The plot line of the firefighting story is a series of battles in a never-ending war waged on fire. It comes down to battles won and lost.
In each telling of the story, we put the wet stuff on the red stuff, usually earning public gratitude and rarely scorn. We also save lives and solve a range of other ordinary and extraordinary problems. The utility of the firefighting narrative is its inherent simplicity, stories of the heroic struggle by firefighters against a common enemy.
Despite that fact, the narrative fails us at times.
Nineteenth-century urban fires and conflagrations fueled the fire service narrative. As fires destroyed large areas of the urban landscape, firefighters stood out as a symbol of what is good in society.
Great strides
Yet heroism was not enough, the threat of urban fire required new technology and a professional fire service. Along with professionalism came improvements to public water systems, building codes and systematic fire insurance underwriting, all seemingly arising from the ashes of the great urban fires of Portland, Chicago, Boston and Baltimore, as well as scores of other cities and towns.
Over the course of the early 20th century, the fire service developed and organized around a paramilitary scheme waging an on-going battle against fire. The fire narrative successfully employs metaphors of war fighting to describe strategy, tactics, organization and operations.
We measure success and failure of firefights in terms of acres, buildings, dollars, lives and property. Fire-loss data underscores discussions and evaluations of progress in the fire war. Nevertheless, these are merely metrics, a way of summing up the destruction and a means to validate expenditures for the resources and materials of the war.
We do not like to admit that fire has an affinity for beating us. We control it only when we find ourselves ready, prepared and most importantly in a unique position to overwhelm it with force. The point of fighting a war is to vanquish the enemy through total victory.
Our unbeatable enemy
The weakness of the fire war narrative is that we cannot prevail. Total victory eludes us because we fight an enemy we cannot defeat and humiliate. Wildfires in the western United States stand as proof of fires ability to humble the best efforts of firefighters and modern technology.
In 1910, a fire known variously as The Big Burn or The Big Blowup humbled human efforts to control. The efforts to suppress it grew from a federal policy implemented as a misguided attempt to appease enemies of the U.S. Forest Service.
The weekend of Aug. 20-21, 1910 saw one of the largest single recorded fires in U.S. history. The fire consumed an estimated 3 million acres of timber across Washington, Idaho, Montana and British Columbia. It may have included 1,000 to 3,000 individual fires ignited by sparks from locomotives, dry lightning, forest crews setting backfires and nurtured by an exceptionally hot and dry summer.
In the early 20th century, the U.S. government, through the actions of President Theodore Roosevelt, placed large tracts of western land under federal oversight, but powerful businessmen with interests in the natural resources contained within those lands stood against such efforts. After losing the struggle with Roosevelt, they pressured members of Congress to destroy the U.S. Forest Service with the result that the fledgling organization had insufficient staff and inadequate resources to do its job.
Win at all cost policy
Fire fighting strategy on federal wildlands fell under the control of Gifford Pinchot, chief of the Forest Service. When the 1910 fire erupted, he issued the order to suppress the fires, even though many foresters knew that some sections of this forestland needed a fire to rejuvenate growth.
From that point, total fire suppression became a federal policy. Thus, in the hot summer of 1910, the Forest Service mounted an inadequate attack on numerous fires spread across a large geographic area under extraordinarily dry and windy weather conditions.
The worst of the fires may have occurred during a six-hour period, fanned by hurricane-force winds blowing across the tinder dry forests. The fires blew through the Bitterroot, Cabinet, Clearwater, Coeur d’Alene, Flathead, Kaniksu, Kootenai, Lewis and Clark, Lolo, and St. Joe national forests.
The firestorm claimed 87 people, including 78 firefighters. U.S. Army troops, the famous Buffalo Soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment aided inhabitants of the Idaho towns of Avery and Wallace during the fire.
This was not the first time the U.S. military aided the civilian population in a fire or disaster, but it did represent a situation where American soldiers were present and actually involved with the disaster as a responsibility. The Big Burn set the bar for future wildland firefighting policy decisions and contributed to the general idea of fire fighting as a war on fire.
Fire is a force of nature. We cannot conquer fire in cities or forests anymore than we can prevail over hurricanes or earthquakes, but we can prevent fires and control it under ideal conditions thereby mitigating the potential damage. We view fire as our enemy and then presume to believe we can conquer it when necessary.
The war we fight against wildfires is costly and the battles have gone on for more than a century. The war on fire in the built-up environment is also costly. In both cases, public policy constrains some of our options.
The fire narrative influences politics and public policy. The level of fire service funding derives from that policy. The fire service competes for resources with other public agencies and institutions.
Our narrative influences what people think of us, those people vote for the politicians that determine public policy. How the public and politicians come to think of us is changing. The fire service must adapt to a changing environment and declining levels of resources or face the consequences.
Doing things smarter and using technology is part of the solution and does not take away from our heritage. Adapting to change will actually enhance the image of firefighters.
Suppressing fires is a critical function, but preventing and mitigating fires is our real job.
