Backyard Infernos

As the Pinesdale, Mont., volunteer fire department sprayed foam on the roof of his mother-in-law's new house, the man grabbed a baby picture off the refrigerator door and a few Mormon Scriptures from a shelf. There was no time to rescue larger items. The fires whirling down the mountain were just too near, filling the air with flurries of black cinders and sending up tall cliffs of orange flame. Overhead a massive Sikorsky helicopter dumped water into the smoke, but the time to stand and fight had passed. The man jumped into his truck and raced away, followed by the fire crew, which retreated half a mile downhill just in time to escape a freakish fire tornado 200 ft. high and headed for the town center.

The combination of a mild winter, a broiling summer and outbreaks of dry thunderstorms that have produced much lightning but little rain has plagued Montana and neighboring states with fires of a ferocity not seen for half a century. From the central mountains to the western valleys, more than 50 homes have burned as well as 300,000 acres (and counting) of kindling-dry timber. Besides forcing thousands to evacuate, the flames brought down power lines and melted cars and trucks. Last week 6 million acres of public land were closed to civilians by order of the Governor, and each day new crews of fire fighters arrive, to be housed in tent cities that look like refugee camps.

Worst hit has been the Bitterroot Valley, where the skies glow red all night and the smoke on the highways forces vehicles to travel in convoys behind pilot cars. Paul Chamberlain of the U.S. Forest Service, deputy operations chief assigned to the raging valley complex fire, has never seen anything like this disaster. "Many of you have been fighting fires for a long time and haven't ever witnessed a fire event like yesterday," Chamberlain told his tired troops. "You may never witness another one in your whole career." What complicates the fire fighters' job is that the picturesque valley, like so much of the West, is adding population rapidly, creating what's called an "urban interface" of sometimes palatial homes tucked high among the trees. "Forest fire" is a misnomer: the Bitterroot fires are village fires, backyard fires.

In such a setting, containing the blazes is not a priority, nor is it even practical. "As it is," says Steve Frye, incident commander for the valley complex, "we have only enough resources to protect homes and property." Given the flames' unpredictable behavior, providing a heat shield is often impossible, and even under good conditions it can require novel, high-risk tactics. "We are going into situations that, absent homes and property, we wouldn't be putting fire fighters into," says Frye. Now and then rugged cabin dwellers tell Frye they don't expect the Federal Government to defend their dwellings, but when the flames reach their door, Frye says, such proud individualists always change their tune.