Firefighting rules to be emphasized

Associated Press

The U.S. Forest Service knows why firefighters die on the fire lines, but now the challenge is finding ways to get them to avoid making fatal errors.

"A lot of the safety rules are in place. We have covered a lot of safety ground," Tom Knappenberger, a Forest Service spokesman on temporary duty in Washington, D.C., said Thursday.

"It becomes an issue of getting people to follow the training and executing it in the field."

On Wednesday, the Forest Service released its report on the Thirty-mile fire, where four firefighters died and another 10 were trapped, along with two campers, on July 10.

The report said all of the most basic firefighting safety rules were broken or disregarded, and that the deaths could have been prevented.

"They didn’t hold back anything. We all made a lot of mistakes that day, especially the higher-ups," said Brian Schexnayder, a squad boss in charge of five Lake Wenatchee Ranger District firefighters who narrowly escaped that day.

"The thing I learned most about that day is I need to watch out for myself and not trust anyone else to make decisions about when to get out," Schexnayder told The Wenatchee World.

As far back as 1957, a Forest Service task force listed the same sort of problems on the fire lines as were cited in the Thirty-mile fire report:

Poor leadership, unrecognized potential for explosive fire and poor emergency escape plans.

After the 1994 South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters on Colorado’s Storm King Mountain, a whole new emphasis was given to wildland firefighting safety.

Firefighters were encouraged to refuse dangerous assignments and report safety problems.

"I’ve never seen an agency that more consistently speaks safety than this one," Tony Kern, a Forest Service accident specialist who helped investigation the Thirty-mile fire, told The Seattle Times.

But the report on the deaths of Tom Craven, 30, of Ellensburg, and Devin Weaver, 21, Jessica Johnson, 19, and Karen FitzPatrick, 18, all of Yakima, points to more elemental failures.

From the start, the report said, fire managers, supervisors and firefighters never recognized the potential for danger in the narrow Chewuch River Canyon in the Okanogan National Forest.

Some 400 firefighters have died on the job since 1910 in the federal fire service, which includes the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Sometimes safety takes a back seat to aggressive firefighting, according to a 1996 study — prompted by the deadly fire on Storm King Mountain — that included information from 1,000 firefighters.

Forty percent of those firefighters said that getting the job done was as important as safety. Another 15 percent said it was policy to break rules to put out a fire.

More than 25 percent said they and their supervisors often ignored standard warning signs while fighting fires. Others said they failed to receive mandatory safety briefings or that many close calls were never reported.

"One of the damning things here were how many areas needed work," Philip Schaenman, a consultant who led the survey, told the Times.

Many fire experts believe safety lapses can be traced back to training. Fire rookies must spend 32 hours on class work and field exercise and are supposed to be able to deploy a fire shelter in 20 seconds, but there’s little realistic, firsthand experience until they get on the fire lines.

Last year, the $1.8 billion National Fire Plan included money to hire 5,300 more firefighters but none of the money was earmarked for more training.

And while firefighters are taught the 10 basic safety rules and the 18 warning signs for fire, those are things that are esoteric and tough to remember under stress, experts have said.

"Something’s not sinking in," Paul Gleason, director of firefighter safety for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, said.