Wildfire tragedy highlights firefighters’ youth, passion

Three young men killed fighting blaze in Washington.

TWISP, WASH. — One was a college student for whom fighting fires was a summer job. Another had graduated and wanted to make firefighting his career. The third was already a professional firefighter who had gone back to school to earn his master’s degree.

Tom Zbyszewski, Richard Wheeler and Andrew Zajac — the three men who died Wednesday when flames consumed their crashed vehicle in Washington state — were typical of the wildland firefighters who start out as fresh-faced college kids making as little as $12 an hour then find themselves hooked on the work.

Four others were injured in the canyon, one critically. But their firefighting brothers and sisters had little time to mourn as raging fires forced entire communities to flee their homes 60 miles away.

The complex of fires grew more than 100 square miles in a single day, creating a situation too chaotic to even track how many homes had burned.

“We have lost them, but I don’t know how many,” Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers said. “We’ve got no idea.”

As conditions worsened, emergency officials ordered evacuations in Okanogan, with 2,500 residents, as well as Tonasket, a community of 1,000 people, and its surrounding area.

Nearly 29,000 firefighters — 3,000 of them in Washington — are battling some 100 large blazes across the drought-and heat-stricken West, including Idaho, Oregon, Montana and California. Thirteen people have died.

There are more firefighters on the ground this season than ever before, and the U.S. government is spending more than $150 million a week on fire suppression, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Tidwell said.

It’s not enough. Additional personnel and equipment were being brought in from abroad, and Washington state officials have called for volunteers to help fight the flames.

In addition, President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration authorizing federal help for 11 Washington counties and four Native American tribes.

The three firefighters who died were based in Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, said forest spokeswoman Carrie McCausland.

Wheeler, 31, the oldest of the three, started fighting fires to save money for college then realized he could dedicate his life to something that had meaning, said the Rev. Joanne Coleman Campbell, his pastor at Wenatchee First United Methodist Church.

Zbyszewski also followed in his father’s footsteps. He was the youngest of the three who died, a 20-year-old physics major at Whitman College with an acting bent. He was due to return to school next week.

Zajac, 26, was the son of a Methodist minister from Downers Grove, Ill. He was a professional wildland firefighter for the Forest Service and received a master’s degree from the University of South Dakota last year.