The Mann Gulch Fire & Smokejumping

[Jubal]

I thought this piece was really interesting. I've known about the Mann Gulch fire for a while as it's the subject of some folk songs, but this longish article on the problems with smokejumping, situating in the wider picture, and the fact that old-style brush firefighting might actually have worsened future fires by changing the forest structure was really interesting to me: http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/mann-gulch-norman-maclean-2014-9/

For those who don't know, the Mann Gulch Fire was in Montana in 1949, a time when it was policy basically to put out all forest fires as soon as possible. This led to "smokejumpers" becoming a thing - teams of firefighters who'd be airdropped near a fire and tasked with putting it out. On this particular fire, 15 men jumped down to join one ranger who was already fighting the fire, led by the rather incredibly named Wagner Dodge, who instructed his men (most of them in their twenties, and it was a fairly new crew that hadn't worked with him before) to head down toward the Missouri river - as long as they had their backs to the water it was just a time-consuming job to get the fire damped down. Tragically, the fire jumped the gulch ahead of them - cutting off their retreat to the river, and starting the fire changing direction to start burning uphill fast. The steep slopes and lack of ways through the ridge to the next valley, combined with the fact that a hot fire goes up a steep slope extremely fast, doomed most of the men involved - just two made it through safely to the other side of the ridge, eleven died on the slope, and two died later in hospital.

Which, if you've been counting, leaves one - specifically Wagner Dodge, who despite being the lowest man down the slope at the start, and the oldest of the crew (though only 33 himself), survived without reaching the ridge at all. Realising he couldn't make it that far, and with the huge wildfire under a minute from reaching him, he did the most sensible and least intuitive thing you can do in that situation; he took out a match and started a fire. He attempted to get his crew to join him in the effort, but the second in command decided to keep running and the rest of the men followed him - perhaps unsurprisingly since it wouldn't have been clear what Dodge was doing and there was no time to explain. Dodge's tactic, which he had invented on the spot although it was already very well known to native Americans, created an "escape fire" - by burning everything around him, he created an expanding circle in which there was no fuel for the main fire, thus giving himself a protected area that he could lie down in and remain safe until the main fire had passed. It worked perfectly and he got up unharmed - sadly to find almost all of the rest of his crew dead.

It's an interesting albeit very sad episode - and yeah, I'd recommend the article linked, which puts it into context better than anything else I've seen.