WILDFIRE IN MEXICO!

© 1998 Kelly Andersson
Contributing Editor
WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER Magazine

SOUTH-OF-THE-BORDER FIRES: Mexican jungles, snakes, malaria, jaguars -- and FIRE!

Smoke and fire everywhere, for as far as you can see and as far as you can fly. Local volunteers who show up in sandals and cutoffs to fight fire. Limited -- if any -- communications. Language differences, cultural differences, and political testiness. Local native peoples who may or may not welcome the assistance sent by the powerful political neighbors to the north. Straight up-and-down slopes, sinkholes, malaria-carrying mosquitoes, logistical nightmares. Water sources protected by impenetrable jungle and deadly snakes. And jaguars. The spring fires in Mexico managed to juggle all of these and more into a smoke-choked couple of months for thousands of people with thousands of fires over thousands of acres.

"There were a lot of fires -- it was like Yellowstone to the xth power," says Andy Parker, FMO on the Peaks Ranger District of the Coconino National Forest. "I had 79 fires named in one state, and the smallest was over 6000 acres. Then I had a whole bunch of fires unnamed, and I can't define a whole bunch -- from the sky there was smoke everywhere -- it was one of those deals that was almost too much to take." Parker worked at the southern Mexico bases of operation in the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca (wa-HA-ka) from mid-May to June 17. "I was in Cintalapa and Zanatepec," he says. "It felt like I was there for four or five years."

By late June, firefighting efforts south of the border included thousands of military and civilian firefighters and countless volunteers battling fires that had burned over a million acres. At least 60 residents and firefighters were killed, including 10 military personnel who were killed when their helicopter crashed. Suppression efforts were hampered and aircraft were grounded by impenetrable smoke, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which was coordinating U.S. efforts at assisting Mexico. Unusually dry conditions attributed to El Niño exacerbated the fires, which had blazed through jungles, forests, and pastures of Mexico and Central America for months. Drifting smoke caused problems and health warnings north of the border, particularly in Texas. Fires were still burning in Oaxaca and Chiapas, the Mexican states containing the largest and most ecologically valuable tropical rain forests.

Resources sent from the U.S. to Mexico included about 70 tons of tools and protective equipment to outfit 3,000 Mexican firefighters, along with communications equipment, infrared aircraft, and three or four dozen fire specialists for technical assistance.

Mike Conrad, acting FMO on the San Bernardino National Forest, was sent down on the initial assessment team, and then stayed on as deputy IC. "I went down with Paul Weeden," he says. "There were two of us from the Forest Service and two from Texas State Forestry -- they were down there with us and we adopted them onto our team. We had two others from the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and the six of us went down on assessment after the Mexican government asked for what they called fire experts. We were to go to the fires and figure out what they needed and then get the recommendations back through the embassy. The inversion was so bad when we got there, though, that we couldn't even fly. We couldn't get a helicopter off the ground. It was ugly, heavy smoke, just nasty."

The team made a quick assessment. Their job was to do and get back, and within four days they had met with IC's in two Mexican states, made their assessment, and presented their recommendations, first to the U.S. embassy officials and then to the Mexican government's equivalents of the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of the Interior. "In a day and a half we got a go-ahead," says Conrad, "and we generated the orders through Washington for the personnel and the equipment, which was then assembled and sent to us in Mexico City. We got on a plane and went to Tuxtla Gutierrez and got the people distributed into the fire camps that they'd already established. We started integrating our people with their command structure. All of the equipment -- 120,000 pounds of it -- was sent to Mexico City, and the Mexican government trucked the part we'd requested to Tuxtla with a military escort. We took delivery and set up a supply system to get it out to the fires."

Mike Dudley, aviation management specialist at the Forest Service's Washington office, acted as coordinator at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He and other Forest Service staff worked with the USAID coordinators on getting personnel, supplies, and equipment into Mexico City and cleared through customs and immigration to the center point of Tuxtla Gutierrez, the largest small city in the state of Chiapas. Their major shipment, which came in May 25, included tools and personal protection equipment for 3000 personnel. Put together by the National Coordination Center and the Great Basin Cache in Boise, the equipment was flown out of Los Angeles on two planes, an L-1011 widebody and a DC-8. "The intent was to keep part of the equipment in Mexico City at the SEMARNAP center," says Dudley. "The rest of it went to Tuxtla for distribution. What we take for granted here is unusual to them -- other than SEMARNAP personnel, they don't have PPE such as pants, or helmets, boots, or even shirts -- nothing for fighting fire on the scale that we're used to. The farmers there, if there is a fire on their land, are responsible for helping fight that fire -- but they'd show up in sandals and cutoffs to help fight the fire."

Dudley says SEMARNAP was efficient but still a very small agency. "One key person was essentially responsible for getting everything through customs. They don't specialize in just fire; they handle the full range of environmental and natural resource management."

As on many bigticket fires, radio communications was a real problem. "It was a nightmare for the radio techs," says Dudley. "The most critical need was for the radio communications. They don't deal with fire like we do, or anything on this large a scale. They originally asked for two radio kits, one for Mexico City and one for the field. It didn't take long to figure out that it wasn't going to work. They ended up with three radio kits between the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, and for the radio techs that was a bit of a nightmare. The thing that was killing them was finding good peaks. When you travel in the Western United States, there are high points where you can land and stick up a repeater. Down there, though, everything is covered under a full canopy layer of jungle. They had a hard time getting things into position and getting it to work."

Perhaps the biggest need they had in Mexico -- the one they didn't know about -- was the infrared (IR) aircraft resources. It's tough to set up your strategy when you don't know where your problems are, and the Mexicans had no way to know this. The smoke layer, covering pretty much everything on the ground for miles and miles, prevented effective overflights. Even in spots where it was possible to see, most of the fire was at ground level, creeping through the duff under a solid layer of jungle canopy. Even then, there were days when the smoke was so thick that they couldn't fly, and areas where the jungle canopy was so thick that it was tough to see even with the IR equipment. "But the IR resources were maybe the most important thing they had," says Dudley. "It gave them an idea of just how much problem they had, but the fires were hidden away in the jungle, and the locals didn't want to go in there. There's a lot of superstitions about going into the jungle."

Some of the locals and volunteers in Oaxaca were reluctant to fight fire in the jungle, but SEMARNAP firefighters go where they're told. "SEMARNAP is professional; they know what they're doing," says Dudley. "But we were overwhelmed in 1988 and 1994, and this was like that for them -- only worse. This was a 100- or 200-year event for them, and they weren't set up to deal with it."

Some of the supplies sort of dropped into the black hole of cross-the-border oblivion that's possible between a U.S. carrier and an international carrier -- it's hard enough to keep track of your luggage on a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, let alone running wildfire cargo through foreign customs. One 4800-gallon pumpkin left Boise and -- nearly two weeks later -- was finally tracked down and cleared out of customs in a little tiny town in Mexico. It was supposed to show up in southern Mexico, but it had been ordered in a later shipment, so it didn't get through customs like the earlier shipments did. On the first two air shipments, the head of Mexican customs at the international airport personally saw to the clearance of the cargo. Later minor problems with ordering were common, though; fire personnel in the U.S. are accustomed to ordering up stuff that shows up today or tomorrow, and many of them had to learn that mañana doesn't always mean literally tomorrow.

Parker says that the folks from SEMARNAP -- the Mexican federal secretaria of the environment, natural resources, and fisheries -- and the others he worked with were professional and unbelievably dedicated. "The Mexican locals were all volunteers; they supplied their own tools and food. They walked to the fire, worked on the fire, and walked home -- it's part of being a citizen. There was close cooperation between SEMARNAP, the volunteers, and the military; those three groups really worked hard and did a lot of excellent work. In the state of Oaxaca, the military had four generals, 75 officers, and nearly 1600 military personnel on the fires, which covered over a thousand square miles. We had four SkyCranes there, two from Heavy Lift and two from Erickson. We had 212s from the U.S. and Mexico, and 204s and a bunch of Russian MI-8s -- Russian helicopters in the service of the Mexican military. It's hard to say how many there were; they just kept coming and going."

Parker was in an operations center in a small building in a small town that Rand McNally doesn't know about. He worked primarily with SEMARNAP, which is based out of Mexico City. "They have regions in the states," he says, "and each state has a delegado, like a state forester, and a subdelegado. They are political appointees, and they interact with SEMARNAP."

Parker worked in the rural areas of Mexico, where poverty and get-by agriculture are a way of life. Fires are also a way of life; farmers scrape a meager living from the land by burning off their fields. Pigs and chickens and small adobe houses dot the land, and livestock graze in the fields that stretch away to the edge of the jungle. "There were more pigs than cars in the town," says Parker. "It's not unusual to see oxen pulling carts; but this is in the tropics, so we're not talking dirt -- there are mango trees everywhere. They go out and burn, and it helps trigger the monsoons, which traditionally arrive in mid-May. But it didn't happen this year. They usually have nine feet of rain in ten months, and they haven't had any serious rain since November. It rained twice, a little bit, while I was there, but every day on the way back in the from the fires, we'd see 30 more fires. We're up against centuries of agricultural burning, and these people are good at burning -- you could see where they'd cut lines around their fields and it spotted over and just kept going. There are fields of grass, pasture for their livestock, and it was all burned when I got there, just all scorched earth. It burned up to the forest, and continued on and approached the jungle. The jungle was our mission -- to protect it. It's never even been studied; we have no idea even what species are in there. It's a very foreboding place. The natives say if you go in the jungle you never return. From the air it's a solid canopy for as far as you can see and as far as you can fly. The canopy is about 90 feet above the ground and very dense; we don't have anything like it here. The closest I've seen to it is the tropical rainforest in Australia."

Fighting fire in Mexico was also like nothing Parker had seen here. "In Mexico they had no tools and no roads," he says. "People with machetés go out and cut a stick and scrape with it. Part of our mission was to instruct them in tool use and safety, portable pumps and hose and air operations." The Mexican people were appreciative and cordial, but it wasn't like a team from Boise showing up in Montana to help on a project fire. "For some of them, Spanish was their third or fourth language," he explains. "You have to think in a different paradigm about the fires in that area; you can't compare it to anything up here. It's like you go to the end of the world and take a left. The native people would walk six hours and make a helispot, then walk another six hours and make another helispot, then walk another 14 hours and make H-3. It's not like going across town." Water sources for helicopter drops were plentiful, but access to the lakes and rivers was not easily gained. Military teams had to go in and open up the jungle, and much of the terrain is straight up and down. It was all hand work, with machetés and a few chainsaws.

One such helispot-by-macheté operation turned into a near-disaster, resulting in a last-minute airlift. Pat Velasco, Payson's FMO on the Tonto National Forest, was sent down as a technical specialist, and worked from mid-May to June 17 as ops section chief and advisor to the IC in Cintalapa. "I had ten helicopters on my unit," he says, "and it was really tough with helispots. The jungle is so thick, and so rugged, it would take us four or five hours to travel a kilometer. The Mexican army special forces rappelled into some areas to set up helispots, and they nearly got burned over on one spot. We got them out in time -- we longlined them out, four guys on the end of long ropes, 13 miles over the Selva Del Ocote jungle."

Velasco's unit included two MI-8s with the Mexican army, two 212s, two 205s, a 204 and three SkyCranes -- two from Rogers Heavy Lift and one of Erickson's. "The MI-8s weren't equipped for rappelling, so we used a 205," says Velasco. "We were trying to put some helispots in there. We had people in places who were working the fire, but they were walking six or eight hours out of those little camps, and by the time they got there they were pretty well beat, so were trying to put some helispots in. It's very rugged. The slopes are steep, with deep canyons, and big sinkholes everywhere -- it's just not made for human beings. There are monkeys and lions in there, and jaguars, and snakes. They're really ugly snakes, too -- snakes that can kill."

One man had a close encounter with a Chichen tree. He got sap all over him, and it burned him badly enough that they had to get him to doctor and then back to the U.S. Though the drought has resulted in a serious lack of pools and ponds in which mosquitoes breed, Velasco says the mosquitoes still managed a good assault. "They were eating us alive. There were still plenty of them. A lot of us took a malaria treatment."

Cargo planes brought load after load of hand tools, and teams from the U.S. went from village to village with tools and instructions. "We would go to a village," says Parker, "maybe with six to twenty huts, and the men would come out, however many could that day, and we'd get them up to speed and move on to another village. I had five branch directors and seven division supes, and some of them would go to a village and spend two days or four days in the bush. They may have had a box or two of tools, pulaskis or shovels or whatever we could get." He says that though the villagers could all speak Spanish, it was sort of like growing up in the Southwest and then visiting New Orleans or New York -- the subtle differences in the language, and native languages in the villages, sometimes made for tricky communications. While team members spread out to the small villages and rural areas, Parker worked with the subdelagado and his staff trying to organize how the suppression activities were being handled, setting priorities for the operational period, assisting the IC, and coordinating the efforts of the states.

Though many of the fires were burning in heavy jungle understory, towns and agricultural areas were also burned or threatened. "We saved a little town called Emilio Ra Vasa," says Velasco. "It was threatened with a big line of fire coming toward it. The flamelengths were not real huge, just in the four- to five-foot range, but there was just so much fire on the south slopes, and some extreme fire behavior, and real high fireline intensity because of the extreme fuel depth. We dropped a lot of water, and the helicopters and ground crews picked it up and saved the town."

Velasco also helped with logistics, and assisted in organizing the material and equipment as it came in. He had Mexicans doing the ordering for tools, clothes, and rations. In addition to shipments of MREs, Velasco helped bring in boots, blivets, long lines, helmets, headlamps and batteries. "We brought in the basics from top to bottom, and we had two radio systems that we brought in. We had a guy from the L.A. County Fire Department, and radio comms from Boise, and an EMT from Rural Metro Fire. The Mexicans had their organization in place, and they were doing fine, but then we came in and advised the IC and helped them with the helicopter operations. They had some experience, but our guys really brought them up to a higher level. By the time we left they were operating just like any of our helibase managers."

Velasco worked with people in logistics skills, and trained about 120 people in basic firefighting. They were outfitted with tools and clothes from top to bottom, and acquired skills in helicopter operations, retardant mixing, planning, and operations. "We introduced the concept of planning meetings and trained about 35 people in basic ICS system. We converted the whole thing in Spanish. We were just busier than heck."

Helicopter pilots and crews were busy, too, ferrying equipment, water, and personnel. Rogers Heavy Lift out of Clovis, California had helicopters on contract with SEMARNAP. They were based near Cintalapa, and had another helicopter in Zanatepec, Oaxaca. "We had six of them down there for two months," says Robin Rogers. "We had four 212s there, and two SkyCranes. It's just been a blur. We flew them down there in April; it's close to 3000 miles from our home base. The rain forest was flat burning up there; they get a little rain and the farmers think they can burn some more. The Mexicans are very capable and very professional, though, and that helped us a lot. The people we were working for were very professional. There was just so much fire, though; if that much fire had happened in the United States, we wouldn't have been able to handle it."

For more information, check the USAid website at www.info.usaid.gov or the Spanish website at www.semarnap.gob.mx (translated version).

COMMENTS?
email Kelly Andersson

LETTER TO THE EDITOR?
email Brian Ballou

[ HOME ] [ ARTICLES ] [ CLASSIFIEDS ]
[ LINKS ] [ JOBS ] [ ADVERTISING ]