A Department of Energy official warned of the possibility of a "mother of all fires" because of a lack of fire prevention work just a month and three days before the Hanford fire of 2000.

"I predict we will ultimately have a very large wildland fire in the near term future similar in size to the 1984 Hanford Range Fire," Craig Christenson, DOE's program monitor for the Hanford Fire Department in 2000, said in an e-mail sent from DOE's Richland office to DOE headquarters.

The prediction turned out to be right. The 2000 fire started with a car and truck crash on Highway 24 and spread across 256 square miles, destroying 10 homes.

On Jan. 7, a Federal District Court judge in Richland is scheduled to consider whether the federal government may be held liable for the fire, which quickly spread across what used to be a wide firebreak along the road and south across the Hanford Reach National Monument. More than 100 homeowners, landowners, public agencies and insurers have sued for $108 million.

The suit also charges that the fire is responsible for two deaths. A man who suffered burns when his home was surrounded by fire died several months later of heart failure, and a baby, born shortly after her mother survived the fire, died within hours of complications.

Plaintiffs claim the federal government not only did not prevent the fire from spreading from the Hanford nuclear reservation, but also increased the fire danger through negligence.

It already has prevailed in a smaller suit filed over the fire.

Richard McWhorter asked for $284,349 in damages after the fire spread from the monument to his ranch land and destroyed 5,900 acres of pasture land and fencing.

But earlier this year federal Judge Robert Whaley dismissed his claim before it went to trial.

McWhorter had been instrumental in reaching an agreement between local ranch owners and DOE to provide fire protection assistance to each other from 1986 to 1996.

The government's responsibility under the agreement was to maintain fire breaks along Highways 24 and Highways 240 on Hanford, according to court documents. It plowed a strip of land up to 70 feet wide along the side of the highways, sprayed for weeds and burned weeds.

But in 1994 a driver on Highway 240 complained to the Benton Franklin Counties Clean Air Authority about blowing dust caused by disking for fire prevention along the roadway.

In 1995, the government contractor with DOE at the time, and the Washington State Department of Transportation, determined that the firebreak disking could cease without compromising fire prevention, according to an order signed by Whaley.

McWhorter claimed the government was negligent in not providing a firebreak in 2000 that would have prevented a fire on the highway from sweeping across Hanford and onto private land.

But the judge questioned, among other matters, whether Washington law requires landowners to take preventive steps, such as creating firebreaks, to prevent the spread of fires.

The problem was more than the government failing to take preventive steps, he said.

"By disking and then letting it go, it actually created a worse situation," he said.

Native grasses have slowed fires in the Mid-Columbia for hundreds of years. Native bunch grass, as its name suggests, grows in bunches. But once disturbed -- by fire or disking -- it can't hold its ground against cheat grass.

Cheat grass spreads in a carpet across the ground. It turns brown as summer begins, leaving an unbroken expanse of kindling to feed and spread flames.

He also believes the thousands of pages of documents he has collected and searched -- including the May 2000 e-mail to DOE headquarters -- will better support his clients' claim.

That e-mail was written as the federal government considered its policy for allowing controlled burns to create firebreaks. Before the 2000 Hanford fire, a controlled burn went awry at Los Alamos, N.M., destroying 47,000 acres, and burns were temporarily banned.

The e-mail to DOE headquarters said controlled burns had not been done for several years at Hanford because of environmental concerns and air authority restrictions.

"We can't even cut fire breaks anymore!" it said. "All we can do is use sprayed on herbicide to kill off weeds in their early growth and that has a very limited effect."

Two years earlier, McWhorter, after complaining about the lack of firebreaks along the highways, had been told in a letter that "the spraying has been comparable for fire management purposes to the previous practice of cutting firebreaks."

Apparently, the reference was to an eight- to 10-foot wide strip at the edge of the pavement along the highways patrolled routinely by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

At one point, the plan had been to expand the area controlled by herbicide spraying, according to a court statement by Rex Jordan, the Hanford fire marshal.

Periodically state and Hanford officials discussed that, but the state was eventually told no Hanford money was available for increased spraying, Tom Root, a maintenance superintendent for the state, said in a court document.

A Department of Energy investigation into the 2000 Hanford fire eventually fingered the "lack of maintenance of defensible fire breaks along state highways running through the Hanford Site" for allowing the fire to spread quickly onto the national monument.

In fact, a draft of the report obtained by Flynn said "maintenance of this barrier would most likely have prevented the range fire."

In the final report, the statement was changed to say maintenance of the barrier "may have prevented" the car fire on the highway from igniting vegetation on the monument.

The federal government is asking that the claim be dismissed, saying that the government was not required to take preventive measures to change the condition of its property in advance of "some feared future event."

But Flynn said the federal government knew it had a problem that could have been solved.

"(The fire) should have been stopped quickly and easily when it was a traffic accident," he said. "They had an effective means of stopping it. In fact, they did it for years. Not only did they let it go, but they created a worse problem."