Racing The Flames

Drought—an extended period of months or even years when a region notes a deficiency in its water supply

As of late-March, parts of the Coastal Empire and Lowcountry are running more than 5 inches below average in rainfall totals. This places our area in a moderate drought. And during times of drought, wildfires are always a concern.

Well, imagine being inside an oven, wearing heavy clothing with smoke filling your lungs…this is what it’s like to fight a raging wildfire.

In this episode of Storm Stories, we’ll take you back to 1994 when 14 firefighters lost their lives battling a wildfire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado.

Lightning started the Storm King fire on July 2, 1994, a year of drought and low humidity. The fire wasn’t reported until July 3, and not until July 5 did a Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service crew begin tackling the blaze.

Here’s the story of survivor Eric Hipke, (source: Vail Daily)

“Everybody screwed up, from the management right down to us on the fire,” Hipke says. “We could have put people on this earlier, but communications were tough and we were behind the curve.”

Hipke, a smokejumper, landed on a ridge near Storm King Mountain with his team on July 6. Another smokejumper crew was already on the scene, and ten members of the Prineville Interagency Hotshot Crew joined the effort later that afternoon. By that time, the fire had exploded to 50 acres from less than ten the previous day.

As Hipke and his colleagues began to make a fire line to secure the fire, the brush they were working reached heights of 12 feet, obscuring their view.

“I remember (James) Thrash saying, ‘This is not a good idea. We shouldn’t be here,” Hipke said, sweeping his arm across the mountainside still dotted with charred oak trees. Thrash, a smokejumper, perished in the fire.

But the group continued into the afternoon, sticking to their original plan of digging a fireline. By 3p.m., Hipke said, clouds had begun to form on the horizon, the beginnings of the cold front that ultimately pushed the fire up the mountain and trapped the men and women.

“We just lulled into it,” Hipke said of the work that day. “The fire was certainly no more than a foot flame length. That was our huge mistake—we didn’t plan for the worst-case scenario.”

The cold front quickly advanced, and by 4p.m. 100-foot flames, aided by 45mph winds burst up the drainage basin through highly flammable oak trees.

“We couldn’t see – all we saw was smoke. There wasn’t even a discussion – we immediately started walking up that way,” he said, pointing to the trail going up Storm King Mountain.

“I had one thing in my mind and it was to get out,” Hipke said, and so he continued up past the other firefighters, the air becoming oppressively hot.

The smoke blocked the sun, enveloping him in an eerie dark red, and strong winds blew cinders all around him. Thirty feet from the top, a strong gust of wind slammed Hipke to the ground, but he was able to recover and make it the rest of the way to the top.

“I remember that feeling, to not be fighting gravity anymore and the heat,” Hipke said. “Somewhere along there I saw my hands – the skin was falling off them.”

Hipke traveled down the east drainage to safety, one of 35 firefighters who survived by either escaping down the east side or deploying their fire shelters. In all, 14 people died in the fire.