Posted on 06/30/2002 7:21:44 PM PDT by WakeUpChristian
Suspect in 'Rodeo' fire held
"We're insured. We'll rebuild," says Bobby Deneke, in the ruins of his Clay Springs home. "But insurance, what can that give us?"
By Mark Shaffer, Anne Ryman and Chris Fiscus
The Arizona Republic
June 30, 2002
A Bureau of Indian Affairs firefighter has been arrested in connection with starting the "Rodeo" fire, according to federal sources.
A spokesman for the multi-agency task force investigating the fire also confirmed an arrest was made at 8:15 p.m. Saturday. The suspect is in custody, he said, and will have an initial court appearance at 9:30 this morning before a U.S. magistrate.
Paul K. Charlton, U.S. attorney for Arizona, was to have a news conference on the arrest this morning. Details will be available at azcentral.com after the briefing.
The suspect's name was not released.
The Rodeo fire broke out June 18 just north of Cibecue on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and later joined with the "Chediski" fire, set as a signal fire by a lost hiker. Their union created a blaze that, so far, has charred more than 455,000 acres, destroyed at least 423 structures and cost at least $17 million to fight.
In Colorado, Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service employee who reported the "Hayman" fire, is charged with starting that blaze, which has burned 137,000 acres, destroyed at least 133 homes and cost more than $29 million to fight.
Barton, 38, has pleaded innocent to four federal charges, including arson, in the blaze June 8 southwest of Denver. She was indicted by a federal grand jury. Barton was a seasonal employee with the Forest Service for 18 years, and officials said Saturday she was fired.
The break in the Arizona investigation came on a day when ash fell in Forest Lakes but flames remained about a mile away, leaving residents and firefighters upbeat.
About 20 miles of bulldozed lines and fires intentionally set to rob the wildfire of fuel were credited with helping to keep the fire away from the community and about 800 homes. Flames hit the lines several times Saturday, but they held.
A concern today is that if winds increase, embers could leap across those lines.
"We dodged some pretty big bullets these last few days," said Jim Littlepage, chief of the Forest Lakes Volunteer Fire Department.
The fire is now 35 percent contained.
About 1,300 firefighters battled the fire's volatile western front near Forest Lakes to try to block the blaze from crossing Arizona 260. They included seven hotshot crews, each with about 20 people.
There is hope that Forest Lakes could have a similar fate as Show Low, all but doomed one day only to survive.
Fire officials Saturday night were hopeful, unlike the previous evening.
The mood was far different than when about 300 residents attended a morning briefing at a Payson evacuation center, listening to the tenuous hold crews had on the fire.
As Leo Paletta, a 65-year-old retired salesman, listened, his thoughts were of the two-bedroom home in Forest Lakes he bought in 1985. He moved there full-time in 1998.
"It seems like a dream, like a nightmare," he said. "You have to resolve yourself you might lose it."
But if crews have their way, Forest Lakes won't join the list of casualties.
A bulldozed fire line south of Arizona 260 stood guard between the fire and the mostly seasonal community that is a mix of old cabins, 4,000-square-foot luxury homes and mobile homes.
Crews also were able to seal off the five main canyons, known as the "Devil's Claw," that lead into the Forest Lakes community. Airplanes dropped slurry along Arizona 260, and helicopters used water buckets to attack the fire.
They also used a "helitorch," a helicopter used to set ground afire in targeted areas. Crews also dropped what essentially are pingpong balls filled with a dry chemical that is then injected with antifreeze to ignite, starting small fires when dropped in specific areas.
Others used the more mundane approaches, raking around houses, thinning out smaller trees and scratching buffers around propane tanks.
Sally Kennedy, a paramedic for the Forest Lakes Volunteer Fire Department, wrung her hands as she watched the fire, which resembled a billowing thundercloud as it rose over the top of the Mogollon Rim.
"When they say it's a monster, it is," she said. "It's got a mind of it's own."
Law officials were investigating a human-caused fire that was set Saturday afternoon in Linden and was spotted by a fire official in Juniper Ridge. It grew to 20 by 20 feet before it was extinguished.
Smoke from wildfires in Arizona, Colorado and other Western states even drifted over parts of Minnesota last week, prompting air pollution alerts.
While smoke drifted to other states, wildlife drifted into Forest Lakes. The community was overrun Saturday by black bear, elk and rabbits fleeing the fire and looking for food. Animals tipped over trash cans; elk ate fruit from trees.
In Payson, the concern wasn't food, it was stress. A middle school became a place to try to ease anxiety for evacuees, with one woman offering free massages and a chiropractor offering his services. Others went for free haircuts at a local beauty salon.
Republic writer Brent Whiting and the Associated Press contributed to this article.
By Colleen Long, Associated Press Writer
June 29, 2002
The U.S. Forest Service has fired Terry Barton, the employee charged with starting the largest wildfire since Colorado became a state.
Forest Service spokesman Lynn Young said today that Barton was fired because of her "conduct." Young wouldn't elaborate because the investigation is continuing into the Hayman fire, which has burned 137,000 acres, destroyed at least 133 homes and cost more than $29 million to fight.
Barton, 38, has pleaded innocent to four federal charges, including arson, for allegedly starting the blaze June 8 that is burning southwest of Denver. She was indicted by a federal grand jury.
She had been a seasonal employee with the Forest Service for 18 years, and was serving a year probationary period as a full-time staffer, Young said. Probationary employees are not allowed to appeal administrative decisions.
Seasonal employees, including firefighters, work roughly eight months a year. It is not uncommon for seasonal employees to work many years without becoming fulltime staff.
Barton was given a letter that her job was terminated June 22.
Barton family spokeswoman Connie Work said she hoped Forest Service officials were not assuming that Barton was guilty, and the decision was protocol.
"It's heartbreaking for her. She loves her job and she loves what she does," Work said. "There's not a chance in the world she did it deliberately and this is just one more blow."
Work said she hoped Barton would be reinstated if found innocent.
Young said the news of Barton's charges came as a shock to forest service employees.
"It's the same kind of feeling as if you found out it was a member of your family," he said. "But we employees, like the rest of the country, are going to have to let the legal system take its course."
Young, a 35-year Forest Service veteran, said employees should not dwell on the situation.
"There are still a lot of fires to fight," he said.
Barton was released Thursday from the Jefferson County Jail on $600,000 bond.
As a condition of her release, Barton was required to stay at a halfway house and get mental health counseling. She is also not allowed to leave the state or enter a forest.
Earlier in the week, her estranged husband agreed to use their home as security for her bond.
Barton has allegedly told authorities she sparked the fire accidentally while burning a letter from him.
Friends said she had been struggling with a failing marriage and is trying to obtain a divorce before the accusations.
Leonard Gregg, 29, worked part-time as a firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and was one of the first people called to fight the blaze.
Gregg admitted setting the fire so he could get work on a fire crew, according to a statement filed in federal court by a BIA investigator.
''This fire was started with a profit motive behind it,'' U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton said Sunday. Gregg is the second person employed to fend off wildfires who is accused of setting the blazes during one of the country's most destructive fire seasons. Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service employee, was charged earlier in June with setting Colorado's largest-ever wildfire.
At a hearing in Flagstaff federal court on Sunday, a tired-looking Gregg said, ''I'm sorry for what I did.''
But U.S. Magistrate Stephen Verkamp cut him off, saying he shouldn't make any admission of guilt at the hearing.
Gregg was arrested Saturday in connection with two fires set June 18 near the Fort Apache Indian Reservation town of Cibecue. One fire was put out, but the other exploded up steep terrain and quickly spread, threatening the town of Show Low and overrunning two smaller communities just to the west. The wildfire merged with another, started by a lost hiker signaling a helicopter, and became the largest in Arizona history.
By Sunday, the 452,000-acre combined blaze had destroyed at least 423 homes. It was about 35 percent contained by fire lines near Show Low but continued to burn out of control to the west.
According to the criminal complaint, Gregg said he had set the fires near Cibeque by using matches to set dry grass aflame. Before the fire was reported, he told a woman he had to get home because there was going to be a fire call, the complaint said. Gregg didn't expect the fire to get so big, the complaint said.
If convicted of both counts of willfully setting fire to timber or underbursh, Gregg could face 10 years in prison and be fined $500,000.
Jim Paxon, a fire spokesman, called Sunday's revelation ''gut-wrenching.'' ''It causes a lot of angst and heartburn and questioning,'' Paxon said.
The judge said an attorney would be appointed for Gregg and set a preliminary hearing for Wednesday. Gregg, a resident of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, is being held in the Coconino County Jail.
Firefighters continued to fight the blaze Sunday and were focused on keeping the flames from bursting out of steep canyons and into the 600 homes of Forest Lakes, about 40 miles west of Show Low. The fire merged with another blaze, set by a hiker signaling for help, into the largest wildfire in Arizona history. In Show Low, residents were back in their homes for the first time since June 22.
About 25,000 residents were allowed to return to the area Saturday after firefighters were able to hold the blaze to within a half-mile of Show Low's edge. The town of 7,700 was untouched, but in nearby communities, dozens of homes had been burned and blacked by the flames.
As residents poured back into the area, they found a patchwork of burned homes around the communities of Pinedale, Pinetop-Lakeside and Hon-Dah. ''I just kept praying and I knew it was going to be all right,'' said Mary Capuozzo of Pinetop-Lakeside. In nearby Linden, residents were still kept from the more heavily damaged subdivision of Timberland Acres, a square mile that had been dotted with log cabins, trailers and ranch-style homes.
Residents of areas farther west of Show Low, including Heber-Overgaard, where more than 200 homes burned, were still under orders to stay out, among 3,500 to 4,000 people still kept from their homes. In other developments: - Lightning sparked several wildfires in Wyoming that threatened rural homes. A 4,600-acre west of Wheatland was burning ranchland owned by Republican gubernatorial candidate Ray Hunkins, who immediately put his campaign on hold. ''I'd guess the whole south part of our place has been burned,'' he said via cell phone from atop a hill overlooking his spread. ''We're out of the cattle business, it looks like.''
- An 8-000-acre fire that burned through the town of Shields, N.D., was contained Sunday afternoon. It burned 30 buildings in the 15-resident town, leaving only one home, a bar and the small post office, since Saturday afternoon. - Thousands of people fled the South Dakota gambling town of Deadwood because of a wildfire that was 35 percent contained Sunday afternoon. Two homes and six other buildings were destroyed in the town of 1,380 residents.
- Fire crews in Colorado extended their containment lines around a more than 71,000-acre wildfire north of Durango. It was 40 percent contained but still threatened 152 homes. The flames had destroyed 56 houses.
Enough to make you wonder if Washington is covertly waging war on forest-dependent regions of the West.
This is a somewhat familar senario where government money is involved - as it has been in the "environmental" and "forestry" business for the past.....what(?)30 years or so.
I recall during the 1960's when we were installing ICBM missle sites as fast as we could (Titan I), we would bring a lot of wealth to the small towns that had never seen that kind of money before.
Local contractors would be hired to do some of the regular work in the silos; plumbing, heating and air-conditioning ducting, painting, etc; and they were working three shifts and getting wages that they only dreamed of before.
Well, when the work started to end and the money machine appeared to be drying up, suprise of suprises, a few of the contractors (usually the individual employees, not the company) would commit little (and sometimes pretty big) acts of sabatoage so the money would keep flowing.
Sounds to me that some of the same mentality is at work here. "The gov's got the money, how do I get some? Start a fire I guess"!
I'm not sure how you solve the problem One possible solution is to go back to volunteer firefighters in rural communities - and let them and the "enviromentalists who care" fight forest fires. But thats probably a bit idealistic and drastic....no simple solutions occur to me....anyone got an idea?
Do a google search and you'll see what I mean.
Sounds like there is a need for serious psychological profiling prior to hiring ALL public servants. IMHO.
Timberland in the South, which to this day accounts for three-fourths of Livingston Parish, is largely held in private hands. The bulk of southern timberland is owned my large, publicly-held corporations, but there is a sizeable share held by small, private owners.
Out West, on the other hand, a very different situation exists. Most western states were first territories belonging to and managed by the federal government before they were officially admitted to the union with full-fledged statehood. In the South, land was privately owned long before the United States government entered the scene. In the West, land was owned by the U.S. government, and then parceled out to private owners.
As a result, a huge amount of timberland west of the Mississippi River in the United States is owned by the federal government. It is on these lands that the wildfires making recent headlines have started.
There is rarely a major timberland wildfire on private property. That is because private property owners view their trees as an investment. They can’t afford to sit back and watch their slow-growing crop burn to the ground. Trees are money, and money shouldn’t be burned. Or should it? The federal government’s view of its own timberland is quite different from the view of a typical private landowner, large or small. The government’s attitude is that fires in the forest are a good thing.
The National Wildlife Federation, whose top executives came from the very liberal Bill Clinton administration, actually promotes the value of wildfires in the forest. This radical environmentalist group flatly states on its web page (www.nwf.org) that “. . . fire is critical to healthy forests.”
Oh really? Then why are there very healthy forests all over the South that are rarely, if ever, destroyed by wildfire?
It’s because the owners of those timberlands in the South are private individuals and private corporations. They carefully “weed out” their commercial timberland, keeping their trees healthy without the “benefit” of fires. Modern tree farming does not embrace the absurdity that “fires are good.” Today’s tree farmers keep their forests “healthy” the same way other farmers keep their cotton fields or corn fields healthy. By engaging in forest management techniques that clean out negative growth in their forests and systematically harvest trees when their time has come, these private landowners avoid the destruction caused by fires.
Any visitor to Yellowstone National Park during the last decade has seen first-hand what the landscape can look like after a major wildfire. And the purchase of an inexpensive book at the site of Old Faithful can teach the visitor that, yes, the fire that destroyed Yellowstone’s timberland was allowed to burn by government employees on the theory that “fire is good.”
The “good” fire burned out of control, and an entire generation of forest was lost.
Some of the National Wildlife Federations’ top officials were largely responsible for Bill Clinton’s last-minute executive orders that severely curtailed permitted timber harvesting on federal lands. Clinton’s environmentalist employees rarely were able to capture the true interest of the president. But his Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbit, a dedicated Greenie from Arizona, was able to convince Clinton during has last two days as president to sign sweeping orders restricting the government’s authority to allow private companies to harvest timber on federal lands. According to the Washington Post’s account of Babbit’s meeting with Clinton, the president glanced up at Babbit just before signing the orders and with raised eyebrows said, “Bruce, this is a good thing, right?”
No, Bill Clinton was never much interested in environmental issues, but he knew that some of his most caustic critics in the Congress opposed the orders Babbit wished him to sign. And so, with Babbit’s personal assurance that his signature on the orders was “a good thing” he sought revenge against his antagonists, the western Republicans in Congress, by severely limiting federal timber sales.
The impact of Clinton’s executive orders is plain to see as wild fires rage on public lands in the west destroying billions of dollars in property and endangering lives.
The assertion that “fire is critical to healthy forests” just isn’t true. If it were true, there wouldn’t be a “healthy” acre of timberland east of the Mississippi and south of the Ohio. But the reality is that the entire South is covered with healthy forests managed in private hands and never suffers the sort of massive wildfires experienced by the West.
Yet, despite the fallaciousness of the assertion that public ownership of land is crucial to the survival of our forests, that assertion is very much the policy of the federal government today, enhanced greatly by Mr. Clinton, Mr. Babbit, and their old cronies now nesting at the National Wildlife Federation.
Burn, baby, burn.
Jeff M. David is the publisher of the Livingston Parish News.
Ok that's it, you stop posting this hate speech right now. We all know only White Males can be guilty of such an onerous crime. I'm going to get with the ACLU and sue you for this. /sarcasm
I suspect that his first name and initial is "Pat C." When the public cries for a villain to blame, you can leave it to your gov't to come up with one, rightly or wrongly. The agenda: "Accuse him, try him in the media, the forums and he'll never get a fair trial or see the light of day." God bless the righteous unsuspecting cog caught in the system who is falsely accused in these situations. The gov't gets its "villain," just like Enron got the gold mine and the little guys got the shaft.
Best of luck and Godspeed to you both.
Yep - I feel safe already...
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