Författarbild

Mark Matthews (2)

Författare till A Great Day to Fight Fire: Mann Gulch, 1949

För andra författare vid namn Mark Matthews, se särskiljningssidan.

3 verk 30 medlemmar 2 recensioner

Verk av Mark Matthews

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Det finns inga Allmänna fakta än om den här författaren. Du kan lägga till några.

Medlemmar

Recensioner

From the disaster book list. Author Mark Matthews describes A Great Day to Fight Fire as a “nonfiction novel”. The subject is the 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, which has inspired a surprising amount of attention for a relatively obscure event – Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, the movie Red Skies of Montana, and numerous other works. The facts are relatively simple – on August 5, 1949, fifteen Forest Service smoke jumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch, met up with a ground-based ranger, and went off to fight what seemed to be a relatively minor fire. When the smoked clear, ten of the smoke jumpers and the ranger were dead, and two more smoke jumpers died of their burns in the next few days. Sometime later, a Forest Service fire scientist died of a heart attack in Mann Gulch while investigating the fire, and ten years later a victim’s widow shot herself in the head.


The “novel” part traces the lives of the victims, the survivors, and the rescuers, attempting to recreate what they were thinking on the fatal day. Since my major interest in disasters in how people behave, this was pretty interesting; unfortunately, although the author cites extensive interviews with the sole living survivor and the families of the others, much of his analysis has to be educated guess and reasonable speculation. Further, his description of the fire is interspersed with the personal narratives, which makes it very difficult to understand what was actually going on. He includes a section of a USGS topographic map of the area with the locations of various events marked, but it doesn’t show how the fire developed; I had to resort to various online sources to reconstruct it.


The ranger had already gone up the canyon and started to dig a fire line when the smoke jumpers were called out. When they saw the fire from the air, it was a relatively modest affair burning on the south-facing slope of the gulch. They gathered their equipment and started down the gulch toward the Missouri River, intending to attack the fire from the flank with the river as a potential refuge. The gulch twisted as it descended toward the Missouri, and when the crew came around an angle they discovered that the fire had hopped across the gulch, was now burning on both sides, and was ascending the gulch straight toward them. The crew leader, Wagner (“Wag”) Dodge, immediately realized that this was not good, turned the team around, ordered them to drop their equipment, and headed up the gulch. It quickly became obvious that the fire was moving much faster than they could. Dodge was the oldest, and had been slightly injured during his landing; he stopped, started another fire, and when it had burned a little dashed into the burned area, called for the men to follow him, and threw himself face down on the ground. Nobody else understood what he was trying to do, even after his repeated orders; instead they scattered, some continuing up the gulch and others trying to climb the 45 degree slope on the north face and get over the ridge top. Two made it, taking refuge in a rockslide on the other side of the ridge. One stuffed himself in a rock crevice near the ridge top, another fell behind a rock.


Dodge, possibly to his surprise, found himself slightly scorched but otherwise OK after the fire burned past; his “escape fire” had saved his life. He found two of his men alive but fatally burned; two more unharmed after making it over the ridge (Dodge’s “escape fire” indirectly helped them by slowing down the main fire; the main fire was burning up the gulch while the escape fire burned up the north slope, at right angles to the main fire; this acted as a partial shield allowing a little more time). The remaining corpses were recognized by whatever personal effects hadn’t burned.


The lessons learned, as I see them:


• The whole Forest Service program of fighting every fire was flawed. It was based on European forest management, that dealt with forests which were scoured clean of underbrush and dead trees by wood gatherers. American forests not only didn’t have this situation, they were also made up of trees that had adapted to frequent but mild fires.

• The smoke jumpers were overextended. Their original role had been to parachute into deep wilderness areas to fight small fires before they grew large. Although Mann Gulch was in a “wild” area (predecessor to a wilderness area), it could easily be reached from the Missouri River. The Forest Service could have easily landed ground based fire-fighters by boat (in fact, the surviving smoke jumpers and the bodies were mostly extracted by boat, although a helicopter was used for some). The smoke jumpers contributed to this; they got overtime pay for fire fighting and wanted to go to as many fires as possible. Their superiors were former smoke jumpers who sympathized with the young men with families and sent them out more often than necessary.

• The smoke jumpers were complacent. No smoke jumper had ever died in the line of duty, either by fire or by jump accident.

• The team may not have had confidence in their leader and the leader didn’t do much to instill confidence. Wag Dodge had only worked with three of them previously and didn’t even know the names of the rest. Dodge didn’t explain what he was trying to do, either when he started down toward the river, turned around, or set his escape fire. The two other survivors finally realized it when they looked down into the gulch after the fire had burned past; one commented “So that’s what Wag was trying to do”.

• The men had no training in setting escape fires; although the technique had been used before it doesn’t seem like anyone was aware of it and Dodge came up with the idea on the spur of the moment. Firefighters were trained to “keep one foot in the black”, i.e., stay close enough to an already burned area to quickly retreat into it, but it didn’t dawn on anybody but Dodge that you could create your own burned area.

• The crew didn’t take the fire seriously enough. It’s not really clear from any of the accounts I’ve read thus far, but this was mostly a grass fire. Even at the time of Mann Gulch, however, grass fires on the eastern slope of the Continental Divide had killed more fire fighters than forest fires on the west. There was a lot of grass, and it was really dry; the speed with which Dodge’s escape fire spread illustrates this; in only a few minutes before the main fire arrived it spread far enough to give him a protected burned area.


I found the book worthwhile enough; it was on remainder. The stories of the men involved really are pretty interesting – the same sort of slice of life tales of young men from all over the USA that you get in war stories. I would have liked a little more dry fire science mixed in with the storytelling.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
setnahkt | Dec 1, 2017 |
History of the Drop City commune in Colorado. told in an inventive way.
½
 
Flaggad
coolmama | Nov 12, 2012 |

Priser

Du skulle kanske också gilla

Associerade författare

Statistik

Verk
3
Medlemmar
30
Popularitet
#449,942
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
2
ISBN
33