Goldmark ad blasts Valley View fire fight

OLYMPIA – In a startling last-minute campaign ad, the pilot of a firefighting plane blasts state Public Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland, saying Sutherland and his staff dawdled during July’s Valley View fire, worsening the blaze that claimed 11 homes.

“It didn’t need to be so severe,” pilot Craig Haws says in the new radio ad. Sutherland, he says, “could have immediately dispatched a firefighting plane sitting 10 miles away at Deer Park. Instead, his staff waited hours before calling a plane from Wenatchee. While the fire raged, bureaucracy got in the way of firefighting.”

The ad’s paid for by Democrat Peter Goldmark, a rancher hoping to unseat Sutherland, a Republican.

“The pilot came forward and said, ‘Look, you need to be aware of these issues,’ ” Goldmark said.

Sutherland’s campaign spokesman, Todd Myers, said the ad is inaccurate.

“When a candidate is desperate, he’ll make things up,” he said.

For one thing, Myers said, the state considered the plane Haws piloted – a 1940s PBY tanker – unsafe for firefighting. Although Sutherland’s Department of Natural Resources had long used the plane, called Tanker 85, on wildfires in the past, this year the agency didn’t renew the contract. The DNR cited the plane’s age and the fact that federal concerns about safety also barred it from being used to fight fires on federal land.

Secondly, Myers said, only after high winds prevented the DNR from using aircraft out of Coeur d’Alene did the agency order in the bigger plane from Wenatchee.

Even when the bigger plane arrived, he said, the winds made its water drops ineffective.

“Had the plane been there” immediately, Myers said, “it still would have been ineffective.”

Fire and DNR aircraft logs show that local fire crews initially said twice they didn’t need aircraft as they sized up the blaze about 4 p.m.

At 4:30 p.m., they called for aerial help. At 4:55 p.m., the Coeur d’Alene air tanker crews said it was too windy to fly. By 5:45 p.m., DNR had the large CL215 air tanker en route from Wenatchee.

In addition to the homes, the fire burned more than 1,000 acres of Spokane Valley forests. It took hundreds of firefighters to bulldoze and hand-cut fire lines around it.

The area coordinator at the time, Spokane Valley Fire Chief Mike Thompson, agreed Tuesday that the high winds made the air drops ineffective. Given the fact that the DNR was watching dozens of fires across Eastern Washington at the time, he said, the agency did pretty well.

“Everybody was pretty much strapped,” Thompson said. “We’ve kind of gone over this ourselves with a fine-tooth comb to see how we could do it next time. Other than, as these things usually go, wishing we had more resources, things went relatively well.”

Haws did not respond to a phone message or e-mail. Nor did the PBY’s owner, Bud Rude.

Rude had appealed the state’s decision not to renew the contract for the World War II-era plane, but the DNR stuck with the 1987 CL-215. The newer plane carried slightly less water than the PBY’s 1,500 gallons, but it flew faster. It also cost 10 times more per flight hour than the $600-an-hour PBY.

While fire crews were still mopping up hot spots July 15, Haws criticized the fire response in a posting on a firefighting Web site. The state’s aerial firefighting plan was “dysfunctional at best,” he wrote, and the Spokane blaze was awash in bureaucracy.

“Too many clipboards/cell phones,” he wrote. “The administrative people outnumbered the actual fire fighters.”

Goldmark, a longtime volunteer firefighter in Okanogan County, says more could have and should have been done. Haws and the PBY crew were very experienced, he said, and Sutherland has emergency authority to tap such resources when needed.

If elected, Goldmark said he would change DNR policy to dispatch aircraft immediately. When someone calls in a blaze, crews on firetrucks don’t wait to see if it gets worse, he said – they roll the engines.

“You know it may be a false alarm,” he said, “but you want to make sure that you’re there in time to save property and time.”

And the July 10 fire was clearly no false alarm, he said. The blaze was in a tinder-dry area with high winds and many homes.

“Is it easier to pay for the fuel or is it easier to rebuild the homes?” Goldmark said.

Myers said such a change would be absurd.

“Pulling planes, without a request, in inappropriate circumstances would not have saved these houses,” he said. “But it would have made other fires worse.”