PHOENIX - A state safety agency recommended fines totaling $559,000 against the state's Forestry Division on Wednesday, saying the agency wrongly put the protection of "structures and pastureland" ahead of the safety of firefighters battling a wildfire in Central Arizona last summer, including 19 who died while trapped by the flames on a mountain. The report said the forestry division kept the firefighters on the mountains even after commanders realized they could not control the flames burning through parched, thick chaparral along the western edge of the old gold-mining village of Yarnell, 80 miles northwest of Phoenix In a report, inspectors for the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health said the actions resulted in "multiple instances of firefighters being unnecessarily and unreasonably exposed to the deadly hazards of wildland firefighting." The report, released during a meeting of the Industrial Commission of Arizona, which enforces rules governing the health and safety of state employees, also faulted the team running firefighting operations on June 30, when the 19 firefighters died, for being understaffed, which led to "an organization that lacked the initial cohesion needed" to successfully battle the blaze. The team, the report said, "failed to re-evaluate, re-prioritize and update suppression efforts." Safety officers who were recruited to help arrived only after firefighting operations were well underway on June 30, when thunderstorm winds hooked the flames, sending the fire racing toward the 19 firefighters, all members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a highly trained front-line fire suppression squad. At the meeting, Marshall Krotenberg, safety compliance supervisor for the state's division of OSHA, told the commission's members that the absence of safety officers "increased the risk of firefighter exposure to hazards." The area was deemed inaccessible to vehicles and hard to reach on foot, and the fire did not seem to pose a significant threat despite a prolonged drought. A fire management officer in command that day chose to delay firefighting until the next morning. Flames were escaping, but fire managers nonetheless failed to conduct a complexity analysis, compromising the safety of the operations that would follow, Mr. Krotenberg said. The crew also failed to check the escape route - downhill along the eastern side of a mountain, an area the fire had not yet burned - and to evaluate the time it would take for them to reach the ranch that they had set as their destination against the potential rate of spread of the fire, based on their knowledge that thunderstorms had been forecast for that afternoon.