A Painful Mix of Fire, Wind and Questions By FERNANDA SANTOS and JACK HEALY Published: July 6, 2013 PRESCOTT, Ariz. — They trained their eyes on the mountain that smoldered in the distance as they carved a path through a forest choked by fire and drought. The ground crackled underfoot. Packs sagged from their backs, heavy with the gear frontline firefighters must carry: pickaxes, temperature gauges, spades, radios, plenty of water. Down in the valley, a village burned. “This is pretty wild,” one of the firefighters, Andrew Ashcraft, wrote in a text message to his wife, Juliann, at 2:02 p.m. that Sunday as the team continued its fateful march through the wilderness. Three minutes later and 130 miles away, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Flagstaff spotted trouble on the radar: thunderstorms and dangerous winds heading toward the firefighters. He picked up the phone and alerted the fire’s dispatch center. Officials at the center transmit information by radio to the firefighters. The meteorologist called the center again at 3:30 p.m., repeating his warning. It is unclear at this point whether the firefighters ever received those messages. At 3:19 p.m., Mr. Ashcraft sent another message to his wife: “I would love some rain over here.” Ms. Ashcraft never heard from her husband again. All but one of the 20 members of the team, a highly skilled fire suppression squad known as the Granite Mountain Hotshots, lost their lives that day in the mountains 32 miles southwest of Prescott. In the week since, amid tears and tributes, a question has weighed over this shaken community: how could they have died? “It had to have been a perfect storm,” said Wade Ward, a firefighter and a spokesman for the Prescott Fire Department who was close to the men. “They were very cautious, very conservative, and they were very skilled.” Investigators are now beginning the task, which will take months, of unraveling how a routine afternoon of cutting fire lines along the edge of a community threatened by flames turned into the deadliest day for wilderness firefighters in 80 years. What caused the tragedy is still unknown. But in recent years, fires like the one that engulfed the Granite Mountain Hotshots have become more frequent and more dangerous, straining the men on the front line and the logistical infrastructure that stands behind them. Communication Concerns The Granite Mountain Hotshots spent the weeks before the Yarnell Hill fire, as the blaze that killed them is known, fighting a wildfire in New Mexico and another one in the Prescott National Forest, just northwest of their fire station in town. Doce, as the Prescott blaze was called, had been a difficult fire, both for the crews battling it and the dispatchers trying to track the movements and needs of aircraft, engines and hundreds of firefighters. As the Hotshots carried their chain saws to Doce’s western edge, dispatchers faced serious technical challenges. Telephone calls were being disconnected or were not going through. A computerized system that helps the dispatchers track crews was “giving all kinds of error messages,” a frustrated dispatcher said in a report logged on June 18 by the National Interagency Fire Center, a multiagency logistical support center. “The problem is never taken seriously and never completely resolved for the long term,” the dispatcher wrote. “This has been an ongoing problem and happens EVERY time we have an incident. It is unacceptable! We need to remain at a high operational level 365 days out of the year.” Communication problems made up half of the complaints reported to the interagency fire center last year, according to a study by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group, which manages programs, policies and training for wilderness firefighting. In the last two months alone, wilderness firefighters and Forest Service employees across the West repeatedly complained about problems with communications, in some cases pleading that malfunctions be fixed before something terrible happened. Another common complaint was that firefighters were being pushed beyond exhaustion or were being asked to work in unsafe conditions. At a wildfire in Idaho last year, a crew of Hotshots from Montana refused to join others fighting it, saying that proper safety procedures like extinguishing even the smallest pieces of burning wood were being ignored. The crew’s supervisor told the commander at the scene that he would not engage his men “because we have standards and protocols we need to follow,” according to the account he gave to the interagency center. The next day, a 20-year-old firefighter, Anne Veseth, was killed by a falling tree. It is too early to tell if any of these problems were a factor in the deaths of the 19 Hotshots fighting the Yarnell Hill fire. Investigators emphasize that they are at the very start of what will be an exhaustive examination of the events that led up to the deaths. “I am not aware of any communication issues on June 30,” said Randall Eardley, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center. “But that is something the investigation team will certainly look into.” Carl Schwope, a fire operations section chief on the Yarnell Hill fire, said on Wednesday that fire commanders had posted two radio repeaters — combination receiver-transmitters that improve low radio signals — atop the mountains near the fire to help relay signals into valleys and ravines. The repeaters were installed on Monday and Tuesday, Mr. Schwope said, after the Hotshots were already dead. (A team of federal agencies took control of the fire’s operations on Monday, after it was elevated to a Type 1 incident, a category reserved for the biggest or most complex fires. The designation had been made on Sunday before the thunderstorms materialized on the radar, but it took time for the team to assemble.) Mr. Schwope, a member of the new command team, said he did not know anything about the lines of communication for the Granite Mountain Hotshots that Sunday. He said, however, that crews were taught not to confront a fire if they could not talk to their command centers. The Granite Mountain Hotshots certainly knew the dangers of battling fires along canyons and ridges layered with dry chaparral and brittle oak brush, where afternoon thunderstorms can change the way the wind blows and the flames travel in a matter of minutes. Hotshots are wilderness firefighters, known for exhaustive training, punishing standards for physical fitness and ability to work under difficult conditions far from roads. As one of 110 such teams across the country, they were used to mountain hikes carrying 40 pounds of gear and 16-hour shifts in harsh conditions, chopping brush to cut fire lines on the hardened ground. They also knew how to manage risk, officials said. Like other teams working the fire, they received daily briefings at the start of their shifts about fire and weather patterns and the conditions of the terrain. They designated one member a lookout, someone to keep an eye on the way the fire behaved from afar and to warn them of any sudden changes. Whenever the Hotshots rolled toward a blaze in their hulking red and white Ford fire buggies, they knew to pick escape routes and safety zones. Growing Dangers Experts say that wildfires across the West are becoming increasingly dangerous and unpredictable adversaries. They are burning bigger today than they were 30 years ago, a result of persistent drought and overgrown vegetation, which have led to longer and hotter fire seasons. To make matters worse, budgets for managing forests to reduce risk have been cut or siphoned off to help cover the increased cost of fire suppression. This winter, a fire continued to burn inside Rocky Mountain National Park even after the snows arrived. And as development pushes deeper into the wild, fire experts say, more houses will be destroyed and more firefighters will be put at risk trying to protect homes and residents from the flames. The area around the Yarnell Hill fire had not burned in about 40 years. Dried and thick in some spots, the vegetation there was ready to ignite at the first spark. A bolt of lightning struck at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, June 28, west of State Highway 89 between the old gold-mining villages of Yarnell and Peeples Valley here in central Arizona. It was a small fire at first, 200 acres. By Sunday, it had grown tenfold, and the flames were heading straight toward Peeples Valley. The Granite Mountain Hotshots went to fight it, marching into the hills in stifling heat. Sudden Shift in Winds Firefighters at the Yarnell Hill blaze on Sunday spoke with awe at how the winds suddenly swung around like a sailboat’s boom, lifting tents, swaying portable toilets and rattling grounded air tankers. In Yarnell, residents who had been given three hours to evacuate were forced to pack up and leave in 30 minutes when the wind, as Adria Shayne, 52, described it, “did a horseshoe and came right onto us.” The thunderstorm rolled over the fire scene at midafternoon, though most of the rain it brought evaporated before it hit the ground, creating a mass of cool air that sank and spread in different directions. This weather phenomenon, known as a thunderstorm outflow, can cause severe winds. Brian Klimowski, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service office in Flagstaff, where the warning calls about the thunderstorm came from on Sunday, said the area’s jagged topography would “significantly affect” the way the outflow winds behaved and would most likely alter the trajectory of the flames. Until the thunderstorm’s arrival, Sunday had been a normal day for the Granite Mountain Hotshots. They stopped for lunch around 2 p.m., about the time Ms. Ashcraft sent her husband a text message telling him that she had gone swimming with the children and that their oldest son, Ryder, had spoken very well in church that morning. “I’m really proud of him,” Mr. Ashcraft replied. The team was a tight brotherhood within the brotherhood of the Prescott Fire Department. The oldest was Eric Marsh, 43, the crew’s supervisor and an avid outdoorsman. The youngest were just 21. There were Robert Caldwell, 23, and his cousin Grant McKee, 21, who planned to work as a Hotshot for just one season and then devote himself to becoming a paramedic. There was Wade Parker, 22, who followed his father’s footsteps into firefighting. There was Mr. Ashcraft, 29, whose love for his job was outweighed only by his love for his family. “I remember when he left that morning, we both felt kind of defeated,” Ms. Ashcraft said. “He wanted to finish out this season strong and then think about when he might change to a profession that’s a little more family-friendly.” As the thunderstorm approached, the men were digging a trench near the Glen Ilah subdivision southwest of Yarnell, trying to protect its homes. Perched on higher ground, Brendan McDonough, the lone survivor and the lookout that day, radioed the team to say he no longer felt safe at his post given the drastic change in the weather. He took to his escape route, a trench dug by a bulldozer. Mr. Ward, the Fire Department spokesman, said that when Mr. McDonough looked back, the spot where he was standing had been overtaken by flames. At 4:47 p.m., dispatchers managing the deployment of equipment and personnel to the fire heard an aircraft pilot say over the radio that the Granite Mountain Hotshots had deployed their emergency shelters, which are meant to protect them from smoke and intense heat but not flames. To any wilderness firefighter, the shelters are a last resort. About an hour later, when the smoke had dissipated, a helicopter crew from the Arizona Department of Public Safety landed nearby, and a medic hiked in to confirm that the worst was true. That night, as relatives gathered in a middle-school auditorium in Prescott to hear the news, a group of firefighters stood vigil over the bodies. The next morning, the 19 men were carried one by one out of the mountains where they had met their end.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 03:47:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015