Latest lessons of Storm King focusing on human behavior

GARFIELD COUNTY - It's been 11 years now since the Storm King Fire catastrophe, but experts continue to stir the ashes for fresh lessons.

Many of those lessons involve human behavior - not just fire behavior - and has prompted several policy changes and discussions on how firefighters act around wildfires:

-- A conference in April focused on human factors behind wildfire decision-making and accidents, and marked the 10th anniversary of a landmark workshop on that subject that followed Storm King.

-- In June, the U.S. Forest Service created a foundational doctrine for wildland fire suppression, aimed at changing firefighter thinking to reduce the chances for future firefighting tragedies.

-- And on June 27, in a special Fortune magazine issue on decision-making, a business professor analyzed one supervisor's decisions prior to his dying along with 13 other firefighters on Storm King Mountain.

The 14 died July 6, 1994, when the fire blew up on the mountain, just west of Glenwood Springs.

The continuing focus on the tragedy encourages Ted Putman, who helped investigate the fire but refused to sign the investigative report. He argued the report failed to adequately address human factors behind the deaths, something Putnam and others began exploring the year after the fatal blaze. Now retired from the U.S. Forest Service, he's encouraged to see that interest in the subject continues to this day.

"A lot of the work I had done after (Storm King), I almost thought nobody was listening," Putman said. "In fact I almost kind of gave up on it."

Dick Mangan, president of the International Association of Wildland Fire, said some "very good people," including academic researchers, are now focusing on human factors that can lead to deaths among wildland firefighters.

"It's kind of the new and hot topic right now" among some in academia, he said.

Mangan also had investigated the Storm King Fire, and like Putnam refused to sign the investigative report. He contended U.S. Bureau of Land Management fire managers in Grand Junction should have been held accountable for their actions in the days before the deaths.

Mangan served as chair of the association's April safety summit, held in Missoula, Mont. The association gave Putnam its safety award at the summit.



Firefighting goes to higher learning

Such highly academic discussion isn't going unnoticed by firefighting leadership. Tom Harbour, national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service, said the mounting number of rules being imposed on firefighters "probably has finally reached a tipping point."

Harbour said the Forest Service is trying to learn from the Marine Corps and Army Special Forces, where people make critical decisions under stress.

The agency's new firefighting doctrine will seek to ask firefighters to focus instead on the doctrine, the intention of their commanders, and all that they have learned, "and then focus their brains on dealing with the fire and the situation, not trying to remember 47 rules that may apply in this particular situation or 32 that may apply in this situation."

Mangan said it can be hard for surviving families when the decisions of those who died are questioned. But he said it's important to try to understand how people think in such situations in order to help others make the right calls in similar situations.

Michelle Ryerson, a Storm King survivor who now works in the BLM's Office of Fire and Aviation in Boise, Idaho, co-authored a paper for the April safety summit in which she said 70 to 80 percent of accidents "are associated with human error."

She and co-author Chuck Whitlock, a Forest Service retiree, noted that a system for analyzing human factors already exists elsewhere in the world of accident investigation.

"This model has been used primarily in aviation-related accidents, and we are currently working towards implementing it for ground wildland fire accidents. ..." they wrote.

Mangan is happy to hear of the government's new direction in looking at human decision-making.

"I fully support what they're doing. It's the right approach," he said.



Dennis Webb can be contacted at (970) 945-8515, ext. 516, or at dwebb@postindependent.com.