THE FIRE ON CEDAR CREEK

FRANK J. JEFFERSON.

(Except for the names, this is a true account of how a forest fire started and was stopped. It is the composite of the experiences of a man who has fought fires in the West for 38 years. He changed the names of places and men so that he could bring in details and facts that happened at one place or another, although all of them did not occur at any one place at one time.)

The telephone at the Red River ranger station rang urgently early one Saturday afternoon in August. Hurry Earle, the district fire dispatcher, took a message from Guy Roberts, the forest ranger at the Snag Flat fire camp.

Roberts reported :

"Fire caught by bad whirlwind. More sparks and hot embers from burning snags scattered across Red River than patrolmen can put out. New fire headed up ridges both sides Cedar Creek. Fire on east ridge climbing fast in grass. Rate about mile an hour. Spreading up ridge and to east slope. Will hit timber about mile up ridge. On west side, fire moving up ridge slower. Ridge rocky with scattered fuel but bad brush field just ahead of fire. Six patrolmen on north side of river trying to prevent east and west sides of fire spreading farther up or down river. No more men can be spared from Snag Flat without taking chance of losing it and having a bad fire on both sides Red River.

"Call Swanson's 40-man logging crew with bulldozer. Have them start right away for mouth of Cedar Creek. Start full Rock Creek road crew of 25 men and 2 bulldozers for same point. Also Strawberry Flat 4-man tanker crew. Establish camp on road at mouth Cedar Creek. Send in 100-man camp outfit, including 2 backfiring outfits. Phone forest supervisor's office advising him of the situation and action taken. Make clear to him all fire-control resources of this district now called into action. Ask him to arrange for additional help as he believes needed. Tell him will use logging and road crews to try and keep fire from crossing either Ant Creek or Fly Creek. Wind southwest. Humidity is 8. Goodbye, Hurry but hurry!"

Thus was control work on the Cedar Creek fire started.

The forest supervisor, who had taken over for his central dispatcher during the lunch hour, in turn received the call from the local Red River dispatcher. Fire-weather forecasts had been critical for several days. Years of experience and observation of the explosive burning conditions that could develop by a continued alliance of dangerous degrees of wind, temperature, and humidity had given the supervisor a prescience that warned him this could be a worse Saturday afternoon than even the forecast for the day had indicated. Today, if decisions were needed, they had to be quick and sure. So he had stayed in his office this Saturday afternoon, ready for whatever might happen; he had alerted a topflight fire-control overhead crew; he also had asked his assistant, Loitved, a man well trained in fire suppression, to be on call at home over the week end for emergency service.

The supervisor scanned a map and made his decisions. First, the new fires that were spreading across the Red River from Snag Flat should be handled as a separate operation. (Ranger Roberts himself and his men already had been through a grueling fight and would do well if they completed the job of controlling the still dangerous main fire on their side of the river. Certainly Roberts should not be called on to handle both jobs.) The supervisor dispatched the alerted overhead crew with instructions to its fire boss,

Johnson, that he was in charge of the new fire, and to call back from the Red River ranger station for further instructions.

Next, a message was sent to Roberts advising him of the decision and agreeing with his plan for use of the road and logging crew. Roberts was instructed that he was to do everything possible until Johnson arrived to check the new fire without risking further break-over from Snag Flat. A prompt report on the Snag Flat situation also was requested.

The forest supervisor decided further to have Loitved make air reconnaissance of both fires and then go into Snag Flat to do whatever correlation was needed between the two jobs.

By then, the dispatcher had returned from lunch, and Loitved, whom the supervisor had called, arrived. The three men got out aerial photographs and type maps and hurriedly conferred on a plan of action.

It was plain that one back-country fire camp out of reach of roads would have to be established quickly by airplane. The best bet for the back-country job was to obtain the specially trained 30-man crew of fire fighters, known as the "hot-shot outfit," on the adjacent Blackjack Forest, if they could be spared. Those men had been carefully chosen and trained for this sort of work and, because of their skill, could absorb reinforcements of a reasonable number of green men.

The forest dispatcher went into action. He called the nearby airport and obtained a plane equipped for cargo dropping for immediate use. He also instructed the forest warehouseman to take an air-borne camp-and-tool outfit for 50 men, including water and backfiring torches, to the airport. He requested the Lake District ranger headquarters to send three tanker outfits to Cedar Creek. He placed a call for the regional dispatcher to ask that the Blackjack hot-shot crew be sent to Cedar Creek if it were available and that he be advised promptly as to the outcome of this request and the estimated hour of arrival at Cedar Creek. The Red River dispatcher was instructed to send four saddle horses to Cedar Creek without delay.

The supervisor and his assistant, Loitved, knew that Cedar Creek itself had been logged for cedar poles many years earlier, that it was not accessible by road, and that it was full of old slash, which is good fuel for fire. The also knew that on the east a road of sorts ran 4 miles up Ant Creek, the next stream up the river from Cedar Creek, that Ant Creek was open timber interspersed with glades, that the slope was moderately steep, and that on the west a road extended about 2 miles up Fly Creek, the first stream down river from Cedar Creek. A good trail ran east from it to the divide at the head of Cedar Creek. The east side of Fly Creek, for the first 2 miles upstream, was mostly covered by oak and brush, which changed to timber at the first large easterly branch of the stream. 'The slope into the stream was steep and cliffy. The west side of Fly Creek and its headwaters above the trail supported a valuable stand of mature timber, as did Ant Creek. The photographs and maps showed that the divide at the head of Cedar Creek was sparsely timbered, steep, and rocky.

One conclusion the men reached immediately: Saving any part of Cedar Creek was out of the question with running fire flanking it on both sides, it was doomed. Its large volume of dried-out slash would blow up during the afternoon and scatter spot fires into the cliffs and ravines at the headwaters of the stream. They would have to hold the fire on the two ridges, keep it out of the heads of Fly and Ant Creeks, and prevent it from crossing either of the streams.

The surest and fastest way to do that would be to backfire the roads up Fly Creek and Ant Creek to points from which effective fire lines could be built to the head of Cedar Creek. The backfiring and construction of the lines would have to be timed carefully to avoid being flanked by either backfires or by the main fire.