the fire line

THE FIRE LINETHE STORY OF

THE GRANITE

MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS

AND ONE OF THE

DEADLIEST DAYS IN

AMERICAN

FIREFIGHTING

FERNANDA SANTOS

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PROLOGUE

Page 88 of the Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investi-gation Report, the offi cial account of the deadliest wildfi re in the United

States since 1933, offers a distanced, emotionless diagram of a fatal last stand against fl ames and heat. Coffi nlike shapes represent nineteen fi refi ghters killed in the Arizona wildfi re on June 30, 2013, all members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. It’s an arresting chart— loyalty, death, and immea sur able grief, graphed in numbered geometric fi gures arranged in precise disarray:

18

15 24 ft.

30 ft.

85

176

3

7

11

16

12

1

13

104 14

2

19

20N

FIRE

The chart depicts the fi refi ghters’ bodies in the hollow where the wildfi re trapped them— a steep mountain to their backs, a high wall of fl ames ahead. A list of names below it keys to the individuals who lost their lives:

1. Eric Marsh; 2. Jesse Steed; 3. Clayton Whitted; 4. Robert Caldwell; 5. Travis Car ter; 6. Christopher MacKenzie; 7. Travis Turbyfi ll; 8. Andrew Ashcraft; 10. Joe Thurston; 11. Wade Parker; 12. Anthony Rose; 13. Garret Zuppiger; 14. Scott Norris; 15. Dustin DeFord; 16. William Warneke; 17. Kevin Woyjeck; 18. John Percin Jr.; 19. Grant McKee; 20. Sean Misner.

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Number 9, Brendan McDonough, is missing. He’d been assigned lookout duty a half mile away.

On that hot and dry June day, the Granite Mountain Hot-shots had risen with the sun, as usual. They’d taken their as-signed seats in the crew’s four personnel carriers and traveled through forty- three winding miles, from their home base in Prescott, Arizona, to a speck of town—649 residents, barely 9 square miles— called Yarnell, a hideaway for hippies, artists, re-tirees, and others looking to forget and be forgotten. The men had parked near the end of a dirt road, on the edge of the wild, and sized up a fi re that was chewing at a ridge west of town. They’d trudged uphill in single fi le for what should have been a usual day’s work— sawing off brush, tossing it aside, and scrap-ing the ground down to mineral soil, to starve the approaching fi re of the vegetation that would keep it burning. The task is called cutting fi re line, and it’s how wildfi res are fought.

The sun pounded down upon the Hotshots. They marched upslope, bowed under the weight of fi fty pounds of gear, their eyes on the rocky ground underfoot. Parched chaparral coated the majestic Weaver Mountains, highlands that rise from the So-noran Desert’s leafy fl atlands. It hadn’t rained in Yarnell since April. For the fourth consecutive day, temperatures had soared above one hundred degrees and lingered there, disrupting the usual easy summer in that cool mountainside retreat. In fl ame- resistant pants and long- sleeved shirts that some had folded up, others had closed by fastening a strap of Velcro around their wrists, the men lumbered past massive granite boulders that blasted waves of heat at them. In their gloved hands, they each lugged one of the tools of their trade: picks, axes, shovels, Stihl 440 chain saws.

The fi re hadn’t looked like much to them when they had


PROLOGUE

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rolled into town that morning— a swirl of saffron smoke against a boundless blue sky. Sparked two days earlier by lightning, the fi re had crept north of its point of origin, a gnarled cluster of chaparral plants— catclaw acacia, scrub oak, and manzanita— near the tip of Yarnell Hill, seventy miles northwest of Phoenix.

The Hotshots took positions on the fi re’s slowest- spreading edge, its heel, an area close to its point of origin. Yarnell stood to their right, ringed by thick, tall brush, land that hadn’t burned in forty- seven years. To their left lay a charred patch of about two hundred acres—an area fi refi ghters call the black, because the vegetation there had already burned. They marked it as a safe retreat if the fi re turned on them.

Their fi rst task was to fi nd a strategic starting point for the fi re line they aimed to build as a barrier to the fl ame’s spread, and as an anchor to a hand- carved buffer zone clear of every-thing fl ammable. They settled on a gap on the fi re’s southwest corner, along the dense wall of a steep, rocky slope facing toward the town of Congress, away from Yarnell. They swung their tools, pounding, digging, slicing, and clearing the ground around the fi re’s southern perimeter— a line about a yard wide around a bent elbow— and onward along the fi re’s eastern fringe, its right fl ank. The task is a sort of savage science, strategic in its planning, prim-itive in its execution, punishing bodies and minds. Stooped, the men attacked the hardened soil with furious precision, deter-mined to take away the fuel that would other wise feed the fi re if it ran toward Yarnell.

Then, every thing changed. As forecasters had twice warned, a power ful thunderstorm blew in from the north. It crashed head- to- head with the fi re, which was rolling toward Yarnell’s small neighbor Peeples Valley, a community of ranches and mid-dling homes with about half of Yarnell’s population and twice


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the acreage. The collision was at once fearsome and spectacu-lar. Winds gusted to forty, then fi fty miles per hour, bending the northbound fl ames eastward and shoving them southward at a speed of a mile in four minutes, a hundred yards in fi fteen seconds— faster than any gear- laden fi refi ghter can sprint. Smoke cleaved a horse shoe in the air, stamping the fi re’s changing ori-entation in gunmetal gray against the darkened sky.

From her home in Yarnell, Adria Shayne gasped at the apoc-alyptic sight. She grabbed her pets and, stunned, drove away in her battered pickup truck, leaving her house and every thing in it heating up behind her. Propane tanks hissed and exploded as she escaped. Glass windows shattered. Ammunition fi red spon-taneously. Flames rolled through the west side of town, then barged inside a neighborhood at its southern tip, Glen Ilah, burn-ing homes at random, skipping some, as if in a drunken game of hopscotch. Pipes cracked and water gushed underfoot. Ash shrouded the sun, turning the day dark.

From a knoll northeast of the rest of his crew, McDonough, the assigned lookout, swung a pocket- size psychrometer, an L- shaped instrument that mea sured temperature and humidity on the fi re line. Lookout is a physically easy task that requires intimate knowledge of fi re, weather, and their wicked tricks. The easy part suited McDonough that day as it was his fi rst back at work after two days at home nursing a cold, and a night out with friends.

Facing north, McDonough felt the wind that had caressed his neck shift and slap his face. He saw the fi re suddenly rolling toward him, no longer away from him. Over the radio, he warned the crew’s captain, Jesse Steed, that the fl ames had charged close to the knoll. Steed agreed when McDonough said he’d pull back to safety: “I’ve got eyes on you and the fi re, and it’s making a


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good push,” Steed had said. McDonough had looked back over his shoulder as he left and saw fl ames devouring the perch where he had just stood.

The nineteen Granite Mountain Hotshots stayed in the burning wilderness.

•••

Eric Tarr, a police offi cer– paramedic with the Arizona De-partment of Public Safety, was part of a three- men team as-signed by the state to drop water on the fi re from a collapsible bucket suspended from the belly of their Bell 407 he li cop ter, Ranger 58.

The Hotshots had vanished and it had fallen upon Tarr to go looking.

The he li cop ter circled the smoldering Weaver Mountains. Smoke nearly smothered its jet engine. Swirling winds kept shoving its nose down. The fuel gauge dropped perilously toward empty. With two minutes of fl ying time left, Tarr glimpsed a fl eeting apparition through an opening in the haze— a cluster of scorched fi re shelters.

Fire shelters are portable cocoons, mandatory since 1977 for those on the fi re line, a last- resort protection against heat and smoke. They’re made of layered fi berglass cloth, silica, and alu-minum foil and are stuffed inside a hard- plastic case strapped at the base of each fi refi ghter’s backpack. Firefi ghters grasp han-dles marked left hand and right hand and shake the shel-ters, which unfurl like rounded pup tents. They then step into the shelters, drop to the ground, and roll on their bellies, wedg-ing the shelters’ openings underneath. They keep their faces turned to the ground, their legs spread, and their feet to the fi re, protecting their airways and torsos. Within, they slip their arms


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through straps on each side, lessening the chance of the shelters’ blowing away. The shelters are not supposed to hug the bodies inside like blankets, but to wrap them loosely, like sacks. De-ployed, they look like giant silver bullets.

The shelters Tarr saw at the bottom of the canyon that day looked like burned ash logs, tightly arranged on ground the Hot-shots had half- cleared and brush they’d half- sawed.

The aircraft looped twice, counterclockwise, over them. Tarr clung to the hope that someone might have survived, even though none of the shelters had stirred during the he li cop ter’s transits. The fi refi ghters’ radios had gone silent since their superintendent, Eric Marsh, had tautly announced, “Our escape route has been cut off. We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush, and I’ll give you a call when we are under the sh— the shelters.”

The pi lot, Clifford Bursting, circled the he li cop ter closer to the ground, worried whether the carbon- composite rotor blades would withstand the heat radiating from the land.

Tarr spotted an opening. Trees burned on one side. A pic-nic bench burned on the other. It would have to do.

Bursting lowered the helo farther. Tarr stepped out and in-haled. The roof of his mouth throbbed. Scorching air seared his nostrils and then his windpipe. His throat burned. His eyes stung. He grabbed his medical kit. It had a pulse oximeter, which mea sured the level of oxygen in the blood, a stethoscope, and some basic ban dages, moist and sterile, for wrapping burned skin.

Tarr began a lonely hike uphill, toward the shelters.The fi re had scorched the dusty ground black and turned

the high desert’s golden soil to charcoal. The sand crackled under the soles of his insulated boots, as though he were tread-ing on eggshells. Ahead, thick smoke caressed the granite


PROLOGUE

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boulders the fi re had seared. To his left, fl ames still danced against the pale- gray sky. Tarr saw planes above, but couldn’t hear them. The air didn’t stir.

As usual on the job, he carried a pistol in his holster. His vest held handcuffs and a canister of pepper spray. A rectangular case latched to his backpack contained his own fi re shelter, in case the fl ames menaced him. He knew they could.

From upslope, past a ranch spared by the blaze, a muffl ed voice pierced the desolate stillness, startling him.

“Hey! Hey!” Tarr bellowed. “Can anybody hear me?”He picked up his pace. His heart pounded. He heard that

voice again.“Is anybody out there?”At the crest of the rise, he halted.His search ended.The Hotshots had collapsed in the jagged circle. Eleven of

them had their feet to the fi re, as they’d practiced. Billy Warneke lay between Marsh and Clayton Whitted, the crossbar of an H linking lines of bodies— one at right angles to his feet, the other to his head, where the fl ames must have fi rst touched the men.

Tarr looked at his wristwatch, noting the time— six thirty- fi ve in the eve ning. He moved deliberately from east to west, stopping at each shelter, tallying the magnitude of the disaster.

The bodies lay in a lonely hollow. Together, they represented the greatest single loss of fi refi ghters since the 9/11 attacks, and the largest death toll of professional wildland fi refi ghters in more than a century.

“We have nineteen fatalities,” Tarr said, and heard that muf-fl ed voice again. This time he recognized it as his own, echoing from a fi refi ghter’s scorched radio.


the fire line

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