Deadly Arizona Blaze Reflects Rising Risks
By FERNANDA SANTOS and JACK HEALY
Investigators are beginning the task of unraveling how a routine
afternoon of cutting fire lines along the edge of a community in Arizona
became the deadliest day for wilderness firefighters in 80 years.
Time-lapse photographs by Matt Oss
A Painful Mix of Fire, Wind and Questions
The Yarnell Hill fire burned on June 30, around the time when officials believe the fire expanded. Matt Oss
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.
Andrew Ashcraft, one of the Granite Mountain Hotshot firefighters, took this photo of the growing Yarnell Hill fire while the crew ate lunch, hours before he and most of his team were killed. Andrew Ashcraft/Juliann Ashcraft, via Associated Press
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
30 MILES
89
60
Vicksburg
Payson
Yarnell
Arizona
Phoenix
Prescott
The New York Times
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.
Erratic winds are created when cool downdraft air reaches the ground and spreads outward.
UPDRAFT
DOWNDRAFT
Thunderstorm cell
High winds
The New York Times
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.
89
1 MILE
Extent of fire
as of July 4
Approximate
area where
fire began
Glen
Ilah
Yarnell
Peeples Valley
The New York Times
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.
Satellite
images are from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Analysis of the weather patterns was provided by Daniel T. Lindsey of
NOAA and Scott Bachmeier of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Haeyoun Park and Graham Roberts/The New York Times
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.
The final movements of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were based on interviews with officials and photographs. Time-lapse photographs of the fire were taken by Matt Oss.Hannah Fairfield, Jeremy White and Karen Yourish/The New York Times
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.
Slide Show | photos
The Search for Clues
Investigators
are now beginning the task, which will take months, of unraveling how a
routine afternoon of cutting fire lines turned into the deadliest day
for wilderness firefighters in 80 years.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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