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resources went unanswered even as
historically dangerous east winds and
ﬁre danger arrived — the two things
they feared.
h Independent and retired ﬁre ex-
perts who looked at the response were
mixed in their assessment. Some said
the agency did the best it could given a
diﬃcult, dangerous ﬁre location — and
limited resources — while others said
ﬁre crews were too cautious and should
have stayed more aggressive.
What ﬁres were involved in the
Santiam Canyon?
There were three diﬀerent ﬁre events
that ravaged the Santiam Canyon and
areas east of Salem on Labor Day night.
The Lionshead Fire was active
around Mount Jeﬀerson. Labor Day
night, historic east winds pushed the
ﬁre all the way to Detroit.
The Beachie Creek Fire was active in
the Opal Creek Wilderness and blew up
on the winds as well, torching the wil-
derness and recreation area, Jawbone
Flats, the Little North Santiam Canyon
and perhaps beyond.
A third ﬁrestorm was ignited by
downed power lines in towns such as
Gates and Mill City — known as the San-
tiam Fire — and was blamed by ﬁreﬁght-
ers for widespread impact within towns
and cities. The Santiam Fire was later
renamed the Beachie Creek Fire since
the two had merged and were managed
by the same team.
An investigation into which ﬁres
burned where remains ongoing.
In all, the ﬁres burned 400,000 acres,
destroyed 700 homes, killed ﬁve and
brought widespread damage and chaos
to the area east of Salem.
Controversy over original
Beachie Creek Fire
Many Santiam Canyon residents
have been frustrated by how the original
Beachie Creek Fire was fought.
First spotted Aug. 16 in a remote part
of the Opal Creek Wilderness, the ﬁre
stayed relatively small for three weeks
before blowing up Labor Day night.
Some have argued the Forest Service
didn’t do enough to put it out before it
became a disaster.
“The sole cause of the Beachie Creek
Fire destruction was Forest Service in-
competence,” Rob Freres, president of
Freres Lumber Co. Inc. in Lyons, said in
a statement last October. “No Oregon
community should ever have to face a
situation where a wilderness ﬁre is not
attacked appropriately.”
Beginning of the Beachie Creek
Fire
Smoke from the Beachie Creek Fire
was ﬁrst detected around 2 p.m. on Aug.
16 — three weeks before Labor Day —
from the Opal Creek Ancient Forest
Center at Jawbone Flats. The smoke
prompted a large-scale evacuation of
the popular recreation area.
Fire crews spotted the blaze about 2
miles from Jawbone Flats on a steep
ridge — estimated at a 70% grade —
above Beachie Creek, a tributary of Opal
Creek, in old-growth forest. The ﬁre fol-
lowed lightning strikes in the Cascade
Range that ignited other ﬁres, but the
oﬃcial cause still is listed as “under in-
vestigation.”
What actions did the Forest
Service take that ﬁrst day?
Forest Service records show that on
the ﬁrst day, Aug. 16, smokejumpers
were dispatched to the ﬁre “but could
not locate a safe place to jump.”
“Rappellers also attempted to access
the ﬁre but safe rappel locations could
not be identiﬁed,” said a Beachie Creek
Incident Decision document from Aug.
21.
Without ﬁreﬁghters on the ground,
helicopters dropped around 35,000 gal-
lons of water on the ﬁre area. Dwayne
Canﬁeld, executive director of the Opal
Creek Ancient Forest Center, watched
the helicopters before evacuating.
“The response from (ﬁre crews) was
pretty rapid in my estimation,” Canﬁeld
said on Aug. 16. “They had two big heli-
copters on it pretty quick. It’s a very re-
mote area to reach from the ground.”
The ﬁre, estimated then at 10 acres
and later revised to around 25 acres,
was labeled a “full suppression ﬁre,” ac-
cording to decision documents. That
means the agency intended to put it out.
Wildﬁres are sometimes allowed to
burn in federal wilderness areas like
Opal Creek to beneﬁt forest health, and
it was considered in this case. But ulti-
mately, “given the potential for dynamic
ﬁre growth during critical ﬁre weather
events, and potential impacts to adja-
cent values at risk, beneﬁts (of allowing
it to burn) are not commensurate with
risk,” ﬁre crews wrote.
Helicopters drop 296,000 gallons
of water, ground crews reach ﬁre
The most aggressive ﬁreﬁghting ap-
pears to have taken place the second,
third and fourth days of the ﬁre — Aug.
APPEAL TRIBUNE
17-19.
Large helicopters dropped roughly
296,000 gallons of water on the ﬁre tho-
sethree days. Fire retardant was ap-
proved for use, “but the order could not
be ﬁlled due to higher priorities in the
region,” documents say.
In addition, a “rappel ship” was sent
in to consider inserting a rappel team of
ﬁreﬁghters onto the ground at the ﬁre.
“However, they were unable to safely
rappel,” the Forest Service said.
On Aug. 18, a team of hotshots
“achieved access to the ﬁre via road and
trail systems and cross-country hiking.
Based on the assessment of these very
seasoned ﬁreﬁghters, the risks associ-
ated with ground ingress and egress
could not be mitigated. Additionally,
on-the-ground assessment of the na-
ture of the vegetation (large, mature for-
est with 6 to 8 foot trees and dense un-
derstory), coupled with very steep
slopes (70-90%) makes probabilities of
success for direct suppression very low,
while risks remain very high,” said the
decision document published by ﬁre
crews on Aug. 21.
Was the initial response strong
enough to put out the ﬁre?
The documents and actions illustrate
a team trying to put out a ﬁre with no
ground crew availability, said Michael
Beasley, deputy ﬁre chief of Yosemite
National Park from 2001 to 2009 and a
retired interagency ﬁre chief.
“They dumped a lot of water on it,
they used a lot of resources and spent a
lot of money,” he said. “That wasn’t for
show.”
Beasley said his only question about
tactics was: “I would say in my day we
never did water drops without a crew on
the ground, because you really need
that ground crew to be eﬀective in actu-
ally putting out the ﬁre. These days, hot-
shot crews have more ability to turn
down dangerous missions and it has be-
come more common to have aircraft
dropping water without ground sup-
port.”
The Forest Service said the dense
old-growth forest made it diﬃcult to put
out the ﬁre with just water drops.
“Because of that fuel complex, it had
extremely high resistance to control,”
said Rick Stratton, a ﬁre modeling ana-
lyst for the Forest Service. “You have
deep duﬀ, signiﬁcant litter and a ladder
fuel. That’s why it doesn’t matter how
much water you put on it, it can hold
heat. You have to have people on the
ground working right there, in an area
that elite ﬁreﬁghters turned down
twice.”
Beachie Creek ﬁre goes quiet, air
tankers cut off
After the initial attack, documents
show, the Forest Service changed tac-
tics around Aug. 21.
“Based on our inability to safely get
ﬁreﬁghters on the ground by smokejum-
pers, rappellers and ground crews, a de-
cision was made to pivot to a longer-
term strategy,” a decision document
from Aug. 21 says. “The new strategy
will include continued use of aviation
resources to check ﬁre spread while we
identify a series of natural and con-
structed barriers that could possibly
serve as containment or check lines.”
But aviation was rarely used. In the 10
days from Aug. 21 to Aug. 30, ﬁre crews
only dropped water on the ﬁre once —
5,400 gallons on Aug. 24.
In most cases, the reason given was
that there was little ﬁre behavior and
limited smoke.
“Smokes were deep in the ground and
not receptive to water drops,” Forest
Service records say on Aug. 22.
“The ﬁre had only faint smokes and
no deﬁned columns,” said an Aug. 23
update said.
In other cases, the Beachie Creek
team loaned their smaller helicopter to
one of the many other ﬁres that had
popped up with the lightning storm.
But records show that crews recog-
nized that a hands-oﬀ strategy could
become a problem later.
“The strategy is vulnerable to re-
source availability and to critical ﬁre
weather events (east winds for exam-
ple),” they wrote on Aug. 21.
A missed opportunity?
The 10 days of quiet ﬁre activity rep-
resent a moment of “missed opportuni-
ty,” said wildﬁre expert William Derr,
former special agent in charge of the
Forest Service California region, who
has written about the elements of suc-
cess in aerial ﬁreﬁghting.
Instead of backing oﬀ and building
ﬁre lines around the ﬁre, the Forest Ser-
vice should have redoubled its eﬀorts,
he said.
“The 10 days of virtually no suppres-
sion action as the ﬁre ‘barely puﬀed’ was
clearly a missed opportunity to contain
and control the ﬁre prior to its escape,”
Derr said. “There seems no logical rea-
son why aggressive and direct full ﬁre
suppression tactics with smokejum-
pers, rappellers and increased helicop-
ter water drops and air tankers could not
have been safely used.”
Beasley, another former ﬁre com-
mander, said they could have tried to
“wash the ﬁre oﬀ the mountain” by
dumping more water with larger tank-
said Arden Corey, who worked in the
Forest Service from 1962 to 1994, includ-
ing on wildﬁres. “There’s always the
chance of somebody getting hurt. On
the other hand, if you don’t put it out,
there’s the chance the ﬁre could get out
of control like this, and the result is that
this community won’t be the same for
30 years.”
Sheley agreed.
“Safety is being used as an excuse for
a lack of aggressive attack,” he said. “If
they are going to stick with this, we will
continue to have massive wildﬁres.”
The ramp-up to calamity
Helicopter dropping water on the
Beachie Creek Fire on Sept. 2. US FOREST
SERVICE
ers. But, he said, that would be an ex-
pensive choice given it was a small ﬁre
that had a low probability of quick
growth.
The Forest Service stressed that
there were many higher-priority ﬁres at
the time, including the nearby Green
Ridge Fire, White River Fire and Frog
Fire in Oregon. That brought a lot of
competition for heavy helicopters and
Would more aggressive smoke
jumping tactics have worked?
Chuck Sheley, a longtime smokejum-
per and editor of Smokejumper Maga-
zine, pointed to a map that showed smo-
kejumpers accessing many areas
around the Beachie Creek Fire in previ-
ous years.
Sheley and Derr said that across nine
days, crews could have found a way to
drop smokejumpers to acceptable loca-
tions and built heliports to deliver hot-
shot crews or used pumps — such as a
Klump Pump — to get water on the ﬁre.
A Klump Pump is a mobile ﬁreﬁght-
ing device with a 1,000-gallon water
tank and high-pressure pump that can
be reﬁlled by helicopter, Sheley said.
The Forest Service said the jump
spots were beyond “our realm of accept-
able risk.”
“The area around the ﬁre didn’t allow
for a safe jump spot within a several
hour hike from the ﬁre. The terrain was
steep with large continuous timber. On
the ridgeline there were some small rock
openings littered with boulders, howev-
er due to the slope and large rocks, they
were not considered safe for either a
jump spot or landing zone,” Pawlitz said.
“Additionally, inserting ﬁreﬁghters on
the ridge above an active ﬁre isn’t within
our realm of acceptable risk.”
Sheley disagreed and said that in the
past, smokejumpers frequently landed
above ﬁres.
“If we didn’t jump above a ﬁre, 90
percent of the ﬁres we jumped and
stopped wouldn’t have been jumped,”
he said. “Even if the jump spot was sev-
eral hours away, that is a reasonable dis-
tance to hike and man the ﬁre in its early
stages.”
Beasley defended the decision to not
drop in teams.
“If you have elite ﬁreﬁghters on crews
like these saying there is no good way to
do direct suppression, then, as ﬁre man-
agers, we tend to believe them and not
force them into a dangerous situation,”
he said. “When one or more crews have
turned down an assignment, we gener-
ally don’t go ﬁshing for crews, until one
is found willing to take the risk. That is
simply not how we do business today.”
Tragedy on a different Oregon ﬁre
may have influenced aerial flights
There was another reason Beasley
and the Forest Service crews put a
greater focus on safety.
On Aug. 24, Tom Duﬀy was ﬂying wa-
ter drops on the White River Fire near
Mount Hood when his aircraft went
down and he died. Duﬀy, 40, from Boze-
man, Montana, was described as a “big
man with a big heart that brought calm
and skill to every mission.”
It was an event that shook ﬁreﬁght-
ers statewide and on the Beachie Fire.
The death “led to discussions about
transfer of risk to our pilots and a shift to
further minimizing risks,” the Forest
Service wrote.
“If the ﬁre wasn’t a threat at the time,
they probably saw it as a way to reduce
risk to aerial crews,” Beasley said.
But is the Forest Service
playing it too safe?
One concern voiced by former ﬁre-
ﬁghters and smokejumpers was that the
Forest Service is too quickly declaring a
ﬁre “too dangerous” to attack on the
ground in response to some high-proﬁle
accidents, including the 2013 Granite
Mountain Hotshots tragedy in Arizona
that saw 19 killed.
The same concern was echoed during
the 2017 Whitewater Fire in the Mount
Jeﬀerson Wilderness and the 2017 Chet-
co Bar Fire in southwest Oregon.
“You can always say that it’s not safe,
but ﬁreﬁghting is not a safe activity,”
The thing ﬁre crews feared all along
began to happen in early September, as
the weather began to turn.
The ﬁre doubled from 25 to 50 acres
on Sept. 2. Helicopters dropped 50,460
gallons to check the ﬁre’s hotspots on
Sept. 1 and 2.
“Warm and dry conditions are ex-
pected to persist for the next 7 to 10
days,” a daily report said.
The forecast turned increasingly dire
and the ﬁre grew to 150 acres, then 200
acres, then 379 acres. More aircraft were
ordered, dumping 142,200 gallons of
water on the ﬁre from Sept. 3 to 5.
Concern about a major east wind
event started being discussed. And just
as oﬃcials had feared, getting the larg-
est air tankers wasn’t possible given the
number of active ﬁres burning across
the West.
“Every ﬁre in the West with open con-
tainment lines was begging for crews to
try and button things up before the
winds hit,” Beasley said.
By Sept. 5, Saturday of Labor Day
weekend, it was clear something bad
was brewing. As closures and
evacuations were ordered for the Mount
Jeﬀerson Wilderness and Paciﬁc Crest
Trail, more assets were ordered on the
Beachie Creek Fire.
A helicopter dropped 45,900 gallons
of water Sept. 6, but “scooper planes”
that were planning to pick up and drop
water from Detroit Lake were unable to
ﬂy due to increasingly smoky condi-
tions, reports said.
The Lionshead Fire grew to 16,000
acres near Mount Jeﬀerson and the Bea-
chie Creek Fire reached 500 acres as ﬁre
oﬃcials prepared for “a hurricane to hit
active wildﬁres.”
On Sept. 7, the National Weather Ser-
vice issued an “extremely critical ﬁre
weather warning” for the Beachie Creek
Fire area. It was a forecast that only oc-
curs a few times per century, meteorol-
ogists said.
All aviation on the ﬁre was grounded.
“Winds rendered aviation assets in-
eﬀective,” the Forest Service said on
Sept. 7, Labor Day.
Disaster spreads
at astonishing speed
As dry winds of 50 to 75 mph began
funneling into Western Oregon the eve-
ning of Sept. 7, NASA’s GOES satellite
was circling above the earth taking pic-
tures that can measure heat.
By 4 p.m., the Beachie Creek Fire
started to cook, putting up enough heat
that it was spotted by the satellite. By 9
and 10 p.m., the heat signature was rip-
ping toward Elkhorn in the Little North
Santiam Canyon. Over the next few
hours, the heat pattern grew and grew,
until it consumed the entire Santiam
Canyon.
The satellite images are designed to
measure heat across large areas, so
wouldn’t pick up small ignitions fueled
by power lines igniting in Gates or Mill
City, said Russ Dengel, a senior instru-
ment technologist at SSEC, who helped
create the platform.
Even so, it’s clear the original Beachie
Fire put up an incredible amount of heat
that spread outward, mirroring the
massive wildﬁres that spread through
the Santiam Canyon.
Could the Forest Service have
done anything before the blowup?
Critics of the Forest Service response
to the Beachie Creek Fire say the agency
could have stayed more aggressive
when the ﬁre went quiet. They could
have “washed the ﬁre oﬀ the mountain”
with massive dumps of water or tried
again with smokejumpers or hotshot
crews.
Failing to do so, “ﬁreﬁghters and the
public were exposed to far greater risk
than would have been present had an
aggressive direct attack been made with
all available resources at the outset,”
Derr said.
The agency said it did the best it
could given the dangerous terrain and
that ﬁreﬁghting resources were
stretched thin.
“Could they have marched out there
in late August and ﬁnished the job all the
bucket work started? Maybe,” Beasley
said. “But you can’t manage every wild-
ﬁre for the once-in-a-lifetime wind
event that occurred — there’s simply
not enough money in the United States
treasury.”
Zach Urness has been an outdoors re-
porter, photographer and videographer
in Oregon for 13 years. Urness can be
reached at zurness@StatesmanJour-
nal.com or (503) 399-6801. Find him on
Twitter at @ZachsORoutdoors.