SALMON - Fire managers say they wish they could go back in time when doing a good job meant putting the fire out.
Instead, stacks of policy papers and the prospect of being held personally liable for the destruction caused by wildfires is prompting some to rethink a job already rife with risk.
Rowdy Muir, who just returned home to Utah after a 14-day stint as incident commander of the Withington Fire near Salmon, said his job used to be geared toward fire tactics and strategies on the front lines.
Now there are other concerns.
He said he's heard comments that three commanders are needed on today's larger fires. "One to deal with the public, one to deal with the fire and one to deal with policy, conference calls and meetings."
Fire managers fear the layers of bureaucratic directives turn the incident commander into a perfect fall guy - responsible, and maybe liable, for everything that happens during a fire.
Politics crept into firefighting after Yellowstone burned in 1988. In the past 10 years, federal officials have responded to wildland firefighting deaths by issuing policy statements that are supposed to make firefighting less dangerous.
At the same time, agency officials have ordered fire leaders to cut costs.
In June, Idaho's congressional delegation introduced a bill that would make it easier for private landowners to sue the federal government when wildfires escape public land.
Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, one of the Buffer Bill's co-sponsors, said federal agencies - notably the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management - need to be held responsible when public lands are managed in a way that makes them prone to fire.
Simpson said the proposal is not an attempt to make trouble for fire managers and said, "We're not trying to put personal liability on incident commanders. These are good people trying to do a good job."
Paul Hefner, deputy chief of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, said new policies are a concern for fire managers.
Last year, at least one Forest Service fire manager took his name off the national roster, and others have felt compelled to buy liability insurance.
"Every time we add accountability, it adds more pressure on an incident commander," he said.
Hefner, chairman of a national incident commanders group, said he would prefer to see a measure that would ease the strain, providing fire managers with legal immunity so those who take issue with fireline decisions cannot personally target an incident commander.
Behind the fireline
At fire camp, everyone wears the same Nomex clothing - a bright yellow shirt and forest green pants - including the cooks. The head of the fire, the incident commander, is distinguished only by what he lacks - a sooty face and a hand tool. His shoulders do not seem extraordinarily broad, even though the load put on them is increasingly heavy.
Running a big fire has always been a monumental task. The incident commander has to assemble and organize hundreds and sometimes more than a thousand crew members, most of whom have never worked together.
Firefighters need food and shelter, transportation and tools - all on not much more than a moment's notice. Significant costs must be managed. There always is the business of outwitting Mother Nature and her powerful regiment of fire.
Years of fire experience and countless hours in the classroom give an incident commander a unique confidence to tackle such challenges. But no amount of training can prepare an incident commander for a fire that goes wrong - when death, injury or loss of property occur on his or her watch.
"Incident commanders are making decisions in an extremely unpredictable environment," Hefner said.
The investigations in recent years of high-profile blazes that claimed the lives of wildland firefighters have boosted the number of rules and regulations incident commanders have to take into account.
The Thirtymile Accident Prevention Plan is intended to make sure mistakes that contributed to the death of four firefighters on the 2001 Washington fire are not repeated. The plan is specific about how much rest crews must have, how daily briefings are given, even how weather information is communicated.
Steve Raddatz, fire management officer for the Boise National Forest, serves as the deputy incident commander on one of the busiest Type I teams in the nation. He isn't opposed to the safety emphasis presented in plans such as the Thirtymile. What does concern Raddatz and others is the implication that total compliance is expected all the time, a nearly impossible benchmark.
"You do your best to manage a fire," Raddatz said. "You do your best to make sure that everyone on that fire has received a positive in-brief and has enough rest. But it almost makes you think that if you are only doing that 99.9 percent of the time, it's not good enough."
Walking a fine legal line
When fires become catastrophic, an incident commander's thought processes and actions are scrutinized and second-guessed. Investigation teams are brought in. News reporters probe. Lawsuits loom.
Don Smurthwaite of the Bureau of Land Management's Fire and Aviation office said he is not aware of any incident commander who has been personally sued for decisions made on the fireline. That's partly because of a clause in federal law that protects fire managers - but not the federal government - from legal claims if they are found to be acting within their official "scope of employment.''
Smurthwaite pointed to the 1995 Point Fire near Kuna as an example. The families of two volunteer firefighters killed in that blaze brought a wrongful-death suit against the government. The court ruled that the BLM incident commander breached several of his duties, but because he was working within the scope of his employment, he wasn't responsible for the nearly $1 million awarded to the families.
But Hefner said the "scope of employment" clause leaves incident commanders on shaky ground.
"There are a lot of gray areas when you are making decisions based on a dynamic environment like fire,'' he said. "There are a lot of people showing up on incidents and we have to make basic assumptions about their training and their experience level.
"There may be factors that you are not aware of. All kinds of things can go haywire."
Those possibilities increase as wildland fires and residential neighborhoods meet on a more frequent basis.
Simpson said his legislation helps solve that problem by giving federal agencies added motivation to build firesafe buffer zones near private lands. He said if nothing else, the bill's introduction serves as a wake-up call to his colleagues in Congress about the real costs of forest mismanagement.
Lemhi County correspondent Gina Knudson can be reached through the Post Register at 542-6791 or via e-mail at bginter@idahonews.com .
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