Editor’s note: This article draws on significant contributing factors identified in the official Serious Accident Investigation report on the Knowles Fire entrapment. The full report is available for download at the bottom of this story.
- Unprecedented fire behavior
- Extreme drought and fuel conditions
- Suppression posture driven by land-management policy
- Dispatch center understaffing and chaos
- Interagency/jurisdictional confusion
- Radio communication failures
- Frequency deconfliction failure
- Loss of Air Attack coverage
- No shared situational awareness/resource tracking
- Leadership attention consumed by administrative coordination
- Obstructed visibility/terrain
- False assumptions about fire spread
By Katie Langford
Estes Park Trail-Gazette
WASHINGTON — An extreme fire, communication failures, understaffed dispatch centers and aging, faulty radio equipment all contributed to the deaths of four firefighters who were overtaken by a wildfire on Colorado’s Western Slope this summer, according to a federal investigation report released Thursday.
Firefighters Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson, Nathan Matthews and Sydney Watson died after the Snyder fire exploded in size and raced across more than seven miles of canyon terrain near the Utah border in just three hours on June 27. Flames caught them by surprise, leaving little time to escape or for commanders to rescue them.
Three died while trying to take cover under protective shelters.
Matthews and a fifth firefighter made it out of the entrapment alive, but Matthews died from his injuries at the UC Health Burn Center on July 24 . The fifth firefighter, who has not been publicly identified, is still recovering from injuries, according to federal officials.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s investigation found many factors contributed to the fatal burnover, including extraordinary fire behavior, communication problems, firefighters and crew not having the complete picture of how the fire was growing, stretches of time when there were no aircraft monitoring the fire, and the intense, chaotic nature of the incident itself, federal officials said in a news release.
“No single decision or system failure fully explains the outcome. Instead, the events reveal the cumulative effects of known limitations operating under extraordinary tempo and conditions,” investigators wrote in the report.
The investigative team interviewed dozens of firefighters, crew members and witnesses, several of whom described the Snyder fire’s blow-up — running across cliffs, washes and canyon edges — as unprecedented and shocking.
“The fires’ tendency to spot over natural barriers that day was unlike anything the fire management organization had previously experienced,” federal investigators wrote.
The Snyder fire started that morning as three separate fires burning on 60 acres that merged and grew into a 28,000-acre blaze, consuming nearly 44 square miles in a matter of hours.
One veteran firefighter described the Snyder fire as less like a normal wildfire spread and more “like a storm, sweeping with the wind” over the landscape, according to the report’s authors.
Colorado’s 2026 wildfire season was fueled by a multi-year, extreme drought that often left firefighters facing some of the worst fire weather possible: single-digit humidity levels, high winds and hot temperatures. The conditions on June 27 were no exception, according to the report.
A weather station closest to McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area, where the fire started, recorded less than a tenth of an inch of rain in May and June. Winds up to 50 mph pushed the Snyder fire toward the five firefighters, who were responding to two smaller fires in the area, and also prevented firefighting planes and tankers from taking off from the Grand Junction airport.
“Severely compromised”
Chronic problems with aging equipment, understaffing and faulty computer systems in western Colorado and eastern Utah’s emergency communication centers were growing long before the Snyder fire sparked in late June.
Most of the staff at dispatch centers in Grand Junction and Moab, Utah, were still in training when reports of new wildfires started ramping up on June 27 , investigators found. Radio equipment throughout the region often failed, and dispatchers were forced to repeatedly log out and back in to two different computer programs in the middle of the crisis because the centers did not have compatible systems.
Old equipment, system outages and software crashes “severely compromised official command channels during peak operations” on June 27, investigators found.
One dispatcher recalled that they couldn’t break through the radio traffic to air a weather report that morning and instead had to rely on texts and emails to communicate with crews fighting the fire.
Problems with radio communication on the Western Slope were so bad that fire crews had started using personal cell phones to communicate with dispatchers and incident leaders, which meant information about what was happening wasn’t all in one place and was not being heard by everyone involved.
There was also confusion between the dispatch centers over who was responsible for different tasks, like ordering and tracking aircraft. At one point, operations coordinators asked the Moab center to take back control of the increasingly complex Snyder fire after the Utah dispatch center had handed the incident over to Grand Junction earlier in the day.
A Moab staffer refused and said the ask was “past my span of control with this,” adding that all but three people at the Utah dispatch center were trainees. They would need help in order to take over the Snyder fire, the staffer said.
“Here, take mine.”
While communication and equipment problems plagued dispatch and coordination centers throughout the day, the five firefighters working to control the small Gore and Knowles fires in Mesa County believed everything was fine until about 30 minutes before they were overtaken by flames.
The area of McInnis Canyons where Barker, Hutcherson, Watson, Matthews and the fifth firefighter were dropped in had a rocky, rolling topography that blocked them from seeing the Snyder fire as it raced toward the group.
A superintendent overseeing the group from afar who wanted to fly over the Snyder fire to see how it was growing decided against it to avoid getting in the way of other aircraft fighting the Snyder fire.
But there were no major air operations nearby at that time, because high winds prevented planes fighting the Snyder fire from taking off.
Meanwhile, the five firefighters on the ground thought the air crews were keeping an eye on the bigger fire and would warn them if it was a threat, investigators wrote. No one was assigned to keep track of where different fire crews were at any given moment as the Snyder fire blew up.
“Overhead (staff) did not recognize that firefighters were positioned directly in the fire’s line of advance,” the report’s authors wrote.
At 2:40 p.m., the superintendent called Barker and Watson and asked if they were comfortable with the conditions on the Knowles and Gore fires. Both were calm and said they wanted to stay and keep working.
The helicopter pilot, however, saw the growing smoke and wanted to evacuate the crew immediately. Ten minutes later, the superintendent and pilot changed course and started planning to extract the five firefighters.
Over the next half hour, conditions on the ground deteriorated so quickly that the helicopter pilot could not see through the smoke to land and pick up the five firefighters.
At 3:19 p.m., Barker was communicating with the pilot about whether the aircraft could land when the pair lost contact.
Nine seconds later, the five firefighters were heard on another radio transmission deploying their fire shelters.
As the crew raced to get inside their individual shelters, the fifth firefighter was struggling to get the shelter deployed, according to the report. Barker stood over the firefighter and offered her shelter.
“Here, take mine,” the firefighter remembered her saying. Seconds later, the firefighter managed to free their own shelter and get inside.
Because of how quickly the crew had to use their fire shelters, most did not have time to put on protective equipment like gloves, roll down their sleeves or clear the area of trees and brush to keep the flames at bay. The firefighters were trapped in their fire shelters for more than 2 hours before a rescue helicopter was able to land.
"(The firefighter) remembered in fire shelter training that survivors reported feeling the urge to get out of the shelter because the conditions seemed unbearable. Firefighter 5 concluded that that urge ‘is very real,’” investigators wrote. “But with everything they had, they held the shelter down and stayed put.”
In a statement Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum called on firefighters across the country to dedicate themselves to apply lessons learned from the investigation in honor of Barker, Hutcherson, Watson and Matthews.
“It is our duty to always remember their service and sacrifice,” he said.
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