Forest gives painful lessons

In the summer of 1910, the forest burned.

The conflagration raged in Idaho, Western Montana and parts of northeastern Washington. It wiped entire towns off the map, torched a good portion of Wallace and changed for nearly a century how the U.S. Forest Service fought fires on public lands.

Author and journalist Tim Egan wrote about the fire of 1910 in his New York Times best-selling book “The Big Burn,” now the basis for a new documentary on PBS’ “American Experience.”

The film’s producers stay true to Egan’s book, the Spokane native said in a recent telephone interview.

“I was really happy,” he said. “I thought the documentary was very faithful to this amazing story. They did a great job.”

The story traces the conditions – climatological, political, cultural – that contributed to a fire that torched some 3 million acres and killed at least 85 people. Among them: a wet early spring and dry summer that created plenty of dry fuel, lack of personnel in the Forest Service – then a fledgling agency – and no consensus as to the best ways to fight fires. These are all brought to bear when a massive lightning storm lit the match.

These are all lessons worth remembering today.

“It’s more important as we move into an era of climate change and they’re predicting some pretty catastrophic wildfires in the next few years,” Egan said. “There are so many tinder dry forests, fire season is extended, et cetera.”

One of the wrong lessons of the 1910 blaze led to an effort to put out every forest fire.

“You just can’t do that because it leads to fuel build-up, which has led to some of the problems that we’ve had, particularly in the warmer parts of the West,” Egan said.

That “put out every fire” philosophy has fallen away as forest managers now better understand forest health, and realize that fire is natural and necessary to maintaining a healthy forest ecosystem.

“But I’m upset that we still have loss of life and firefighting techniques that in some ways date back to the Big Burn,” he said. “Fires will blow up and when they do blow up, you’d better have an exit.”

The act of fighting these huge fires can come with huge human cost. There were 85 deaths in 1910. Thirteen firefighters died in the Mann Gulch fire in Montana in 1949. In 1994, a fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado killed 14 firefighters. The Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona claimed 19 lives in 2013. According to statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center, from 1910 to 2012, 478 people died in “burnover” accidents.

“I’ve been to many, many of these conferences where they say, ‘This will never happen again. We’ll never have the loss of life. It’s not worth human beings dying saving somebody’s summer home,’ ” he said. “But then it does happen again.”

The documentary, which will repeat several times in the coming weeks, features Egan and historians talking about the fire, as well as historic photographs and some re-creations to get a sense of what a fire is like.

While he acknowledges some debate among documentarians about the practice, Egan was pleased with how the filmmakers handled the re-creations.

“I thought they did a really good job in this ‘American Experience’ because one of things I wanted to convey in the book, and you really can’t do it in a book, you have to do it film, is just the ferocity of a fire of this size. What it’s like to have something blow up, at 2,000-degree temperatures and create their own weather system,” he said. “I like that they tried to educate people on the science of fire.”

He also appreciates the film’s approach of the larger, political discussion: What is the role of conservation and how do we feel about public lands.

“All those things were there in 1910,” he said, “and they’re with us in 2015.”