Smoke jumpers are specially trained firefighters who parachute into remote areas to fight wildfires on difficult terrain. The best time to fight a forest fire is when it is small. Unfortunately, prior to 1939, it could take a long time for crews to hike to a remote fire. In 1934, a Forest Service Employee, T.V. Pearson, proposed that firefighters be parachuted in to fight small before they could grow into major blazes. Many people thought the idea was crazy. In 1939, the Forest Service began an experiment with smokejumpers. It immediately became apparent that the program was going to be effective. The first mission for the smoke jumpers was a fire in the Nez Perce Forest in Idaho on July 12, 1940. The program quickly expanded.
On August 5, 1949, a group of 15 smokejumpers from Missoula, Montana were dispatched to a fire in the Helena National Forest in Montana. It appeared to be a routine fire. It was a hot and dry day in when the smokejumpers landed in a canyon called Mann Gulch at about 4 p.m. They were joined by another firefighter. By 5:30, the firefighters were employing classic forest firefighting technique, digging a trench around the blaze as a firebreak. The fire had begun to burn to the top of the ridge, and the crew, led by Foreman Wagner Dodge thought that the fire had spent itself. Suddenly, at 5:35 p.m., the fire began migrating down the hill and got between the men and the Missouri River. The fire began to explode into an inferno in a phenomenon known as a blowup. With disaster looming, the crew began running from a rapidly advancing wall of flame. It was a race they could not win. The men were running for their lives.
Suddenly, in a move that is controversial to this day, Foreman Wagner Didge suddenly stopped and lit a fire in the dry grass around him. He was lighting an escape fire. It was a technique that was unknown in thiose days, but is commonplace today. Today, firefighters know all about “keeping one foot in the black,” meaning that the advancing fire would not be able to jump across an area which had been starved of fuel. Dodge ordered his men to join them, but by that time, the men were fleeing in all directions. They may have thought he was crazy. They may have not been able to hear him over the roar of the approaching flames.
Dodge threw himself down into the ashes of his escape fire. Two rookie firefighters ran alongside Dodge’s escape fire as it ran up the hill toward a ridge of rim rock. It saved their lives. They made their way through a cleft in rim rock and made it safely to the other side when they got into a rock slide. The fire passed them by. Dodge survived as the fire jumped over him. The other 13 fire jumpers were killed. The tragedy did have a positive impact on forest firefighting. The incident has been taught to thousands of firefighters as a training course over the years since 1949. Procedures were re-written and safety rules created. Before fighting fires, safety zones must be designated and escape routes chosen in advance. A clear chain of command is required. Actions must be based on predicted fire behavior. Crew safety is the number one consideration in the decision making process. There were no other fatalities among smokejumpers in the U.S. until 1994’s South Canyon Fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. The South Canyon Fire was replay of Mann Gulch. The fire’s behavior was not monitored and forecasts of increasing winds did not reach firefighters. 14 firefighters were killed when the lessons learned 45 years earlier were not heeded.
