95 Wildfires
The Long Island Wildfires of 1995
from Larry Haftl.com
If you've always been able to handle life's unpleasant surprises without asking others for help, then its easy to believe you will always be able to handle them in the future. If you've lived near a forest for a decade or two and never seen wildfire go roaring through it like a tornado, then it's easy to believe it never will. And if you've fought brush fires and always managed to knock them down before they turned into uncontrollable firestorms, then it's easy to believe your tactics are the right ones to use.
But what happens when you get hit with an unpleasant surprise that's bigger and meaner than anything you ever imagined? What happens when you see a hundred-foot wall of flame come hurtling down on you from that forest that never burned before, or have a typical brush fire blow up in your face and turn into a house-eating, life-threatening monster? With luck and skill and enormous effort, you may be able to weather the storm and live to reflect on what happened to you. You may even be able to learn enough from the experience to avoid reliving it in the future.
Then again, maybe not.
In 1936, enormous wildfires burned through the pine barrens on Long Island, New York. Because it was then a rural area, the fires caused little concern outside of the few small communities on the island. As the area changed from rural to urban over the next 60 years, belief in the possibility of massive wildfires disappeared about as quickly as the pine barrens. People knew that wildfires could happen because Long Island had several hundred every year, but those fires were always controlled before they did much damage.
The firefighters on Long Island became really good at stomping out brush fires. They even developed specially equipped engines called "stump jumpers" - two- to six-ton open military surplus trucks fitted with water tanks and brush guards - that could bust through the brush and knock down pine trees that happened to be in their way. Stump jumpers enabled the firefighters to get right to the heart of the fires and douse them with water before they got too big. Given that history, it's easy to understand how the residents and firefighters on Long Island came to believe they could handle all of their wildfires by themselves.
And then came August of 1995
There are 100,000 acres of pine barrens - mixed scrub oak and pitch pine forest - more or less in the center of the island, plus another 10,000 acres in three outlying areas, and other tracts of grass and brush scattered around the island. The summer of 1995 was unusually dry for Long Island, and there were numerous starts in and around the pine barrens. They were quickly spotted and extinguished. On Monday, August 21, one fire deep in an area of the barrens called Rocky Point got away and over the next four days burned about 1,000 acres. It was serious enough to call for a disaster declaration and to ask the New York State Emergency Management Organization (SEMO) for assistance. SEMO responded by providing financial aid along with water-dropping helicopters from the Army National Guard and spotter planes from the Air National Guard.
On Thursday, August 24, just about the time the Rocky Point Fire was being brought under control, a second fire blew up. This one, called the Sunrise Fire, was right on the edge of an urban area. The fire was driven for the first eight hours by strong, erratic winds. During the first 32 hours it ate up more than 5,000 acres of pine barrens, forced hundreds of evacuations, and threatened hundreds of homes, businesses, the local airport, and the island's commuter rail line. Fire behavior during those eight hours was so extreme that single engine air tankers (SEATs) from New Jersey and a national Type I incident management team were mobilized. C-130 air tankers were also requested, but for a number of reasons they did not arrive in time to be of any practical use. One hundred sixty-four local fire departments from Long Island and New York City, along with Army and Air National Guard units and state and federal crews fought the fires.
When it was over five days later, no one had been killed. More than 60 firefighters had been treated for minor injuries including smoke inhalation, bruises, scrapes, minor burns, sprained ankles and one broken arm. One home and six stump jumpers had been destroyed, 17 homes, a train station, and a lumber business had been partially damaged, and 5,200 acres of pine barrens looked like a lunar landscape. Only the enormous efforts and skill of firefighters -- combined with a little luck, kept those numbers so low.
Burned-out Stump Jumpers
Because no one died or was seriously injured and property damage was so minimal, it's fair to ask why this fire gained so much national attention and why is it worth looking at a little more closely.
The answer to the first question is easy. The fire gained national attention because it burned only minutes from the largest media market in the United States - New York City - and because the homes of several rich and famous people were threatened. If the fires had occurred away from a major media market and the homes of the rich and famous, it is unlikely they would have been covered by the national media unless, perhaps, it had been a really slow news day.
The answer to the second question is not as obvious, but it's far more important - for two reasons. The first is that there are places all over the United States where conditions are as ripe for a major catastrophic urban wildfire as they were (and still are) on Long Island. By comparing conditions there with local conditions in other parts of the country, people may come to realize that "it could happen here" and take steps to see that it doesn't.
The second reason for looking at the Long Island fires more closely is that they illustrate many of the problems firefighters encounter when fires cross several jurisdictional boundaries and get too big for local resources to handle. Useful lessons can be learned by looking at what happened during and after the fires.
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CONDITIONS
"Weather was the dominant factor," said Dave Fischler, commissioner of Suffolk County, where the fires started. "We had a drought year -- 22 days with no rain and only 28 percent relative humidity, which is extremely low for us. During this wildfire there were wind changes every two or three hours from different directions, not the onshore and offshore winds we usually get. Our tactics and strategy would say this is where we will take a stand and focus our energies, and then er would see the fire come to exactly where we wanted it. Then all of a sudden we'd get a 90-degree wind shift and the fire would go right around where the trucks were, where we didn't think it would go."
"In Suffolk County, during a summer day with drought conditions, it is not unusual to get many brush fires," said Fred Daniels, deputy commissioner of Suffolk County. "There were several other fires at that time, and to us that was normal - we had enough people to extinguish them. It's a normal day's duty and nothing unusual. What was unusual was the size of this particular one, the Sunrise Fire. It started in the pine barrens that had no natural firebreaks, and once it caught hold it was quite a conflagration. We had apparatus staged on the Sunrise Highway with the fire on the north side, and it jumped to the south side without damaging any of the equipment." The Sunrise Highway is four lanes with a 50-foot median and cleared areas on both outer shoulders.
Kurt Massey was the first chief on the scene and became the IC for the fire. "On my way to the fire," said Massey, "I called for a lot of equipment because of the conditions and the fact that it hadn't burned in that area for a long time. I thought we would have extreme conditions. When I got there, the ground fire was maybe 10 or 20 feet wide and 100 feet deep. At tree level it was three or four times that, like a big tornado. The wind was 10 to 15 mph from the northwest, and then it shifted to the south and later to the west. You could see the fire going right around. Most of the fire departments in the pine barrens community are used to fires that act like that, but we were not used to that magnitude."
"I've been a volunteer firefighter for 27 years," said Roger Putnam of the Suffolk County Volunteer Fireman's Association. "But I've never experienced anything like that fire. The amount of fire, the wind and the noise it was generating - it was almost like a jet engine taking off. Some of the fire was in a peat moss type of bog area. It was so embedded that after we figured we'd knocked it out it would rekindle again. We get our brush fires, but this was something else."
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TACTICS
"Our tactics are to get multiple trucks and start on one edge of the fire and work our way around the fire," said Massey. "Start from an anchor point, flank it and pinch off the head." He explained that before the fire crossed the Speonk-Riverhead Road, a ' forest ranger helicopter from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) did a flyby and told them to move their equipment because they were directly in the path of the fire. "It didn't make a difference," Massey said. "If we were there, we were going to try to stop it. We had gear that could be in that position. We had to make an attempt to stop it before it got into a large area. We don't use burnouts; we're not trained in it. We might have been able to stop it at the Sunrise Highway if we had done a burnout at that point."
The firefighters were not able to prevent the fire from crossing either the Speonk-Riverhead Road or the Sunrise Highway. Unfamiliarity with burnout operations also led to the arrest of a DEC firefighter from upstate New York -- where burnouts are a common practice. He was trying to save a structure by doing a burnout, and one of the local chiefs mistook him for an arsonist and had him arrested. The matter was quickly cleared up, but all burnout operations by DEC firefighters ended.
The use of stump jumpers had proven effective in the past, but six were destroyed by the fires. "We lost one at Rocky Point and another five at the Sunrise Fire," said John Searing, IC for the Rocky Point Fire. "It's a good and bad tactic. You can get right in there to the seat of the fire instead of letting it burn. The bad part is that you are sending teams of trucks into areas with poor access. The Rocky Point area used to be owned by RCA, who did the first transatlantic communications from there. There are a lot of old 24- to 28-inch-thick poles, old antennas and guy wires lying on the ground in there, so when these trucks are running through the woods they sometimes get tangled up in that stuff. One of our trucks went over something and got hung up. The guys saw the fire coming at them, and they just left the truck and ran. Two guys got minor burns. We don't carry fire shelters, and we are beginning to look into that. We all wear bunker gear, and that is not good for you either. We're looking into providing wildland gear in the future."
"We all use bunker gear when we fight wildland fire," said Putnam. "That is why the guys were taking such a beating. That is why we needed as many men as we did." There were 164 local fire departments on the fires, each providing between two and ten pieces of equipment with crews. More than 2,000 firefighters were involved the first night, more than 5,500 during the entire incident. "At one point," said Putnam, "I was out there on standby, and there must have been 35 or 40 or 50 trucks with men all lined up in one of the staging areas."
"We had hundreds of apparatus in reserve and at staging areas," said Daniels. Searing also recalled an abundance of equipment on the Sunrise Fire. "I had 25 pumpers sitting there saying, 'Where do we go?' and I said, 'You got me.'" Even with all the personnel and equipment, the firefighters could make little progress against the Sunrise Fire until the wind calmed down around 4:00 a.m. Friday.
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COMMUNICATIONS
"The problem wasn't with the number of departments," said Daniels. "The problem was communications. The confusion came from overtaxing our communications. At times we had to resort to cellular phones, but they became over-taxed once the media arrived and started using the cellular system. Confusion lay in a everybody having a radio and everybody wanting to communicate at the same time."
The Suffolk County emergency management staff on Thursday set up a command center on the campus of a local community college. Fire departments from Suffolk County used one set of frequencies coordinated through the Suffolk County command van. Fire departments from Nassau County, the other county on Long Island, used different frequencies and were coordinated through the Nassau County command van. "Neither of the vans could handle all the frequencies," said Fischler. "So we put both vans together and it was a matter of walking out one door and into another to relay messages." The system worked, but frequently became overloaded because of the number of radios in use. By Friday there were 47 media trucks with satellite uplinks parked near the community college, and cell phones were the primary method reporters used to communicate with their offices. "We're trying to get legislation passed," said Daniels, "that would reserve some of the cell phone system for emergency services only."
Overloaded radio and telephone systems were not the only communication problem. As the Sunrise Fire raged out of control Thursday night and Friday morning, the county called on the state for assistance and the state in turn called for federal assistance. Air tankers, federal fire fighting crews, and a Type I incident management team were requested. The process of integration did not go smoothly.
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AIR OPERATIONS
By early Friday helicopters from National Guard units in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut were already on station. Five SEATS were mobilized through State and Private Forestry at the Northeastern Area Coordination Center (NACC) in Radnor, Pennsylvania. An FAA-restricted flight zone was established over a five-mile radius by 5:00 Thursday evening, but the sky was frequently filled with aircraft owned or rented by the media and by private pilots who were curious about what was going on and ignored the restrictions.
Harry Doughty, regional ranger with the Maine Forest Service and air operations chief for the national Type I team, arrived about 8:30 Friday morning. "I flew down in a Maine helicopter," said Doughty, "and we could see smoke from the fire while we were still over Massachusetts. As we did a flyby of the fire, I saw one helicopter passing through the smoke column and another rising up in it. This, to me, was not safe. As soon as we landed I met with Ed Jacoby. He knew me and knew my qualifications, and he asked me to take over air operations immediately rather than wait for the rest of the Type I team to arrive. I then met with Colonel Hill, base commander of the Air National Guard unit at the airport. He made it very clear to his people up front that they were there to support us in any way they could. All we had to do was ask them. He turned over his air traffic control people, his ground support and other personnel so we didn't have to bring in other people. They were outstanding."
Col. Ed Jacoby was then superintendent of the New York State Forest Rangers. He had been sent by then-Governor Pataki to provide and oversee whatever state support the counties needed. He was also the primary link between the local and federal agencies.
Doughty immediately assigned the SEATs to the north and east flanks and the helicopters to the south and west flanks. "I separated them for a couple of reasons," said Doughty. "The north and east flanks were clear of smoke, and that made it safer for the air tankers to operate there. The south and west flanks had more smoke, but also had most of the structures. Helicopters work better around houses. Also, there was water close to those flanks that the helicop- ters could use. The air tankers had to land at the base to refill."
Even with air control in place, there were still some concerns. One incident involved a helicopter trailing a water bucket flying directly over another helicopter that was taking off. In civilian air operations, this is a major bozo no-no, but both were military helicopters. "In the military we fly differently," said Col. Vorlicek of the New York Army National Guard unit. "We fly in close formation, which makes civilian pilots nervous. We're used to flying rotortip to rotortip, and very low nap-of-the-earth contour type flying - which is not what civilian helicopter pilots do. The pilots of both those helicopters knew exactly what they were doing. It's what they are trained to do. It was a matter of perception, but once we found out what air ops wanted, we immediately maintained their flight rules and distance between aircraft."
The most bizarre air operations incident cost taxpayers $300,000 - and it had no bearing on putting out the fires. It did, however, become a major focal point for media criticism.
When Jacoby arrived on the scene on Thursday, he immediately recognized the need for air support. He ordered David Ames, head of the New York Division of Forestry, to request air tankers, including two C-130s. Ames contacted State and Private Forestry at NACC and requested air tankers. NACC arranged for five SEATs from New Jersey to be on station by noon on Friday, confirmed this with Ames, and thought the SEATs filled the request. No action was taken to order C-130s. Meanwhile, Jacoby thought the C-130s had been ordered, and he told Sen. Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) as much when he briefed D'Amato Thursday night. D'Amato then called President Clinton directly and asked for help. Clinton guaranteed he'd provide it.
By 8:00 Thursday evening White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes called Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Richard Rominger and told him that the President was directing the Secretary of Agriculture to provide assistance to fight the fires on Long Island. D'Amato's request was passed through this chain and landed on the desk of Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons. Lyons tried to get the directive implemented, including the request for C-130s, but he didn't realize that doing so would have violated the established procedures for dispatch and control of federal air tankers.
Under the existing system, only the IC on a fire can request air tanker support. Members of the IC team are the only people in a position to correctly determine appropriate resources needed to fight the fire. They have the experience, they are on the scene, and they can see the prevailing conditions. There is an effective system in place - from the IC through the geographic area coordination centers to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise - to deliver appropriate resources when and where needed. The system was designed to resist political pressure, and political attempts to expedite or circumvent the system - no matter how well-intentioned - inevitably create more problems than they solve. The political insistence on using C-130s is a perfect example.
C-130 dropping water
Putting C-130s in the limited airspace above the Long Island fires would have been like bringing an elephant into your home to crush out a cigarette butt - and the people on the Type I team knew it. "My recommendation from day one was that we did not need the C-130s," said Doughty. "They had nothing to offer for that particular incident. They would have been a hazard and I made that perfectly clear to everyone." On Thursday night, though, D'Amato went on camera to announce that the President was sending C-130s. When D'Amato later learned that they had not been ordered, the C-130s became a political face-saving necessity, and their non-appearance became a media cause celebre.
Two Department of Defense C-130s were dispatched to Long Island from their base in North Carolina. That dispatch, though, violated a federal policy requiring that DOD aircraft be used only when private contract air tankers are not available - and they were available. One of the C-130s eventually did a "demonstration" drop in an area chosen to give the media a good photo opportunity. During the C-130 runs, all other air operations were grounded for safety. They used only water - phosphate-laden retardant could have contaminated the island's primary water source. The tankers later made a drop on a small flareup. Another was planned, but local firefighters had gone in right after the first drop. Another would have put them at risk, so it was called off.
Aerial support requires close coordination between the pilots and the people on the ground. A 3,000-gallon salvo drop carries a lot of weight; getting hit by even 150 gallons of water falling from the sky can be lethal. None of the local firefighters had ever trained or worked with aerial support, and few of them even understood its benefits. That none were injured by any of the hundreds of aerial drops made by all aircraft on the fire is a credit to the firefighters, operations, and the pilots.
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COMMAND AND CONTROL
What happens when local firefighters are confronted by a firestorm many times larger than anything they have ever seen or heard of? The simple answer is that they call for help through previously established mutual assistance agreements. There were three problems with this process that surfaced during the Long Island fires.
"One problem we all had was the fires crossed three fire districts, three jurisdictions," said Searing. "We had already trained with all of the surrounding neighbors, and we had mutual aid drills that would flow smoothly, but we never took into consideration a fire that would cross three jurisdictions. What we wound up doing is figuring out really quickly that we ought to have the three chiefs from those districts together. We wound up having a unified command with DEC, but we had not worked with them before and it was kind of touchy."
Even though the Suffolk County emergency management team was able to set up a central coordination and command post, there was still a lot of miscommunication. Part of it was caused by the overloaded communication system. DEC firefighters, who are used to fighting large wildfires in other parts of New York, also used tactics and strategies foreign to the local firefighters - the arrest of one DEC firefighter for arson is just one example. "The biggest problem we had," said Massey, " was freelancing. A chief would call for equipment, a unit was sent, and then somewhere along the way that unit would see fire and stop to fight it without reporting what they were doing. When the unit didn't arrive where it was supposed to, then that chief would have to call for equipment again. I would say cooperation and partnership worked well at the top, but when we gave an order to an individual truck at the scene, some of them still felt that their chief was the chief and wouldn't always obey the command."
The root of this problem is that 170-plus fire departments - who had never worked or trained together - were trying to coordinate fire fighting efforts under pressure. This unfamiliarity was magnified because few of the departments had ever trained to a common incident command system (ICS) standard. Did the Suffolk County fire departments have an ICS in place? "Yes, no, sometimes, maybe," said Fischler. "We had an approved plan being printed. Yes, we had an approved plan. No, everyone was not up to speed on it because they didn't have copies yet. Sometimes it was used because some people had draft copies and were running with that. And since adoption by each fire department is up to them, maybe they were using it, maybe they will adopt it in the future."
In March 1996 the governor of New York issued an executive order requiring that all state agencies will train to and operate under the National Fire Academy's National Interagency Incident Management System (NIIMS). The NIIMS ICS is used by all federal and many state land management agencies, including the New York DEC. Jacoby, now director of SEMO and long-time advocate of NIIMS, is working to ensure that all state agencies incorporate NIIMS into their operating procedures. But the mandate applies only to state agencies, not to county or local agencies. Suffolk County has chosen to use the ICS system developed by the National Fire Service Incident Management System Consortium instead of the NIIMS model.
The NIIMS model is primarily designed to organize extended attack on wildfires or extended support for other major disasters. The consortium model is designed for large-scale urban disasters involving up to 25 responding departments. It also includes a wildland/urban interface module. The two models are supposed to be compatible, but a lot depends on how they are implemented. Fischler admits that even though they are going with the consortium model, they are making some changes to fit local conditions. "People keep trying to change it for their specific needs," said Jacoby. "And that takes us right back to the old problem of having two or three or four different systems. We need one system in the U.S."
The ideal of a single standard system for managing response to disasters is appealing, but reaching it will be more than a question of mandates and training. Most big wildland fires occur in the Western states, and most Type I teams are trained to fight them with typical Western resources - hand crews, helicopters, and air tankers. What happens when a Type I team is assigned to a fire with engines and stump jumpers as primary resources, and none of the firefighters are trained to work with aerial support? One of the biggest complaints voiced in the review of the 1996 Miller's Reach Fire in Alaska was the inability or unwillingness of the Type I team to use local resources. On Long Island it was the other way around. The local agencies either didn't know how or simply didn't want to use the Type I team. There was no common ground in training, procedures, delegation of authority, or exercise of command. The local agencies did, however, welcome $5,000,000 from FEMA to cover 100 percent of the fire fighting costs. Fortunately for Long Island, the extreme fire behavior was short-lived and the local agencies, with the notable exception of air operations, were able to eventually control the fires themselves.
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AFTERMATH
If nothing else, the fires brought people together on Long Island in ways that were not possible before. Shortly after the fires, the Central Pine Barrens Commission formed a wildfire task force with representatives from 36 different fire, land management, and environmental agencies. The general objective was to develop a fire management action plan and strategy covering the pine barrens, according to Tom Brady, fire management officer on the Green and White Mountains National Forest in New Hampshire. "We've had a lot of meetings," said Brady, who is also the task force's fire liaison for state and private forestry. "We talked about a lot of things, people feeling each other out. It acted as a forum to hear each others concerns. That relationship building is probably the biggest value of the task force even today."
In addition to building relationships, the task force has provided training in risk assessment. People from Long Island attended an interagency training session on fire protection assessment, then began to apply the lessons learned. "The essence of the training was to look at your risks, hazards, and values," said Brady. "The final objective was to highlight critical areas not only for fire prevention but also for strategic fire planning, which could include pre-suppression. The folks from Long Island started working on an assessment right away. They have identified several large propane tanks very close to the site of the 1995 fires, and all sorts of hazmat sites. They are going to have a lot more information available in a centralized place if there should be another fire."
The task force also introduced a different attitude toward fire. "When the wildfires of 1995 hit, we were already thinking about the use of prescribed burning," said Susan Antenen of the Nature Conservancy. "Some of the fires were on our preserves. Our interest on the task force has been in promoting prescribed burning for ecological and fuel reduction purposes. Some people were open to this idea; others attacked it. But now even those who attacked us at first are fairly supportive." Part of that change in attitude resulted from the first-ever prescribed burn in the pine barrens last April. "It was planned as a demonstration on nine acres," said Brady. "But they cut it off at three acres because the relative humidity dropped below prescribed limits. Afterwards we heard comments from some of the veteran chiefs who were originally against it saying they were completely turned around in their attitude. They were impressed that it was so planned and so controlled, that we stopped it when we wanted to, that it didn't escape, that the fire behavior and flame lengths predicted were exactly what happened." As a result of that demonstration, other burns are being planned.
The task force is also just about to release a comprehensive report on fire management and planning. "The report will be incorporated into a regional land use plan for the pine barrens area," said Ray Corwin, executive director of the Central Pine Barrens Commission. "The larger plan will include land use, zoning, and land management. Now that the task force has completed a lot of the technical analysis - training, ICS, communications, a fire protection plan -- the commission faces the question of how to balance its legal responsibility to create and maintain a preserve with its responsibility to manage for public safety, recreation, and other public concerns -- especially what to do about buffer zones around existing homes and recreation areas. The fire folks tell us we need clearings around buildings and certain procedures in place. How do we incorporate that with the goal of a preservation area?
"The land use people are also in a pickle of a situation. On the one hand, if you deny a building permit you have to be prepared to buy up the lot or compensate the owner. If you do issue the permit - knowing full well it's in a hazardous area - and then the house burns down or somebody gets hurt, you could be found liable for issuing the permit. We had a land use plan approved a month before the fires, and the irony is that there was a two-page section that talked about the possibilities of wildfire and prescribed burning and warned of the conflagration potential from fuel buildup. "Prophetic words."
This year (1997) the fire index on Long Island got worse than that of 1995, but then the rains came. The potential for a life-taking, home-eating wildfire monster coming to life is still there, and people are preparing for that eventuality. All over the country there are communities as much at risk as Long Island. The question is whether they will learn any lessons from the Long Island fires. Do they need to face a monster wildfire themselves before they take steps to reduce the risks?
First published in Wildland Firefighter Magazine, November, 1997
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17 of these wildfire photos are courtesy of Sonny Day Photo (Walker Turner Jr)
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