The self-described "messengers" who came to Mancos Wednesday evening left with a mailbag full of hard words and pointed questions.

Nearly 100 people came to the Mancos school cafeteria to hear an update on the Bircher Fire and ask the questions that had been concerning them for nearly a week.

The presenters were Mike Znerold, U.S. Forest Service Dolores district ranger; Nancie Ames, Mesa Verde National Park administrative officer; Lt. Kalvin Boggs, Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office; and Justin Dombrowski, spokes-man for the incident command team fighting the fire.

Znerold repeatedly said they were just the messengers, bringing the latest news from the fire managers and taking back questions and concerns from the public.

Messengers were not what the crowd wanted; they wanted answers.

"We have to have somebody here who knows what happened," lifetime resident Herman Wagner said, echoed by businesswoman Joan Krajack. "They have to tell us what the hell happened."

The questions focused on two areas:

• The events and rationales of the first 24 hours of fighting the fire, and

• The general conduct of the fire-suppression effort by the fire managers.

Dick Simmons and Rich Sousanes, both of whom live near the point where the fire began July 20 after a lightning strike, questioned the speed of response by firefighting forces. Several people said they had reported the flare-up of the lightning-struck tree before the officially acknowledged 1 p.m. Thursday call from park employees working at the Mancos Overlook in the park.

Sousanes wanted to know whether there was a shortage of archaeologists that caused a delay in attacking the fire on Friday, and whether the incident commander calling the shots on the east rim could actually see what was happening there.

Simmons declared "The fire was out Friday at 6 a.m.," and said he and his neighbors then watched in awe as it rampaged for hours with no apparent suppression attempts.

Their neighbor, Bill Baikie, wanted to know why "this was a 9 to 6 fire," referring to the fact that he didn’t see any slurry-bombing of the fire before or after those hours.

Mike Deabay wondered why ground crews were not able to be at the fire before 7 a.m. each day, especially after the fire had proven to be very active in the early morning.

Mancos resident and Montezuma County Admin-istrator Tom Weaver wanted to know why, when a county bulldozer was at the site with an operator, the fire managers would not let them clear a 200-yard fire line that, he said, might have prevented the blowup of a blaze that has now scorched 23,000 acres.

Before the questions and frustration took over the meeting, Znerold said he and the others at the head table were there as messengers to provide the information currently available, listen to concerns and take audience questions back to the fire managers for answers.

"We’ll get back to you again," was a theme he frequently repeated.

Boggs pointed out that, under Colorado law, the sheriff is also the county fire marshal.

"We defer to the experts," he said, and "the experts are the local volunteer fire departments."

Dombrowski summarized the start and spread of the fire, noting that, with the assignment of a Type I incident command team, the fire had become the top-priority fire in Colorado and one of the top fires in the nation, freeing more resources to be used in suppression.

"We’re experiencing the most severe conditions we’ve ever had ... especially on the Western Slope," he observed.

The flames were at times 300 feet high, reported Dombrowski.

"You can’t put people or equipment up there," he said, and fire retardant doesn’t affect flames of that magnitude.

He also described the fire as unusual in its behavior. Instead of the afternoon flare-up firefighters expect, the Bircher Fire blew up at 7:15 a.m. on Friday and ran strongly for four hours, then made another run in the afternoon, burning an additional 9,000 acres on that day.

Many attendees wondered whether aircraft had been used effectively. Nancie Ames, standing in for Superintendent Larry Wiese, said the helicopter based in the park was working on a fire at Vallecito when the initial call came in; it had to be recalled for use at the park.

Dombrowski explained that the local fire manager does not have direct control over the bombers; he has to call the national air support center, and bombers may or may not be dispatched to his fire, depending on nationwide priorities.

Many of the questions were unanswerable at the meeting, officials said. "You have a right to expect answers," Znerold told the audience, saying they would be back and would try to bring someone from the incident command team.

Recognizing the crowd’s interest in what was going on Friday morning, when the incident command team was sizing up the situation and the fire was making its run, Znerold agreed that there needs to be a smooth transition from local suppression efforts to the incident command team’s assumption of responsibility. One way, he suggested, would be to include local fire-department managers in the incident command team during that transition.

Little that Znerold or his companions could say on Wednesday was appeasing to the audience.