Hull Mountain Fire Entrapment 1994

The Oregon Department of Forestry Incident Management Team 3 was mobilized to fight the Hull Mountain Fire which burned on private land and land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The Department of Forestry protects BLM forest land in western Oregon. Despite erratic and extreme fire behavior and the early loss of several homes, firefighting efforts proceeded normally for the first several days. An entrapment fatality occurred Thursday, August 25, 1994, in the southeastern portion of the fire on Division C. Early in the afternoon, as the morning smoke inversion lifted, the fire began to move into extremely dry vegetative fuels. The fire quickly spotted across control lines from the previous day and once in Division C grew to a plume-dominated fire event. As fire behavior escalated to firestorm proportions, the flames made a rapid run toward Meadows Road covering a quarter mile in an estimated two to five minutes. A half mile west of Meadows Road, two dozers became trapped by the fire. One of the dozer operators, Mike Davis, was able to create a defensible zone where he survived the fire storm. The other dozer operator, Sydney B. Maplesden Jr., was not able to get out of the fire's path and was killed. He was found laying face down on the ground next to the dozer he had borrowed from a nearby landowner. The victim was removed from the fire scene later that evening.