BURNED

Firestorm

Poor planning and tactical errors fueled a wildfire catastrophe

Story by

LAURA GUNDERSON

&

TED SICKINGER

Aug. 12, 2016

The Malheur National Forest was on red alert.

Weather forecasters were calling for abundant lightning and strong, gusty winds. Months of drought and record-breaking summer temperatures had left the eastern Oregon forest tinder dry. Conditions were so extreme, the forest's managers applied for and received emergency money for extra firefighting crews.

A lightning strike Aug. 12, 2015, near Berry Creek starts one of the two blazers that would become the Canyon Creek complex wildfire

Then, as if on cue, lightning strikes started a dozen fires on Aug. 12, 2015 -- exactly a year ago. Within two days, gale-force winds fanned the two most substantial starts into a ferocious firestorm that raced through the Canyon Creek community south of John Day.

The wildfire ultimately destroyed 43 homes and nearly 100 barns, workshops and other structures. Cherished pets. Family heirlooms. Livestock. Tools. Trucks. Timber. Much simply vanished, vaporized at temperatures that in places hit 2,000 degrees, leaving puddles of melted metal and glass on soil baked to a glassy sheet.

Managers with the U.S. Forest Service insist they did everything possible to contain the wildfires at Mason Spring and Berry Creek, which combined to create the Canyon Creek fire.

They blame high winds, drought and a lack of national resources to supplement their own forces. In the end, they say nothing more could've been done to prevent this act of God that cost $31.5 million to extinguish.

"We did everything we could with the resources we had available at the time to put those two fires out," said Steve Beverlin, supervisor of the Malheur National Forest. "Sometimes Mother Nature has other plans. That's what happened."

But an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found systemic problems within the Forest Service that left the Malheur primed to burn. And a cascading set of tactical errors slowed the agency's response and squandered its chances to extinguish the fire early.

Read offline: Download the Canyon Creek wildfire package

No lives were lost, but the fire destroyed more private property than any Oregon wildfire in the past 80 years.



While Forest Service managers have yet to produce any in-depth analysis of their strategy in fighting the Canyon Creek fire, The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed thousands of pages of public documents, dispatch records and Forest Service manuals. Reporters interviewed more than a hundred agency officials, firefighters, loggers, community members and fire victims to produce the only comprehensive analysis of the fire that burned through 110,000 acres of private and federal forests.



Ultimately, The Oregonian/OregonLive investigation shows forest officials mismanaged the Canyon Creek fire on multiple levels.



They discounted alarming weather reports, strayed from existing staffing plans and opted for conservative firefighting tactics when the two initial fires were small. Communication breakdowns hampered both firefighting operations and community evacuations. Consider:

Forest Service leaders shipped off three of their four 20-person crews in the days before the fire, despite dire weather predictions and staffing guidelines that required at least two crews remain. One crew was sent to another fire eight hours away.

Resulting crew shortages left incident commanders without the firefighters they needed during the crucial first 24 hours of the fires.

Fire managers took a conservative approach early on. They declined to put engines directly on the accessible Mason Spring fire. They landed smokejumpers and rappellers well away from the Berry Creek fire.

Incident commanders failed to maximize available crews at critical points in the firefighting efforts. They deployed firefighters late on the first two days and sent them home early the first night.

Dispatchers and fire managers bungled communications and left Mason Spring without a backup handcrew on the first day of the fire.

Managers left an inexperienced commander in charge at Mason Spring and approved his decision to allow his handcrew to walk away from the still-smoldering area that later erupted.

Evacuation notices for some residents in Canyon Creek were conflicting and late, forcing many to flee with little notice and few possessions.

There are no guarantees in firefighting, a treacherous and difficult job under any circumstances. Conditions were as bad as they could get last year. And by August, large wildfires were already burning in Oregon, Washington and California. By the time winds whipped flames toward Canyon Creek on Friday, Aug. 14, no amount of resources could have stopped them.



Beyond the missteps last summer, the Canyon Creek fire highlights the inability of the Forest Service to manage dueling missions of firefighting and forest management. It's a national problem that has smoldered for decades and left millions of people and their properties exposed to risk.



Blame decades of fire suppression, selective harvesting of big and more fire-resistant trees and environmental pushback that subsequently limited logging. Together, they've created a system of national forests littered with dead and downed trees, dried needles and low branches. Conditions are acute in eastern and southwest Oregon, where historically fire-adapted forests have been turned into overstocked tinderboxes.



This year, officials designated June 3 as the start of wildfire season in southwest Oregon, and two days later, a 20,000-acre blaze was burning in the southeastern part of the state. The 2016 season is not expected to be as bad as last year's record-setting burn. But in an era when climate change is stoking longer, more intense fire seasons, the problem is only expected to worsen in Oregon and across the country.



Though most of the biggest fires burn hours from the state's major population centers, they impact everyone in Oregon -- and across the country. The Oregon Department of Forestry spent nearly $77 million last year fighting large fires, compared to its average of $22 million over the past decade. Federal agencies spent more than $2.1 billion, eclipsing their own average by 52 percent.

WHO CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Would you like to let those responsible for firefighting in Oregon know your reaction to "Burned"? You can contact

Thomas Tidwell,

Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, at the email below.



The Forest Service says it's at a tipping point. Fire costs now consume more than half its budget, robbing money from all other programs, including those that reduce fire threats. But after four years of debate, Congress is still dithering about solutions.



The Forest Service points to the Malheur as a new business model, a successful collaboration between the agency, environmental groups, loggers and the community. The partnership has accelerated efforts to restore healthy forest conditions and create jobs by increasing the pace and scale of thinning, clearing, prescribed burning and habitat restoration projects.



But progress has been slow. Since 2012, the Forest Service has accomplished some form of timber harvesting, thinning or prescribed burning on 144,000 acres of the Malheur. Annually, however, the Forest Service has fully treated an average of only 19,980 acres -- far short of the 83,000 acres that agency officials say is necessary to return the forest to ecological health.



The Forest Service had identified the forest neighboring Canyon Creek as a high-risk area for a catastrophic fire more than a decade earlier. It approved a project in 2006 to reduce hazardous fuels by thinning and underburning overstocked stands. The project was scheduled to be completed by 2010. But by last summer, the agency hadn't completed crucial parts.



"Chances are, fully treated, the area would have still seen a fire," said Mark Webb, a former county judge and timber faller who heads up the collaborative, "but considerably less intense and devastating."

In its wake, the fire left a charred wasteland and an angry, divided community whose losses approach $10 million. Residents want answers that Forest Service managers have been reluctant to provide. They want an investigation that Grant County authorities refused to fund.



Among those seeking answers is Dean Fox.



On Friday, Aug. 14, 2015, neighbors streamed past Fox's home south of John Day, evacuating the canyon in a panicked caravan of pickups, horse trailers and farm equipment stuffed with their belongings. Some firefighters were surrendering, too, powerless against a wind-whipped conflagration so ferocious it was creating its own weather, raining fire from the sky and eclipsing the midday August sun.



Fox waved the wand of his pressure washer at the inferno descending the ridge behind his home, hoping he could magically hold off the flames with the thin jet of water.



His wife, Courtney, scurried in and out of their ranch home -- carefully removing her muddy shoes each time -- grabbing family pictures, guns, her grandmother's hope chest. Fox eventually made her leave, ignoring her pleas for him to follow.



The situation seemed inconceivable. That morning, they'd made the eight-minute drive to their feed store in John Day under an electric blue sky. Two days before, Courtney had driven her 7-year-old daughter near where lightning had started one of the two fires burning just outside town.



"'See, it's tiny and it's so far away,' " she remembered saying. "You have nothing to worry about.' "

Dean Fox snapped a photo of his home before it was consumed Friday, Aug. 14, 2015, by fire near Canyon Creek.

On Friday, however, winds arrived as predicted -- and stronger than expected.



By mid-morning, 30 mph gusts of wind were super-charging the two fires. The winds grounded planes that had been dropping water and retardant across the fire's path into town.



That afternoon, the Forest Service said winds reached 43 mph.



In a few brief hours, the Canyon Creek fire would grow from 575 acres to more than 30,000, an area one-third the size of the city of Portland.



Fox heard that the fire was picking up. He rushed home by 12:30 p.m. and met a sheriff's deputy in his driveway. Pack up and be ready, the deputy warned, the canyon was at a Level 2 evacuation notice.



The head of the blaze was still 30 yards off, but in the onslaught of intense heat and flying embers, a pine tree next to the house suddenly burst into flames, sending a ball of superheated gases under the eaves. When the roof soffit blew, Fox pointed the thin spray from his pressure washer at his bedroom window.

Minutes later the deputy drove by again. It was Level 3: Get out.

Then the pressure washer exploded, too.



Choked by the smoke, singed by the flames and overcome by frustration, Fox jumped in his truck and fled.

It took less than 20 minutes for fire to destroy Dean and Courtney Fox's home. More than 40 homes were destroyed in the Canyon Creek complex fire.

A short time later, he said he pushed his way past the police roadblock and drove back up the canyon. He found his house burned to the ground, along with his workshop full of tools.

Dean Fox with the spring-fed hose he used trying to save his home.

"This should never have happened," Fox said last fall, his voice choked with emotion as he replayed his last-ditch efforts to save his house. "They should have put this fire out."

A forecast for fire

The summer of 2015 was scorching. By early August, wildfires burned across much of the West. In Oregon alone, there were eight large fires, including the 900-acre West Fork Fire just west of John Day.



Local fire dispatchers knew extra firefighting resources were nearly impossible to come by. Fire engines were being shipped west from Maine and Michigan.

Because of the ongoing drought and extreme danger of a wildfire, Beverlin, the Malheur supervisor, had received nearly $440,000 to pay for additional firefighting resources through August.

The money came just in time. On Saturday, Aug. 8, the National Weather Service's Pendleton office issued a red-flag warning for all weather zones in its coverage area, including the Malheur in eastern Oregon's Blue Mountains.

"Red Flag warnings in effect from 11 a.m. Sunday through 2300 (11 p.m.) Tuesday for thunderstorms with abundant lightning. ... Fuels are sufficiently dry and large lightning-caused fires are possible."



The Malheur was well-prepared to meet the risk. It had eight engines, each staffed with two firefighters, and two 20-person handcrews based near the forest in John Day and Prairie City. The Oregon Department of Forestry's regular fleet included five more engines and a five-person handcrew.



Forest leaders used the infusion of cash to bring in water tenders, bulldozers and additional experienced supervisors and dispatchers. They also had backup resources from independent contractors on reserve, including six engines and two more 20-person handcrews with the same training as federal firefighters.



The Malheur had been on its most-severe preparedness level of "red" for three days. But there was only one fire burning in the district, and forest managers Roy Walker and Brandon Culley faced a choice: They could hold onto their resources, paying crews to stay close to home.



Or, they could let some leave to fight a fire burning elsewhere, providing crews with real-world experience. The district's preparedness plan, which sets minimum required staffing based on forest and weather conditions, suggested that one handcrew or two engines could leave "providing lightning is not imminent and staffing levels can be met."

U.S. Forest Service Fire Management Officer Roy Walker says the job is about protecting all forests.

Lightning was forecast, but Forest Service culture played into the decision, too. Walker, the Malheur's manager for fire operations, said sharing crews is the norm. The bottom line is about protecting all forests -- not just your own.



The district could say "no," Walker said, "but you're going to look bad. ... You've got to let them fight the fires you have."



In fact, there's a slur to describe the practice of holding back a crew when you don't have a fire: rat-holing.



"There was nobody rat-holing anything," Walker said. "If there was, I would want to hear about it."



Walker and Culley gambled. They placed 20 firefighters, U.S. Forest Service Crew 120, into the national database of available resources. The decision meant the crew based in John Day could be sent anywhere a fire was burning for as long as 14 days.

WHO CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Would you like to let those responsible for firefighting in Oregon know your reaction to "Burned"? Contact

James Pena

, the Pacific Northwest regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service, at the links below.

The crew immediately was snapped up by the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, where a 1,400-acre fire had been burning for a week.



By Aug. 9, the John Day crew was on the road bound for Gold Beach, eight hours away.

Crews welcome the assignments. The seasonal employees want the action and the pay bump. Between overtime, increases for hazardous duty and daily food and lodging stipends, federal firefighters earn at least 25 percent more on a fire. It's enough, some say, to cover the payments on a new truck or pay for college courses for firefighters in school.

The district still had most of its resources in place. But by Monday, Aug. 10, lightning had ignited several small fires in the southern part of the forest managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Burns, an hour from John Day.



Walker agreed to "lease" the bureau his two 20-person contract crews. He wouldn't have to pay for them if they weren't on his forest, and if a fire started on his section of the Malheur, he could call them back.



While the Malheur's preparedness plan called for the Forest Service to have a minimum of two handcrews available to attack new fires, it no longer did. Of more than 120 firefighters it had a few days before, only half remained.



"We did go below our staffing guidelines at that point," Walker said. "In hindsight, absolutely I would have kept those two crews -- I would have kept all of them. It's just those decisions you've got to make whether to help your neighbor out or not."



That decision to release the contract crews came with another risk: Crews have expiration dates. As they fight fires -- or drive to and from a blaze -- work hours accumulate. Crews typically work 12-hour shifts and max out at 16. Their duty is also limited to 14 days in a row before they're required to take two days off.



If crews rack up hours elsewhere, they're limited when they return.



Not all Forest Service leaders are so concerned about rat-holing. Some, including three interviewed in the region, say they sometimes play it safe.



"It's like a military operation," said Rodney Smoldon, supervisor of the Colville National Forest in northeastern Washington. "You don't want to send all your resources away and get attacked from the other end."



Over the summer of 2015, Smoldon said, he did not let any of his crews leave his forest for other fires.



"You know human nature," he said. "Everyone handles risk differently."

Aug. 12: Mason Spring ignites

The predicted lightning storm hit the Malheur in the early hours of Wednesday, Aug. 12, sparking a dozen new fire starts.

The Berry Creek and Mason Spring fires began after lightning strikes reported early on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2015.

A spotter in the Flagtail Lookout, 23 miles southwest of John Day, was the first to report the smoke at 7:18 a.m.



The dispatch center in John Day, operated by several agencies including the Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Forestry, relayed the report to the nearby Forest Service compound.



Less than an hour after the first smoke report, three engines -- each carrying 300 gallons of water and two to three crew members -- headed south on U.S. 395. The fire was a 35-minute drive away, but it took an hour and 45 minutes to find it.



As is Forest Service policy, the highest-ranking incident commander took the lead.

That morning at Mason Spring, it was Chris Gorman. Only a month before, the 32-year-old veteran firefighter had been promoted to incident commander 4. That's a step up from the lowest-ranked leadership level, "IC5," which Gorman had held for four years. Forest Service guidelines recommend that the duties of an IC4 be limited to managing "small fires" typically lasting 24 hours, though the time period can expand. Within a few hours, he was commanding more resources than he'd ever managed in his life.



(Malheur Supervisor Beverlin allowed The Oregonian/OregonLive to interview a group of firefighters, including Gorman, but directed them not to identify themselves by name.)

Smoke rises at the spot where the Mason Spring fire began.

The fire started on a gentle, accessible slope, which many local residents and firefighters say could have been easily reached by a four-wheel drive fire engine. Gorman decided the terrain, brush and other downed limbs made such a move too risky. So he and five other firefighters hiked in by 10 a.m., about three hours after the lightning start was first reported.



The fire covered a half-acre -- about a third the size of a football field. Gorman immediately asked dispatch for a helicopter to start dumping buckets of water and a plane to drop retardant. He also asked for a dozer and a 20-person handcrew to dig a containment line around the fire.



Gorman needed the help. But with 12 fire starts that morning and three crews fighting fires elsewhere, there was a shortage of boots on the ground. The only handcrew left in the district was U.S. Forest Service Crew 401 from Prairie City, which was mopping up the month-old West Fork fire west of John Day.

District fire managers ordered Crew 401 off that fire. The firefighters stopped in Prairie City to replenish supplies, then headed south for Mason Spring. The 20-person crew was short four members due to scheduled absences and time off.

The first plane arrived by 10:57 a.m., dropping an 800-gallon stripe of retardant across the head of the blaze, buying firefighters some time. By then, the fire had grown to 3 acres.



The 15 firefighters from Crew 401 and their leader hiked into the fire just before noon, about four and a half hours after it was spotted, to assist Gorman and his engine crews.



By then, a small breeze had picked up. The 3-acre fire had grown to 5.

Then, Berry Creek

Five miles north, the Forest Service was also getting a slow start on what would become known as the Berry Creek fire.

Rancher Gordon Larson heard the lightning strikes before dawn. Just after sunrise, he climbed into his Gator utility vehicle to go looking for "smokes," the telltale columns signaling a fire start.



He headed east, bouncing up the rough dirt road leading to the ridge above his Berry Creek Ranch, which borders the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness.



He drove around for a half-hour, scanning the clear sky above ridges and treetops. Seeing no sign of a start, he headed back to the ranch. "I actually had a sense of relief," said Larson, a former Oregon State Police lieutenant.



He was sitting at breakfast with his wife and son when the phone rang. It was Christie Timko, his neighbor across Highway 395 to the west. "Did you know you've got a smoke up there in Deer Creek?" she asked, referring to a spot over the ridge he'd just checked.

Adrenaline pumping, Larson jumped back in his Gator, this time speeding west to a better vantage point near the highway. Sure enough, a thin trail of smoke was drifting vertically from behind the ridge, as if from a single chimney on a calm day.



He immediately called dispatch. It was 7:59 a.m. His wasn't the first call. That came 37 minutes earlier. But Larson could pinpoint the fire and told the dispatcher that a road passed just below it.



If a firefighting crew met him at the ranch, Larson said he told the dispatcher, he could drive them to within a short hike of the fire start. The trip would take 40 minutes from the Forest Service compound in John Day.



Dispatch records show the conversation took place, but Walker, the Malheur fire manager, said he didn't recall Larson's message being passed on. Ultimately, no handcrews were available, and Walker said they'd already decided to use an "aerial attack."



It took another three and half hours to get the first firefighters on the scene.

Rancher Gordon Larson saw the early signs of the Berry Creek fire and later helped ferry firefighters to the growing blaze.

Dispatchers called airbases in Redmond and La Grande, each about 130 miles away, to send rappelers and smokejumpers -- rapid-response teams that could drop into the forest near the fire.



A plane with five smokejumpers on board took off from Redmond around 9 a.m. and a helicopter with four rappellers followed minutes later. A second helicopter with more rappellers left La Grande around the same time.



The advantage of rappellers is that they can be deployed with pinpoint precision, even in steep terrain. But that didn't happen at Berry Creek.



The three aircraft approached the fire around 9:30 a.m., and in the ensuing congestion, one helicopter was diverted to the airbase in John Day, where the rappellers remained until the afternoon. Instead of rappelling close to the fire, the second team landed in an open meadow on Larson's ranch, well away from the fire. The smokejumpers, meanwhile, took another hour to parachute onto the ranch.



In the end, Larson drove four rappellers back up the road to the base of the ridge, where they still faced another half-mile hike in.



The nine firefighters were on the scene by 11:51 a.m., four and half hours after the fire was reported. Two of them were posted as lookouts, leaving seven to fight the fire burning on a rocky 50-degree slope.



With the temperature rising and humidity levels falling, it had grown to 5 acres.



Dispatch records show the Forestry Department had earlier offered up another five-person crew. But Kevin Brock, the Berry Creek incident commander, didn't take them.



He'd already ordered a 20-person handcrew and figured the smaller crew could be used elsewhere. Soon enough, the five-person state crew was sent to a fire near Granite, an hour-and-a-half drive away.

Not enough people

Berry Creek's difficult terrain and proximity to homes made it the early priority for the Forest Service. But Mason Spring was the sleeper, the fire they underestimated until it was too late.



Over the first 24 hours, the short-staffed Crew 401 was left on the ground to contain a firestart that would become the driving force in one of the state's most destructive wildfires. Overhead, two helicopters dropped water on hot spots, while three single-engine air tankers reinforced the crew's line with retardant.



They knew conditions were extreme.



Standing in the sparsely forested meadow where the lightning struck, firefighter Stephan Drokin, a 20-year-old pre-med student in his first fire season, spun a device called a sling psychrometer to measure relative humidity. Once he got a reading, he used it to calculate the likelihood that flying embers could start a new spot fire.



"It was at 80 or 90 percent," he said -- levels he'd never seen before. "That means if you throw 10 matches on the ground, eight or nine will start forest fires."



Geared up in flame-resistant yellow shirts and green pants, the crew carried their own packs and water tanks and, in some cases, 15-pound chainsaws.



The crew initially gathered at the "heel" of the fire, splitting into smaller squads to flank the flames on either side and begin digging a line around the 5-acre blaze. They stopped only to seek cover as loads of retardant rained down.



The bright-red liquid can't fully stop a fire -- when it dries, a fire can burn right through it. Yet when it's wet, the retardant buys firefighters time to dig a line that can hold back low flames crawling along the forest floor.



Another firefighter on the scene, Tucker Billman, a University of Oregon political science major in his third year fighting fires, remembered the oppressive heat and how his shovel recoiled off the deep-rooted beargrass dotting the hillside.



Then there was the buckbrush, an evergreen shrub with stalks thick and gnarly enough to pull the chain off a saw.

"It's just nasty, your worst nightmare," Billman said. "It was real slow going."



The conditions and growing size of the fire set off alarm bells for Gorman, the incident commander.

Shifting winds and high heat helped turn the Mason Spring and Berry Creek fires into a single large blaze. Firefighters say conditions on the ground and in the air were oppressive.

Around 12:15 p.m., he asked dispatchers for another 20-person handcrew. Soon after, he reported that the fire was pushing to the north and spreading on both flanks. It had grown to 8 acres.



But then the dozer arrived. What had taken crew members an hour to dig, the dozer cleared in seconds with a sweep of its 10-foot blade. It was a welcome sight for the tired firefighters, who were cycling off the fire to grab food and water.



While the dozer driver focused on building the line, firefighters shifted to searching for windblown embers. The crew, joined by several of the engine firefighters, lined up about 5 feet from one another and began sweeping the perimeter. The typical goal is to cover about 200 feet out from the line.



"We didn't have enough people to make it 200 feet," Billman said. "There just weren't enough people."



As early afternoon winds picked up, the Mason Spring fire spread to 9.5 acres.

"Miscommunication"

At 2 p.m., Gorman rattled off a wish list to dispatchers, asking again for more water -- and a 20-person handcrew to double his ground resources.



Gorman continued asking for an ETA on that second crew. At 3:36 p.m., dispatch let him know that contract firefighters from the Grayback 5-Alpha crew were expected around 6 p.m., after making the drive back home from Burns.



That crew never arrived.



Due to a "miscommunication" that Forest Service leaders said they couldn't pinpoint, the crew drove by the turnoff to Mason Springs and into town, 15 miles away.



Dave Hannibal, base manager of Grayback Forestry's John Day office, says his crew checked in by radio when they were about 15 minutes out from Mason Spring.



"They were told dispatch checked in with the IC at Mason Spring," he said, "and they were told they were not needed and they headed for home."



By then, the fire was lined with 11 loads of retardant. A helicopter worked the fire, and would ultimately dump 27 bucketloads, or more than 9,000 gallons of water, on its interior before peeling off to work on the Berry Creek fire. Crews from the three engines surrounded the fire with hose.

A U.S. Forest Service image showing how the Mason Spring fire was contained with a dozer line and retardant (left) on the afternoon of Aug. 12, 2015. It also indicates a line of hose that firefighters could use on Aug. 13 as they continued to mop up the flames.

Gorman had decided things were looking good and his bosses -- Culley and Walker -- didn't push back. Culley, the Malheur's duty officer, quickly split the Grayback crew, sending half home and the other to help on a different fire deeper in the forest.



While Gorman didn't need a backup crew that night, he wanted one ready the next morning.



"Be at the compound at 0800," dispatch records show.



Members of Crew 401 worked the fire for several more hours, pushing shovels and heaving pulaskis, a tool that combines an axe and a hoe, to turn the dirt until it was cool to the touch. Working from the fire line in, they'd gone about 30 feet, digging deep to find cool soil to pile on glowing embers and smoke.

A widely used firefighting textbook recommended by the Forest Service warns against underestimating a blaze. After a line is set, it directs incident commanders to "totally extinguish" small fires and mop up larger fires "at a minimum of 100 feet." The guide also recommends considering "potential/predicted weather and fire behavior."

With increasing winds forecast the next afternoon, the Forest Service's decision to pull its handcrew off a nearly 10-acre fire before sunset and let it burn overnight untended was potentially fateful.

It is also one widely second-guessed by the community.

"To take people off the fire was inexcusable," said Bob Reed, a retired U.S. Forest Service employee and victim of the Canyon Creek fire. "Predictable is preventable. This fire was predicted. They could have stopped it."

Berry Creek: A snag

Five miles away, helicopters and planes had been fighting the Berry Creek fire for much of the first day. But less than a dozen firefighters, including lookouts, were on the ground working to build a line around the blaze.



It was grueling work. Unlike Mason Spring's relatively open meadow, Berry Creek burned on a steep slope a few hundred yards into the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness. The firefighters initially dug a trench at the bottom of the slope to catch any burning debris that rolled downhill. Then they started clearing a line up the east flank of the fire as helicopters and planes worked the opposite side.



A second contract crew, Grayback 5-Bravo, was set to leave John Day around 3:15 p.m. after driving back from Burns. But instead of making the half-hour drive and hiking into the fire, the incident commander decided to fly them directly in to save time and firefighters' energy.



Records show a helicopter shuttled the private crew in around 6 p.m., when the Berry Creek blaze was burning on about 8 acres. But in the ensuing chaos and growing darkness, it ended up being a short shift.



Just as the crew joined the line, one of its members struggled to get his breath. The 19-year-old's heart rate slowed and he complained of stomach pains -- typical symptoms of dehydration and heat-related illnesses.



As a medical technician and crew boss tended to the injured firefighter, nightfall made conditions difficult for crew members in the steep terrain. At 9:22 p.m., Jeannine Faulkner, a smokejumper then serving as incident commander, told dispatch she had pulled crews back to a nearby camp: "They will not engage tonight."



Rappellers and two teammates were helping the injured firefighter hike out when a burning tree fell over the line on the west flank. Embers skittered across the dry ground, ignited and started burning through lines of dried retardant.



The Grayback crew was prepared to camp near the fire so they'd be ready to hit it during prime firefighting hours early the next morning. Instead, Faulkner decided that was no longer safe. She sent them home to John Day.



That Wednesday night, the fire that had been only 40 percent contained climbed into the trees and pushed south and west toward private land.



Overnight, Berry Creek quintupled in size to 50 acres.

Thursday, and it's gone

Commanders on the Berry Creek and Mason Spring fires had good reason to get their days started early. Facing a forecast of increasing winds Thursday and Friday, they were racing the weather.

By Thursday's end, the Berry Creek fire barely had spread past its origin point. The Mason Spring fire had jumped to 500 acres.

Yet on both fires, the Forest Service repeatedly missed the opportunity to get ahead of the flames.



An axiom of firefighting is that the early morning hours are the most productive. The ground and air are cool. Relative humidity is high. Fire moves sluggishly and cooler conditions are easier on firefighters.



Beverlin, the Malheur supervisor, and other managers said that when fire season is active, they'll schedule crews to start as early as 5:30 a.m. and work 16-hour shifts. That didn't happen at Mason Spring or Berry Creek.



On that Thursday, sunrise was at 5:56 a.m. With a nearby weather station reporting temperatures of 66 degrees and relative humidity at 45 percent, conditions were good to get a jump on the fire.



The engines crews monitoring the fire were "briefed and engaged" shortly after 7 a.m. But the handcrew was bedded down in John Day and wouldn't arrive for another two and a half hours.

Steve Beverlin, U.S. Forest Service supervisor of the Malheur National Forest, schedules crews to work 16-hour shifts during fire season.

Gorman radioed his first update from Mason Spring at 8:38 a.m.: "Minimal smoke" with large logs ands stumps burning. "Contained at this time."



Mike Nault, who manned a water tender on Berry Creek, said that key firefighting time was spent in the standard morning briefing at the Forest Service work compound in John Day.



"It's been that way on every fire I've ever been on," said Nault, who lost several of his own outbuildings to the fire. "The meetings start at 6:30 a.m., and it's a lot of guys getting up and congratulating themselves on the good job they're doing."



After the hourlong meeting, he said, firefighters usually must pick up their water and lunch for the day and then drive to the fire, where they have another meeting with the incident commander.



"You always want to fight fire when the wind is down, the temperature is down and the relative humidity is up," Nault said, "but by the time you get out of those meetings, at least two of those are already gone."



Crew 401 arrived at Mason Spring at 9:30 a.m., got a briefing, and hiked back into the fire. By 10 a.m., the weather station said the temperature had already climbed to about 80 degrees, and the relative humidity had plummeted to 14 percent.



The crew was alone again.



Half of the 20-person Grayback contract crew that was supposed to provide backup the day before had been diverted to Berry Creek. The other half remained on another fire.

A helicopter dips water from a private irrigation dam to deliver to the Mason Spring blaze on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015.

Spot fires, retreat

Crew 401's first order of business: finish the full 50-foot mop-up zone that they'd started the previous afternoon. They split into four squads, attempting to slowly suffocate the fire.



"Once we completed 50, it was get the 100," said Drokin, the 20-year-old firefighter on Crew 401. "We're going to work on this fire until it's completely out."

Mop-up is taxing work. Mixing soil. Spraying it down. Digging out burning stumps. Felling trees. Hacking the bark off burning logs. And mixing the chips until they're extinguished. The job is often performed while eating smoke, with retardant planes strafing the treetops and helicopters hovering overhead, dumping 350-gallon buckets of water on hot spots and flare-ups.

Crew 401 worked steadily into Thursday afternoon. The wind was picking up, and the relative humidity was reaching new lows.

At 2 p.m., a gust of wind blew a burning ember 400 feet over the line, and a spot fire ignited.



The crew rushed to smother the new start. Within minutes, however, wind gusts had turned one spot into four, each of them running in the dry grass. When another big spot emerged over the next hill, the entire crew scrambled to hook it.



Adrenaline pumping, crew bosses yelling, they ran down the hill, found an anchor point and dug a quick scratch line in the dirt.



But by that point, the fire was climbing into the trees. Tall pines exploded in balls of flame. Crew 401 retreated to the next line of defense, a nearby Forest Service road, where they desperately began removing low branches and dead wood on the ground.



As the fire bore down, embers off the torching trees landed behind them, setting off new fires that threatened to box them in on all sides.



It's the worst-case scenario in firefighting: a burnover.



The trucks came in fast. Crew 401 scrambled aboard and retreated.



Mason Spring was on the loose.

Fire was blowing embers a mile north of the main blaze. Its column was starting to rotate, sucking in oxygen to feed its spread and producing erratic winds and fire runs.



"As we're driving out, we can see 100-foot flames," Drokin said. "We stopped to regroup, and get more water, and as we're sitting there it's literally raining fire, bark.



"If you're not religious, at that point you're thinking, maybe. Perhaps."

Slow start at Berry Creek

Things weren't going much better at Berry Creek.



As morning broke on Thursday, the fire was actively burning on the west flank, at the border of Gordon Larson's Berry Creek Ranch.



But ground resources trickled in slowly. Half of Grayback 5-A, diverted from Mason Spring, arrived at Larson's ranch around 8 a.m.



But instead of hiking in, the 10 firefighters stayed at the staging area for four and half hours. The Forest Service said fire managers needed to scope out exactly where the enlarged fire was burning before sending in ground crews.



"The fire we had been fighting the day before was a whole different animal," a fire manager told The Oregonian/OregonLive. Forest Service leaders wouldn't allow him to use his name. "We just didn't have the intelligence we had the day before."



Dispatch records, however, show that a helicopter completed a reconnaissance and mapping mission on the fire at 8:45 a.m.

The second contract crew, Grayback 5-B, arrived back at the ranch shortly after 11 a.m. The crew had evacuated Wednesday night as the fire grew. Now they waited alongside Grayback 5-A for almost two more hours.



At 12:40 p.m., with temperatures hitting that day's peak of 89 degrees, the two crews hiked in to start fighting the fire.

Fire moves down a hill and toward the town of Canyon Creek as the first evacuation notices go out on the evening of Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015.

The Forest Service says three helicopters dropped 30,000 gallons of water on Berry Creek that day. They were also responding to other fires, and one helicopter was diverted for an hour to retrieve the camping and personal gear that Grayback 5-B had left behind when it evacuated the previous evening.



Meanwhile, two medium-sized air tankers out of Redmond dropped curtains of red retardant, attempting to hold the fire in check. But by 3 p.m., aircraft began to be diverted to help with the runaway fire at Mason Spring.



By then, gusty afternoon winds arrived. A weather station in Seneca, a small town of 193 residents to the south, reported gusts up to 21 mph. The resulting turbulence grounded all the helicopters working Berry Creek.

The Canyon Creek fire devastated the property owned by Judith Reed and her husband Bob

Sitting on her 30-acre homestead in the canyon, Judith Reed watched the air campaign grind to a halt.



"They couldn't do anything once the wind started," she said. "The thing that bothers us is that all the agencies knew the wind was going to come.



"It was just mismanagement."

Racing to recover

Although Forest Service managers underestimated the potential of the Mason Spring fire on Wednesday and Thursday morning, they kicked into high gear that afternoon, mounting a desperate attack as 25 mph gusts pushed the blaze northeast toward Highway 395.



Gorman asked for another handcrew. An hour later, he asked for three more, plus a dozer and a helicopter. The dispatch center buzzed. "Does any incident have extra bodies?" Soon, engines from other nearby fires reported in, along with a five-person handcrew and additional on-the-ground fire leaders.



Four planes and a helicopter dumped retardant and water on the head of the fire as a proliferation of spot fires broke out as far as a mile north. Four engines sped from Burns to join the ground troops.



At 5:17 p.m., dispatchers put out a desperate national call for four more handcrews.



"UTF," came the response: unable to fulfill.



By 6:15 p.m., the fire was at Highway 395 and had begun its slow march down Starr Ridge toward the largest concentration of homes and ranches outside of Canyon City.



As the Forest Service air attack wound down for the night and crews pulled out, contractor John Sanowski and his son staged a last stand on what was now a 500-acre fire. They drove their dozer through the night in an eerie, dust-choked attempt to establish a new fire line at Vance Creek, the last significant gulch between the Mason Spring fire and nearby homes to the north.



Their intention was no longer to put the fire out, but with any luck from Mother Nature, to help push it back into the wilderness area to the east.

Smoke from the Mason Spring fire fills the sky the evening of Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015.

"Coming out Thursday night, there were spot fires everywhere, 50 or 100 of them," said firefighting contractor LJ Sanowski, who relieved his father at 11 p.m. "They're everywhere, chunks of bark, embers, all over the hillsides."

Evacuating the canyon

Fire managers described Sanowski's dozer line as their "hail Mary" to stop a fire that was already out of control.

By 6 p.m. Thursday, the Forest Service and Grant County sheriff's deputies began issuing evacuation warnings to homeowners at the base of Starr Ridge, telling them to be ready to leave.



A Forest Service report filed Thursday night noted that the next day's weather could cause "extreme fire behavior and rapid rates of spread." Yet the larger concentration of residents farther north were still oblivious to the danger. They went to bed Thursday night with little idea that Mason Spring was on the move.



And they woke Friday and went about their business.

The Mason Spring fire spread northeast and joined with the smaller Berry Creek fire on Friday, creating the Canyon Creek complex blaze.

Under a blue sky, Mark Bagett headed to work in Long Creek, an hour away. Gordon Larson left to deliver his niece to college in Monmouth, five hours away. Dean and Courtney Fox drove to their feed store in John Day.



"There was nothing, no warning," said Judith Reed, who spent the morning on her deck looking at the Berry Creek fire.

Curt Qual did much the same. He got up, poured a cup of coffee and went out to his deck to check out the Berry Creek fire, which he could see directly east across the highway.

A retired Forest Service manager, he'd been watching airplanes and helicopters work the fire for two days and had driven up to check on Mason Spring the day before. This morning, there were only wisps of smoke out of Berry Creek. The flag on his backyard pole was slack.

The home of Mike Manell burns at 3:47 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 14, 2015. Former Grant County undersheriff Todd McKinley passed the blaze while helping respond to the Mason Spring fire.

All good. He went back inside, dressed and shaved. When he came back out, a little breeze began to blow. Inevitably, he thought, the winds were going to increase, so he started his basic preparations to evacuate.



He moved pallets away from the house, put one sprinkler on his two-ton pile of wood pellets and another southwest of the house where he figured the winds might be coming from. He parked his truck and his boat in a bare spot by his shop.



By mid-morning, the flag was snapping, standing straight out in what he estimated was a 25 mph wind. As he hurried back into the house, the phone rang -- a neighbor calling to tell him that all residents in Canyon Creek were on a Level 2 evacuation notice -- "be ready to leave at a moment's notice."



Grant County didn't have an emergency alert system at the time, so residents typically checked the radio and local websites for evacuation updates. When it's time to go, deputies aim to alert homeowners in person. But folks are careful in the canyon -- they check to be sure the message has been passed, especially to elderly neighbors.



Qual said he heard the radio reporting a Level 1, so he called Forest Service dispatchers to check, then called the radio station to correct its report: It was a Level 2.

Fire moves down the hill from Mason Spring and come up behind Canyon Creek homeowners (not seen, to the left). Smoke at far right is coming from the Berry Creek fire as the two blazes come together.

He backed his camper up to the front door and started loading. Laptops. Papers. Photos. Firearms. Then he called his wife, a nurse in John Day.



"You've got to get up here. We're going to have to evacuate."





Smoke and light pierce the forest after a helicopter dropped water (seen on road) at the Mason Spring fire.

She arrived 10 minutes later, around 12:30 p.m. The two were in the house for only a few minutes, but when Qual came back out with an armload of clothes and looked up, the Mason Spring Fire had laid a massive column of smoke over the ridge in back of the house. Turning around, he saw that the Berry Creek fire was halfway down the ridge in front of his home.



Like a battlefield pincer movement, the fires were rapidly pushing north up both sides of Canyon Creek. The growing columns sucked in oxygen and drew them together, enveloping the homes in the middle. That's when the Mason Spring fire merged with the Berry Creek fire -- creating the Canyon Creek inferno.



"The thing was just ripping. I'd only seen fire behavior like that one other time in my career and that was from quite a distance away," Qual said. "It was a half-mile away, if even that. The thing sounds like a hundred trains. It's just a roar."



A fire engine crew tasked with protecting homes pulled into his driveway. While Qual was walking them around the house, a fireman's radio squawked to life. The fire had crossed the highway in several spots. Residents needed to evacuate immediately.



"He looked at me and said, 'You better go,'" Qual recalls.

Too hot to fight

The evacuation of Canyon Creek was a panicked, last-minute affair. Notice started going out around noon as law enforcement worked to close the highway through the canyon. But some residents, like Mike Mannell, got no word at all.



Mannell was napping when a neighbor knocked on his door and told him to get out. He had just enough time to move his horses to a pasture across the highway, roll his Harley-Davidson under a neighbor's lawn sprinkler, and grab his guns.

He saw fire trucks parked in front of the home he'd built with help from family and friends over the past five years. "Aren't you going to do anything?" he asked them. Then he left, followed by the engines.



Grant County Undersheriff Todd McKinley, helped by a deputy and a reserve officer, spent the morning racing up dirt driveways, some miles long, to be sure everyone was getting out.

Some homeowners refused to leave. Sam Palmer, younger brother of Grant County Sheriff Glenn Palmer, held off the flames at his best friend's home with a garden hose. When Palmer refused to go, McKinley handed him a Gatorade and sped off to check on others. (Palmer stayed as the fire burned around him and ended up saving his friend's house.)



One of McKinley's last stops was at Fox's ranch-style home near the mouth of the canyon. Fox stood at the corner of the house, spraying his pressure washer into the maw of the looming inferno as engines full of water passed on the road below.



The fire was gone. Too hot to fight. Aircraft were grounded.

Within hours, the combined fires swept through the canyon and burned 39 homes. Other nearby communities were later evacuated and the growing blaze ultimately burned another four homes. While word got back to some residents about what remained, most couldn't get back to their property until Saturday.



Shiela Kowing lived at the north end of Canyon Creek, not far from where the fire's progression stopped. She recalled the silence when her family returned. No birds, no bugs. Dust blew in her eyes and the acrid smell burned her nose.



Her rental house stood, but tools, horse tack and her husband's new backhoe were gone. Days later, their badly burned and blinded cat returned home, both ears missing. He was in pain, but leaned in to be petted. Her husband went to borrow a neighbor's gun to put him down.

The landscape that once inspired Kowing, an avid photographer, now conjures images of the hungry flames. Even the sky can scare her.



"I'll be out and my heart will start racing and I have to tell myself, 'Those are clouds, not smoke. You're OK.'

"It's not gone just because the firefighters went home," she said. "It stays."

-- Laura Gunderson & Ted Sickinger

-- Carli Brosseau contributed to this report.

Read what experts think and offer your comments

Lgunderson@oregonian.com

503-221-8378 | @lgunderson

Tsickinger@oregonian.com

503-221-8505| @tedsickinger

Debris and devastation from the Canyon Creek complex wildfire as seen on Saturday, Aug. 15, 2015, south of Canyon City.

Burned: More coverage

Firestorm: Poor planning, tactical efforts fueled a wildfire catastrophe

Fallout: Forest Service logging undercuts victims' recovery efforts

The Forest Service responds to key findings

Editorial: A monster wildfire that could have been tamed

Video: How Oregon's worst fire in 80 years played out

Video: Canyon Creek fire was mismanaged on multiple levels

Video: Harvest of timber fraught with problems

Video: A 360-degree hike where the Mason Spring fire started

Video: A 360-degree hike where the Berry Creek fire started

Video: A 360-degree trek through the burnt forest

Read offline: Download the Canyon Creek wildfire package