BRIAN HEAD — Even today, five full years after the Brian Head Fire burned through over 71,000 acres of public and private property, unanswered questions remain regarding how the fire was fought.
Ed. Note: This is the third installment of a four-part series commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Brian Head Fire. If you haven’t read it already, you can start with part one by clicking here.
Brian Head cabin owner Robert Lyman, the man who readily admits that he initially started the fire, says he believes the blaze may have been close to containment within the first few days.
As reported in St. George News / Cedar City News, five days after it began, the fire made an 8-mile run, doubling its size to nearly 11,000 acres on June 22, 2017.
Just a few days prior to that, then-Gov. Gary Herbert had taken a helicopter ride over the fire, accompanied by all three members of the Iron County Commission and a fire official.
Dale Brinkerhoff, who was one of the commissioners aboard the helicopter, later said in a two-minute video statement that the fire was “less than 1,000 acres and one small flame still visible.” He likened the size of the fire to a “weenie roast.”
Brinkerhoff, who is no longer on the Iron County Commission but is a member of the Iron County School Board, said he then asked one of the fire officials if they were planning to set “backfires” — planned burns designed to eliminate fuel in the target fire’s path.
“He said, ‘Yes, they would be doing that,’” Brinkerhoff said in the video, without identifying the official he talked to. “The following morning, he called me at home on a cell and said, ‘Hey, the worst thing happened. The fire got away from us. And I said, ‘As a result of the backfires?’ And I recognized that he answered in the affirmative.”
Lyman said he has no reason to doubt Brinkerhoff’s account.
“He knows what he’s talking about because he’s been involved in fires,” Lyman said. “He was stationed over in the Grand Canyon area fighting fires, and he’s well-educated on it.”
“He was with the governor. And the governor saw that it was put out. But then he goes and puts a tweet out there that I used a weed torch. Now, why would you do that? Just think about it. Those guys had a backburn, and boy, they were not going to own it. They were going to put it off on me.”
“You know, I don’t claim to be blameless,” Lyman added. “It’s my fire. I started it. There’s no way that I can deflect. I’m not going to deflect and say it’s somebody else’s fault. It was my fault.”
“But I think it would serve the public well if people knew what actually happened,” he added. “I mean, even to this day, I went through the criminal courts and the civil courts without ever saying a word. I never got up in front of the judge and testified. I never got up and said one thing publicly about what I’ve told you. And for that to go onto me, that’s a miscarriage of justice. You know, how a guy like me can be prosecuted and go through the system without anybody ever hearing my side. That’s what really upsets me.”
Jason Curry, who is now the deputy director for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, was the public information officer for the division at the time of the Brian Head Fire. Curry told Cedar City News he remembers the fire as a fast-growing, long-term event.
“My recollection is hearing about the fire being reported to our office. It grew really rapidly, which is what caused us to go ahead and call a team and have them manage the fire,” Curry said. “Then, there was a wind event that really pushed the growth, and the fire moved really quickly and had pretty extreme fire behavior.”
Curry also addressed the question of whether any backburning was used, as described by Brinkerhoff.
“I don’t want to get into a back-and-forth disputing what he’s saying,” Curry said. “What I will say is that that fire has been looked at and the response has been looked at from a number of different agencies and a number of different investigative looks, including people that don’t have any sort of a dog in the fight. And everything that was done, was done in accordance with standard firefighting tactics. And there was no conspiracy … there was no plan to make this into some sort of a bigger deal.”
“We were making efforts to put the fire out as expeditiously as possible,” Curry added. “Just like with any fire that grows to any size, really, fighting fire with fire was an option, and it was a good option to use at that time. We actually accomplished a lot of good, and were able to get some containment early on, but with the wind that came, it negated all of that.”
Retired Bureau of Land Management fire official Sheldon Wimmer called the conditions at the time of the fire a “perfect storm” of ingredients, particularly in regard to the fuel load in the forest.
A large amount of standing dead pine trees had been killed by a massive bark beetle infestation that spanned decades, he noted.
“When that starts like that, then it limits the capabilities of the agencies to suppress it,” Wimmer said, which in turn can lead to decisions to just let the fire burn through certain areas.
“That’s a good idea, maybe, I don’t know, but that’s how it ended up this way,” Wimmer said. “You’ve got a $32 million fire.”
Underground bunkers cause delay
Just over one week into the Brian Head Fire, crews were removed when the blaze reached several underground “doomsday” bunkers and a cabin that had been illegally constructed on public lands as long as 30 years earlier. The bunkers were stockpiled with various supplies, including ammunition and explosives, so the firefighters were removed for safety reasons until all of the bunkers had been located and had their potentially hazardous contents removed.
As previously reported in St. George News / Cedar City News, investigators later questioned a Parowan man in connection with the incident.
Richard O. Batt, who was 81 at the time of the fire, ultimately pleaded no contest to attempted recklessness with an incendiary device, a class A misdemeanor. He was fined $543 and sentenced to probation and community service, which he later successfully completed.
Lyman said that incident allowed the fire to spread unimpeded for at least a couple days.
“They pulled the firemen off the ground for two days, which allowed the fire to round the corner,” Lyman said, adding that by that time, the fire was rapidly heading toward the Panguitch Lake area, where multiple cabins would be burned and many more residents would ultimately be evacuated.
Full containment
Finally, after burning for nearly one month, the Brian Head Fire was declared fully contained on July 15, 2017. The final numbers were staggering: 71,672 acres burned, 13 homes or cabins lost, 1,500 people evacuated and an estimated $32 million in suppression costs.
Lyman said his insurance company ultimately paid out $300,000 in claims, which he acknowledges covers only a small part of the total cost of the fire.
Although no human lives were lost during the Brian Head Fire itself, one man was killed during a reclamation project a few months later. Bryan Burr of Alpine, the 58-year-old co-owner and president of a charter helicopter service that had been contracted for the project, died Oct. 7, 2017, when he was accidentally struck by a rock or other piece of debris as a helicopter was dropping a load of mulching straw on a hillside within the burn scar area.
Lyman said upon learning of Burr’s death, he immediately reached out to Burr’s son, Ben Burr, to express his condolences.
“He was very good about it. He’s very understanding,” Lyman said of Ben Burr. “He knows it wasn’t my fault. I mean, yeah, if the fire hadn’t started … but that was his job. And he took on that job willingly. And that’s the way I look at it. I’m not going to take the blame for that man’s death.”
“Now, if somebody had died in the fire on the first day, I couldn’t live with that,” Lyman added. “I couldn’t live with it if somebody had died in the fire the second or third day. But three months later, a man gets killed in an accident. You can’t blame that on me unless you’re a real mean, spiteful person.”
“I don’t blame Bob for what happened to my dad,” Ben Burr confirmed to Cedar City News. “It’s not so much a blame game, but it’s definitely a broken system.”
Burr works as a public lands consultant, helping farmers, ranchers and other private property owners manage conflicts with federal land agencies.
“I actually did some consulting work for the ranchers and private property owners that got burned out by the Pole Creek and Bald Mountain fires,” Burr said, referring to the two lightning-caused fires that ultimately burned nearly 100,000 acres in Central Utah in the fall of 2018.
Burr said that those fires, which started separately but eventually merged together, remained quite small at first, even after burning for days.
“It was contained within a small amount of acreage, like, I want to say less than 15 acres,” Burr said. “And they were watching it. They knew it was burning. A helicopter could have put that fire out in two water drops. But they chose to let it burn, and that’s in the record.”
Burr said the decision to let it burn fell under a policy that covered naturally caused, unplanned fires.
“It’s a wildfire in the right place at the right time, meaning it was at the end of a season. So there’s a good chance we can keep it under control as we head into winter,” Burr said, explaining the officials’ thinking behind the strategy. “And it was at the right place, it was in a place that had these high fuel loads. And so we’re just gonna let it burn.”
However, Burr said that tactic is quite different from that of a prescribed burn, because humans aren’t controlling the conditions.
“And then, there were five ‘red flag’ wind days, and that fire blew out of control and burned 100,000 acres and ended up being a more expensive fire than the Brian Head Fire,” he said.
Burr said although he doesn’t think letting a wildfire burn is a good policy, he actually supports prescribed burns.
“I work for a nonprofit, and we often will send in comments in favor of prescribed burn treatments for the Forest Service, as long as they do them responsibly and they don’t do them in conditions where they could get out of control.”
“We always put in our comments that they also should not ever let a wildfire meet the objectives of their prescribed burn plan,” Burr added. “Because wildfires, by their name, have a tendency and often do burn out of control. You should contain wildfires and do prescribed burns in completely separate management decisions.”
Ed. Note: This is the third of a four-part series marking the anniversary of the Brian Head Fire. Check back on St. George News / Cedar City News on Friday for the final installment.
Read more:
- Brian Head Fire retrospective, Part 1: After 5 years, man who started massive Brian Head Fire shares story
- Brian Head Fire retrospective, Part 2: Lyman contends with legal proceedings and rumor mill
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