Bircher Fire was unstoppable

Bircher Fire was unstoppable, report says.

August 24, 2000

By Jim Mimiaga
Journal Staff Writer

There was no real chance to stop the fast-growing Bircher Fire that burned 23,600 acres in nine days on and near Mesa Verde National Park last month, a committee formed to investigate early efforts to contain the inferno has concluded.

Meetings scheduled on fire findings

A series of public meetings on the findings about the Bircher Fire at Mesa Verde National Park will be held during the last week of August.

The fire, which burned approximately 23,000 acres, began on July 20 from a lightning strike in the Mancos Valley. Some residents have expressed concern about the ways in which the fire was fought.

At the meetings, a computerized Power Point presentation will be given on the results of the review boards’ findings of the initial stages of the fire. There will also be a question-and-answer period.

The schedule is as follows:

Monday, Aug. 28, 7 p.m., Mancos Fire Station.
Tuesday, Aug. 29, 7 p.m., Cortez City Council chambers.
Wednesday, Aug. 30, 7 p.m., Pleasant View Fire Station.
Thursday, Aug. 31, 7 p.m., Towaoc Tribal Complex Building, east-wing conference room.

But mistakes were made, specifically a lull in firefighting efforts on the second day that left slurry bombers sitting idle on the airport tarmac in Durango and exhausted firefighting crews recovering from 12-to-15-hour shifts with no fresh teams to replace them.

The delay was the result of a confusing transition from a local incident command team to a more resource-rich Type II team on July 21, investigators reported Monday at a meeting with the Montezuma County commissioners.

"There was down time during the transition, plus firefighters were being pulled from the Bircher Fire to go and fight nearby fires in Towaoc and to protect structures in Mancos Canyon," said John Lujan, an investigator for the fire committee and superintendent of the El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico. He co-authored the report along with Montezuma County Sheriff’s Detective Steve Harman.

"The new (Type II) team needed time to evaluate what they were getting into," Lujan said. "They did not know what was going on and so that confusion led to a pull-back in order to protect firefighters."

In the end, though, no department, person, agency or policy was to blame for the fire getting so huge so fast, the committee concluded.

Instead, it said, the inferno was the result of severely dry conditions, a century’s worth of fire suppression in the park’s dense woodlands and Mother Nature’s cruel propensity to combine heavy drought and dry lightning storms, factors which started the fire on private property July 20.

After listening to hours of dispatcher tapes and interviewing dozens of fire, law-enforcement, park and archaeology officials, a team of three investigators came up with four conclusions that they presented this week to the committee.

A more comprehensive report outlining evidence to support the team’s findings will be presented to the public at four community meetings, the first of which is Monday, Aug. 28, at 7 p.m. in the old Mancos Fire Station.

The investigation team found that:

• No evidence was found to support claims that the Mancos Fire Department failed to extinguish a tree blaze on July 15 that smoldered and then reportedly re-ignited, causing the Bircher Fire.

• Accusations that Mesa Verde National Park archaeologists purposely let the fire burn in order to uncover more Anasazi ruins concealed behind foliage and timber were unfounded.

• Claims by a county bulldozer operator that he could have stopped the fire by completing a fire break, had he been allowed to, proved implausible because of overwhelmingly dangerous fire conditions in the area. The operator was pulled back because of safety reasons.

• There was a lull in fire suppression during the second day of the fire to provide time for a new command team to size up the situation.

"Nobody died; that is a success in itself," said Kalvin Boggs, a sheriff’s detective on the committee.

Additionally, the committee found that the fire grew so fiercely at first that there was little time to prevent it from spreading into the thick, steep forests of Mesa Verde.

Lujan said that, according to interviews and dispatch recordings, the Mancos Fire Department was on scene within 20 minutes, but had trouble finding a water source. He said crews began digging a hand line, enduring difficult conditions on the first day that pushed the fire 66 feet per second with flames shooting 11 feet high.

By the end of the first day, Thursday, the blaze had consumed several hundred acres, and by 6 p.m. Friday 3,500 acres had burned.

Investigators said that the fire’s fury and the fact that there was no clearly established safety zone for firefighters to work in, or escape to, in case they became trapped or overwhelmed by smoke and heat prompted crews to back off.

"I ordered my teams to back away because of the intense dangers," said Lyle Cox, chief of the Mancos Fire Department. "I don’t want that put on the park’s shoulders."

A county dozer started to cut a fire break, but it would not have been able to negotiate the steep slope that begins the park boundary, Lujan said, contradicting speculation that the dozer operator was told to stop by park archaeologists.

"At times there was fire on both sides of the dozer cutting that first line," said Lujan. "The operator did not have proper firefighting gear, nor a roll bar on the dozer, which is against established safety rules. He did not realize the rate of the fire versus the time it would take to complete a break. The decision was wise to turn back because of safety reasons."

Mesa Verde Superintendent Larry Weise added that it is not park policy to let fires burn on purpose in order to uncover ruin sites.

In the future, officials said, there needs to be more coordination and overlap when management teams are upgraded to ones with more resources, in order to insure that critical fire information gets passed along.

Boggs said that during the transition to a Type II team, there was not enough debriefing between local crews with knowledge of current fire conditions and new teams who were brought in from elsewhere.

The investigation will continue until the first public meeting is held Aug. 28. For instance, GPS maps indicating precisely where property lines marking the Bircher property, BLM land and Mesa Verde National Park begin and end will be determined before then.

The review group that heard the investigators’ conclusions is composed of officials from the National Park Service, BLM, Forest Service, Ute tribe, the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Department and the city of Cortez.