By Mike Van Meter
Bulletin Staff Writer
This isn't the sort of job for folks into instant gratification: Long hours of tedious, exacting work and a batting average that makes a big league pitcher look like a slugger.
"We're pretty darn hot and we're still at 10 percent," said Ron Pugh, coordinator of the Central Oregon Arson Task Force.
On Monday, pretty darn hot meant arresting Aaron Douglas Groshong, the Bend man charged with setting eight fires -- including the Awbrey Hall fire that burned a 7-mile-long crescent from Shevlin Park to homes in south Bend in August 1990. Pretty darn hot meant nailing the guy the task force thinks is responsible for at least 35 fires over the past eight years.
Pugh, a U.S. Forest Service investigator, and Deschutes County Sheriff's Lt. Greg Brown, spokesman for the team, attribute that and other successes to the same thing that helps big league teams win despite the hitting of their pitchers: teamwork.
"We're all so sensitive that it is going to be a group effort," Brown said. "This is where the group is so successful."
During fire season, 14 full-time and numerous part-time investigators probe blazes started in a region that authorities believe has one of the highest incidence of arson-sparked wildfires in the nation.
Last year, 21 fires were deliberately touched off by humans; this year, 12 have already been attributed to arson. While last year's success rate was .333 -- seven of the 21 cases have been closed -- just one of this year's fires have been solved (a batting average of .083, if you're keeping track).
More than 100 Central Oregon arsons since 1988 are unsolved. Eight arrests have been made by the task force -- one for every year of its existence.
No instant gratification there.
Yet the task force meets every morning during the height of fire season in a spare room in a warehouse -- almost literally a hole in the wall. Team members go over the latest fires, the freshest evidence, take assignments, chart progress.
And hope for a breakthrough.
Six years ago investigators hoped they had a breakthrough when they found a fingerprint on a beer bottle near the origin of the Awbrey Hall fire. Nothing matched then. Nothing turned up three years later when they ran it again. Nobody knows whether, when it is run this time, it will match anything in police databases. It's all part of the grind.
Mundane tasks like leafing through files occasionally point to breakthroughs, as when a suspected forgery turned up in Aaron Groshong's firefighting documents.
Face-in-the-dirt tasks like blowing layers of dust from the ground near a blaze's origin can point to breakthroughs -- or they can turn up jigsaw-puzzle bits of evidence that sit for months or years waiting for the piece that completes the picture.
Once it takes on a case, the task force has to take every phone call -- from few or none in a remote blaze to hundreds from a fire close to town, like last summer's Green Mountain fire.
Team members get their clothes dirty earlier than planned when they arrive at a fire before suppression crews -- then get dumped on by retardant planes. Their speed can make or break a case.
Even taking papers to the copy machine and then passing the copies out can be a piece that ends up making headlines in the afternoon paper.
Most often, it's just another piece of the grind. No stars are born. The next day brings more grind.
Keeping the team together under the pressure of long hours, weeks or months without an arrest, is the result of everyone willing to pass up solitary glory for the good of the whole.
"It's not an individual thing," Larry Duncan, a U.S. Forest Service cause investigator, said this morning as the task force gathered for the grind. "It starts with the dispatchers, the engine crews (who have been trained to preserve the site where fires start) and continues from there."
The stuff of success.
Coming to the point where a dozen agencies have dedicated personnel to the task force took years. The group was formed in 1987, but has grown not only in numbers but in experience and skills.
It has also grown and crossed traditional agency boundaries as community concern over wildland arson has grown.
"When we started the task force, it was real hard to get a lot of agencies involved," Brown said. "We have come to that point where the Bend Fire Department put a person on the Paulina team (in mid-July). We've recognized it's everybody's problem."
And, unlike crimes where witnesses are sometimes reluctant to talk, folks aren't reluctant to speak to investigators.
"When you knock on the door and it's an arson-related thing, they invite you right in and say, 'Here, have some cookies,' " Pugh said.