Arizona's Tragedy

Arizona's Tragedy

It is telling how uppermost in mind tragedies involving massive forest fires consuming vast tracts of forested land, and eventually peoples' homes happen to be, even when exploring tragedies of an entirely different nature also resulting in the deaths of many people. In his book, Forever On The Mountain, a look back at American Mountaineering's most controversial and mysterious disaster that took place on Denali, Alaska's highest peak in the summer of 1967 when seven young climbers were caught in a raging storm and died there after having summitted, the book's author, James Tabor, recalls another kind of misadventure:

"Did the young Smokejumpers trying to outrun that blowup in Mann Gulch think it was going to incinerate them? Apparently not, not even in the final seconds when the tidal wave of fire was about to wash over them. One man, Walter Rumsey, told investigators later that he was watching scenery as he sprinted up the hillside, trying to outrun the racing flames behind him. Another, David Navon, a 101st Airborne Division paratrooper who had survived the siege of Bastogne, stopped to take snapshots of the blaze running him down. Rumsey made it, seemingly for no reason other than luck; Navon did not. The fire burned him and twelve others to death."

And here is Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and Fire, writing about his own experiences tracking fires in the company of professional firefighters:

"The camp we were at was termed a spike camp, and the hotshots here -- sixty of them plus several helitack crew members -- were said to be spiked out. That meant that they were established in a roadless area and supplied by helicopter with food, tools and paper sleeping bags (marginally warm but washable and reusable) According to forest Service policy, hotshots should not be spiked out for more than two days in a row. One level less comfortable than a spike camp is the coyote camp, and hotshots are not universal in their love of coyote camps. Coyoteing, as it is called, means dropping in exhaustion wherever you happen to be when it gets dark. Because hotshots have only their line packs when they fight fire, they are usually caught without food, sleeping bags, extra clothes. If it's cold, they will make a fire in the black -- the burned area -- and huddle around it all night. If it's really cold, they might decide to keep building line simply to keep warm. For food, they might have thought to pack some military MREs (meals ready to eat). If not, they go hungry."

"In 1910 a fire storm overtook a group of forty-five fire fighters who were trying to escape an Idaho fire called the Big Blowup. The leader Edward Pulaski -- who later manufactured the tool that bears his name -- led them into an abandoned mine shaft and had to keep them there at gunpoint because they were so terrified. Five men died; the rest emerged several hours later, burned and dazed. They had survived a firestorm of such ferocity that entire hillsides of timber had been flattened by fire and convection wind."

In Yarnell, Arizona, one man only of a 20-man hotshot team survived the windblown blaze that consumed 19 of his comrades. He happened not to be with them at the time. He had been deployed to move their unit truck, and that was what saved his life. The hotshot team had been fighting fires in New Mexico and Prescott, and then responded to a call from Yarnell. They came with their backpacks, chainsaws and gear for the removal of brush and trees.

The Times, U.K.

It wasn't likely that night-time temperatures would freeze them. A heat wave across the Southwestern United States had sent temperatures soaring. A lightning-sparked fire quickly gained traction in that heat. It had already consumed about fifty homes and another 250 were threatened in and around Yarnell, a 700-population town in mountains northwest of Phoenix. Hotshot teams are trained in survival techniques. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

In this instance, the 19 firefighters did as they were trained to do under such phenomenally dangerous circumstances; they each dug a shallow pit in the ground to lie in, and covered themselves with a bag-like shelter comprised of fire-resistant material. Not fire-proof, fire-resistant. "It's an extreme measure that's taken under the absolute worst conditions", explained Prescott fire Chief Dan Fraijo. They were overwhelmed by circumstances beyond anyone's control.

According to the National Weather Service Flagstaff office, a sudden increase and shift in wind occurred around the time the dreadful incident occurred. That shift caused the fire to grow exponentially from 80 hectares to about 800 in a matter of hours. The fire-resistant coverings meant to protect the hotshot team were clearly no match for the ensuing heat and the raging flames. All the shelters had been deployed, and all had failed.

Conditions were ripe for this kind of extreme flammability. A historic drought has left the state highly vulnerable to fire. "Until we get a significant showing of the monsoons, it's show time and it's dangerous, really dangerous" commented incident commander Roy Hall. The last wildfire that killed more firefighters than this one was in 1933 in Los Angeles when the Griffith Park blaze killed 29 men.

And in 1994, the Storm King Fire near Glenwood Springs, Colorado, killed fourteen firefighters, when a fierce explosion of flames overtook the men dispatched to do their utmost to battle the blaze:

"Word quickly filtered back to BLM officials in Grand Junction that something terrible had happened on Storm King. Mike Mottice, the agency's area manager, had driven past the blowup and arrived at his Glenwood Springs office around 5:00 p.m. Minutes later crews began arriving from the mountain, and Mottice realized for the first time that there were people unaccounted for. "I hoped that the fire shelters would save them", he said. "But that evening some smoke jumpers confirmed that there were deaths."                 (Fire, Sebastian Junger)