Dude Fire
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The Dude Fire was a forest fire in the Tonto National Forest of Arizona , USA , triggered by lightning in the summer of 1990 , which reached an area of approximately 9,712 hectares (97 km²) and destroyed approximately 70 buildings. In addition, six firefighters died in a canyon when they were surprised by the flames while creating a firebreak. The tragedy had an impact on forest fire fighting.
Origin and spread
The fire was triggered by lightning during a dry storm on June 25, 1990 at around 12:30 p.m. at Dude Creek, below the Mogollon Rim in Payson District and reported at 1:15 p.m. During a reconnaissance flight 15 minutes later, the affected area was estimated at 2 hectares and expanded to 40.5 hectares in north, east and south by 4.15 p.m. There was also a single fire about a mile east of the main fire. The local vegetation was dry and consisted of yellow pines , manzanita and dwarf oaks. Needles, leaves and dead wood lay on the ground .
At 6 p.m., 360 firefighters arrived to carry out the initial attack on the fire. A type 2 incident command team was in charge of on-site operations , but a type 1 team arrived shortly after 9 p.m. and was supposed to take control the next day. The joint headquarters were in the Bonita Creek settlement, southeast of the fire and north of Fire Control Road, a gravel road built by the CCC in 1935 with a west-east course. Walk Moore Canyon runs north-south to the west of Bonita Creek. Since the morning hours of the next day, a bulldozer and firefighters expanded this into a firebreak.
Lively canyon winds had expanded the fire area to 769 hectares by the early morning of June 26, before the winds died down and the fire calmed down. Firebreaks were created around the fire and fire-fighting aircraft and fire-fighting helicopters were constantly flying to contain the flames. The wind was about 5 mph (8 km / h) and was coming from the northeast. There were only torches, isolated fires and only minor spreads of flames in the treetops. Only south of Fire Control Road did a small single fire occur shortly after 2 p.m. In the meantime, the Type 1 team had taken over responsibility.
At around 2:30 p.m., the emergency services were suddenly surprised by winds of up to 60 mph (96.5 km / h) from the northwest, which spread the fire at great speed in almost all directions. The reason for this was the downburst of a collapsing convection column above the fire area, which had previously been reinforced by the fire. Shortly before that, eyewitnesses had reported a darkening of the sky and an almost complete calm.
The fire destroyed buildings in Bonita Creek and the Pyle Ranch to the east and skipped Fire Control Road to the south. The Zane Gray Cabin also fell victim to the flames. In Walk Moore Canyon, eleven firefighters were trapped and rolled over by the flames. Six were killed and four others seriously injured. By 4:45 p.m., the temperature around Payson had risen to 106 ° F , setting a record for the area since records began in 1908.
On June 27, northern Gila County was declared a Disaster Area and a state of emergency was declared on Payson. In the north, Forest Road 300 could be used and defended as a firebreak. A total of 2,632 emergency services with 24 aircraft were deployed. On July 1, the fire was under control and the 1,152 evacuees were allowed to return to their homes.
Effects
Those killed were the fire-fighting prisoners Joseph Chacon, Alex Contreras, James Denney, James Ellis and Curtis Springfield, as well as the guard Sandra Bachman. They were part of a crew of 17 from Perryville Prison in Goodyear and were trained firefighters. The men killed were posthumously pardoned on November 6, 1990 by Governor Rose Mofford .
The investigation into the tragedy revealed poor communication, inadequate weather monitoring and ambiguities after the handover of command to the Type 1 team. In addition, 7 of the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders and 8 of the 18 Situations That Shout Watch Out were not complied with.
As a reaction to this, the security concept LCES (viewpoints, communication, escape routes, security zones) was introduced in June 1991, which simplified the standard firefighting orders and became the modern security basis for fire fighting in the wilderness. The concept was developed by Paul Gleason, Superintendent of the Zig Zag Hotshot Crew, who was also employed by the Dude Fire.
The Dude Fire also resulted in the first Forest Service Staff Ride , a type of case study modeled on the US military. Firefighters are confronted at the scene of the tragedy for training purposes with decisions made at the time and their effects. The Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center also produced an instructional video about the events.
The phenomenon of the collapsing convection or smoke column, originally called column collapse or plume collapse , was included in the training. It occurs when strong updrafts from the fire cool down in the upper atmosphere and thus sink quickly, creating strong downdrafts. A characteristic of this process is the dense and powerful column of smoke, which can rise several thousand meters into the sky and which coined the term Plume-Dominated Fire . This process was by no means unknown, but had previously been neglected in fire fighting.
After the Type 1 team took over command, there was some confusion. For example, the new supervisor assigned to Walk Moore Canyon, according to later interviews, did not know his exact area of responsibility and was in the dark about the fact that the Perryville crew was also under his control. For this reason, the procedure for command transfers has been revised and the logging has been improved.
Since the fatally injured were equipped with fire shelters , a kind of fire-proof protective tarpaulin in the form of a tent, Ted Putnam from the technology and development center in Missoula was called in. Witness statements and an on-site inspection revealed that the fatally injured had not fully unfolded their fire shelters or had left them during the fire. Five of the men had survived in their shelters.