Suit seeks millions for fire victims
The phone rings. A voice cries out frantic and sobbing.
“My wife called me and said the flames were across from the house,” Michael Reed tells a Sevier County E-911 dispatcher. “I told her to call 911, and I haven’t heard from her since.”
He never heard from her again. Reed’s wife, Constance, and two daughters, Chloe and Lily, died in the Nov. 28, 2016, Gatlinburg wildfire, trapped by flames as they ran from their home in the Chalet Village community.
Eleven other people died as well — some from smoke and flame, one from a heart attack and another from a fallen tree limb — in the space of a few hours after high-speed winds fanned a mountaintop blaze inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to fury and sent the flames racing through town.
A federal lawsuit filed Thursday on behalf of Reed and others seeks millions of dollars in damages from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for failing to contain the fire, which burned for five days before it left the park boundaries, and failing to warn the residents in its path in time.
The lawsuit lists Reed and James England, who lost his home on Greystone Heights Road, as lead plaintiffs and seeks class-action status for all victims of the fire. Attorney Sidney Gilreath said he expects the number of claimants could top 300 people. Damages sought include more than $15 million for Reed and $1.3 million for England but will most likely grow.
The complaint cites two after-action reports — one by a park service review team and another by an outside consultant, ABS Consulting — that faulted the park’s response to the fire as casual, shortsighted and too little, too late.
The park’s fire management officer, Greg Salansky, and “park senior leadership were not only unprepared but unqualified to manage the fire,” ignored repeated National Weather Service warnings of high winds and dry conditions, failed to notify Gatlinburg firefighters and police in time, broke their own firefighting rules and park service policy, and bear direct responsibility for the 14 deaths and more than $1 billion in property damage caused by the fire, Gilreath wrote in the lawsuit.
Park officials haven’t filed a response yet and would not discuss claims made in the lawsuit Thursday.
‘By policy, the National Park Service does not comment on active litigation,” spokeswoman Dana Soehn said.
The wildfire began Nov. 23, 2016, the day before Thanksgiving, when Salansky spotted smoke coming from the park’s Chimney Tops peaks at the end of one of the driest fire seasons.
He initially chose to try to contain the fire rather than fight it, despite forecasts by the National Weather Service that warned of high winds and “critically dry” conditions.
Salansky didn’t attack the roughly acre-sized fire directly, didn’t dig containment lines initially and waited four days to order water drops by airplane and helicopter. Most of the fire crew’s staff was on vacation due to the holiday. No one called them in.
Salansky devoted his efforts instead to containing the fire inside a 410-acre box in hopes of coming rain — “a debacle of historic proportions, made worse by innumerable and repeated failures by Salansky and park officials to adhere to settled firemanagement policies,” Gilreath wrote in the lawsuit. Policy called for a second officer to review Salansky’s decisions, but no such check or balance took place, with top officials like park Superintendent Cassius Cash mostly deferring to Salansky.
Salansky didn’t assign any monitors to watch the fire overnight, so rangers ended up caught by surprise when they discovered embers carried by the wind had started new fires the morning of Nov. 28, including a fire near the Twin Creeks Picnic Pavilion, within a mile and a half of the Gatlinburg city limits.
Park service policy calls for placing protection of human life, including neighboring residents, as the first firefighting priority. But Gatlinburg and Sevier County officials didn’t learn about the fire until the morning of Nov. 28 when a Gatlinburg fire captain called Salansky about the clouds of smoke hanging over town — and didn’t learn until 12:30 p.m. in a meeting with park officials the fire was headed their way.
“The most critical failure of all was the complete lack of early notice to local officials,” Gilreath wrote in the lawsuit.
The ABS review found that delay most likely cost lives.
Early attempts to build firebreaks focused on a single portion of the city — Mynatt Park and surrounding neighborhoods in the southeast corner at the national park’s edge — based on recommendations from Salansky and other national park officials.
Gatlinburg Fire Chief Greg Miller sent out calls for aid from other fire departments, eventually drawing 3,535 firefighters from around the country. Most of that aid didn’t arrive for hours, and officials at all levels, concerned with protecting Mynatt Park, failed to consider a potential threat to Chalet Village and other communities across town to the southwest.
By 6 p.m., winds topped 60 mph — maybe cracked triple digits by some accounts — and sent the flames hopping roads and creeks out of the park and into Gatlinburg. The fire grew and forked to fold around the city on both sides, with the western half of town undefended. Most of those who died were on that side of town, just outside the city limits.
Constance Reed and her daughters tried to run from their home after Michael Reed became caught in traffic fleeing the fire. The mother called E-911 to beg for help, but the line went dead.
The lawsuit describes Reed navigating back roads and driving through clouds of smoke in a vain effort to try to reach his family.
“Mr. Reed got out of his van and screamed his wife’s name, but there was no answer,” Gilreath wrote.
Authorities found the bodies of mother and daughters days later in a nearby home where they’d apparently tried to take cover.
The city had no mass warning system and relied on officers and firefighters to make notifications in person. Police and firefighters raced from door to door to evacuate homes, but the fire outran them. Flames in some places forced fire crews into retreat, and some hydrants ran dry due to lack of water pressure.
Most of the 14,000 people in the fire’s path escaped to safety. The wind finally died down around 2 a.m. as rain doused the flames.
Authorities ultimately charged two teenage boys from Anderson County with starting the fire by playing with matches. State prosecutors dropped the case, and federal prosecutors have given no public sign of pursuing charges.
City and county officials refused to release records on the fire for months, citing the Juvenile Court case against the boys, but finally complied after the case was dropped.