Earlier in the Mann Gulch era, firefighters missed another opportunity to rethink. The opportunity was right in front of them. Before Dodge started tossing matches into the brush, he ordered his team to unload their heavy gear. They had been frantically running uphill for the past eight minutes, still carrying axes, saws, shovels, and twenty-pound backpacks.
In a scenario of escaping, your first instinct might be to shed anything that could slow you down. However, for firefighters, their tools are essential for their missions, and carrying and caring for their equipment is deeply ingrained in their training and experience. It wasn’t until Dodge gave the order that most firefighters relinquished their tools. And even then, one firefighter clung onto a shovel until a colleague took it from his hands.
Could the team members have potentially saved their lives if they had ditched their tools faster?
We will never know for sure, but Mann Gulch was not an isolated incident. Between 1990 and 1995 alone, a total of twenty-three wildland firefighters perished while trying to outrun wildfires uphill, and shedding their heavy gear could have made a difference between life and death.
In 1994, on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, strong winds caused the fire to leap over the gulch and engulf the area. Fourteen firefighters and wildland firefighters, including four women and ten men, all ran uphill on rocky terrain, seeing safety just two hundred feet away, only to meet their demise.
According to investigators later, without their tools and backpacks, this group of people could have increased their speed by 15% to 20%. “If they could drop their gear and run to safety, most could have survived,” one expert wrote.
“If they ‘drop their backpacks and tools,’ the U.S. Forest Service concurs, ‘firefighters can beat the fire to the ridge.'”
It’s reasonable to assume that initially, the team members may have sprinted without conscious thought, possibly not even realizing they were still carrying backpacks and tools.
“I had run about three hundred yards uphill,” a survivor from Colorado testified, “before I realized I still had my chainsaw on my shoulder!” Even after making the wise decision to drop the twenty-five-pound chainsaw, he wasted precious time: “I irrationally started looking for a place to set it down where it wouldn’t burn… I remember thinking, ‘I can’t believe I have to put down my chainsaw.'”
When one victim was found, they still had a backpack on and were tightly gripping the chainsaw handle. Why did so many firefighters hold onto their tools, even though letting go could have saved their lives?
If you are a firefighter, dropping your tools not only requires you to break habits but also to ignore your instincts. Letting go of your equipment means admitting failure and stripping away part of your identity.
You must rethink the purpose of your work and your role in life.
“You can’t fight fire with your body and hands; you have to use the tools that represent firefighters,” organizational psychologist Karl Weick explained. “That’s why firefighters were deployed in the first place… Dropping the tools creates an existential crisis. Without my tools, who am I?”
Wildfires are relatively rare, and most of us do not rely on split-second decisions that determine our survival, forcing us to reimagine our tools as sources of danger and fire as a path to safety. However, the challenge of rethinking assumptions unexpectedly widespread and perhaps universally applicable to everyone.
We all make the same mistakes as firefighters and wildland firefighters, but the consequences are not as dire and often go unnoticed. Our ways of thinking become habits that could crush us, and we fail to question them until it’s too late.
We expect our squeaking brakes to keep working until they finally fail on the highway. We believe in the stock market continuing to rise even after analysts warn of an impending real estate bubble. Assuming everything is fine in our marriage even as our partner grows emotionally distant. Feeling safe at work while some colleagues are already being laid off.
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