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Author shares tragedy and lessons from "Big Burn"

Thursday, November 19

Seattle author Tim Egan didn't set out to write a comprehensive story about fire and the Forest Service when he started his new book "The Big Burn". As he researched the 100^th anniversary of the nation's largest blaze here in Montana and Idaho, he discovered not only amazing stories of people caught in the fire's path, but how the event impacted forest management for decades.

Egan is wrapping up a 30-city tour to promote his new book, "The Big Burn", released a few weeks ago. It tells the tragic, and heroic tales of the 1910 fire commonly called "The Big Blowup" which erupted in August that year.

An usually dry spring and summer, coupled with two major thunderstorms started more than 25-hundred fires by mid-August. But it was hurricane force winds out of Eastern Washington, a "Palouser", which turned those fires into an unbelievable inferno. Towns like Wallace, Idaho were nearly destroyed, others wiped off the face of map forever and 1-hundred firefighters were dead.

"It was almost lost to history and very few people know about this thing, even though it dominated the news a hundred years ago. This was the Hurricane Katrina of its time in fires."

Yet Egan's book is about more than a cataclysmic fire. It tells the fascinating back story about how the fires tested the young U-S Forest Service, formed just five years before.

"What it was like to fight fire when they had no idea what a fire was like. Today we have the smokejumpers here in Missoula and they're about as good as it gets. But then they had no idea what it was doing. So, in many ways it was like a step back into another world, even though a hundred years ago is not long in historic times. Completely like another world"

Still it's the stories of the heroes and villains which stick with you from this best seller. And living here in Western Montana, the frightening speculation of whether Nature would ever strike with fire like this again.