Hopefully the helicopter crash will be further investigated and a new approach to flying without open cargo compartments will be adopted.

Thank you very much for your note. Please accept my sincere condolences and prayers for your family.

Throughout all this I have been very concerned about the effect of my posts on your family. I do not wish to cause you any more grief, and I apologize if I have.

Firefighting is a noble and heroic profession, as well as a dangerous one. Americans appreciate our firefighters very much.

We all mourn the loss of our fallen firefighters. But perhaps only those within or close to the firefighting community understand why and how these tragedies happen.

Sometimes the causes are purely accidental and unavoidable acts of God. Sometimes, though, a myriad of human errors is to blame. When the latter case occurs, it behooves all of us to study and speak up about the errors, so that they might be avoided in the future.

In my opinion, that job should not fall on the bereaved family. It should fall on the rest of us: the firefighting community, the forestry community, and the concerned public.

Without a doubt, however, bereaved families are affected by subsequent investigations, reports, debates, and commentary. Again, I apologize for any additional grief I may have caused you and your family, but please understand my goal is to support the people who put their lives at risk to protect forests, and if possible, make the job a little less risky.

Mike

Monica was the isolated firefighter at Little Venus

There were no witnesses to the crash of Helicopter N355EV.

The Factual report has recently been released and can be accessed through ntsb.gov. Click on the aviation accident database and search for accidents on August 13, 2006 in Idaho. I have no comment on the accident investigation.

The Unaweep FUM recieved a critical stress debriefing in Cody Wy, after the incident, standard stuff, and the case is open on its effectiveness in my opinion.

Monica comes from a firefighting family (Her father is a 30 year Forest Service fire veteren, I have 13 years with the BLM and Forest Service in Idaho)

Why Monica went back to work was Monica’s decision. After Little Venus NOBODY would have questioned her at all if she flat walked away, least of all myself. We talked briefly about what she was going to do when I visited her in Cody. She informed me that she was going to take some time off and then go back to work, because that’s what she wanted to do, probably for the same reasons I would come back, a love for my job and the people around me, and a chance to educate others in navigating the myriad of clusterfucks that we in the wildland firefighting community have to navigate on a daily basis, and a clusterfuck is what Little Venus was.

Monica Zajanc was the first to recognize the danger. She tried to get the others to realize it, too. Her decision, to move with or without them down the escape route to safe ground, was the right one.

Had the other Unaweep firefighters followed her lead, they might all have been safer. As it happened, no one died. But the situation was dire, and they all could have been killed.

Had Monica not done the right thing, the Unaweep crew might have ventured farther up the canyon and been fried. Her leaving stalled their ascent up the trail, and probably saved their lives.

Did Monica in effect save the Unaweep whoofoo crew? The case can be made that she did.

We don’t know what kind of post-traumatic counseling or therapy she received, if any. We do know that less than a month later, Aug. 13, 2006, she was killed in a helicopter crash, along with two other Krassel/Payette firefighters and the pilot: Lillie May Patten, Michael Gene Lewis, and Quin Stone.

Evidently the USFS threw Monica back into active duty right away, back into the fire so to speak, without any real consideration for the trauma she experienced on the Little Venus burnover. Indeed, she was killed on the South Fork Complex Fire/Whoofoo before the Little Venus Peer Review Report was even issued.

Burn over your whoofoo crew, then pretend like it’s no big deal. Treat your employees like they’re disposable, replaceable tools. That’s unusually harsh personnel management, even for the US Government. We would not be surprised to see massive lawsuits and criminal charges arise eventually.

Just to clarify. I call FUM’s whoofoo crews. I invented the word “whoofoo.”

My understanding is the radio repeater system has been broken for years and still isn’t fixed.

I personally don’t like deliberate forest fires that destroy vast tracts of public forest. In the old days we called that “arson” but apparently it’s not arson if the government does it.

Of course, I personally don’t get a vote. There never has been a vote. There has never, to my knowledge, ever even been a debate about whoofoos.

It would have been nice, but now it’s too late. Now the whoofoo program must be shut down entirely.

First the inaccuracies:
The firefighter who drove his truck to heli-base to get the helicopters in the air heard the radio traffic from the Unaweep FUM AFTER their deployment (not “before they deployed” as you state above).

Fire Use Management Teams are NOT “made up of FUMs (fire use modules).” Fire Use Management Teams consist of overhead/supervisory personnel such as Incident Commanders (IC), Fire Behavior Analysts (FBAN), and Long-Term Analysts (LTAN). Fire Use Modules are the boots on the ground, the firefighter crew working for the Team. FUM’s don’t do fire behavior predictions (except on a basic day-to-day gut level), those are done by professional FBAN’s and LTAN’s.

Who are the “we” who refer to FUM’s as Whoofoo crews? Those of us who work with or for Fire Use Modules refer to ourselves as Modules or FUM’s. I’ve never heard anyone else call a Module a “Whoofoo crew.”

You claim that “there were many similarities between the Little Venus incident and the Thirtymile Fire of 2001.” You mention two (Federal firefighters being entrapped in a narrow canyon during a blowup; and fire shelter deployments occuring). In my mind those are the only similiarities. The Thirtymile fire involved firefighters with vehicles actively engaged in suppressing a fire. The Little Venus deployment involved firefighters hiking into a WFU fire in order to continue structure protection and fire monitoring activities.

Now a little about what Fire Use Modules do. The focus of the Modules is not fire suppression, but Wildland Fire Use (which includes not just Wildland Fire Use (WFU) fires but also prescribed burning and hazardous fuel reduction projects). We also do fire suppression when needed, such as when the National Prepardness Level is at 4 or 5, or when local resources are stretched thin.

On a standard WFU assignment what we do from day-to-day commonly consists of: posting lookouts to monitor the fire and be the eyes for other firefighters who don’t have eyes on all active parts of the fire; monitoring fire behavior (taking and recording fire behavior measurements such as flame lengths, rate of spread, fuel type, etc.); monitoring weather (”spinning” weather to determine temperature, calculate humidity, measuring winds, calculating fuel moisture, probability of ignition, etc.); sampling fuels to determine fuel moisture; wrapping structures such as backcountry cabins and bridges with fire-protective wrap; setting up other structure protection such as hoselays and sprinkler systems; conducting burnouts, and digging line to check fire spread in specific areas; directing aircraft; mapping the fire perimeter and threatened resources with GPS units; working with and directing other crews; photodocumentation; assessing and protecting sensitive sites such as Threatened & Endangered Species sites; etc. It usually involves a lot of hiking in rough terrain in order to monitor different areas of the fire.

And then…when the day is done we go back to our spike camp and deal with the logistics of safely camping in a wildland fire environment: cooking our own meals and keeping a clean camp as to not attract bears.

So yes, “Whoofoo duty is not exactly the same as a Boy Scout camping trip.” It’s quite different. And the “girls” you refer to are women; strong women that could likely hike your butt into the ground while carrying a 45-pound pack, plus their radio and a tool.

And yes, we DO have communications while on WFU fires, both inter- and intra-crew radio communication. Admittedly on the Little Venus incident the Repeater system had been working very poorly (if at all at times) and repeatedly breaking down, we did have direct (non-Repeater) radio communication as well as a satellite phone.

For you to call what FUM’s do “an extreme sport, like parasailing or bungee jumping” would be like me calling forestry just a walk in the park, hugging trees to measure their basal area - it’s a gross oversimplification that doesn’t really touch on the truth.

I hope I’ve enlightened you and your readers a bit about the Little Venus incident and about what Fire Use Modules do. Thank you for hosting this open forum.