By Staci Matlock
The Santa Fe New Mexican (New Mexico)
Copyright 2007 The New Mexican
SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico became the first state with a law that protects wildfire supervisors from criminal liability if a volunteer firefighter under their command dies while battling a fire.
Firefighters called on to fight wildfires are supposed to be certified to national standards, but in rural communities, it is often volunteer firefighters without proper training who arrive first on the scene.
House Bill 507, crafted by the State Forestry Division, was signed into law this week by Gov. Bill Richardson. The bill was spurred in part by reaction among firefighters over last year’s indictment of a U.S. Forest Service boss in Washington state on involuntary manslaughter charges involving a 2001 fire there that killed four firefighters. A subsequent nationwide survey of firefighters found that 36 percent of the 3,362 respondents would make themselves less available to fight wildfires because of liability concerns, and one-fourth said they would downgrade their qualifications to refuse supervisory positions.
Dan Ware, state Forestry spokesman, said the growing concern is that qualified incident commanders and fire-line supervisors will refuse to accept those positions because of liability. Firefighter safety is the first concern, Ware said, but “it’s a double-edged sword. If you have a community where a fire department has members who aren’t certified and they don’t go out on a fire, you could lose a community. If we’re faced with scrambling to find incident commanders and fire-line supervisors, that delays our response time and allows the fire to grow.”
Santa Fe County volunteer fire department chiefs said they hadn’t heard of HB 507 and had mixed reactions about the new law.
Stanley Volunteer Fire Department Chief Herman Sena supports the law. “Being a chief and a supervisor on quite a few fires, I’d sure hate to get sued,” Sena said. While he knows his crews are trained, “if they come from another county or another district, we may not know if they are certified.”
And small fires don’t require the same level of training as large complex ones, he said.
Tom MacDonell, chief of the Turquoise Trail Volunteer Fire Department, thinks the law is unwarranted. “If someone is just out there worrying about whether or not they’re going to be sued, then they’re in the wrong business,” MacDonell added. “They need to be worrying about the whole scene, safety of the crew.”
La Cienega Volunteer Fire Department Chief James Valencia said he thought the bill wasn’t well thought out. "(As a supervisor,) you have to make sure the person coming on your fire is qualified,” Valencia said. “That is your responsibility. You must be held liable on this matter.”
Dan Smith, national fire director for the National Association of State Foresters based in Boise, Idaho, said he believes New Mexico’s firefighter liability law is the first one in the country. He said fire supervisor liability is a national concern.
Wildland firefighters are supposed to take at a minimum a four-day class and a physical test to be certified and must be recertified every year. Santa Fe County requires all of its firefighters, both paid and volunteer to take wildland firefighter training. But not all counties and communities do.