The Burning Truth -- Mistakes And Poor Management Decisions Fueled South Canyon Fire Tragedy

------------------------------- "Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire" by John N. Maclean Morrow, $24 -------------------------------

On July 2, 1994, a lightning strike sparked a small fire high on the shoulder of Colorado's Storm King Mountain. Colorado was experiencing one of its worst fire seasons that year; a prolonged drought had baked the scrub oak, pine and juniper forests tinder dry. The fire burned slowly at first, covering only 10 acres in two days. Then, on July 6, a storm front swept in with 50 mile-per-hour winds, and the fire "blew up" into a raging inferno. In a matter of hours, more than 2,000 acres were scorched and blackened, and 14 firefighters lay dead on the mountain's slopes.

The South Canyon Fire, as it came to be known, was one of the worst disasters in firefighting history. It ranks with the infamous Mann Gulch fire, which took the lives of 13 Montana smoke jumpers in 1949. Norman Maclean, famous for his Montana classic, "A River Runs Through It," explored the roots of that earlier tragedy in "Young Men and Fire," a poetic account that occupied the last years of his life. His son, John N. Maclean, assisted with its posthumous publication. A career journalist, it's fitting that the younger Maclean should tackle this next great firefighting tragedy. The ghost of Mann Gulch revisited firefighters on Storm King Mountain. John Maclean set out to find out why.

Beginning with the misnaming of the fire (South Canyon lies across the Colorado River from the burn), a series of mistakes and poor management calls quickly compounded themselves. Although visible from Interstate 70 as well as nearby homes, the fire was allowed to burn unchecked for three days. Absorbed with the other wildfires in the area, federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) officials failed to respond when the fire was small and manageable, and were reluctant to provide needed resources once it grew large. When a local crew finally hiked into the fire, they were plagued by equipment failure and poor communications, and hiked out before additional help could arrive.

By the afternoon of July 5, when a Montana smoke-jumper crew parachuted into the blaze, it had spread to 30 acres down both sides of a steep, rugged ridge. An "initial attack" team usually brought in early to contain much smaller fires, the jumpers wondered why they were called in so late.

The next day, four days into the fire, there were 49 men and women on the mountain - too few and too late to affect the fire's behavior. Earlier, BLM fire supervisors had ample opportunity to airdrop crews and chemical retardant on the fire. In fact, air tankers sat idle only minutes away. As his narrative unfolds, Maclean demonstrates how poor communications, disorganization and complacency among supervisors set the stage for catastrophe. Perhaps, most tragic of all, a National Weather Service forecaster predicted severe winds for the afternoon of the blowup and issued a "red flag warning" to firefighters in the area. The message was received by the local BLM office, but was never broadcast to the crews on the fire.

In an eerie replay of Mann Gulch, sudden, severe winds fanned spreading spot fires into a "blowup," a whirling ball of flame that swept up both sides of the steep canyon, trapping firefighters in a desperate uphill race to escape. Fourteen never made it. Maclean describes a blowup as one of the nature's most powerful forces, equal to an avalanche or volcanic eruption, "as different from the smoldering four-day-old fire on Storm King as a hurricane is from a summer squall."

Maclean gives an intimate look into the culture of modern firefighting: the elite smoke jumpers, the highly trained, mobile "hot shot" crews, the air tanker and helicopter crews, and an elaborate network of dispatchers and supervisors who oversee massive efforts. He also provides personal sketches of many of the men and women who were key players in the drama. He writes with sensitivity and compassion for those who put themselves in harm's way for a living, but he lacks the elder Maclean's lyric grace. Unlike his father, he maintains a journalistic distance from his story, but the objectivity strengthens his analysis and lends weight to his conclusions.

Maclean deals harshly with the BLM fire supervisors in charge, and rightly so. They ignored stated policies, and a long-standing feud between offices seriously compromised their efforts. Eight of 10 standard orders for firefighting developed in the wake of Mann Gulch were violated.

In "Young Men and Fire," Norman Maclean framed Mann Gulch as an almost classic tragedy, the heroes descending from the sky to do battle against a force beyond their control. In "Fire on the Mountain," his son exposes South Canyon as something more modern, a world where men and women fell victim to a bureaucratic failure to learn from the past.

Tim McNulty's "Olympic National Park, A Natural History" was reissued this year by Sasquatch Books.