Deadly Wildfire Epilogue

This week, my column dealt with the impacts of forest fires. No one feels that pain more than the families of firefighters who've been permanently injured or who have been killed.
On August 5, 1949 (61 years ago), 13 smokejumpers suited up and loaded onto a U.S. Forest Service leased aircraft in Missoula. Their destination was a remote canyon along the Missouri River just north of Helena, Montana's state capitol. It was a place named by Lewis and Clark as the Gates of the Mountain, a wilderness today.
They safely landed but by 6 o'clock that night, 12 of them had been killed by the inferno called the Mann Gulch Fire which took 450 men to extinguish.
In 1994, 14 firefighters were killed on Storm Mountain in Colorado in what has been called the South Canyon Fire when, like the Mann Gulch Fire, the flames outraced them.
Bringing the tragedy closer to home, 4 Forest Service firefighters were killed on July 10, 2001 after becoming entrapped in their fire shelters. The fires started from an escaped picnic cooking fire in the Chewuch River Canyon north of Winthrop, Washington. The four deaths were "caused by asphyxia due to inhalation of superheated products of combustion." That tragedy was the result of the Thirty Mile Fire, but the reports about what led to those deaths cannot be found on the U.S. Forest Service website.
The point of my column and the subsequent blogs is those who make forest management policy are indeed toying with killer fires today because we are allowing our forests to be ravaged by insects, diseases, and, they have curtailed brush clearing, thinning and harvesting.
Fire is nature's way of cleansing the forest and starting anew, but those fires can be deadly. And, when massive infernos such as the 1910 Big Burn, which killed 85 people in northern Idaho and western Montana, and the 1988 Yellowstone Fire start, they have a life of their own. Those walls of fire spew tons of greenhouse gases, hot embers and choking smoke into the air we breathe. The ensuing erosion pollutes the water we drink and endangers the trout, salmon and steelhead we are trying to save from extinction. They need crystal clear streams not silt-laden torrents.
Really, isn't there a better way?
Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)