Welcome to 10 minute Bible Talks.

Where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Tanya Wilmoth. In the United States, before 1995, the National Forest

Service had a reactive approach to wildfires. If there was a wildfire, their protocol was to put it out. We had fire towers, we had people

manning them through all seasons to be on the lookout for fires. But on August 5,

1949, there was a fire in the man gulch in Montana. A fire spotter noticed the fire from a watch station and notified the department who sent out a group of 15 fire jumpers to get it under control. The team leader was Wagner Dodge and he noticed the fire was burning in a way that was going to be easy to control as long as they kept the river at their backs.

So they split off for a few minutes so that they could fight it separately.

And by the time they got back together, Wagner, Dodge, noticed that something had happened. The fire had

jumped a valley and it was now coming for them much faster than he originally thought.

He realized at one point that they had about 30 seconds before the fire was going to reach them.

And the crew was trained to run away from the fire, which would have been up mountain, and they were also trained to always carry all of their

tools with them. Now, Wagner Dodge knew that neither of those were going to work. Fire

travels faster up, mountain, mountain than down and man travels slower up mountain

than down, especially when you're encumbered by all of your fire tools. So he wanted them to go against their training.

He wanted them not only to drop their tools,

but to do something that he was about to do,

and something that had never been done before,

which was to light a smaller fire and then take cover in it

while the big fire went over the top. Well, we don't know all that happened there was a lot of smoke, a lot of chaos, but most of the men ran and

they were consumed by the fire. In fact, 13 men died. They were found by their

tools kind of scattered in about a hundred foot radius around the mountain

But three men survived

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