Mann Gulch fire

Coordinates: 46°52′47″N 111°54′18″W / 46.8796°N 111.9049°W / 46.8796; -111.9049 The Mann Gulch fire of 1949 was a wildfire in the Helena National Forest, Montana, United States, which claimed the lives of 13 firefighters including 12 smoke jumpers who were parachuted into the area to fight the fire, but were unable to control it.

Sequence of events

The fire started when lightning struck the south side of Mann Gulch, in an area named by Lewis and Clark in the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness. The fire was spotted by a forest ranger around noon on August 5, 1949. James O. Harrison, the recreation and fire prevention guard for Meriwether Canyon Campground, had given up his former job as a smokejumper to find a less dangerous profession. On this day, however, he fought the fire on his own for four hours before he met the crew of smokejumpers who had been dispatched from Missoula, Montana, in a C-47.

After the smokejumpers had landed and gathered together, Foreman Wagner Dodge went off to scout the fire status while the remainder of the team ate. When he returned, Dodge told the team to get on the North side of the gulch and 'sidehill' (keep the same contour) and move "down gulch" towards the Missouri River, because they could then fight the fire from behind it. Dodge stopped to eat and to discuss additional plans with Harrison, who knew the local terrain well. He noticed however that the smoke was starting to boil, and he became concerned. He decided to rejoin his men as quickly as possible and get them out.

By that time, the fire had jumped the gulch from the south side to the north side, downgulch from the men. It had 'blown up', spreading much faster than anticipated, due to various weather and environmental conditions. This was unknown to the crew because various ridges running down the slope obscured their view of the slope. Only when they came over a ridge did they see the huge fire coming at them, only a few hundred yards distant. The men had to turn around and run for it. Soon after, Dodge ordered them to drop their heavy tools (shovels, Pulaskis, saws).

When Dodge realized that they would not be able to outrun the fire, he started an escape fire, taking a match and burning an area of grass to lie in so that the fire would burn around him and his crew. He ordered everyone to lie down in the area he had burnt down. In the book that he later wrote, he claimed that he had been "lifted off the ground" several times by the fire. He later claimed he had never heard of such a fire being set, it just seemed "logical", and it was thought to be an on-the-spot invention. However, plains Indians had used the technique to escape grass fires and it had been written about by authors in fiction stories in the 1800s, e.g. James Fenimore Cooper (1827) in The Prairie.

However, it is unknown if the crew heard or understood him. The group had spread out while running to escape the fire and was strung out along a good stretch. The noise of the fire had also become intense by that time. The 'escape fire' technique had not been part of their training. Dodge later stated that someone said, "The hell with that, I'm getting out of here". The other team members hurried towards the Mann Gulch ridge, hoping they had enough time to get over the ridge to safer ground; though fires spread quickly uphill towards a ridge, they are significantly slower coming down the other side.

Only two of them, Bob Sallee and Walter Rumsey, managed to escape through a crevice, came to the other side of the ridge in Rescue Gulch, and found a safe location, a rockslide with little vegetation to fuel the fire. Diettert had been close behind Sallee and Rumsey, but he did not go for their crevice, for unknown reasons. The two had no way of knowing if the crevice actually 'went through' so it was lucky that they survived. Two other members initially survived with heavy injuries, but died within a day. Unburnt patches underneath the bodies indicate that the rest of the team, including Jim Harrison, suffocated before the fire caught up with them.

Everyone had jumped by around 4:10 pm. The scattered cargo had been gathered at about 5:00 pm. At about 5:45 pm, the crew had seen the fire coming up towards them on the North slope and had turned to run. By 6:00 pm, the fire had swept over them. The time of the fire was judged by wristwatches stopped by the heat.

Aftermath

450 men fought for five more days to get the fire, which had spread to 18 km² (4500 acres), under control.

Wagner Dodge survived unharmed and died five years later of Hodgkin's disease.

Several months following the fire, fire scientist Harry Gisborne, from the US Forest Service Research Center at Priest River, came to examine the damage. Having a history of heart problems, he nevertheless conducted an on-ground survey of the fire site. He suffered a heart attack and died while finishing the day’s research.

Gisborne had forwarded theories as to the cause of the blowup prior to his arrival on site. Once there, he discovered several conditions, which caused him to change his concepts of fire activity particularly those pertaining to fire "blow-ups". He noted this to his companion just before his death on 9 November 1949.

There was some controversy about the fire, with a few parents of the men trying to sue the government. One charge was that the 'escape fire' had actually burned the men.

Lessons learned from the Mann Gulch fire had a great impact on firefighter training. However, some of the lessons were forgotten and the tragedy would be repeated in the South Canyon Fire of 1994, in which 14 firefighters died.

Contributing factors

Several factors described in Norman MacLean's book Young Men and Fire are described that combined to create the disaster.

• Slope - fire spreads faster on a slope, and the north slope of Mann Gulch was about 75%. It also makes it very difficult to run.
• Fuel - fire spreads fast in dry grass, the north slope of Mann Gulch was mostly tall grass, left ungrazed by nearby rancher's cattle because the area had been recently designated a wildlife area.
• Leadership - Dodge did not know most of the crew, as he had been doing base maintenance work during the normal training 'get acquainted' time of the season. This may have contributed to the crew not trusting his 'escape fire'. Furthermore, Dodge left his crew for several minutes, during which the 'second in command' let them spread out instead of staying together.
• Communication - The crew's single radio broke because its parachute failed to open. It could have possibly prevented the disaster or helped get aid more quickly to the two burned men who died later. There were other dangerous fires going on at the same time and the Forest Service leaders did not know what was happening on Mann Gulch.
• Weather - the season was very dry and that day was extremely hot. Winds in the Gulch were also strong 'up gulch', the same direction the men tried to run.

Young Men and Fire

The Mann Gulch fire was the subject of Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire,^[1] which was published after Norman Maclean's death. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1992. John Maclean's 2003 book, Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines Battling Wildfires, also includes a section on the Mann Gulch Fire, and John Maclean published an article in 2004, adapted from that section of the book, in which he interviewed the last remaining survivor of the fire, Bob Sallee.^[2]

Folk songs

James Keelaghan wrote a song about this fire entitled "Cold Missouri Waters" after being inspired by Young Men and Fire. The song was covered by Richard Shindell, Dar Williams, and Lucy Kaplansky on their album Cry Cry Cry. It was also covered by Hank Cramer in his album, Days Gone By. It is sung from the perspective of foreman Dodge, lying on his deathbed dying of Hodgkin's disease five years after the fire. It imagines Dodge saying of his decision to set the escape fire:

"I don't know why, I just thought it. I struck a match to waist-high grass, running out of time. Tried to tell them, 'Step into this fire I set. We can't make it, this is the only chance you'll get.' But they cursed me, ran for the rocks above instead. I lay face down and prayed above the cold Missouri waters."

Ross Brown, a musician/songwriter from Townsend, MT (about 35 miles south of Helena) wrote another song entitled "The Mann Gulch." A scratch version of this song is available on YouTube.

See also

• List of wildfires
• Red Skies of Montana A movie based on this incident

External resources

• Maclean, Norman (1992). Young Men and Fire. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-50061-6. [1]
• Maclean, John (2003). Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines Battling Wildfires. Owl Books. ISBN 0805075917. 
• Rothermel, Richard C. (May 1993). Mann Gulch Fire: A Race That Couldn't Be Won. United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-GTR-299.
• Turner, Dave. Spring 1999. "The Thirteenth Fire". Forest History Today.
• Weick, Karl E. (1993). "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster". Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (4): 628–652. doi:10.2307/2393339. JSTOR 2393339. 
• Matthews, Mark (2007). A Great Day to Fight a Fire: Mann Gulch, 1949. University Of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3857-2.  http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-8061-3857-2
• "August 5, 1949: Mann Gulch Tragedy". Peeling Back the Bark blog, the Forest History Society.

References

1. ^ Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (excerpt), 1992. Retrieved February 28, 2007.
2. ^ Maclean, John N. (2004). "Fire + Ashes: The Last Survivor of The Mann Gulch Fire". Montana: the Magazine of Western History 54 (3): 18–33. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3854/is_200501/ai_n9521780/. Retrieved 2006-10-25. 

Donald Berwick prvides a very interesting perspective on an "Escape Fire" with respect to safety in healthcare: http://itunes.apple.com/au/book/escape-fire/id411946213?mt=11

External links

• Mann Gulch Fire, 1949, a history of the Mann Gulch Fire from the Forest History Society website.
• Mann Gulch Virtual Field Trip
• Satellite map of Mann Gulch, showing a forest fire in progress (via Google Maps)