Park rangers' actions saved lives in Gatlinburg wildfires

GATLINBURG — If Nov. 28 had been a tabletop exercise, Jared St. Clair said he would have left the table.

St. Clair is Tennessee District supervisor of the National Park Service, meaning he is a park ranger who supervises other park rangers in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He directed the rangers’ efforts to save lives and limit destruction when the tragic Gatlinburg fire swept through the Great Smoky Mountains and Sevier County.

“In emergency services, we always do tabletop exercises,” he explained during a recent interview with USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee.

Complete Series: See our coverage of a look back at the Gatlinburg fire.

“If you had told me we were going to have a fire with the wind blowing into the population from various places, we are going to block all of your roads, we are going to cut all of your communication, we are going to give you about 45 seconds to figure it out, and this is the limited number of people you have, quite frankly, I would have gotten up and walked out of the exercise and said, ‘That’s stupid. That’s a stupid scenario to even give us because there is no way anybody can win that.' ”

Exercise becomes reality

Yet that tabletop exercise was reality the evening of Nov. 28.

What happened then is well documented. Gale-force winds, sometimes exceeding 90 mph, occurring under drought conditions swept an acre fire at Chimney Tops into a ferocious blaze that burned more than 17,000 acres, destroyed or damaged more than 2,500 structures, caused $2 billion in damage and led to the deaths of 14 people.

Less known is the work of around 30 to 40 NPS rangers, still reluctant to give their names, and other first responders. At places like the Gatlinburg Bypass, Little River Road, Tremont and especially the Spur, the group battled through smoke, ash and the howling wind to prevent the historic disaster from claiming substantially more casualties.

“Collectively from beginning to end we were all over the place,” St. Clair said.

A school bus in trouble

The park usually has about four or five rangers working at any given time on a normal day, but because of the increasing smoky conditions and reports of the Chimney Tops 2 fire, as it was called, growing significantly from the night before, park personnel were being called in all day on Nov. 28.

More: Black bears stayed put during Gatlinburg wildfires

“We noticed that the wind had picked up and we had to go look at Little River Road," St. Clair said. "There was a school bus at the Elkmont campground and it was empty.”

Little River is a windy road that follows the Little River from Sugarlands Visitor Center near Gatlinburg to Townsend. Elkmont campground is off that road more on the Sugarlands side. That the school bus was empty meant the students and teachers were off on the trails.

“When the wind picked up, trees started falling down — not an unusual event,” St. Clair said. “We went up there to sweep (searching for vehicles and people) and close the Little River Road, and find that school group.”

The unoccupied bus was observed around 11:40 a.m. Rangers spent much of the afternoon clearing trails and looking for the occupants.

The children eventually returned from their hike, boarded the bus and got out of the park safely. While rangers were searching, however, reports came in of problems on the Gatlinburg Bypass, which wraps the city on the north.

Ranger Jim Cannon, who was sent to check out the bypass, said the fire itself hadn’t spread to the road at that time, but there was smoke everywhere, visibility was a challenge and trees were falling with potential to block the road.

Cars were still coming and going like on a normal day, but in a short time it would be the scene of some of the fire’s worst devastation as many homes in nearby Chalet Village went up in flames.

More: When seconds counted, TDOT worker cleared path to Gatlinburg for wildfire crews

Even as work began at the bypass, which was later closed to traffic, word came over the park radio that trees were blocking the Spur, the nickname for U.S. 321 connecting the tourist towns of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. Because of that connection it is far and away the route most visitors take to get into and out of Gatlinburg; it's the only route many tourists know.

Nightmare on the Spur

Fire hadn’t reached the Spur when the first rangers arrived, but it would be there shortly.

The problem at that time was wind.

“The height of the wind was not a single incident; it seemed to last for hours,” St. Clair said. “If you didn’t have a chinstrap buckled, you were going to lose your helmet.

“One tree after another after another was falling.”

The smoke made vision tough and the noise was deafening.

Vehicles were backed up. St. Clair said a pump house on the right side of the Spur headed into Pigeon Forge had caught fire and an officer, not a ranger, had closed the road because of the danger it presented to passing motorists.

“One of our off-duty employees came in contact with the officer and said, ‘Look, you have to let traffic through,’ ” St. Clair said, “and the traffic got flowing again.”

Ranger Keith Schumann was on the Spur with a chainsaw that night.

He came upon one tree with a trunk about a foot thick blocking the road and 15 to 20 people had gotten out of their vehicles attempting to move it by hand.

“That wasn’t going to happen. I told them to stop, trying to yell at them,” he said. “I don’t know if they heard me because I couldn’t hear myself at that time. I told them I had a saw and would assist them. I told them as soon as I get this cut up to start rolling down the road, which they were more than happy to do.”

But, with trees falling everywhere, continued vehicle backups were unavoidable.

Schumann said he could see a line of headlights all the way back to Gatlinburg. And the fire had arrived.

“I could hear propane tanks exploding (at mountainside homes on both sides of the Spur) and trees snapping and falling over the noise of my chainsaw; that’s impressive,” he said.

Rerouting road

St. Clair was back at headquarters at the time, dealing with a thousand problems, including making sure park personnel and equipment were all moved to safety and coordinating with other agencies on operations everywhere. A bus with 90 schoolchildren was at the Tremont Institute near Townsend. The fire had not reached there, but it was close enough to see the red glow of flames from there. The bus eventually was gotten out safely.

St. Clair received a call from Cannon, who was by then with other rangers on the Spur. The rangers recommended trying to put northbound traffic on the southbound lane. The Spur is a divided roadway and this meant closing traffic into Gatlinburg to all but emergency vehicles so that cars also could use at least one inbound lane to instead get out.

“I said, ‘If we can do it, do it,’ ” St. Clair said. “ 'If you can make it happen, make it happen; that is all we have.' ”

It was a little risky — “something we’d never do normally,” St. Clair said — because one lane still needed to be kept open southbound for emergency vehicles, and there was no time to set up cones or warning signals.

But it worked.

“We didn’t have any wrecks, at least none that were reported to us,” St. Clair said.

The southbound lanes were easier to keep open mainly because big emergency vehicles like firetrucks were able to push their way through.

“Firetrucks are not going to be denied,” St. Clair said.

“At one point, a tree was blocking the road and some vehicle had a snow plow,” he said. “He kept ramming the tree until the plow broke off, but he was able to get the tree out of the way.”

The chaos and danger were far from over.

“One of the other challenges was people who were pulling up and leaving their cars in the road to run on foot," he said. "We were clearing the trees, but then we would also have to clear the cars. It would not have been pretty if we had dozens of parked cars that we didn’t have keys for.”

Communication issues by this time were providing more trouble. Cellphone service was mainly gone, and St. Clair said part of the problem was not knowing when a communication was cut off. He said he would be talking on the phone only to realize that it had just lost connection and the person he was speaking with had not received all, if any, of the message.

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Rangers could still communicate by radio with other first responders, but they were limited by different frequencies to listening to just one group at a time and needing to change frequencies to listen to another agency.

“With the noise, you couldn’t hear anything anyway,” Schumann said.

There was more stress.

“This is our community. Our kids go to school here. We go to churches here. We definitely had some concern for houses and families,” St. Clair said. “And we couldn’t communicate with our families any better than anyone else could. I will say that, despite this, everyone stayed and did their job.”

Eventually the decision was made to close the Spur leading out of Gatlinburg and direct people to the other side of U.S. 321 leading out of Gatlinburg toward Cosby. The rangers weren’t sure when this happened. Park spokeswoman Dana Soehn recalled an announcement at an 8:30 p.m. press conference that advised people that the Spur was closing and to use the Cosby route.

“That was the only thing that helped clear things up a little bit,” St. Clair said, explaining that people coming off the many mountain roads that lead into the Spur were still using it to get out even after the announcement. “It was around midnight when additional road crews began showing up” and most of the rangers were finally able to go home.

“I don’t know that we ever got that ‘ah’ moment when we felt it was over,” St. Clair said. “We never got that feeling that we accomplished what we wanted to accomplish — that sense of satisfaction that we were done. I don’t know that it’s happened yet. Maybe that will come some day.”

Reflections a year later

St. Clair said a year later he is still trying to get his head wrapped around everything that happened that night. Fighting the fire was in a way a surreal experience.

“Because of the smoke, you couldn’t even see beyond where you were. Everyone’s world got a lot smaller that night. You didn’t worry about Russia and North Korea; you only worried about what was close by you. As the day went by, your world got smaller and smaller until your world was the size of just what you could see or smell. And that’s what you’re dealing with. You’re in a whole different world, even if the next guy is right down the road.”

He said he doesn’t believe the experience bonded the group of rangers who worked that night because they were already a tight group.

“I do think the camaraderie was increased with other agencies,” he said. “That night there weren’t police departments and there weren’t sheriff’s departments and they weren’t national park rangers. There weren’t police cars and there weren’t firetrucks. Everyone was wearing the same uniform and the colors didn’t matter. We were all on the same team trying to accomplish the same thing.”

How many lives they saved would just be speculation. Cars stuck on the narrow Little River Road would have meant trouble. Complete chaos on the Gatlinburg Bypass would have been a nightmare. That a totally blocked Spur could have meant a thousand deaths is not a stretch of the imagination.

“You take that many cars on that road on any given day and that is a challenge,” St. Clair said. “You take it and put it there with the wind, the trees, the fire and the panic, and the fact that we didn’t have any deaths on the Spur that night is not a miracle; it’s because these guys know what they are doing.

“I think these guys along with the other agencies did a heck of a good job. They put it all together. They fought the battles that they had to fight and won the ones that they could. How did we do that night? I think we did the best we could.”

Related:

Prologue: 1 year ago, a 'whole mountain on fire' forever changed Gatlinburg

Part I: Mountaintop spark, rising wind lit the fuse for Gatlinburg firestorm

Part II: Air attacks, big box couldn't cage fire's surge toward Gatlinburg

Part III: 'Like Armageddon': How the Gatlinburg fire became unstoppable and swarmed a city

Part IV: 'No way out': Sacrifice and survival in the final desperate hours of the Gatlinburg fire

Jack McElroy: Special report caps year of coverage of Gatlinburg wildfire

We knew we lost our home': Immigrant family recalls escape from Gatlinburg wildfires 1 year ago

Black bears stayed put during Gatlinburg wildfires

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Ways of the winds: How fast did gales blow the night of the Gatlinburg wildfire?

When seconds counted, TDOT worker cleared path to Gatlinburg for wildfire crews

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