Dick Mangan knows wildland fire. A retired member of the U.S. Forest Service in fire management, he now runs a private fire consulting company, Blackbull Wildfire Services. He served as the president of the International Association of Wildland Fire from 2004 through 2006 and has lectured on wildfire issues across the United States and internationally. He remains active in wildfire suppression operations, working as the operations chief or safety officer on some of the country's largest wildfires. In 2005, he penned an editorial for Wildfire magazine entitled “On a Slippery Slope.” (The editorial can be viewed online at the Wildfire Web site at www.wildfiremag.com.) In that editorial he recounted developments that occurred following the July 2003 Cramer Fire, in which two U.S. Forest Service firefighters were killed, expressing the opinion that the U.S. Attorney's actions had placed wildland fire on a slippery slope that could have serious effects.

What was the most significant outcome of the Cramer Fire, and why?

In my opinion, it was the action taken by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Boise, Idaho. They explored, based on the findings of the three investigations conducted by the USFS, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Department of Agriculture's Office of Inspector General. Those findings, along with additional information that they had gathered, resulted in criminal charges being brought against the incident commander. A pre-trial agreement was reached prior to a grand jury indictment for the criminal charges; the IC lost his job and received federal probation for 18 months.

My concern was, and still is, that the business of wildland fire is a lot of science but a lot of art, too. And that short time you have to make decisions gets coupled with the fact that all the data you'd probably like to have isn't always there. You don't always know what the weather is going to do for the next couple hours; you don't know that a helicopter will be down for maintenance when somebody calls and says they need help.

We have to make those decisions in 30 seconds or a minute, or a half an hour, but if you make the wrong decision, someone like the U.S. Attorney can spend weeks and months and possibly even years looking back at every training course you've ever gone to, every guideline that has ever been published, every NFPA standard that exists, and on, and on. And then may say, “You made a mistake and we're going to hold you criminally liable.”

Certainly there is a need for accountability. I'll never deny that. And if a person makes dumb mistakes, they should be held accountable, whether somebody dies or not. To put it in the context of structural fire departments, it is a generally accepted rule without a fully functional SCBA, you don't go into a burning building. If I'm a fire chief, and I have an engine crew show up and I tell them, “Aw, hell, just go on in [without SCBA], there's no big problem,” I should be held accountable for that. On the other hand, if I get there and the SCBA is non-functional, but there's a 3-year-old child standing in a window and I am certain in my mind that kid is going to die if we don't do something, and I tell my guys to go in, if someone is hurt or killed due to not having SCBA, how should that be called?

What I see happening is this: Once we were “white hat” guys who were always right, and whose decisions were never challenged, and if an accident happened, people say it is just the nature of the business. Now we're in an environment where people are saying, “My son, my daughter, my husband died, and somebody needs to be held accountable for that.”

Sure there should be accountability out there. The question is, should it be criminally negligent accountability? Or should there be a case for decisions that were when with information that was lacking, or maybe it was a case of doing the right thing and having the wrong thing happen?

Do you expect that the trends you've seen within the wildland fire arena will continue on into structural fire?

Most definitely that is what you are going to see. Surviving members of families of firefighters killed in incidents may go after the fire officers. And the next logical extrapolation might be for homeowners to sue saying, “You didn't do enough to save my home.” There's a lot of discretionary judgment that is going to be challenged. So fire officers need to be aware of the risk, the potential liability that they, as decision-makers, face.

Are there any initiatives within fire service organizations or within even less formal groups that are discussing this issue where our readers could become involved in the dialogue?

A good person to contact would be Casey Judd, head of the Idaho-based Federal Wildland Fire Service Association. That organization lobbies in Washington on behalf of federal firefighters and has a Web site where people can make contact: www.fwfsa.org.