STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Dozens of wildfires are burning parts of the West. We've been talking about Spokane, where tens of thousands of people have had to evacuate. In fact, Washington state declared a statewide emergency, and firefighters are mourning five of their own. Here's Murphy Woodhouse of the Mountain West News Bureau.
MURPHY WOODHOUSE, BYLINE: Friends, family and colleagues gathered in early July to remember three wildland firefighters.
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WOODHOUSE: They were part of a Colorado helitack group. Those specialized teams respond in helicopters, often repelling to the fire line. The firefighters were quickly overtaken by a wildfire burning through a rugged stretch of the Colorado-Utah border.
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PAUL HOHN: Today, we honor Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson, Sydney Watson.
WOODHOUSE: That's Paul Hohn. He's the U.S. Wildland Fire Service chief for the agency's Rocky Mountain region.
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HOHN: I ask us all to also hold in our hearts the two firefighters who were injured.
WOODHOUSE: Nathan Matthews, one of the injured, died July 24. Over the last month, helicopter pilot Nicholas Dale was killed in Colorado, and other firefighters have been burned in Washington and California. The deaths and close calls come amid an intense season fueled by historically low snowpacks and a record-shattering spring heat wave worsened by human-caused climate change.
ANDY JONES: It was almost kind of like I knew this was going to happen.
WOODHOUSE: Andy Jones is on a U.S. Forest Service helitack crew based in northern Utah. The extreme conditions and early-season fire behavior fed his premonition. As news of the June death spreads, friends reached out to Jones.
JONES: It was a huge gut punch 'cause, like, yeah, the fire world is small, but then, like, the aviation community is, like, an even smaller microcosm of that.
WOODHOUSE: The deaths also hit longtime fire veteran Riva Duncan hard.
RIVA DUNCAN: Everybody's been on edge about this fire season.
WOODHOUSE: She's now president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. Beyond extreme weather, she says there are also big, distracting changes, including the creation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. The new Fire Service is under the Interior Department, while the Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture. Both parent agencies gave direction to quickly put out all blazes this season. Interior went further, saying that the default should be working right on the edge of fires to halt them, known as direct attack. That bothered Duncan because direct attack can be dangerous in extreme fire conditions.
DUNCAN: That is a level of micromanagement that is really concerning.
WOODHOUSE: Fire Service Chief Brian Fennessy wrote in an email to NPR that there is no top-down pressure to fight fire a certain way. He says, on the ground, incident commanders are trusted to choose the best approach. Fennessy also defended direct attack as an effective way to minimize risks to firefighters and communities. An initial investigation report on the fatal Colorado burnover describes explosive conditions - winds over 50 miles per hour and bone-dry fuel primed to ignite. Former USDA fire scientist Dave Calkin says what happened in late June is troubling.
DAVE CALKIN: The thing that really hurt me the most was the apparent lack of values that they were protecting and the reality of how risky that environment is.
WOODHOUSE: Chief Fennessy pushed back, noting that the fires were near the Colorado cities of Fruita and Grand Junction. Hundreds of campers and boaters evacuated, and hundreds of firefighters were deployed. Fennessy says those consequences could have been far worse with a less aggressive initial response. For Andy Jones with the Utah helitack crew, he's focused on keeping his people safe as fire activity increases across the country.
JONES: I'm not going to risk getting somebody killed just so we can say that, oh, yeah, we saved a few trees. Cool.
WOODHOUSE: But there are still many weeks of fire to make it through.
JONES: You think things are bad now?
WOODHOUSE: Just wait, he says. It could get worse this month.
For NPR News, I'm Murphy Woodhouse.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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