Major Fire in U.S. History and the Codes Regulations it May Have Influenced

¶ … fire in U.S. history and the codes/Regulations it may have influenced

Fire safety: The 'Big Blowup' of 1910

Only five years after the U.S. Forest Service was established in 1905, a series of deadly forest fires engulfed Idaho, Montana, and Washington. Fire season began unusually early that year, starting with a larger wildfire in the Blackfeet National Forest in northwestern Montana on April 29, 1910. Conditions remained extremely parched throughout the summer. On August 10, brushfires began breaking out in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Over 4,000 troops as well as firefighters were called into action. The men appeared to have the fires contained until hurricane-force winds on August 20 reactivated the fires, causing flames hundreds of feet high. "Trains raced to evacuate towns just ahead of the flames" ("1910 Fires," U.S. Forest Service History, 2012).

Over the summer of 1910, "1,736 total fires burned more than 3 million acres of private and federal land and consumed an estimated 7.5 billion board feet of timber. At least 85 people were killed" and more than 5 million acres were consumed by fire ("1910 Fires," U.S. Forest Service History, 2012). Smoke and soot from the fires reached all the way to New England and Greenland ("1910 Fires," U.S. Forest Service History, 2012). Rather than trying to stop the fire and protect their homes, residents fled in trains for their lives. Of the Idaho forest rangers' efforts, it is written: "they fought shovel by shovel, bucket by bucket -- now not to control the blaze, but to survive it" (Jamison 2010).

The fires made a lasting impact upon the American terrain -- and American politics. When Roosevelt was elected, there was little support for funding the preservation of public land. But "opposition in the Senate to federal purchase of eastern forests had gone up in the smoke of a 1910 holocaust in Idaho" (Egan 2009). Before, Congress had resisted funding the Forest Service, but the heroism shown fighting the fires turned the sway of public sentiment. "Barely ten months after the fire, Congress doubled the money in the Forest Service budget for roads and trails, giving the rangers what they had begged for in previous years" (Egan 2009). Forest rangers, immortalized as "ragged young foresters fighting a sea of flame" became so common that a poplar book even showcased one as its hero The Young Forester (Egan 2009). Thanks to increased funding, over the decades, the "forest Service introduced bulldozers, smokejumpers, and planes that dropped tons of flame retardant" as well as roads designed to facilitate transportation into the forest infrastructure during fires (Jamison 2010).

However, despite the undeniable heroism shown by many rangers during the great fires, there was also a great deal of criticism leveled at the policies of the U.S. Forest Service before and after the fires. Poor environmental management by loggers and railroads "whose coal-fired engines kindled many forest blazes" were contributing factors in the spread of the blaze (Jamison 2010). Regarding the Big Blowup's might, according to one historian: "it was a 1,000-year event, a perfect storm of long-term drought, lightning, high wind, and a total lack of trained people on the ground" (Jamison 2010).