By Jeff Horwitz
San Bernadino County Sun (Calif.)
Copyright 2006 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The five-man engine crew that perished after being entrapped by the Esperanza Fire had been briefed by a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection official less than an hour before they were overrun by flames, according to the first official report made public on the accident.
Released late last week, the preliminary report was authored by the CDF and outlined the command decisions and weather and terrain conditions that led to the accident, beginning with the fire’s intentional ignition shortly after 1 a.m. Oct. 26 and continuing to the burnover that killed the U.S. Forest Service firefighters shortly before 8 a.m. south of the Banning-Beaumont area
Fire officials are identified by title, not name, in the report.
Appended to the six-page document is a diagram of the area around the house where the firefighters were overrun by flames, with arrows indicating the paths of the firefighters and circles marking the spots where they fell.
CDF spokesman Daniel Berlant, who works at the agency’s Sacramento headquarters, said the document will be used to prepare firefighters for similar situations in the future.
“It’s primarily used for safety and training,” he said. “This isn’t to point fingers at who was at fault, but rather what we can do to improve.”
Among the issues the report highlighted for further review are “lookouts, communication, escape routes, and safety zones,” as well as “structure protection triage” and “risk versus gain analysis.”
Because of the criminal case against the accused arsonist, Beaumont mechanic Raymond Lee Oyler, and the potential for other litigation, Berlant said, he could not say more about the report.
The report draws attention to the severity of the combination of the steep terrain, heavy Santa Ana winds and dense brush that fed the blaze. Thickets of manzanita and chaparral fueled a fire of 1,220 degrees and 90-foot flames that advanced as fast as 40 mph.
The report also focused on the command decisions that preceded the burnover. Assigned to protect a house on Gorgonio View Road, Engine 57’s crew was given instructions by a CDF branch commander about 6:20 a.m., a little less than an hour before the firefighters were entrapped.
At that briefing, the commander discussed the crew’s plan, the weather and topographical conditions and a safety zone. When the branch commander left, the crew set up a fire hose to pump from the house’s pool.
But by 7:10 a.m., winds of 50 mph drove the fire into a drainage below the house. In the area where the firefighters were killed, the report said, were the necessary conditions for “area ignition” - the spontaneous combustion of terrain near the blaze.
At 7:45 a.m., a search for the crew began.