Clues that may have saved lives in Gatlinburg fire came in earlier than many know

The sun hadn’t yet risen on Nov. 28, 2016, when Great Smoky Mountains National Park officials realized a wildfire that had been burning for five days on Chimney Tops mountain had broken loose from the summit.

The flames had leaped a mile the night before from the scraggly spires of the well-known peak to the Chimney Tops picnic area below and jumped two miles north to Bullhead Spur Ridge, on a line pointing toward Gatlinburg.

At 7:30 a.m., park officials met in the picnic area to evaluate the situation. Best-made plans were deteriorating and the day had hardly begun. Already steady winds were expected to grow out of control by the afternoon.

This part of the tragedy has been told. What hasn’t been told, until now, is that a park official warned that morning the fire could roar out of the park as far as Ski Mountain, shorthand for Ski Mountain Road, which winds west of Gatlinburg to Ober Gatlinburg Ski Resort four miles away.

The assessment came in a radio transmission from a park employee to park dispatch around 8:30 a.m., and was detailed in a transcript of communications obtained by Knox News.

It's the earliest known suggestion the fire could threaten Gatlinburg, and though park officials alerted city firefighters three hours later the fire could leave the park, no one shared the assessment that Ski Mountain was at risk.

It’s possible, had the Park Service shared the assessment, lives could have been saved.

Eight of the 14 deaths attributed to the wildfire came as people fled in a mad rush on or around Ski Mountain Road, not far from Highway 441, which runs through Gatlinburg.

Flames were spotted near Ski Mountain Road around 7 p.m. and a mandatory evacuation was ordered just before 8 p.m., but it was largely too late. By 8:15 p.m. Sevier County deputies were ordered to evacuate in order to save themselves, and residents were fleeing for their lives.

An after-action report compiled by the Knoxville office of the Texas-based ABS Group and paid for by Gatlinburg and Sevier County later confirmed park officials never shared the suggestion that the fire could advance to Ski Mountain Road. The report largely blamed park officials for their failure to share information with municipal leaders.

In a combined statement to Knox News, city and county leaders said the newspaper's new findings further bolster the ABS Group report.

"This information confirms that the contents of the After Action Review report, which the City of Gatlinburg and Sevier County Government commissioned ABS Group to perform, was correct."

Great Smoky Mountains National Park caught off guard

Fire Management Officer Greg Salansky, who was in charge of the effort to monitor and fight the fire, didn’t assign anyone to watch the fire overnight, so it came as a surprise to park officials when a maintenance crew called dispatch at 7:01 a.m. to report the fire was burning in the picnic area.

The fire had grown at least tenfold overnight, from just 35 acres to as many as 500 acres.

It was around 8:30 a.m. that another Park Service employee suggested the fire could continue to grow.

“Ah, yeah, this thing is spotted from the top of Chimneys Tops all the way across 441 to the ridge tops on the east side of 441.

“My concern is right now is if it starts spotting that far to the north and something gets on the other side of Little River Road and possibly can make a run up towards Ski Mountain, I don’t want to put that out over the air but whoever you send out to Little River Road just make sure that that they’re keeping a good eye on that."

“OK. Yeah we’ll take care of it,” came the reply. “I’m gonna tie in with the 402 in just a minute. We’ll, ah, make it happen.”

Knox News could not confirm who radioed the suggestion about the fire moving all the way to Ski Mountain Road, but Park Service radio call signs show the conversation was between two individuals with call signs 110 and 400.

Based on the transcripts and information corroborated by a former Park Service employee who was privy to the radio communications, it appears the assessment was make by Chief Ranger Steve Kloster and acknowledged by Park Superintendent Cassius Cash.

Transcripts show others referring to the person assigned to call sign 110 by his first name (Steve), and the person identified as call sign 400 making command decisions.

The time of the exchange between the two isn’t recorded in the transcript, but a transmission appearing in the transcript a couple of lines later was noted at 8:32 a.m. on a separate dispatch log, which Knox News used to cross reference the two records of radio conversation.

A park spokesperson declined to comment on a list of questions from Knox News, including which call signs were assigned to which people, citing ongoing litigation by the families of those who were killed. Salansky declined to comment, also citing the pending litigation.

A spokesperson for Sequoia National Park, where former deputy superintendent Clay Jordan is now park superintendent, did not respond to a request for comment. Phone calls and text messages sent to numbers associated with Kloster were not returned.

Fire chief: No warning about threat

On the morning of Nov. 28, the Monday after Thanksgiving, the Gatlinburg Fire Department was getting blitzed by phone calls from residents and tourists wondering if they should evacuate.

The sky was filled with so much smoke it was beginning to blot out the sun.

Gatlinburg Fire Chief Greg Miller told a fire captain to reach out to Salansky at 9 a.m. – roughly 30 minutes after the park official identified by call sign 110 worried about the fire spreading to Ski Mountain – to inquire about the smoke.

But Salansky didn’t answer and didn’t return the call until 10:58 a.m., likely due to lack of cell service in the park, according to the after-action report paid for by Gatlinburg and Sevier County.

When Salansky called back, he told officials the Gatlinburg Fire Department would be alerted, if needed, and that the potential of the fire to spread into Gatlinburg was unlikely and reminded them of predicted rain. Salansky was not part of the radio conversation that included the Ski Mountain Road suggestion.

Salansky reported “no assistance was needed regarding this matter at that time,” the report reads.

At 11:30 a.m., Cash and Kloster arrived at the Gatlinburg Fire Department headquarters to tell them the fire could move beyond the boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

At 11:44 a.m., Park Service dispatch asked Gatlinburg firefighters for help as the fire crept into the Twin Creeks picnic area, a mile and a half from the park boundary south of Gatlinburg. Around noon, police began telling people near Mynatt Park at the city's southern tip that they should consider evacuating.

No record reflects that Park Service personnel mentioned the concern about the flames spreading to Ski Mountain Road.

Miller, the Gatlinburg fire chief, declined to comment about the response to the fire, citing the lawsuit against the park. However, in an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Miller put all the blame on the park.

“(Gatlinburg firefighters and police) were kept in the dark, uninformed by Park officials about the scale and scope of a fire heading toward Gatlinburg at speeds topping 2,000 acres per hour.

“I believe that if the people of Gatlinburg had sufficient warning, lives and property could have been saved,” Miller wrote. “With sufficient warning, we would have had time to cut off electricity and safely evacuate everyone."

Reed tragedy becomes the story of the wildfire

Sometime after 7 p.m. that Monday, Michael Reed and his son left Reed’s wife, Constance, and two daughters, Chloe, 12, and Lily, 9, atop their Chalet Village home just over from Ski Mountain to try to find official word about whether they should evacuate. There had been no word to that point.

He left in the family’s only vehicle.

Reed made his way to the Gatlinburg Welcome Center along the Spur – the Parkway connecting Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge – where he found a pair of park rangers who told him to leave. But Reed got stuck in evacuation traffic as he tried to make his way back to his home, which sat on a hill near on one of the many bends along Wiley Oakley Drive.

Around the same time, Constance noticed flames coming from a house across the street, and about 8 p.m. she reached Michael on his cell phone. The following is taken from the lawsuit against the park:

Constance: “What do I do?”

Michael: “Call 911.”

Constance calls 911: “The fire is next door to my house … My husband is not home. I don’t have a vehicle, and I have no way out of here. I have no way out, and I have children at home.”

Dispatcher: “Stay with me.”

Then, the line went dead.

Days later, a broken Reed told a CNN reporter he was too late by the time he made it back up the mountain.

"The road was on fire and every house was engulfed in flames. I thought she'd be standing in the driveway."

She wasn’t. And Reed would never see her again. The bodies of his wife and two girls were found days later in a burnt-out house down the street where they had sought shelter.

Reed’s grief immediately became the public face of the tragedy, and it would continue as he became the named plaintiff in the lawsuit against the park, which continues.

Reed, through his attorney, declined to comment for this story. In his lawsuit against the park, Reed pointed blame on the park and how the fire was mismanaged from the start.

Lack of urgency cost lives, report says

The report compiled after the fire and paid for by Gatlinburg and Sevier County put much of the blame on a lack of communication from the National Park Service.

The report said “more timely and accurate communication” from the park would’ve helped the city prepare for the disaster. The report commissioned by Gatlinburg and Sevier County covered the fire from start to finish in contrast to a Park Service report that ends abruptly once the fire left the national park and does not examine what happened after.

“In retrospect, firefighting and evacuation plans would likely have been better directed and accelerated if more accurate fire location data from the GSMNP personnel and NWS (National Weather Service) wind data had been used to model fire progression,” the report said.

Lawsuit deals with park’s failure to warn

Whether the park violated its own fire management plan has become the central question of a massive lawsuit.

The Park Service's rules say adjacent communities should be notified of “all planned and unplanned fire management activities that have the potential to impact them.”

Lawyers for the Park Service say blaming the agency for its decisions during an unprecedented natural disaster isn’t fair. They want the lawsuit dropped.

The lawsuit was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Ronnie Greer over what amounted to a paperwork issue, but a three-judge panel on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed his decision in August.

Judge Helene White, who wrote the lead opinion, said the entire lawsuit points to the National Park’s failure to warn.

The families’ lawsuit and the Park Service’s own post-fire investigation report “detail a course of events in which the park’s purported failures to monitor and extinguish the fire were interwoven with the park’s communication failures,” her opinion said.

Tyler Whetstone is an investigative reporter focused on accountability journalism. Connect with Tyler by emailing him at tyler.whetstone@knoxnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyler_whetstone.

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This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Gatlinburg wildfire threat was known hours before evacuation order