Treacherous conditions complicated effort to recover 2 firefighters killed in Utah helicopter crash

RICHFIELD — Responders who worked to find the bodies of the two firefighters killed in a helicopter crash Friday near a wildfire in central Utah described the treacherous conditions they navigated.

The two pilots were on board a Sikorsky S-64 helicopter, which crashed shortly after 10:30 a.m. near the Widemouth 2 Fire on Friday near Richfield. Due to fire conditions near the area, crews worked into the next day attempting to get to their bodies.

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The victims’ names have not yet been released.

Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis described the terrain where the firefighters crashed as over 7,000 feet in elevation and “steep, it’s a lot of brush in there, a lot of trees.” Hand fire crews were trying to get to the area on foot, and search and rescue crew members also arrived to help.

Within about 30-40 minutes, Curtis said, the column of fire had worked its way toward the responders.

“If we had not moved some of our responders and hand crews out, they would have been trapped by the fire as well. It was not an easy choice to move those responders, but thanks to good safety measures … they were able to determine that if we had not done that, we would have lost more lives,” he said, expressing gratitude more lives weren’t lost.

A Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter eventually arrived and brought detectives and a medical examiner, flying into the area near the crash and landing close. They did a “brief” recovery of the two victims.

“I’m sure there was a lot of red tape that we kind of just bypassed to make sure this happened,” Curtis said.

“At that point, we were able to bring them back to the UDOT yard near Old Highway 4,” he said. “And at that point, we were able to turn it to a … solemn handoff to those as they escorted the remains up to the medical examiner’s office.”

The medical examiner’s office will confirm the victims’ identities. Helicopter Transport Services, the pilot’s and passenger’s company, made notifications to the victims’ families, Curtis said.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Incident commander Tyler Hecht, with Great Basin Team 2, addressed delays in confirmation on the condition of the pilot and passenger after the crash. The National Interagency Fire Center confirmed their deaths early Saturday, but the responders on the ground declined to do so until they could get to the crash scene.

“We could not pass off information until we were able to get confirmation” that the pilot and passenger had died, Hecht said.

Conditions when the crash happened were similar to what firefighters had seen, with smoke cover, but nothing out of the ordinary, according to Hecht. The crash happened in steep, rough terrain, “very similar to what we’ve seen over the whole incident footprint.”

The crash happened on the edge of the fire zone, he said.

The firefighting team on Sunday remains heavily involved in fire operations around the crash site, near the I-70 corridor, Hecht said.