John N. Maclean is Norman Maclean’s son, and gets his own fire to immortalize in Fire on the Mountain. On July 6, 1994, the South Canyon fire, near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, blew up and killed 14 wildland firefighters – three smoke jumpers, two helitac ground crew, and nine Prineville Hot Shots – members of a firefighting team from Prineville, Oregon. John Maclean is a newspaper reporter, not a storyteller like his father, and this account shows all the advantages and disadvantages of that difference. Maclean senior was trying to find out what happened; Maclean junior is making a typical modern journalist’s effort to place the blame on somebody.


The first third of the book sets up the situation, and it’s dull and confusing. Maclean is making a case that the chain of command was muddled and beset with bureaucratic infighting; unfortunately he has the modern journalist’s pathological aversion to charts and diagrams, so what could have been explained in couple pages of organization charts instead takes up 100 pages of prose. I ended up having to make my own to figure out who was who. Thus, the players were:


*National Interagency Fire Center – Boise Airport, Boise, Idaho
Federal multiagency group (Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Weather Service) charged with wildland firefighting. Supervises RMCC.

*Rocky Mountain Coordination Center – Jefferson County Airport, unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado
Federal multiagency group charged with wildland firefighting in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Supervised WSCC, reports to NIFC

*Western Slope Coordination Center – Walker Field, Grand Junction, Colorado. About 55 air miles from the South Canyon fire.
A Federal, multiagency group charged with wildland firefighting on the “Western Slope” (western Colorado and eastern Utah). Reported to RMCC; since merged with it.

*Bureau of Land Management, Colorado Office
Supervises BLM Grand Junction

*Bureau of Land Management, Grand Junction District – Grand Junction, Colorado
Reports to BLM Colorado, supervises BLM Glenwood Springs

*Bureau of Land Management, Glenwood Springs Office – Glenwood Springs, Colorado
Reports to BLM Grand Junction

*Forest Service, White River National Forest – Glenwood Springs, Colorado

*Forest Service Smokejumpers – Missoula, Montana
*Forest Service Smokejumpers - North Cascades, Washington
*Forest Service Smokejumpers - McCall, Idaho

*State of Colorado

*Garfield County Sherrif

*City of Glenwood Springs – about 5.5 miles east of the fire

*New Castle Volunteer Fire Department – unincorporated Garfield County, Colorado

*Rifle Fire Department – Rifle, Colorado

*Prineville Hot Shots – Prineville, Oregon

A “dry lightning” thunderstorm started a small fire at Storm King Mountain on the night of July 2, 1994. Initial observers thought the fire was in South Canyon – on the other side of the Colorado River from Storm King – and that’s the name that stuck. The slopes of Storm King are not majestic Rocky Mountain forest but scrubby piñon/juniper/Gambel oak. For the first few days the fire remained small; engine crews from Rifle, NCVFD, and the BLM showed up and looked around but the fire was unreachable by road (“engine crew” is probably a misnomer here; it’s traditional firefighter language but the people involved never got a vehicle anywhere near the fire, instead hiking or helicoptering in). The Incident commander, James “Butch” Blanco, was a BLM engine foreman. Blanco initially called for air tanker support and smokejumpers; he got a load of smokejumpers (8) and a helicopter (pilot plus four ground crew – two at the base and two on the mountain). The smokejumpers came from the Forest Service; the helitac crew was BLM.


The way Maclean tells it (although the participants denied this, or at least glossed over it afterward) the parties did not play well together – in particular, the BLM (based on my own experience with multiagency operations, I’m inclined to believe Maclean). Although WSCC was theoretically supposed to organize things, the BLM Grand Junction office controlled the air tankers based at Walker Field and was very reluctant to release them. It got so that the WSCC manager would drive to Walker Field – a few minutes from his office – note the ID of parked tankers, then call up the BLM and ask for specific airplanes, knowing that they could not be denied.


The fire gradually enlarged as the first string of smokejumpers, the IC, some BLM ground crew, and helitac support were lifted to the Storm King and had a look around. Blanco asked for air tankers again and more support; he got another string of smokejumpers and the Prineville Hot Shots on a bus. (To be fair to the BLM, there was a major fire going on near Paonia, Colorado. It was getting a lot of news coverage as it spectacularly took houses. The South Canyon fire seemed minor in comparison – although clearly visible from I-70, when the Prineville Hot Shots arrived they didn’t believe they had been called out for something so trivial. This was their first ever fire in Colorado.


By midafternoon on July 6, there were about 40 firefighters on Storm King mountain; two strings of eight smoke jumpers, some BLM crew, and part of the Prineville group. The smokejumpers had parachuted in; the others had been ferried up, five at a time, by helicopter. The helicopter was called away for water dropping duties before all the Hot Shots could be lifted. There were a couple of peculiarities in leadership. The overall commander – the Incident Commander – was veteran Butch Blanco with the BLM. The “smokejumper in charge” was Don Mackey; he was actually outranked by Kevin Erickson, but smokejumper tradition makes the first person out the aircraft door the smokejumper in charge. Neither the Prineville superintendent nor the second-in-command made it to the mountain; the weight-carrying limits of the helicopter made it necessary to spread the Prineville crew out.


It’s a wildland fire axiom that you never fight a fire on a slope from the top down, always from the bottom up. The reason is the only things that can run uphill faster than downhill are fire and grizzly bears, and you don’t want either of them chasing you. As far as the people on Storm King could tell, the fire was burning in a draw and they were on a ridge above it, but they thought they could “hook” it; cut a fire line down the ridge and get below the fire, so that’s what they did. They all commented on the danger but thought they could get away with it – it didn’t look like there was much to burn at the base of the draw. What they didn’t know is that the fire had already crossed below them and was burning up another, more or less parallel draw.


The WSCC weather forecaster issued a warning that cold front was coming through, and would bring increased winds out of the west. Although the message was passed to the BLM radio dispatcher, it never got through to the people on Storm King. At 16:09 the previously minor fire “blew up” and began racing up two draws – and over the separating ridge, curling around firefighters on three sides. The firefighters in its path ran for their lives. Some made it, either by outrunning it and getting to a previously burned area, or by finding a burned area and sheltering up. Fourteen – three smokejumpers, nine Prineville Hot Shots, and two helitac crewmen - did not.


As is often the case, there were plenty of resources available afterward – 240 firefighters and 6 air tankers, plus helicopter. Governor Romer and state representatives came out; President Clinton called from Europe. (All the instincts of the survivors were to remove the bodies, but they decided that they had to remain where they fell until the fire forensic team flew in from Missoula. They were told that the governor wanted the bodies removed immediately. One said “Well, f**k the governor – with Romer in earshot. Romer came over to ask for an explanation, and on getting it, agreed that the bodies would remain on the mountain until they could be examined).


Once again, though, it seems like the BLM was uncooperative. Two people were unaccounted for – the helitac ground crew (who were BLM employees). Although they didn’t respond to radio calls, it was possible they were still alive and in desperate need of burn care. The search and rescue was under the jurisdiction of the Garfield County Sherriff; the BLM refused to allow the Sherriff to use any Federal resources. The Sherriff rented a private helicopter – which the BLM refused landing permission because it didn’t have proper “safety clearances” (Maclean doesn’t say what that means, but anybody familiar with FAA regulations could probably come up with some suggestions). The Sherriff then leased a second helicopter – which the BLM also vetoed. At this point the undersheriff in charge of the rescue operation threated to handcuff the BLM employee making the objection to a post until the search was over and the helicopter was allowed to land. (As it happened, the two helitac crewmen had been killed instantly in a blast of fire so intense that it partially buried their bodies in debris; they weren’t found until July 8).


The fire forensic team did get a lot of useful information; some of it pretty grim. The bodies were strung out in a line; for unknown reasons, none of the group had attempted to push off on their own (there were three survivors from the line; they had made it up to the ridgetop. The first two had minor burns; the third in line had third degree burns over 10% of his body. A firefighter right behind him was found on his knees; he had apparently staggered a few steps after the blast hit him. A few others in the line had tried to shelter up; in some cases it seemed that the shelters had been blown out of their hands as they tried to deploy them. In one case, a firefighter had taken his backpack into the shelter with up – with was standard procedure at the time. Several flares in a backpack pocket ignited, and the procedure was changed to leave the backpack outside.


The post-fire investigators were accused of blaming the dead firefighters instead of the living supervisors, and Maclean makes the case that there’s a lot of truth to that. However, there are a number of mysteries about the group that didn’t make it:


* Why didn’t they stop and shelter up earlier? The investigators thought at least the leaders in the line could have survived if they had sheltered instead of continuing to run for it.

* Why didn’t they drop their tools and equipment earlier? They were carrying backpacks, chainsaws, gasoline cans, shovels, and other equipment (all three survivors of this group dropped their equipment). It seems like firefighter tradition may have been a factor – abandoning you equipment was “sissy”. Even the survivors didn’t just drop their chainsaws – they looked for places they could set them where they might not be burned.

* Did the presence of four women in the group lead the men to stay behind rather than break out and run for it? Possibly; the behavior of Don Mackey is interesting. Mackey was a smokejumper, but had gone to see how the Prineville group was doing (there were 15 people altogether in this group; nine Prineville hot shots, five smokejumpers, and a BLM employee. Two smokejumpers and the BLM firefighter survived). Mackey was in the middle of the group when the flames hit. Based on the forensic evidence, Mackey was knocked down – but then got to his feet and walked downhill, i.e., into the flames. He was found next to the last body in line, Tami Bickett (who was one of the Prineville squad bosses and thus right where she should have been, bringing up the rear). Mackey had a distinctive multi-blade knife, and the blades were found spaced down the slope as the plastic handle melted away.


My interest in this sort of thing is how people respond to disaster. The Incident Command System was put in place after a series of wildland fires in California in the 1970s, then expanded to hazmat spills, terrorist attacks, and similar situations. Training is an OSHA requirement. I’ve take the initial course, and then 20 year’s worth of annual refreshers. The whole thing always left me uneasy. There are all sorts of chains of command that are supposed to be set up, catchy acronyms for evaluating a situation, and preplanning – but I always had the feeling that whenever the excrement actually contacted the rotating blades all the careful plans would remain in their files drawers and everybody would just run around screaming at each other. (I’m reminded of von Moltke saying “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy”). That certainly seems the case at South Canyon. The incident commander was experienced and had good people under him, but when it came to it he couldn’t get the resources needed from higher ups, and the critical decision to fight the fire downhill was made by committee (although the IC, to his credit, took the blame for it). When things went to hell the firefighters that were overcome seem to have acted on instinct rather than training.


Well, all in all this was a flawed valuable book. I’m rather suspicious of some of Maclean’s conclusions about individual and bureaucratic behavior, which seem more motivated by journalistic practice than historic research – but, as mentioned, they do agree with my own general experiences. The book is badly handicapped by lack of organizational charts, an index, and most severely by lack of maps. There’s one good 3D model of Storm King Mountain at the beginning, but it shows the situation at 14:00 on July 6, well before the blow up. Maclean’s description of what happened is entirely verbal, with terms like “Double Draw” and “Lunch Spot” that refer back to this initial map, where a couple of maps showing the progress of the fire and the location of the crews would have been infinitely preferable. Fortunately the Forest Service report on the fire provides the necessary information. Saddening but instructive. ( )

This is a well written book that reads like a good novel, but is about one of the worst firefighting tragedies in the American West. The author does an excellent job placing you in the shoes of the firefighters and victims. The author also does not pull any punches when it comes to assigning responsibility to the government agencies that could have prevented this travesty by sharing resources and jumping on this fire before it became unmanageable. It just goes to show you, give the government something to do and they will screw it up, every time. ( )

Following in his father's footsteps, John Maclean has become the preeminent writer to document wildland fire fatalities. The misnamed South Canyon Fire (on Storm King Mountain) slowly progressed from a "nothing" fire, to a blowup that killed 14 young men and women. These firefighters were the best of the best -- hot shots and smoke jumpers. How did the end up in the wrong place at the wrong time? Maclean probes into the complexity of fire suppression: from agency infighting to unfilled resource order to disengaged managers in charge of the fires. A must read for wildland fire professionals, land managers with fire responsibilities, and anyone else interested in understanding the failures of the firefighting bureaucracy. ( )

Well written account of the South Canyon Fire of 1994 in which 14 fire fighters were caught in a blowout. Many were from the Prineville, Oregon Hot Shot Team. ( )