Burned into our memory
Payson-area fire recalls a deadly blaze from 1990
On June 25, 1990, lightning struck near Dude Creek, a small stream in the high country near Payson. A fire started, and within days, the Dude Fire had killed six people, injured others, destroyed 60 homes and burned 25,000 acres of forest.
Twenty-seven years later, firefighters returned to the forest to battle the Highline Fire, which burned across the Dude Fire’s scar — evoking chilling reminders of a wildfire that shook a community and changed the way crews fight fires.
Both fires forced people to flee their homes, though the Highline Fire evacuations were brief and affected only the communities of La Cienega and Ellison Creek Estates.
Firefighters fought to keep the Dude Fire below Forest Road 300. They have been doing the same for the Highline Fire.
And crews fought blistering weather then and now.
The firefighters’ deaths in 1990 shared the front page of The Ar-
izona Republic with news of an all-time record-high temperature of 122 degrees in Phoenix. Temperatures climbed nearly as high this week.
The Highline Fire, first reported June 10, has burned about 7,000 acres and is now fully contained. Its cause is still under investigation.
Reporter: ‘The fire actually growls’
Since the Dude Fire, Arizona has seen bigger fires — nearly a decade apart, the RodeoChediski and Wallow fires cumulatively burned nearly 1 million acres — and one that was deadlier, the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, which killed 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
But the Dude Fire was jarring.
Newspaper reports at the time tallied the damage: six fatalities in a single day. Five were firefighters on a crew from the Arizona State Prison at Perryville; the sixth was a prison employee. Reports say 11 firefighters had to deploy their shelters when the fire crossed a fire line.
At one point, about 2,400 men and women worked on the fire, which cost $500,000 a day to fight; the total cost reached about $7 million. Scores of homes burned. The fire spared a fish hatchery, but the aftermath was tough on the fish. Zane Grey’s cabin, where the author wrote 14 Western novels, was destroyed.
Smoke turned the sun into a “lurid orange disc,” Phoenix Gazette reporter Glen Creno wrote. “The fire actually growls.”
Another reporter caught up to Walt Shaw, who had been fighting fires since 1944. He said: “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is a 15.”
Propane tanks exploded, 100-year-old trees were consumed in a blink, and the smell of smoke and the “rattle” of helicopters hung in the air.
The fire was finally contained July 1.
What happens when fire finds a foothold
In the aftermath, Stephen J. Pyne, at the time working in the Arizona State University history department, wrote that the fire season had “followed a classic formula.” During the “natural pyrotechnics of monsoon season,” he wrote, “fires flash from the mountains like beacons.”
Every year, the beacons are lit. Yet the Southwest landscape was changing, the effects of fire suppression more evident over time, Pyne wrote: “Brush congealed into jungles; open forests, once dappled with glades of sun and shadow, snarled with down logs, dense tangles of understory, and dog-hair thickets of pine and fir. More recently the woody invasion has included houses.”
That sounds a lot like what today’s firefighters were up against as they worked to contain the Highline Fire through much of June.
“It’s easy to fund a dramatic fire fight; tough to justify the quiet burning which, if it is done properly, does not become a public spectacle,” Pyne wrote.
On that front, there are a few signs of change.
Homeowners near Flagstaff seemed grateful for a prescribed burn at the foot of A1 Mountain this spring.
A Forest Service public information officer can quickly provide numbers that show the high costs of fighting a fire vs. the low cost of a prescribed burn.
The Dude Fire led to changes in firefighting tactics. Agencies adopted a model that emphasized lookouts, communication, escape routes and safety zones. The system, still in use, was developed in part by Paul Gleason, a superintendent of a hotshot crew at the Dude Fire.
No longer a beacon, an expert warns
An interagency website for firefighters shows that, so far this year, the Pinal, Snake Ridge and Dove fires were caused by lightning and managed, but not fully suppressed. The site shows several prescribed burns in northern Arizona, including the Kaibab North and South and the Long Jim 3.
Attitudes may be changing, but it’s hard to say how that should translate on the ground, Pyne would say in an interview after state’s largest wildfire, the Wallow Fire.
Climate change, drought and other factors keep throwing more fuel into the forest.
The Forest Service budget remains burdened with heavy suptrol,” pression costs. A 2015 report said that in 1995, five years after the Dude Fire, fire management took 16 percent of the agency’s budget. By 2015, that number had risen to 50 percent.
Every summer, the beacons are lit.
Unless more is done, fires will come “that no one wants, no one can con- Pyne wrote. “The fire on the mountain Southwest will no longer be a beacon but a pyre.”