Tree work incident report 22OR001: a burned green tree falls on a wildland fire crew, Oregon
What Oregon's FACE report 22OR001 says about a contract wildland firefighter who died in August 2022 when a fire-damaged green Douglas fir fell on his crew.
Checked against the sources at the bottom of this page on October 9, 2026. Rules, fees and pay change: the source has the last word.
This page reports what the official source says. It is not legal advice: ask the office named here. This page restates one official fatality report in our own words: case 22OR001 from the Oregon Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program at Oregon Health and Science University, dated May 28, 2023. It covers a contract firefighter struck by a hazard tree before any work on or near the tree had started. No one is named here or in the report. OSHA lists the report under struck-by on its tree care page. The table of every report we read is in the official case library for tree work incidents.
The job and the employer
Lightning started fires in southern Oregon on August 17, 2022, and the state forestry department called out approved contractors. The man who died owned a small forestry services company for reforestation and wildland fire response and went out with two crew members in a Type 6 engine that the report says he had not before expected to use in a fire response, and both crew members were on their first fire response. Almost half of the crews at the site were on a first fire response, and many had not worked together. Some crew members spoke English and many from other contractors spoke Spanish. The report says all three had the Oregon OSHA basic fire suppression and fire shelter training, taken on July 6, 2022 as a video series, but other training records for the owner were not available.
What happened
The crews drove in a caravan on overgrown roads, took a wrong turn, and walked the last 0.6 miles while hand crews cleared a path and flagged the escape route. Responders heard trees falling on the way in. At about 4:00 p.m., five minutes after the three men reached the crew boss near the fire edge, a loud sound came and the boss yelled to look out. The tree fell uphill toward the group, grazed the crew boss and struck the firefighter on his right side. It was a 160 foot Douglas fir, 39 inches across, that looked like a live green tree. The report says investigators found old fire scars, a weakened base and internal decay from fungus. Its base had not been visible through undergrowth and smoke.
The incident commander, trained as an emergency medical technician but not assigned to that role and without his kit, called for a helicopter. The short-haul helicopter arrived about 30 minutes after the call, but its line was too short to reach down through the canopy, and it took until about 4:45 p.m. to find a lower spot. The crew carried the patient almost half a mile on the flagged route in a rescue extraction bag. He was lifted at about 5:30 p.m., reached the hospital at 6:30 p.m. and had died of blunt force chest trauma. The report puts the time from injury to hospital at about 2.5 hours.
Contributing factors the report lists
Five: unrecognised hazards from previously burned green trees, a crew inside the fall radius of a hazard tree with poor visibility, the time to definitive care from a remote site, many first-time crew members because of turnover, and communication and team cohesion barriers.
What the report recommends
The report makes five recommendations. Training should stress green tree hazards, and it lists burn scars, catfaces, fungus conks and resin flow as signs of rot, noting that the regional wildfire coordinating group had issued a green tree hazard alert. Training should stress situational awareness in three levels: perceiving, understanding and projecting. Trees should be part of the risk assessment from the first size-up. The report points to the national wildfire group's lookouts, communications, escape routes and safety zones method, to its chainsaw standard's distance of two tree lengths from a tree being cut, and to a snag hazard map. Remote work should carry stronger medical plans, training and extraction equipment. Employers and agencies should work on keeping crews, with a focus on training, and on communication and team building. For the codes on dead and compromised trees in tree work see the guide to dead and hazard trees, and for what regulators say about struck-by hazards the guide to struck-by hazards.
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