Federal report cites understaffing, extreme fire behavior in deaths of four Colorado firefighters

A federal investigation has concluded that unexpected fire behavior, chronic understaffing, a shortage of highly trained employees and a new policy aimed at quickly extinguishing wildfires all contributed to the deaths of four helitack firefighters who were battling a blaze in western Colorado in June.

The report, released by the U.S. Department of the Interior, examined the response to the Knowles fire, which merged with other fires to form the Snyder Fire along the Colorado and Utah border. The firefighters, working for the U.S. Forest Service and the newly created U.S. Wildland Fire Service, were part of an interagency response. The Rifle Helitack crew had been dropped into a remote area to work on a fire line when strong winds pushed the flames toward them and overtook their position.

The deaths came after the Trump administration revived a previously discredited policy of stamping out all wildfires quickly. According to the report, decisions about how to fight the Knowles fire were driven by the desire to prevent the spread of cheatgrass and to protect sage-grouse habitat and a downwind community.

These factors "established an organizational posture to aggressively suppress new starts while small," the report said. "This policy framing drove the decision to insert helitack firefighters onto small wilderness starts on a day with extreme fire weather conditions forecast."

Emily Barker, Nick Hutcherson and Sydney Watson were killed at the scene, while Nathan Matthews sustained burn injuries and died on July 24. A fifth member of the team was burned but survived.

Nick's parents, Ron and Lisa Hutcherson, said the crew should never have been sent ahead of the fire because dangerous winds were in the forecast. After meeting with investigators and visiting the site, they said they believe the deaths were preventable and resulted from a failure of leadership and oversight. "Telling us how the fire reached our son does not answer why he was still there," Ron Hutcherson said in an email to The Associated Press. "Who was watching the bigger picture? Who was responsible for bringing those firefighters home while there was still time?" Lisa Hutcherson added: "My son depended on the people responsible for tracking the fire threatening him and making the decisions needed to keep him safe. We want answers, and we want accountability."

The Serious Accident Investigation report described how multiple lightning fires ignited on June 27 in Colorado's Black Ridge Canyon Wilderness, a region in extreme drought with rising winds. An incident team called in aircraft and crews to cover the fires, and at one point the official in charge ordered all aircraft to the Jones fire. Constant high winds challenged pilots, with many calling it the most difficult flying of their careers. By early afternoon, communication systems broke down as trainee dispatchers tried to coordinate operations amid confusion over who would track aircraft.

"Dispatchers simultaneously tracked up to 16 active aircraft, three emerging incidents, multiple new starts, county river evacuations, and non-stop media inquiries, leading to severe cognitive task saturation," the report said, adding that radio congestion and workload strain prevented dispatchers from transmitting a mandatory scheduled fire weather forecast. Incident commanders on the Snyder and Jones fires also lacked clear information about the location of firefighters on the Knowles and Gore fires to the east. "Because no operational role was assigned to continuously map personnel location against the emerging fires' trajectories, overhead did not recognize that firefighters were positioned directly in the fire's line of advance," the report said.

A large fire about eight miles west of the crew was observed three and a half hours before the entrapment. In less than three hours it ran across complex terrain and reached the five firefighters, who were forced to deploy fire shelters because a helicopter could not reach them in time. The Hutcherson family said they met with investigators in Grand Junction on Oct. 26 for a three-hour official readout, which described failures of lookouts, communications, escape routes and safety zones. They were told an aging mobile radio system and software crashes compromised official channels, forcing firefighters to rely on cellphones. Given the Knowles fire's remote location, the family said, the central question remains: "What justified keeping this crew exposed as communications, observation, and extraction options deteriorated?"

Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, traced the problem to the administration's full-suppression policy, which he said has pushed crews nationwide to take unreasonable risks. "It was outrageous to have a full-suppression policy on a lightning-caused fire in the wilderness to prevent the spread of cheatgrass," Ingalsbee said. "The policy driving this aggressive attack of all fires is an obsolete paradigm that is just humanly or ecologically unsustainable. And unfortunately this crew paid the ultimate price, ultimate sacrifice."