Mann Gulch fire

The Mann Gulch fire was a wildfire started on August 5, 1949, in the Gates of the Mountain Wild Area, now named the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, in Helena National Forest, in western Montana. A team of 15 smokejumpers parachuted in that afternoon. As they approached the fire from uphill, unexpected winds caused it to suddenly intensify and grow rapidly, cutting off the men's route to safety, forcing them to turn back. During the next few minutes, they were overrun by the wind driven grass fire which fatally burned 12 smokejumpers and a ground-based firefighter. Two escaped unharmed by running up the fall line to a rock ridge. The foreman, Wagner Dodge, survived not by outrunning the fire, but by lighting an emergency backfire now known as an escape fire and jumping into the burned area, lying face down in the black while the main fire joined and passed around his flame front. He had ordered his men to follow but they refused and ran.
The United States Forest Service drew lessons from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire by designing new training techniques and safety measures that developed how the agency approached wildfire suppression and emergency management. The agency also increased emphasis on fire research and the science of fire behavior.
University of Chicago English professor and author Norman Maclean (1902–1990) researched the fire and its behavior for his book Young Men and Fire (1992), which was published after his death. Maclean, who had worked in northwestern Montana logging camps and for the Forest Service in his youth, recounted the events of the fire and ensuing tragedy and undertook a detailed investigation of the fire's causes. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1992. The 1952 film Red Skies of Montana, starring actor Richard Widmark and directed by Joseph M. Newman, was loosely based on the events of the Mann Gulch fire.
The location of the Mann Gulch fire was added as a historical district to the United States National Register of Historic Places on May 19, 1999. A sign is placed near Mann Gulch to memorialize the tragedy, and can be seen from the waters of the nearby Missouri River.
The fire started when lightning struck south of Mann Gulch, a tributary of the Missouri River that cuts through steep terrain for approximately five miles ( 8 km ) in the Gates of the Mountains, The place was noted and named by Lewis and Clark on their journey west in 1805. The fire was spotted by forest ranger James O. Harrison around noon on August 5, 1949. Harrison, a college student at Montana State University, was working the summer as recreation and fire prevention guard for the Meriwether Canyon Campground. He had been a smokejumper the previous year but had given it up because of the danger. As a ranger, he still had a responsibility to watch for and help fight fires, but it was not his primary role. On this day, he fought the fire on his own for four hours before he met the crew of smokejumpers who had been dispatched from Hale Field, Missoula, Montana, in a Douglas DC-3.
Several factors that combined to create the disaster are described in Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire.
The C-47/DC-3 "Miss Montana" (a name applied during the eventual restoration, not used at the time of the fire and use by Johnson), registration number NC24320, was the only smokejumper plane available at Hale Field, near the current location of Sentinel High School, on August 5, 1949, when the call came in seeking 25 smokejumpers to fight a blaze in a hard-to-reach area of the Helena National Forest. The C-47/DC-3 could only hold 16 jumpers and their equipment. Even though more help was needed, fire bosses decided not to wait for a second plane, and instead sent No. NC24320 out on its own. NC24320 flew with Johnson Flying Service from Hale Field in Missoula, Montana and was used to drop smokejumpers as well as for other operations for which Johnson Flying Service held contracts. “Miss Montana” has since been restored to airworthy condition and still flies out of Missoula.
It was hot, with a temperature of 97 °F (36 °C), and the fire danger rating was high, rated 74 out of a possible 100. Wind conditions were turbulent. The plane flight was especially rough. One smokejumper got sick on the way and did not jump, returning with the airplane to Hale Field. Getting off the plane, he resigned from the smokejumpers. The remaining 15 smokejumpers parachuted into an open area at the top of the gulch. Below them, they could see the fire burning on the ridge south of Mann Gulch toward the Missouri River. Gear and individual jumpers were scattered widely due to the turbulent conditions. Their radio was destroyed after its parachute failed to open. After the smokejumpers had landed, a shout was heard coming from the front of the fire. The foreman, Wagner "Wag" Dodge, went out ahead to find the person shouting and to scout the fire. He left instructions for the team to finish gathering their equipment and eat, and then advance to the front of the fire. The voice turned out to be Jim Harrison who had already been fighting the fire alone for four hours.
The two headed back up the gulch, and Dodge noted that one could not get closer than 100 feet (30 m) to the fire due to the heat. The crew met Dodge and Harrison about halfway to the fire. Dodge instructed the team to move off the front of the fire, and instead "sidehill" (keeping to the same contour or elevation), and cross over to the thinly forested and grass-covered south-facing slope, north of the stream, where they would move "down gulch" (west towards the confluence between Mann Gulch and the Missouri River). They could then fight the fire from the flank and steer it toward a low-fuel area. Dodge returned with Harrison to the supply area at the top of the gulch. The two stopped there to eat. From the high vantage point, Dodge noticed the smoke along the fire front boiling up, indicating an intensification of the heat of the fire. He and Harrison headed down the gulch to catch up with the crew.
By the time Dodge reached his men, the fire west of them, down-gulch toward the Missouri River, had already jumped from the ridge south of Mann Gulch to the bottom of the south facing slope north of the stream. The intense heat, combined with wind coming off the river, and the upslope direction of the burn (which pre-dries and heats the fuel, and leads to much faster fire movement when a fire is burning up-slope) pushed the flames up the gulch in the dry grass of the south facing slope, causing what fire fighters call a "blow up". Various side ridges running down the slope obscured the crew's view, so they could not see the conditions further down the gulch, and they initially continued to move toward the fire. When Dodge finally got a glimpse of what was happening, he turned the men around and started them angling back up upslope and up the gulch. Within a couple hundred yards, he ordered the men to drop their Pulaskis, shovels, and crosscut saws:
By this point, the fire was moving extremely fast up the 76% incline of the northern slope (37.23 degree slope) of Mann Gulch, and Dodge realized they would not be able to make the ridge line in front of the fire. With the fire less than 100 yards (90 m) behind, he took a match out and set fire to the grass in front of them. In doing so, he was attempting to create an escape fire to lie in so that, deprived of fuel, the main fire would pass the new, burned-out clearing and divert around him and his crew. In the back draft of the main fire, the grass fire Dodge had set burned in the direction toward the ridge above. Turning to the three men by him — Robert Sallee, Walter Rumsey, and Eldon Diettert — Dodge said, "Up this way," but the men misunderstood him. The three ran straight up for the ridge crest, moving up along the far edge of Dodge's fire. Sallee later said he was not sure what Dodge was doing, and thought perhaps he intended the fire to act as a buffer between the men and the main fire. It was not until he got to the ridge crest and looked back down that he realized what Dodge had intended. As the rest of the crew came up, Dodge tried to direct them through the fire he had set and into the center burnt out area. Dodge later stated that someone, possibly squad leader William Hellman, said, "To hell with that, I'm getting out of here." The rest of the team raced past Dodge up the slope toward the hogback of Mann Gulch ridge, hoping they had enough time to get through the rock ridge line to safer ground on the other side. Only Dodge entered the burned-out area of his escape fire.
Four of the men reached the ridge crest, but only two, Bob Sallee and Walter Rumsey, managed to escape through a crevice or deep fissure in the rock ridge to reach the other side. In the dense smoke of the fire, the two had no way of knowing if the crevice they found actually "went through" to the other side or would be a blind trap. Diettert had been just to the right, slightly upgulch of Sallee and Rumsey, but he did not drop back to the crevice and continued on up the right side of the hogback. He did not find another escape route and was overtaken by the fire. Sallee and Rumsey came through the hogback to the ridge crest above what became known as Rescue Gulch. Dropping down off the ridge, they managed to find a rock slide with little to no vegetation. They waited there for the fire to overtake them, moving from the bottom of the slide to the top as the fire moved past. Hellman was caught by the fire on the top of the ridge and was badly burned. Though he and Joseph Sylvia initially survived the fire, they suffered heavy injuries and both died in the hospital the next day. Wag Dodge entered the charred center of the escape fire he had built and survived the intensely burning main fire.
In Young Men and Fire, Maclean stated that when the fire passed over Dodge's position, "he was lifted off the ground two or three times." Later researchers repeated the claim. However, this statement was an exaggeration. Dodge actually wrote, in his statement to the board of review, "There were three extreme gusts of hot air that almost lifted me from the ground as the fire passed over." In another description of Dodge's ordeal, John Maclean said, "as the main fire passed, it [the fire] picked him up and shook him like a dog with a bone." Young Men and Fire attributed the story to Earl Cooley, the spotter and kicker aboard the airplane, who had rebuffed Maclean's overture to collaborate and proceeded to publish his own book. But the mistaken story actually originated with C. E. "Mike" Hardy, who was the head of the litter bearers collecting the bodies the day after the disaster, and spoke with Dodge then as they sat on a log. Rothermel, in the early 1990s and Alexander in 2009 cite separate personal communications with Hardy asserting this account. Hardy assisted Norman Maclean in his research and accompanied him on a trip to the site.
Four-hundred-and-fifty men fought for five more days to get the fire under control, which had spread to 4,500 acres (1,800 ha).
The events described above all transpired in a relatively short period of time. Studies estimated that the fire covered 3,000 acres in 10 minutes during this blow-up stage, an hour and 45 minutes after the smokejumpers had arrived.
Thirteen firefighters died, with eleven killed in the fire and two—Hellman and Sylvia—who sustained fatal burns and died later in the hospital. Only three of the sixteen survived.
Drs. Thomas L. Hawkins of Helena and R. S. Haines of Phoenix, Arizona were summoned at about 9:00 pm. The doctors stopped off at St. Peters Hospital to pick up blood plasma on the way to the disaster site. They arrived at the patients, both of whom had not yet been moved, and administered morphine and a quart (≈1 liter) of plasma to each— Hellman 12:45 am, Sylvia at 1:50, roughly 7 and 8 hours post-injury. Sylvia and Hellman finally arrived at the hospital in Helena around 10:00 and 10:30 am. Both died there before noon, 18 hours post-injury, of renal failure.
Medical understanding of severe burns was still in its infancy in 1949, having only shortly prior gained operational understanding from two mass-casualty fires, the Rialto fire in 1921 and Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in 1942. The now widely used Parkland formula for fluid resuscitation calls for 4.0 ml of Ringer's Lactate per kg of body weight per % total body surface area; half of this volume is given in the first 8 hours and the rest in the next 16 hours. A 70 kg person with 70% TBSA would need nearly 10 liters within 8 hours of injury.
Those who were killed by the fire:
Those who survived:
Earl Cooley was the spotter/kicker (the airborne supervisor who directed the crew of smokejumpers who dropped in to fight the fire) the morning of the August 5, 1949 Mann Gulch fire jump. On July 12, 1940, as part of a two-man jump, Cooley had been the first ever smokejumper to jump on an operational fire jump. In the 1950s, Cooley served as the smokejumper base superintendent and was the first president of the National Smokejumper Association. He died November 9, 2009, at age 98.
Much controversy surrounded foreman Dodge and the fire he lit to escape. In answering the questions of the Forest Service Review Board as to why he took the actions he did, Dodge stated he had never had to use an escape fire before, and it was not explicitly taught; but he was trained to get into a burned area for safety and thus it seemed logical. Maclean incorrectly claimed that Dodge testified that "he had never heard of such a thing before." Similar escape fires had been used by the plains Indians against the fast-moving, brief-duration grass fires. The idea that Dodge devised the escape fire on the spot became popular in spite of contrary evidence. A contemporary of Dodge, Earl C. Schmidt (February 13, 1920 - November 5, 2014), recounted a 1943 discussion in which Dodge explained the use of the escape fire as a last resort. Schmidt's 1996 letter to Starr Jenkins opined that Dodge had calmly selected an area of least fuel and performed the maneuver "without flinching." Another of Dodge's contemporaries, James Arthur “Smokey” Alexander (1918–2014) said that setting escape fires was an "emergency exit procedure" that he had used in the 1930s. Alexander also said that he had discussed it with Dodge and others in 1941.
A few parents of the smokejumpers tried to sue the government with one charge that the "escape fire" had actually burned the men.
It was originally thought that the unburned patches underneath the bodies indicated they had suffocated for lack of air before the fire caught them. However, the unburned patches are called protected areas as their bodies shielded the underlying grass and forest litter from the intense thermal radiation, by keeping out hot gases, and absorbing heat. It is now known that death by smoke and toxic gas inhalation, while common in structure fires because of the confined atmosphere, is virtually nonexistent among wildland fire fatalities.
Several months following the fire, fire scientist Harry Gisborne, from the U.S. Forest Service Research Center at Priest River, came to examine the damage. Despite 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 November 9, 1949.
Lessons learned from the Mann Gulch fire had a significant effect on firefighter training. Two training protocols—"Ten Standard Firefighting Orders" and "Eighteen Situations That Shout Watch Out"—were incorporated into Forest Service firefighter training program, and safety training made mandatory to achieve certification to work on a fire line. However, the training methodology proved inadequate and the tragedy would be repeated twice: in the 1990 Dude fire in Arizona, which killed six firefighters, and in the 1994 South Canyon Fire in Colorado, in which 14 firefighters died. A primary factor in the latter appeared to be surprise of the sudden transition from surface fire to crown fire, leading to the development and adoption of LCES, an acronym for a four-point safety procedure to increase observance of the previous training protocols. LCES consists of posting lookouts, providing all firefighters radio communication with lookouts, identifying escape routes, and designating valid safety zones, and ensuring that all members of the process, from "hotshot" crews to seasonal Type 2 crew volunteers to "crew bosses", understand and follow its tenets.
An inquest by the Forest Service held hearings on Aug. 26–28, 1949, less than a month after the fatalities.
Thirteen crosses were erected to mark the locations where the thirteen firefighters who died fighting the Mann Gulch fire fell. However, one of the smokejumpers who died in the Mann Gulch fire was David Navon, who was Jewish. In 2001, the cross marking the location where Navon died was replaced with a marker bearing a Star of David.
"Miss Montana", the C-47/DC-3 that carried the smokejumpers that day, was later placed on exhibit in Missoula at the Museum of Mountain Flying. The aircraft was restored as a memorial to the smokejumpers and the fire guard who lost their lives at Mann Gulch on August 5, 1949. It was made airworthy and flown to France in 2019 as part of the D-Day 75th anniversary commemorations with a flight to Normandy. On August 5, 2019, "Miss Montana" flew back over Mann Gulch on the 70th anniversary of the fire and dropped wreaths for the 13 men lost.
The fire was a topic in the prologue to Adam Grant's book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know (2021).
The Mann Gulch fire was the subject of Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire, which was published after his death. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1992.
Norman Maclean's son John N. Maclean wrote a book in 2003 titled Fire and Ashes: On the Front Lines Battling Wildfires, which also includes a section on the Mann Gulch fire. In 2004, he also published an article called "Fire and Ashes: The Last Survivor of the Mann Gulch Fire," in Montana: The Magazine of Western History. The article was adapted from the Mann Gulch section of his book, in which he interviewed Bob Sallee, the last remaining survivor of the fire.
Folk singer James Keelaghan wrote a song about this fire entitled "Cold Missouri Waters", released on his 1995 album A Recent Future. Written from the perspective of foreman Dodge on his deathbed, the song describes "thirteen crosses high above the cold Missouri waters" and draws closely on other details from the events of the fire, describing Dodge as:
Of his decision to set the escape fire, the song imagines Dodge saying:
The song was revived as a tribute to the 19 firefighters who died in the massive Yarnell Hill Fire near Yarnell, Arizona, in 2013.
"Underneath Montana Skies", another song about the Mann Gulch fire, was written by Patrick Michael Karnahan of Black Irish Band, and is also on the album Into the Fire.
Ross Brown wrote a song entitled "The Mann Gulch," with a scratch version available on YouTube.
Levi Barrett released his song about the tragedy, "Mann Gulch Fire" in 2018.
The 1952 movie Red Skies of Montana was loosely based on this incident.
46°52′47″N 111°54′18″W﻿ / ﻿46.8796°N 111.9049°W﻿ / 46.8796; -111.9049