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6 volunteer firefighters held in fires tied to 35 arsons

A federal AG report last year noted that 64% of forest fires in the 1990's were started by federal forest service employees or contractors who profited from fighting forest fires.

www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/2009/01/14/20090114fi
refighters0114.html

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Originally posted by rue:
"A federal AG report last year noted that 64% of forest fires in the 1990's were started by federal forest service employees or contractors who profited from fighting forest fires."

This isn't part of the story, it's a comment about the story by John Q Public. I tried to validate the information, but couldn't find any reference that even came close.

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“I’ll burn your house down, set your dog on fire and there won’t be a member of your family left, do you understand me? I won’t hire it done, I will do it myself! Do you understand me?”
-Blount County TN sheriff James Berrong, United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, Nuchols v. Berrong, No. 04-5645, July 11, 2005
www.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/05a0586n-06.pdf

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FIREFIGHTER ARSON: LOCAL ALARM

By Ken Cabe
SC Forestry Commission (1994)
Published in Fire Management Notes Vol. 56, No. 1 (1996)

Day care workers who molest children, religious leaders who seduce parishioners, police officers who brutalize citizens—unfortunately, our icons seem to crumble regularly in the national news. They break a sacred trust and public outrage becomes the expression of private fear. Righteous indignation comes easy when the guilt is somewhere else. But when the headlines scream “Fireman Arrested for Arson,” it gets downright personal.

The South Carolina Forestry Commission began looking closely at this phenomenon in 1993. By the end of the year, the tally of confirmed arrests was truly alarming—at least 33 fire department volunteers had been charged with arson. In 1994, 47 more were arrested. Forestry Commission and South Carolina Fire Service officials alike were astounded at the extent of the problem. “We knew it happened occasionally,” said Miles Knight, fire chief of the Forestry Commission, “but we were surprised by numbers like this.”

This may be the case in other southern states as well. Most forestry agencies in the south acknowledge that firefighter arson does occur to some extent. The Alabama Forestry Commission says they investigated five or six cases in 1993; Arkansas has had five or six cases over the past few years; Kentucky has a “significant problem” with individuals setting fires so they can be hired to put them out; and Louisiana notes that wildland firefighters sometimes set fires to gain overtime pay.

In South Carolina, those firemen who were charged with serial arson were unpaid volunteers. Why do they set fires? Obviously not for monetary gain, so the answer is necessarily a lot more complicated.

The descriptive profile suggests that these young men have very little to bolster their self-esteem except their role as heroic firefighters. Noted arson researchers Lewis and Yarnell (1951) support this idea in their description of the “would-be hero” arsonist:

“ . . . men with grandiose social ambitions whose natural equipment dooms them to insignificance.”

But in North Carolina, where the firefighter arson problem seems similar, one arrested arsonist was already planning to take his heroics a step further. His goal, according to a State Bureau of Investigation agent, was to burn an occupied home so he could rescue the occupants.

www.state.sc.us/forest/lear.htm

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A Los Angeles County Fire Department public information officer and his wife were charged with arson Thursday for allegedly setting ablaze an unoccupied Pasadena house last summer after their attempt to buy it failed.

Roland Lee Sprewell, 37, was arrested by the San Gabriel Valley Arson Explosives Task Force for allegedly lighting a fire that severely damaged the house at 1541 N. Raymond Ave., Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said.

Heidi Sprewell, 36, was charged with one count of arson related to the fire on July 26, 2001.

Prosecutors allege that the Altadena couple set the fire after a bank refused to return a deposit on the home that they had tried to buy.

http://articles.latimes.com/2002/feb/15/local/me-arson15

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Jury convicts firefighter of murder, arson

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A former firefighter faces the death penalty after being convicted of murder Friday for a hardware store fire that killed a woman, her grandson and two employees.

Investigators said John Orr set fires to develop material for a novel he was writing about an arsonist who got sexual pleasure from his crimes.

Orr, 49, was found guilty of four murder counts for the fire at Ole's Home Center in South Pasadena.

He was also convicted on several arson charges for a series of brush and house fires in the Los Angeles area in 1990 and 1991, one of which destroyed 67 hillside homes.

The penalty phase begins ...

www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-19765320.html

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Terry Lynn Barton was trained to spot the first glimmerings of fire in the Pike National Forest in Colorado, where she worked as a seasonal employee for the United States Forest Service.

Leonard Gregg was a part-time firefighter on the Fort Apache Indian reservation in Arizona.

So it was perhaps predictable that the arrest of Ms. Barton and Mr. Gregg, who are charged with starting the largest wildfires in the histories of their respective states, would revive the notion that firefighters and others whose work involves putting out fires were also more prone to set them.

Arson, an environmentalist in the Northwest declared confidently in newspaper accounts after the arrests, is wildfire fighters' ''dirtiest little secret.''

A former fire department engineer in Arizona told a reporter that most arson fires were started by active or retired firefighters -- a fact he said he had learned in his training.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E5D81630F93AA35754C
0A9649C8B63

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The former commander of an elite team of wildland firefighters faces arson charges, prosecutors said. The defendant, Van Bateman, 55, was indicted Wednesday, accused of setting two fires in the Coconino National Forest in 2004.

Mr. Bateman was a Type I incident commander, the head of a wildfire management crew that is called in for the most severe wildfires. He also aided in recovery efforts at the World Trade Center.

He faces two federal counts of setting timber afire and two counts of arson on public lands. Setting timber afire carries a maximum prison sentence of five years, while arson is punishable by up to 20 years, federal prosecutors said.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00EED7123EF932A25752C
1A9639C8B63

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MSNBC and FDNY predict demolition of WTC 7

"This was a 40 story building. It's like watching the collapse of an active volcano. You guys knew this was comming all day?" FDNY: "We had heard reports it would be taken down, or would come down on it's own."

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"For the third time today, a building was deliberately destroyed by well-placed dynomite to knock it down."
-Dan Rather on controlled demolition of CIA HQ in WTC7

http://infowars.com/video/clips/news/010506_rather_wtc7.htm

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Originally posted by rue:
And yet, if you look at Virginia - with 20% of fires on public land arson-related, less than 20% will be set by firefighters. No way does it add up to 64%. It's not even close.

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Originally posted by rue:
Oh. I was just going by PN's statistic -

"A federal AG report last year noted that 64% of forest fires in the 1990's were started by federal forest service employees or contractors who profited from fighting forest fires."

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U.S. Fire Administration/Technical Report Series
Special Report: Firefighter Arson
USFA-TR-141/January 2003
US Dept of Homeland Security

In the summer of 2002, two Forest Service employees were accused of allegedly setting two of the largest wildfires in this country’s history. The Rodeo fire in Arizona that allegedly was started by a part-time Forest Service firefighter, merged with another blaze and raced across more than 465,000 acres. It destroyed at least 423 homes and devastated the economy of the communities nearby, including an Indian reservation. The fire was difficult to contain, and is estimated to have cost the state of Arizona and the Forest Service over $10 million to control. Prosecutors allege that the fire was set in dry grass and with the hope that the firefighter would be called to fight the fire and earn $8.00 an hour as part of the fire crew.

In Colorado, also in the summer of 2002, a Forest Service employee was accused of starting the Hayman fire in the Pike National Forest. It was a 137,000-acre fire—the largest in that state’s history--and the fire destroyed more than 130 homes, caused the evacuation of 25,000 residents, and threatened the outlying suburbs of Denver. Smoke and ash from the fire could be seen for hundreds of miles, and cost the state of Colorado and the Forest Service an estimated $15 million. While the accused employee maintains the fire was accidental, prosecutors suggest that the fire was set for revenge, attention, and to gain financially.

www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pdf

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