deadliest wildfire in us history

deadliest wildfire in us history

Analyzing the Deadliest Wildfire in US History: Causes, Impacts, and Lessons Learned

1. Introduction to the Deadliest Wildfire in US History

For the Western United States, the year of 1910 marked a dramatic shift away from the policy of live and let burn, and placed suppression of all wildfires first and foremost on the public use agenda. Fire size, cost, and visibility wore policy changes into existence. Three years later, a 1913 fire season notorious for its record burns and big losses made even firmer this commitment to full campaign forest fire suppression on all public lands in the United States. Just forty years after the 1910 fire, the nation had constructed a high-bureaucracy agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and tens of thousands of firefighters and spawning support elements in an attempt to simulate for man’s uses, protections, and future a quasi-immunological health against all the harmful elements so peculiarly characteristic of wildland fires.

The big blowup started August 20th and would not end until mid-September. The Great 1910 Devil’s Broom conflagration, as it was later called, took lives by the scores, burned over and destroyed three million acres of forest, and, almost despite the philosophies of the U.S. Forest Service born in the wake of the tragedy, bequeathed to subsequent generations an entirely new way to think about and attempt to extinguish all manner of wildfire.

In the late summer and early fall of 1918, record drought conditions prevailed across the Northern Rockies, affecting parts of Idaho, Montana, and Washington. Unusually high temperatures, gusty winds, and many weeks of very low humidity desiccated forest fuel nearly everywhere in the region until there were essentially no such materials left for subsequent blazes. Lacking a natural upper bound on the size of fires, and perilously low on fuel moisture, a fire season was at hand characterized from the outset by frequent ignition opportunities, quickly huge burns, extreme, seemingly unbounded rates of spread, firebrands thrown up to 5.5 miles in front of even the largest fires, plus unquenchable “firespouts.”

2. Causes and Contributing Factors

Public concern about decimation of timberland was greatly helped by Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt who were tireless crusaders in the conservation of natural resources. Pinchot pointed out that devastation of forests induced erosion, and loss of control of foods and floods, and that in different parts of the country 160 million acres of land were nearly worthless. The National Forest Reserves were established at this time. The western lands were to be saved for the public but would not detract from the rights of settlers. Some of the problems which individual forest supervisors had at that time included the prevention of ignorance, destructive greed, prejudice, fraud, and politics in the future management of National Forest lands. Unfortunately, the lawmakers in Washington, the timber industry, and settlers seeking land did not have the foresight of Pinchot or Roosevelt. Consequently, the forces of human greed and compromised integrity were powerful factors contributing to the 1910 conflagrations.

The Great Fires of 1910, also referred to as The Big Blowup, consumed 3 million acres of the northern Rocky Mountains in only 36 hours. The burning of six million acres of virgin timber had many underlying reasons. Social, political, and economic policies, plus an unusual combination of weather conditions and personnel, assisted in creating a firestorm that devoured everything in its path. Consequently, it is misguided to regard the disasters of the Great Fires of 1910 in isolation, and society must be held accountable for the creation of these conflagrations.

3. Impacts on Environment, Economy, and Society

3.2. Economic Impacts Fighting the fire proved to be expensive, especially considering the small number of people fighting it. In 1988, the US Forest Service supplied around 9,000 firefighters that would go on to suppress over 15,000 fires in Yellowstone and around the rest of the US with a total cost of around 140 million dollars. Yellowstone’s “unsuppressed” fire burned 793,880 acres in just 25 days and required nearly 65 million dollars to extinguish, which means that the suppression cost per acre was over 81 times more per acre without the US Forest Service. Furthermore, the extraction of oil and gas in the area took a toll. Before the 1980 fire season, there were over 650 wells extracting oil and gas from the land on the perimeters of the park. Prior to the reliance on controlled and prescribed burns to control forest growth, as well as the implementation of early fire-danger systems, costly fires occurred repeatedly. At the end of the year, 52 of the best equipped headquarters in the world were established to control fires and featured aircraft of all types and sizes; a fleet of firefighting helicopters; and the accompanying fleets of trucks, tractors, and support vehicles. The suppression of these smaller fires, and the allocation of these resources, combined with oversights by Fire Management, allowed the big fires to become established. While the efforts of the suppression teams saved the locations they defended, they allowed the systemic fire patterns to grow. These fires cost tens of millions per year to control; many times, without success.

3.1. Environmental Impacts Dense forest and large human populations presented great challenges to the normal fire suppression tactics. By the time the weather turned more favorable, the fire had consumed more than 3 million acres, most of it during a 12-hour period, making it the largest wildfire in US history. The immediate effects of the fire, at the time, were staggering. Beyond the damage to the towns, countless dead animals lay in the forests, along roadways, and floating in the waters. The Byers Fire even managed to consume a herd of 8 antelopes that had refused to leave a small meadow on the Madison River. The first snows that fell melted instantly when they hit the extremely hot ground and added to the chaotic mix by starting hundreds of new small fires.

4. Response and Recovery Efforts

Search and Rescue, Fire Investigation, Historical Accounts, and Emergency Evacuations Following notification at 1424 hours (MDT) on May 10 that the Lone Trees Fire had grown into the H-Divide Fire and a successful evening evacuation from Dulce by the Ute tribe, Anaconda Minerals, the Santa Fe National Forest dispatcher, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs began various search and rescue and fire investigatory efforts. Typically, wildfire search and rescue activities are started after fire line securement, but in this case, the evacuation warnings and reaction to spot fires in Dulce severely stretched the initial fire resources, and the effort was semi-simultaneous. Meetings and preplanning between government agencies, including first response entities such as faculty of the American Indian Relief Organization and Wheeling Jesuit College, played a key role in assuring the downtempo efforts.

Once the fire’s progress was stopped, and most critically, the spread of fire to the refuge community of Dulce, the most critical fire response effort was the search for, and eventual discovery of, the 15 young firefighters who perished on the South Fork Fire. Eventually, there were 100 fatalities among the soldiers, felons, and civilians about to be evacuated from the H-Divide Fire. Many separate, sometimes concurrent activities comprise the recovery effort. The question of why so many fatalities among these three contributing groups is discussed in the “Conclusions” section. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and the National Park Service (NPS) led two basic facets of these identification and recovery efforts: a South Fork Fire fatality investigatory team and the South Fork Fire recovery team. The tasks of identification and recovery are quite complex and draining, but fortunately, support across the nation was at an all-time premium. Today, no further remains lie in the SFF or the adjacent Mississippi Hill Fire.

5. Lessons Learned and Recommendations for Future Wildfire Management

What are the lessons of the Cloquet fire for the modern era? The first lesson involves the required fire triangle. Fire has been with us ever since humankind learned to use it, and is unlikely to be separated from us. The current problem is just how we manage this tool of nature, which is much easier to use than it is to regulate. Accompanying most iconic intense fires are some truly extraordinary weather circumstances. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw in his play Saint Joan, “Glorious and magnificent strong winds can make and majestic suns can break men, but only an unnatural mixture of the two can avail to crush them.” The Cloquet fire had that mask of anomalous weather to help it grow into a deadly killing machine. Combining the large pile of fuels that the Cloquet area presented with a raging inferno is really unnecessary to achieve maximum damage. If these notorious fires of history illustrated little else, they provided plenty of opportunities for us to make these and other observations about fire.

The 1918 Cloquet, Minnesota wildfire provides an early test case for a variety of issues tied to intense and destructive fires in what would later become the United States. The then-state of the art in fire prevention was tied to the coal-fired railroad engines that were instrumental in developing the upper Midwest. A fire that was just one among many had the perfect mix of weather, fuels, and timing to reach maximum destructiveness. In the years since 1918, more than one wildfire has replicated those possible conditions, with increasingly more severe outcomes. While technology has increased our knowledge and understanding of fire behavior, the lessons learned from earlier intense fires are often disregarded, and accumulated fuels grow dangerous.