30 Years Later: How the Point Fire Shaped ID Firefighters

On July 28, 1995, Joe Stear was working in the back of his welding shop, Kuna Machine Shop, on Kuna’s Main Street, when he saw a lightning strike in the middle of the desert south of town.

Then he saw a puff of smoke rise up into the hot early evening sky.

“And I thought, ‘Well, I’d better get the shop locked up, so I can get out there,’” Stear, who was then a captain with the Kuna Rural Fire District, told me in an interview at Kuna City Hall, where he’s now the city’s mayor.

Little did he know then that fire would turn deadly, killing two of his colleagues, volunteer firefighters Bill Buttram, 31, and Josh Oliver, 18.

Today, 30 years later, the lessons learned in that fire are still being taught, and firefighters all over the Treasure Valley are reminded of the names Bill Buttram and Josh Oliver, and the ultimate sacrifice they made that day.

“A lot of change comes from tragedy in the fire service, and a lot of times it’s close calls, loss of life, loss of property, that make these changes happen,” Kuna Fire Chief T.J. Lawrence told me in an interview about the fire. “And that’s what happened in this instance here.”

What happened

Around 6:30 p.m. that day, firefighters from the Kuna and Bureau of Land Management fire departments responded to the lightning-caused fire on BLM land.

It was called the Initial Point Fire, so named for the nearby butte. Somewhere along the way afterwards, the name of the fire was shortened to just the Point Fire.

By 8 p.m., fire crews had encircled the 120-acre fire and had stopped the spread, according to multiple reports examining what went wrong. Fire crews began doing “mop-up,” emptying their water tanks on and around the burn perimeter. 

“It got to the point where we were done,” Stear said. “I was up on the road with the water tender, the BLM heavies came up, and I was topping them off, and we were just getting ready to pack it in and head out.”

Engine 620, which Buttram and Oliver were driving, was heading back toward the road, following Engine 622, driven by two other Kuna firefighters, to get more water.

Buttram and Oliver reported that their engine was overheating, but they didn’t seem distressed, and they were only about 700 feet from Swan Falls Road.

“And that’s when the storm came and the winds hit and it went from daylight to dark in just a matter of seconds,” Stear said. “And I mean, even the sky was black, and you could just see the fire was jumping the road. We could see the red glow in the sky above us, and it just took off at that point.”

According to one report, the fire had flame lengths more than 20 feet, which is measured on a diagonal to account for wind and slope.

With 50 mph winds, the fire was moving at an estimated 560 feet per minute, or one-and-a-half football fields in just one minute.

Buttram and Oliver drove north, trying to outrun the fire and trying to find a break in the fence to get to safety. They drove out of the blackened, already burned land and into unburned territory of cheatgrass and mature sagebrush. 

That’s when Engine 620 stalled.

“We got fire coming hard and this thing has died,” Buttram said over radio transmission. 

A minute later, Buttram radioed on the same channel: “It’s not going to let us out of here! We’re surrounded by fire!”

A Kuna command officer asked Buttram to repeat.

Buttram replied, “The truck’s been overtaken by fire!”

That was the last radio transmission from Engine 620.

It took four minutes for the flames to overtake the truck, approximately 1,700 feet away from where the previous fire line was and approximately 700 feet away from Swan Falls Road and safety.

The Point Fire continued burning for two more days, burned more than 11,000 acres of land and forced the evacuation of 250 homes outside Kuna, but as many as 200 firefighters were able to keep the fire from damaging any major structures.

‘Ominous feeling’

Brad Bolen, who is now emergency services assistant chief with the Boise Fire Department, was then a 25-year-old firefighter with the Boise District of the BLM. He was on a helicopter crew responding to a number of fires that night, including the Initial Point Fire just before the storm broke out.

“It was like a blow dryer on the back of your neck,” Bolen said in a phone interview. “It was so hot, so dry, and there was just this ominous feeling, like I had a feeling in my stomach, is the best way to describe it, like there’s something ominous about the day.”

By the time his crew had arrived, firefighters on the ground were mopping up. Bolen’s crew took the BLM incident commander up to assess the status of the Point Fire from above. They eventually left the scene to respond to another fire, but they heard the tragedy unfold.

“From that tragedy, all kinds of standards and recommendations were put into place,” Bolen said. “It really did force agencies to start working toward common standards, common goals. And there’s many things that are in place today that are just common throughout all the agencies, and the relationships that were built upon the past 30 years since then are foundational after that.”

For Bolen, it was a little more personal. He met Oliver the week before the fire at a training exercise.

“For me, personally, now, 30 years later, I can honestly tell you those events shaped me,” Bolen said. “They, without a doubt, in my opinion, set a course for me to understand firefighting in all of its nuances, understand leadership and situational awareness, and to make sure those lessons that we all learned were not lost to future generations.”

Communications

One of the main lessons from the Point Fire was the necessity of communications.

At 8:22 p.m. that evening, the BLM dispatch reported that the National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for dry lightning and locally strong winds, predicting gusts of up to 50 mph from a thunderstorm moving toward the fire, according to a timeline of events put together by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.

BLM dispatch alerted firefighters of the red flag warning by radio.

The BLM incident commander on scene felt that since the red flag warning had come over the BLM channel, all the firefighters had heard it and there was no need for him to ensure that everyone had heard the warning, according to the findings of fact and conclusions of law in a lawsuit filed at the time by the families of Buttram and Oliver.

But Kuna fire crews never heard the red flag warning, according to Stear. Stear told me that Kuna’s radios were unable to pick up BLM’s transmissions. 

Kuna and BLM were communicating on different radio frequencies, and crews could not communicate or hear transmissions on one frequency while communicating on the other, according to the BLM incident report filed after the fire.

Further, the BLM incident commander could not monitor Kuna communications because the frequency was not programmed into his radio, according to the BLM incident report.

Whatever the reason, Buttram and Oliver did not appear to have received the red flag warning and remained out in the desert as the storm approached.

Today, Lawrence said communication is a critical safety priority.

Just recently, Lawrence said he removed first responders from a fire scene because they couldn’t access the correct radio frequencies.

“If I can’t communicate with you, you can’t be on my fire, because that’s how this stuff happens,” he said.

All Ada County fire departments now use the same frequencies, and radios can be programmed to switch between different agency zones, such as BLM or local fire departments.

“The valley was much different than it is today,” Bolen said. “The relationships between fire departments were much, much different. There was true geographic distance between cities and between jurisdictions. What we have today, as far as partnership, and what we have as far as coalition, standard training, none of that really existed at the time.”

In addition, all local and federal agencies review and update frequency lists at the start of each year, and BLM will do refresher training on radio frequencies regularly.

“One of the two biggest lessons learned from that event was a breakdown in the ability to communicate,” Lawrence said. “We had the feds using their frequency and Kuna fire using a different frequency. Not everybody had the same frequencies, and that was one of the contributing factors.”

Training

Today, still some 30 years later, the Point Fire is used as a key lesson when training new recruits, Lawrence said.

Lawrence said he remembers the Point Fire being discussed in his own recruit class 20 years ago.

One of the cautionary tales is about never getting relaxed or complacent when fighting a fire.

“Complacency can put you in a bad situation,” Lawrence said. “So you always have to just be aware, be ready for the unexpected, be expecting something that you weren’t expecting.”

Lawrence has been asked by Meridian Fire to teach their recruit classes about the Point Fire, and the Boise Fire Department brings recruit classes to the Point Fire Memorial, about 7 miles south on Swan Falls Road, where Buttram and Oliver were killed.

“You don’t want the legacy of two fallen firefighters to fall off,” Bolen said. “So we as an agency with our new recruits, we take them out there, we talk about the events that unfolded, we talk about decision making, and that, for us, is a sign of respect to those two firefighters. We go to the fatality site and we reflect.”

Today, all firefighters must get the same basic firefighting and national wildland firefighting certifications before they can respond to a fire. That includes specialized training on understanding wildland fire behavior, topography and even cloud formations.

The training is annual, with refresher courses required at least once a year.

The training also serves to improve coordination among agencies, as they’re all attending the same training.

“There were latent conditions that really led up to this,” Bolen said. “Not everybody was informed the same way, not everybody was trained the same way, not everybody had the same equipment.”

Equipment

Another big lesson from the Point Fire was not to send firefighters out with substandard equipment.

Buttram and Oliver’s Engine 620 was a 1955 Army brush truck, according to previous Statesman reporting, and it had a history of stalling.

Also, Buttram and Oliver weren’t carrying standard range-fire equipment, such as foil-covered portable fire shelters, although it’s not certain fire shelters in their situation would have made a difference. Still, today, fire shelters are very much standard issue equipment on wildland fires, Lawrence said.

Before the Point Fire, the Kuna Rural Fire District, a volunteer force, had sought a $475,000 bond in 1991, which voters rejected.

Just a few months after the Point Fire, though, Kuna voters overwhelmingly approved an $850,000 bond for a new fire station and a water pumper truck.

“People had had a little more respect for fire after that,” Stear said. “Things were a little more serious. It was just devastating for us, of course, to lose two of our own out there, and there was a lot of community support.”

Since then, the fire district has continued to grow and today has an annual budget of $6 million, a full-time staff of paid professionals and a fleet of modern, well-maintained and regularly inspected equipment.

“We now have learned that, yes, equipment is extremely expensive, but dependable equipment is equally as important,” Lawrence said. “As a fire district, it’s important that we not only hire the quality people, train those people, but we also provide the equipment so they can do their job safely and their equipment is reliable.”

While the fire department is still in that same 12,000-square-foot fire station approved in 1995 at the corner of Boise and Linder avenues, Kuna voters in 2022 approved a $6 million bond to finance the construction of a second fire station south of the railroad tracks in Kuna.

Lasting impact

The reminders of Bill Buttram and Josh Oliver are everywhere in Kuna.

A plaque and portraits honoring Buttram and Oliver hang in the front hallway of the Kuna fire station, across from the main entrance, greeting everyone who enters.

Another plaque is mounted inside the cab of one of the Kuna fire engines, a regular reminder for anyone who climbs aboard.

An engraved stone sits in the main city park, near where a tree had been planted shortly after the fire. The tree is since gone, but the stone remains.

And then there’s the Point Fire Memorial, on the west side of the road Swan Falls Road, seven miles south of town.

A series of interpretative signs tell visitors what happened, flanking a stone memorial honoring Buttram and Oliver.

A path leads 700 feet out into the desert, where two white crosses stand in stark contrast to the brown desert landscape, marking the very spot where Buttram and Oliver’s truck was overtaken by fire.

The memorial was installed in 2015 by the BLM and the Kuna Rural Fire District on the 20th anniversary of the fire.

“Even firefighters, we don’t necessarily think of that,” Stear said. “You get fired up, you’ll go put out a fire and squirt water on the hot stuff and save lives and property. And you know, there’s a certain amount of that that really doesn’t hit close to home until something like that happens.

“Life’s a little more fragile than you thought it was, and you’re not quite as tough as you thought you were.”

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