EVENT
Mann Gulch
The August 5, 1949 Montana wildfire in which thirteen smokejumpers died — and which Weick's 1993 analysis transformed into the canonical case study of sensemaking collapse under extreme conditions.
On August 5, 1949, sixteen smokejumpers parachuted into Mann Gulch on the Missouri River to fight what appeared to be a routine Category IV wildfire. Within ninety minutes, the fire had reversed direction and raced uphill toward them at six hundred feet per minute. The crew foreman, Wagner Dodge, improvised an
escape fire — burning a patch of grass and lying down in the ashes — and survived. Two other men reached the ridge. Thirteen died on the hillside, most of them running uphill with their tools still on their backs. Weick's 1993 paper, "The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations," asked the question that gave the disaster its enduring analytical power:
Why did the men not drop their tools? The answer he developed — that the tools were not merely instruments but the material expression of identity, and that dropping them meant abandoning the only coherent structure left when sensemaking collapsed — became the most influential paper in the history of organizational cognition and the template through which