The Seattle Times
TWISP, Wash. — U.S. Forest Service officials said Sunday they don’t yet know why three firefighters were killed and a fourth critically injured last week after they were involved in a vehicle accident while battling a blaze on a hillside near Twisp in Okanogan County.
John Phipps, a Forest Service official leading the agency’s investigation, said officials began conducting interviews about the incident Saturday and were planning to complete most of them Sunday.
Officials have said the vehicle accident may have prevented the firefighters from fleeing when the fast-moving wildfire turned on them near Woods Canyon Road.
The four men were in a small fire engine that Mike Williams, forest supervisor for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, described as a flatbed truck equipped with a water tank and hoses.
Speaking to reporters at a news conference in Wenatchee on Sunday afternoon, Phipps said there were no immediate witnesses to the vehicle leaving the road other than Daniel Lyon, the firefighter from the truck who survived.
Phipps did say officials have determined the truck went off an embankment before stopping but did not roll over.
Lyon is still at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center in intensive care, officials said.
Additional firefighting personnel were injured up the hillside from the truck.
“We think when we get a chance to talk with Daniel we’ll find out a lot more,” Phipps said. “We could speculate but we won’t … It’s a bit of a mystery. There are some theories. But we need to wait.”
Phipps said the Forest Service, in its post-incident investigations, seeks to learn from institutional mistakes rather than finding one or more individuals to blame.
“The wildland fire environment is high-paced and high-tempo with a lot of moving parts,” he said. “It’s amazing we perform so well … We’ve learned over the years that in doing investigations, trying to find the root cause is very problematic, because it’s somewhat of a myth you can really figure it out.”
He added: “We want to shift from holding individuals accountable … We have excellent people operating in an imperfect system.”
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