a fire restriction order each carry a maximum penalty of six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.

The U.S. Forest Service is being criticized for their early suppression attempts of the Rim Fire, as well as their lack of transparency about how it was fought and the cause of the fire. Starting on the Stanislaus National Forest but eventually spreading into Yosemite National Park, it became the third largest fire in California’s history, burning 257,000 acres, 11 homes, and 3 commercial structures. As of October 25, 2013, at least $127 million had been spent on the suppression and rehabilitation efforts.

Rumors swarmed about what started the fire, blaming a variety of causes including marijuana growers, the law enforcement officers pursuing them, or even an object falling to the ground that was related to a military operation. The USFS was very tight-lipped about the investigation and finally said a hunter’s campfire was the cause, but provided little additional information.

According to an article in the Union Democrat, the initial attack as well as the firefighting response during the first 48 hours was less than overwhelming. Below is an excerpt from their article:

…Jim Dunn, [a CAL FIRE S-2T air tanker pilot] who retired in November after a 24-year firefighting career , said he was making drops on the fire near Natural Bridges on Aug. 17 when he responded that afternoon to what later became the Rim Fire.

He told The Union Democrat that both air tankers stationed at the Columbia Air Attack Base responded when the fire was first reported. The Forest Service already had planes in the air and initially dispatched the other Columbia air tanker pilot, but grounded him shortly after Dunn began making drops. He said the Forest Service put him on hold as well, after only a couple hours of dropping retardant.

The fire was only about 40 acres after the first day, but grew to about 250 by the morning of Aug. 18.

“The next morning we started early and nobody was on the ground,” Dunn said. “After about an hour or two, we got retardant around most the (fire) line while it was still in the canyon.”

“On the third day, they (the Forest Service) called us and we made two or three drops — but then they put us on hold,” he said. “The next thing I heard on the air was that it had crossed the Tuolumne (river) and was running toward Pine Mountain Lake.

Thanks and a hat tip go out to Johnny.

The Los Angeles Times has an excellent article written by Diana Marcum which tells the story of how firefighters on the Rim Fire worked to prevent the giant sequoia and old growth sugar pine groves in Yosemite National Park from being consumed by the fire. Everyone would agree that these trees are worth saving. Sequoias grow to an average height of 160 to 280 feet and 20 to 26 feet in diameter. The oldest known sequoia based on ring count is 3,500 years old.

About two weeks after the fire started it was still burning through drought-afflicted vegetation in a manner that mostly confounded and frustrated the 5,000 firefighters trying desperately to stop the spread. It was moving toward the groves that had survived many fires over hundreds or thousands of years, but this fire was not like the relatively cool, slow moving lightning-caused fires that the trees had evolved to to live with. It threatened to wipe them out.

With the Rim Fire only one or two days away from the national treasure trees, firefighters decided their only hope of saving them was to treat the groves with fire, a controlled fire under their own conditions, before the main fire got there. This relatively cool fire would remove most of the fuel on the ground and hopefully prevent the very intense main fire from roaring through the groves, possibly killing the 3,000-year old trees. It was their only hope.

But the test fire worried them when 50-foot flames leaped into the sky.

Below are some excerpts from the must-read article:

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“…Inside Yosemite, officials had tried to restore the natural cycle of fire. For 40 years, lightning-sparked flames in wilderness areas had been left to burn, and specialists lighted controlled burns near tourist areas. But that might not offer enough protection.

“Hypothetically those old fire scars would slow the fire the further it moved into the park,” said Gus Smith, Yosemite’s fire ecologist. “But the Rim fire was like a flood, and it was coming. This was not the fire you wanted to test out a hypothesis.”

[…]

The sequoias evolved to face wildfire. But officials feared that this fire could kill even trees that had been shrugging off flames since before Rome burned.

[Ben] Jacobs and Taro Pusina, Yosemite’s deputy fire chief, drew up a plan. They would set three coordinated backfires and try to stop the wildfire with a “catcher’s mitt” of charred earth.

But first they would wind the fires through two of the very groves they were trying to protect. The Tuolumne and Merced groves were at the top of a ridge, in the direct line of the Rim fire, in an area that had not burned for 100 years. If the hotter Rim fire reached them, it could climb to the tops of 200-foot trees.

A lot could go wrong. If the backfires were too hot, they could cook the groves. If they did not burn enough ground in time, the Rim fire would roar through unblocked. Those two groves and the Merced Grove to the south would burn, the lookout tower and helicopter base would burn, and the firefighters would have to run.

“We knew it was a longshot,” Pusina said. “But no amount of bulldozers or planes or crews had stopped this fire. We were out of options.”

[…]

The next day, with the first grove still burning, a handful of firefighters drove into the Tuolumne grove, a mile to the east.

A fire crew from Arizona had prepared the area — raking debris away from trees, sawing snags and logs. Many of them had never seen a giant sequoia, which is native only on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. The species dates back to the Ice Age.

“They were in awe of the trees. They kept looking up as they worked,” recalled Gary Oye, division chief of wilderness stewardship…”