"The Thirtymile Fire" recounts "chain of errors" that led to firefighters' deaths

"The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal"

by John N. Maclean

Henry Holt, 256 pp., $24

John Maclean's narrative of the lives of the four doomed young people who died fighting Washington state's Thirtymile Fire provokes tears and anger. He provides poignant glimpses into their last days with parents and friends, then details the converging blunders that brought death to the firefighters in North Central Washington in July 2001.

"Picking apart the buildup to catastrophe often discloses a chain of errors, of little or no importance on their own," Maclean observes in "The Thirtymile Fire." "When linked, however, the mistakes can become an unstoppable force, in the same way that a sliding pebble can start an avalanche."

The Thirtymile Fire looked like an easy mop-up, a series of small spot fires close by the Chewuch River (pronounced Chee-wak), north of Winthrop in Okanogan County. An asphalt highway provided easy access to the fire. The Chewuch offered plenty of water to put the fire down early.

But the ground crew's water pumps wouldn't start. A water-dipping helicopter and its pilot inconceivably sat on the ground for hours before being sent to the fire. And until it was too late, no one among the frontline crews knew they were on a dead-end road with no escape.

With the fire raging out of control, the crews were pulled back to a safe location. Then, through a maddening series of misunderstandings, they were sent back to fight it. The four young firefighters — Tom Craven, of Ellensburg; and Devin Weaver, Karen FitzPatrick and Jessica Johnson, all of the Yakima area — died after deploying their fire-resistant survival tents in a poorly chosen location, within steps of safer ground along the road and the river.

Maclean is the son of novelist Norman Maclean, author of the Western classic "A River Runs Through It" and "Young Men and Fire," a nonfiction book about a deadly 1949 wildfire that John Maclean helped publish after his father's death. John Maclean has authored two other books about wildfire, "Fire and Ashes" and "Fire on the Mountain," the story of Colorado's South Canyon fire, which killed 14 firefighters.

John Maclean writes a painfully vivid account of the deaths. He mines the journal of a surviving firefighter, along with first-person interviews, transcripts of investigations and tapes of radio transmissions.

"He was close enough to the others to hear their heavy breathing," Maclean writes of the worst moments. "Someone screamed. Someone recited the Lord's Prayer. Someone cried out, 'I'm burning!' "

The story does not end with the fire. Maclean chronicles investigations by the Forest Service and other agencies, which produced their own peculiar bureaucratic disaster. He recounts the outrage among the parents of those killed, when the first official report blamed the victims for their own deaths. (That conclusion was changed after a second round of hearings.)

As of today, one Forest Service member has been charged with a crime related to the fire. Incident Commander Ellreese Daniels is charged with involuntary manslaughter and perjury; the trial is scheduled to start Oct. 15 in U.S. District Court in Spokane. Daniels' shortcomings as a leader were made clear to USFS higher-ups for years, Maclean says, yet they kept Daniels on the list of those available to take charge of fighting a fire.

The Forest Service may have little time left in which to get it right. A few weeks before publication of "The Thirtymile Fire," a U.N.-sponsored report on climate change predicted some of the worst fire seasons ever. Acreage burned in the West increased nearly sevenfold in the 16 years ending in 2003, compared with the previous 16 years. The report warns of worse times to come. At the same time, Congress and the Bush administration have forced the USFS to change the way it finances its operations, so that fewer dollars will be available to fight more and bigger fires.

After a disastrous 1994 season (the year the 14 firefighters died in Colorado), the Forest Service changed its regulations in order to make firefighter safety its first priority in dealing with any fire. Maclean's book raises tormenting questions about lives lost and billions spent, even with that common-sense policy already in force.

Bob Simmons spent more than four decades as a full-time broadcast and print journalist. He is a former commentator for KING-TV and former writer for the Seattle Weekly.