Mistakes may have led to four fire deaths

Associated Press

YAKIMA — Commanders in charge of fighting the deadly Thirty-mile fire in north-central Washington ignored safety guidelines and delayed ordering a water drop that could have saved four young firefighters, said a report published Sunday.

A seven-week investigation by the Yakima Herald-Republic found that commanders failed to keep escape routes open and ask for a localized weather forecast.

They also allowed trapped firefighters to scatter rather than stay together, and it took them three hours to call in air support after learning that a plane and helicopter were available to drop water on the fire, the newspaper said. Those delays were not related to concerns about the water drop harming protected species of fish.

In addition, the U.S. Forest Service failed to close a road through the canyon where the fire burned. That resulted in two campers becoming trapped and nearly losing their lives. They survived using emergency shelters provided by firefighters trapped with them.

Firefighters Tom Craven, 30, of Ellensburg; and Devin Weaver, 21; Jessica Johnson, 19; and Karen FitzPatrick, 18, all of Yakima, were killed July 10 when the fire exploded from 25 acres to 2,500 acres in less than three hours.

They were trapped by the fire along with 10 other firefighters and two campers in the Chewuch River canyon in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.

The Forest Service is investigating what led to the deaths, but will not comment on what it has learned until its findings are made public later this month, agency spokesman Ron DeHart said.

A separate investigation by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is due out after the Forest Service report.

The Herald-Republic based its report on interviews with witnesses and on records and radio logs from the fire. Incident commander Ellreese Daniels refused to be interviewed for the story, the paper said.

Perhaps most significant was the delay in requesting a water drop on the fire from a plane and helicopter.

Fire management officer Pete Soderquist told the paper that during a briefing at 9:04 a.m., he told Daniels and Pete Kampen that the aircraft were available upon request. The request for a helicopter wasn’t made until 12:08 p.m.; the water-bombing tanker was summoned an hour after that.

After the request was made, crews had to wait for a spotter plane to arrive to direct the air battle. That plane arrived at 1:12 p.m.

At that point, a Forest Service dispatcher told firefighters the helicopter could not pull water from the Chewuch River without permission. At 2 p.m., Soderquist gave that permission.

That account contradicts one given earlier by U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., who made national headlines when he alleged that the Endangered Species Act caused an eight-hour delay in dropping the water. McInnis based his allegations on a timeline of the fire obtained by Fox News.

Gary Starkovich, a 24-year fire commander with the Forest Service who now works as a private consultant, said the requests for the aircraft came too late to make much of a difference.

" (The aircraft) should have been there in the morning," Starkovich said.

The Forest Service told those involved not to discuss the helicopter use, agency spokesman Mick Mueller said.

Since the fire, the agency has said no permission was needed to pull water from the Chewuch River. It wouldn’t say why its workers thought differently.

Daniels was with some of the trapped firefighters that day. He tried to drive 14 of them to safety in a van built for 10, but the only way to route available was down a dead-end road.

They eventually came to a place where they thought they might be able to wait out the fire. There, they met the two campers, Bruce and Paula Hegemeyer, who had been at the Thirty-mile campground. They thought they would be safe at the campground because the road leading to it was open, even as the fire had started to grow from the small mop-up job it started out as, the newspaper reported.

Inadequate escape routes were also a factor in the deaths of 14 firefighters on Storm King Mountain in Colorado in 1994. Escape routes were too long and too steep to afford quick flight once the fires on the bottom and top of the ridge converged, according to the Storm King investigation report.

And, as with the Thirty-mile Fire, the Storm King fire was complicated by delayed water and retardant drops. At Storm King, they were caused by a number of factors, including the tardy arrival of aircraft and unclear procedures.

The notion that the mistakes of the Storm King Fire were repeated at Thirty-mile pains relatives of the 14 who died at Storm King.

"That was my first reaction," said Holly Thrash of Boise, Idaho. "I thought this wasn’t supposed to happen again."