Lawyers, smoke and money

By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

Dick Mangan has fought fires around the country for 40 years and can wear a number of hats: operations chief, planning chief and safety officer.

ERIK PETERSEN/CHRONICLE Fire Information Officer Warren Bielenberg takes a photo of the enormous plume of smoke coming off the Jungle fire southeast of Livingston in September 2006. He’s also past president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, a professional association with thousands of members. He knows his business.

But these days, when he goes on a fire, his wife issues a warning.

“My wife tells me, ‘Don’t do something stupid. I don’t want to lose the house,’” he said.

Like many fires bosses, Mangan has a new concern: personal and legal liability if something goes wrong and lives or property are lost.

The issue got serious in 2006, when Ellreese Daniels was charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and three other felonies, five years after four people under his command died in the Thirtymile fire in Washington.

The charges were later reduced and Daniels has pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of making false statements to investigators. His sentencing is scheduled for July 23.

But the event cast a pall in command tents at fire camps across the nation.

“It puts a very, very dark cloud over everybody in the fire community,” said Mangan, of Missoula.

Firefighting is by nature dangerous work. A safety officer or operations chief spends a lot of time on the lines and has to make decisions in a hurry. He and others must make decisions in a flash. People’s lives depend on them.

“I have a decision space of maybe seconds or minutes, and I have incomplete information to work with,” Mangan said. “You have to ask yourself, why subject yourself to the liability?”

The liability concern was one reason why, in the summer of 2007, he turned down five offers of a safety-officer position on big wildfires.

“When guys like me are deciding to stay home…..” he said.

A survey by the International Association of Wildland Fire found that, because of the criminal charges against Daniels, 36 percent of the members will make themselves “less available for fire assignments” and 23 percent would refuse the job of incident commander.

“This may result in fewer highly qualified firefighters taking leadership roles on fire and a more conservative and less aggressive approach to suppressing wildfires” by those who remain willing to take leadership jobs, the association said in a news release.

“The end result could be more acres burned, more homes and other structures destroyed, and greater fire suppression costs to the taxpayers,” the association concluded.

Firefighters “are looking over their shoulders a little more,” Mangan said. “They do things a little differently and try to cover their butts. And that’s probably not good.”

Another veteran firefighter, Steve Frye, now retired from the National Park Service, for years served as incident commander of an elite Type I teams, the type of massive crews summoned for the biggest, most complicated fires.

“Having the threat of personal liability out there has definitely occupied a substantial amount of time for incident commanders and agencies,” Frye said.

Until the 1990s, Mangan said, federal agencies backed their employees strongly. These days, there’s less of that, plus there are fewer people with fire training in the land management agencies.

Some states offer liability protection, but it varies.

And it’s a litigious world.

“There are people out there who are always ready to blame somebody else,” Mangan said.

It’s also an increasingly flammable world. It’s getting crowded, too.

And that makes things expensive and dangerous.

1988: THE START OF A TREND?

When Mangan arrived in Yellowstone National Park in 1988, he saw fire behavior like he’d never seen before.

“And I never thought I would see it again,” he said. Prior to 1988 “we had big fires, but we didn’t have them year after year.”

Massive fires have erupted all over the West since 1988. Flames like those seen in Yellowstone have blazed across swaths of Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, California and Montana, blackening vast landscapes.

Over the past decade there have been scores of fires that charred more than 100,000 acres, including the 2006 Derby Fire south of Big Timber that burnt 224,000 acres and the 292,000-acre Bitterroot fires near Hamilton in 2000.

Those fires destroyed dozens of homes.

Many scientists blame climate change. Between 1987 and 2003, wildfires in the western United States burned 6.7 times the acreage they burned in the previous 16 years, according to research by Stephen Running of the University of Montana, a lead author on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change.

Running maintains climate change is aggravating natural drought cycles. And the next 50 years will be even warmer and drier, he told Congress in November.

Even as the West grows increasingly flammable, it attracts more and more people. And many of them are building in what is known as the “wildland-urban interface” or WUI, places with a high likelihood of burning.

According to the Bozeman-based think tank Headwaters Economics, 14 percent of private, forested land adjacent to public land in the West contains homes. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that protecting those homes from fire costs as much as $1 billion a year in tax money.

That’s because so much muscle and airpower focuses on trying to save homes built in flammable forests.

While 86 percent of private forest land remains undeveloped, if half of it is subdivided and built upon, firefighting costs could rise to as much as $4.3 billion yearly, according to Headwaters.

“By way of comparison, the Forest Service annual budget is approximately $4.5 billion,” the Headwaters study says.

Intensive use of manpower and aircraft often are cited as the main reason why firefighting is so expensive in the WUI.

Mangan offered further explanation, illustrating the complex relationship between the WUI, the dry forests, the potential liability issues and the rivers of money spent on firefighting every year.

Using a “burnout” is a time-tested firefighting technique, Mangan said. It consists of selecting a road or a ridgetop or building a fireline in the fire’s path. Crews ignite the woods between the line and the fire, robbing it of fuel, sometimes a few hundred acres worth. The strategy calls for sacrificing acres to gain control.

“Now, there might be three or four $500,000 homes in that area,” he said.

That makes it difficult to ignite a burnout, which makes it difficult to gain control.

If the fire escapes “you spend $30 or $40 million putting out a fire we could have put out for $30,000 or $40,000,” he said.

PREPARE, STAY AND DEFEND

Steven Pyne, an Arizona State University professor, a former Park Service firefighter and a historian of fire, said most of the modern problems associated with wildfire are solvable, if the political and public desire is strong enough.

Some fires should be allowed to burn, which would save a lot of money, he said.

Homes in the WUI can be made nearly fireproof with modern building materials and good planning.

Laws could be passed to protect firefighters from liability, as long as they’re doing their best and following the rules.

And people can be trained to protect their own homes and neighborhoods.

When neighborhoods burn, the source of ignition often isn’t a wall of flames, it’s often a neighbor’s house that caught an ember, caught fire and started throwing more embers.

There’s a growing “prepare, stay and defend” movement, especially in places like California, where hundreds, sometimes thousands, of homes burn every year. The movement has been popular for years in Australia, another fire-prone landscape.

“The Australians are way ahead of us on this,” Pyne said.

There, people are encouraged either to evacuate early or prepare themselves to stay and defend their homes. In America, most civilian deaths occur during evacuations, which often come at the last minute, and can be chaotic.

Pyne maintains well-trained and equipped people are safer in their own homes than on the road during a hectic and dangerous evacuation through the smoke and flames. Plus, they can crush the blowing embers that might take out a whole neighborhood.

But America has resisted the movement, yielding firefighting duties almost exclusively to professionals or well-trained volunteer fire departments.

“How is it that fire became a government monopoly?” Pyne asked. “They treat it like it is atomic energy. I can defend my home with an M16 and a bazooka and be within the law. But I can’t do it with a garden hose and a rake?”

Studies from the Australian state of Tasmania have shown that unoccupied homes are three times more likely to burn than are occupied homes.

The California Web site www.prepare-stay-defend.org stresses that training and preparation are crucial to defending your property. So is proper clothing, like fireproof Nomex, which the Web site sells.

The site offers lots of advice, but it also offers a lengthy disclaimer of liability that users must sign electronically, saying they won’t sue the site owners if things don’t work out.

It’s a litigious world.

NOT IN MY BACK YARD

Mangan said there is increasing public tolerance for fires, but it’s often tolerance in an abstract sense.

More and more people understand and appreciate the role of fire in natural ecosystems. But that doesn’t mean they want to see it in their own back yards. Vacations are cancelled. Campfires are banned. Vistas are obscured. Vulnerable people become physically ill from the smoke.

“That’s reality coming home,” Mangan said.

The 1988 Yellowstone fires seem to have ushered in that new reality. Veteran firefighters said at the time that they’d never seen anything like them, but 200-foot or 300-foot flames have become almost commonplace all over the West.

The park’s forests are busily rebuilding themselves, but one fact remains: that summer was bitter, smoky and contentious. And similar discomforts have beset parts of the West with increasing frequency over the past 20 years.

A recent state government forecast said it looks like Montana will have a mild fire season this year, but that could change with a couple weeks of hot weather.

While the weather and climate continue to sort themselves out, firefighting tactics are evolving as well. Frye said one lesson from 1988 was that, when fires are raging, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to pour money on them. The better tactic often is to fall back, protect structures and try to “herd” the fire away from developed areas.

“It’s a very integral part of wildland-fire management among all the agencies,” he said. “There’s little to be gained by committing increasingly rare resources when have a low probability of success. It’s one of the things we learned in ‘88.”

Weather forecasts and fire behavior models have improved, too, since 1988, Frye said. Back then, firefighters didn’t even have the Internet.

Technology offers better tools for predicting what a fire will do.

But humans then have to decide how to react, and the pool of well-trained people is shrinking.

So firefighters are increasingly trying to employ fire on human terms.

When government decides to let a fire furn, it employs the ungainly term “wildland fire use fire.” These fires are closely monitored by well-trained teams, and they are becoming more common, though they comprise a small fraction of “suppression-mode” fires.

Prescribed fires are becoming more common as well. Those are the fires somebody lights on purpose, a complicated and sometimes risky effort to place fire when and where people want it before nature starts a fire on its own terms. And sometimes, prescribed fires escape.

It happened in Lost Alamos New Mexico in 2000, when 235 homes burnt.

“We all in the back of our minds remember Los Alamos,” Frye said. “If you ride horses, you’ve been thrown. If you’ve been involved with prescribed fires, you’re bound to have had one escape.”

But fire of any type has impacts. Some are good. Some aren’t. It depends on where the lighting strikes or the match falls.

But they aren’t going away. Neither are the lawyers.

“We’re going through a cycle of nature that we haven’t seen before in our lifetime,” Mangan said. “We may just have to get used to it for a while.”

Scott McMillion can be reached at scottm@dailychronicle.com.

Reader Comments