On the Burning Edge (22 page)

June 30 was the most
chaotic day of the summer for Chuck Maxwell and the dispatchers at the SWCC in Albuquerque. The Southwest was ablaze. The same wave of thunderstorms that sparked Yarnell Hill had sent more than nine hundred other lightning strikes crashing into Arizona’s and New Mexico’s mountain ranges. Almost thirty fires were burning across the region, and Maxwell was predicting record high temperatures and more dry thunderstorms. Nearly every incident commander wanted additional resources, and most of those orders were funneled through Albuquerque’s command center. Phones rang constantly as dispatchers tried to track down more equipment.

That morning at 8:30, the commanders on Yarnell had ordered a DC-10 and two more large air tankers. The nearest plane was in Albuquerque, but it hadn’t made it as far as Yarnell. Another fire that had started the day before outside the twenty-eight-thousand-person town of Kingman, Arizona, was growing quickly. Evacuations would soon be in effect. The Kingman fire was deemed a priority, and the SWCC diverted the plane, as well as the second DC-10, to the blaze.

Maxwell, who constantly kept National Weather Service colleagues apprised about fires around the region, sent out an email update: “Some resource allocation chaos right now. There are more orders than there are resources. One of the non-environmental factors that supports large fire growth and activity!”

The environmental factors were far more troubling. A layer of moisture that originated in the Gulf of Mexico and the Gulf of California
was tracking toward Prescott and Yarnell. In that high band of atmospheric moisture was enough water to support the growth of scattered thunderstorms. As the day grew warmer, the water would condense into small cotton-ball clouds that would eventually hang up on mountain ranges, where they would develop into thunderstorms before drifting south and southwest with the general atmospheric movement prevailing over the region. At each mountain range the storms passed over—the San Francisco Peaks, the Black Hills, the Bradshaws—they would increase in volatility. Maxwell had no way of knowing for certain where the thunderstorms would develop, or if they would even reach as far south as the Weaver Mountains and Yarnell Hill, but the potential existed, and if the storms did hit, they’d come during the heat of the day, when the fire would be burning at its hottest.

Between the dryness of the fuels and the presence of potentially strong thunderstorms, June 30 was turning into just the type of day he’d forecast for the Prescott area months earlier. All of the environmental factors were aligning. Maxwell broadcast his forecasts to the region’s firefighters, along with a warning most had internalized since their first season on the line:
If you see thunderstorms, expect strong, erratic winds
.

Darrell Willis, the structure-protection
supervisor of Peeples Valley and the Wildland Division chief for Prescott, had come to Yarnell after Shumate called him in the middle of the night. The incident commander desperately needed seasoned help. Willis, with his decades of experience, could see that homes were being threatened when he pulled into Peeples Valley at 3
A.M
.

By 10
A.M
. the Yarnell Hill Fire was becoming agitated. The fire now approached fifteen hundred acres. A flaming front nearly a mile and a half wide stretched across the valley and had taken the arched shape of a parachute catching the winds blowing off the desert floor. It was outrageously early in the morning for the blaze to be burning in chaparral as if it were the heat of day—something Willis had never
seen in thirty-five years of fighting fire. Forty-to-fifty-foot flames churned through the brush, burning north at a quarter-mile an hour. From this point on, all the fire behavior could do was intensify.

The seven structures in Double Bar A Ranch were under the most immediate threat. Willis assigned a Department of Corrections handcrew and a Forest Service engine to protect the ranch while two other engines started thinning the brush around the thirty-five other homes in the Model Creek subdivision. But even with the advantage of roads and pastureland to burn off, Peeples Valley was going to present some serious challenges to the firefighters.

Double Bar A had wood-shake roofs and zero defensible space. A caretaker gave Willis and the firefighters access to a ninety-thousand-gallon water tank, and they set up sprinkler systems to promptly spill most of it on and around the houses. Sawyers began clearing the junipers and chaparral on the side of the ranch facing the fire as fast as they could cut. But creating a solid border of defensible space around the ranch might take most of a day. They had only hours.

Everything looked different for
Granite Mountain. Relative to the wall of flames roaring toward Willis and Peeples Valley, the fire’s back edge was calm. Marsh gave out assignments, briefed the leaders on safety zones (the black, the ranch) and escape routes (the ridge road), and went ahead to scout the ridgeline to the north. Donut’s assignment was to anchor the fire’s cold northern edge. He led a saw team up to the ridgeline. Steed and Bravo squad started lining the fire’s more active eastern flank, a few hundred yards below Donut.

Though creating an anchor point was a critical assignment, the job wasn’t a particularly dangerous one, just uncomfortable. The low brush covering the ridgetops provided no shade, and at 10:30 the temperature was already past ninety. Before hiking, Steed had ordered the men not carrying saws to pack extra water because, at the fire’s heel, there was no promise of a timely resupply. Like many of the guys, Donut had carried in thirteen quarts of water, adding twenty-six extra pounds to his pack. To compensate for the heat and the extra
weight, Steed led the men at a slower pace than usual, even stopping for water breaks on the way in. Donut downed a quart and a half of water before reaching the ridgetop.

While the saw team cut a wide swath in the brush along the fire’s edge, Donut hung back. The few remaining hot spots in the otherwise cold black lay near the stumps of the heaviest brush, and he used his Pulaski to splay open the little pockets of heat, exposing the coals to the breeze and letting the embers burn themselves out. The work was slow and tedious, but the stunning views made it easier. Little clouds cast shadows on the folds of brown mountain ranges and valleys that extended as far as Donut could see to the south, which was most of the way to Phoenix. In the valley where Yarnell sat, a pair of green buggies from the Forest Service’s Blue Ridge Hotshots were parked by Granite Mountain’s trucks. The crew, the second on scene, milled beside the buggies, looking neither pressed for time nor concerned about the fire, while the bulldozer cleared a safety zone around the vehicles. It was obvious to every firefighter on scene that the real action lay to the north, where the smoke column was building steadily.

Shortly before noon,
the superintendent of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, Brian Frisby, and the crew’s captain, Rogers “Trew” Brown, drove a Razor, a four-seat ATV, up to the ridge to meet face-to-face with Marsh and Steed. Blue Ridge’s overhead wanted to ensure that everybody was on the same page. So far, it didn’t seem like anybody was. Blue Ridge had arrived in Yarnell at 8
A.M
. and still didn’t have a clear idea whose division they were on or what the day’s plan was. The firefight at Yarnell Hill still seemed disorganized.

The supes and captains shook hands on the saddle, leaning against their tools and looking over the fire in the valley while they compared notes and observations.

As he often did during slow moments on a fire, Marsh pulled out the fingernail clipper he carried in the front pocket of his yellow and started trimming his nails. He told Blue Ridge about the hikers and repeated the miscommunications he’d had with Air Attack around
9
A.M
., shortly after first meeting with the hikers. When the crew first arrived at the black edge, Marsh had ordered Granite Mountain to burn off a corner of the two-track road they’d hiked in on, but the SEATs kept dropping retardant on his burnout. Air Attack had effectively disregarded Marsh’s tactical choices. It wasn’t a big deal—it meant that the hotshots had to cut direct line around the fire’s heel—but Marsh was frustrated.

Another trouble was the radio frequency, a common issue on fires. Both crews were missing communiqués because of dead spots in radio coverage. To make contact with Abel, Musser, or Cordes, the captains and superintendents often had to switch between a line-of-sight tactical frequency and a command network that used a repeater set up in Yarnell to broadcast the radio signal over a wider area. Sometimes the repeater worked, sometimes it didn’t. As a workaround, they’d started using firefighters in the valley as a human relay system.

Trew and Frisby noticed odd things, too. As Blue Ridge’s overhead understood it, their assignment was to improve the dozer line that Cordes, Yarnell’s structure-protection specialist, wanted built that morning. But the dozer operator now working in the valley wasn’t fire-line qualified. Even his presence on the fire line was a breach of protocol. Trew, Blue Ridge’s captain, gave the dozer operator an extra radio and assigned one of Blue Ridge’s squad bosses the responsibility of keeping him safe. Then the dozer had tried to open up a safety zone around the old road grader that sat at the base of the ridge but stopped when he saw an alarming sign:
DANGER! EXPLOSIVES. KEEP OUT!
Maybe the explosives had been left there during an old gold-mining operation? Nobody knew, but the dozer operator, along with the firefighters he was working with, refused to use his tractor as a minesweeper.

“This is like the Swiss cheese effect,” one of Blue Ridge’s hotshots said to Trew.

“We’d need a piece of cheese for that,” Trew replied. “This is like one big hole.”

Then the chaotic scene got even more confusing. Marsh got a radio call from Division Zulu, somebody he hadn’t heard of yet. Operations
Chief Todd Abel had sent Rance Marquez, a BLM firefighter who had come up from Phoenix, to divide up control of the fire’s western flank. Abel needed structure protection in Yarnell, and that demanded different tactics, and therefore a different division, from the pure wildland firefighting needed to control the fire’s heel. But either Abel forgot to tell Marsh that Division Alpha was going to be split or Abel’s message hadn’t gotten through, because Marquez’s radio transmission was the first Marsh had heard of a Division Zulu.

Marsh responded curtly, and several strained exchanges followed. The two knew each other from the Doce Fire, where Marquez had worked under Marsh’s division. There, the men’s relationship had been terse at best. To Cordes, who knew Marsh from years of working together in Yavapai County, the radio conversation at Yarnell sounded like a turf war that Marsh had no intention of losing.

Division Alpha’s primary assignment—to contain the fire’s heel—promised to be relatively uneventful. But if Marsh let Marquez divide Division Alpha into two pieces, he’d be left babysitting a dead piece of line on what was already proving to be one of the most dynamic fires of the 2013 season—if not his career. Maybe Marsh wanted to use his power as Division Alpha to get Granite Mountain a higheraction assignment, like burning out around Yarnell or cutting direct line somewhere near the head, or maybe he just didn’t like the idea of being usurped by a firefighter who had been his subordinate only days earlier. Either way, Marsh fought to retain oversight of his portion of Yarnell.

“I’m not trying to take over your division,” Marquez told Marsh multiple times over the radio. But, of course, he was doing exactly that.

Without settling anything with Marquez, Marsh called Air Attack to inform him of where he thought the divisions should split. The aerial commander sat in a high-powered prop plane, making wide circles above the fire.

“Go ahead, Division Alpha.”

Compared with the chainsaws and the wind noise that muffled most ground resources’ radio calls, Air Attack sounded as if he were
transmitting from an NPR studio. Marsh explained to him that Division Alpha controlled Granite Mountain, Blue Ridge, and the dozer—all the resources on the Yarnell side of the fire except the engines working in town. Immediately after, Marquez got on the radio and told Air Attack the opposite: Zulu had Blue Ridge and the dozer.

Marsh snapped. “Listen. We need to decide something and go with it,” he radioed out. It was typical of his transmissions: concise, curt, a little condescending. Zulu, clearly cowed, apologized over the radio, and the matter appeared to be settled.

Marsh called Todd Abel on the cell phone. “I wanted to call you and let you know that…well, I…I had to kind of get aggressive with this Division Zulu guy,” he said. “I had to kind of be a little more assertive on the radio than I usually like.”

“Well, did you sort it out?” Abel asked.

They had, kind of. Marsh retained control of Granite Mountain. Cordes controlled the dozer. Division Zulu wasn’t heard from for the rest of the day. And Blue Ridge was still confused about who their division head was and what task they’d been assigned to do. The four groups of firefighters on the southern flank were in disarray

D
onut finished connecting the line to the cold black and met up with Marsh and Steed for his subsequent orders. Granite Mountain’s next step was to go direct by building line on the side of the blaze nearest Yarnell.

The flank sat about halfway between the ridgetop and the valley floor, and in such steep terrain, Granite Mountain would be taking a risk by cutting line across the middle of the slope. If a burning ember rolled downhill and ignited a spot fire below the hotshots, the flames could surprise the men by running uphill at them. That was one factor in the deaths of fourteen firefighters on 1994’s Storm King Fire.

Steed and Marsh wanted a lookout to warn the crew about any spot fires so the men had time to step safely into the black. As superintendent, it was Steed’s job to pick lookouts, but Marsh, likely unfamiliar with Steed running the crew, did it for him. Marsh picked Donut. After his sickness, a slow shift might help him recuperate. Steed didn’t argue.

While the saw team tied back into the crew, Donut hiked the ridge, looking for a perch that allowed him to see past a pair of spur ridges that blocked his view of the slopes beneath the fire’s flank. He couldn’t find a spot he liked on the ridgeline. The place Donut liked
was a half-mile from the saddle, on a knoll in the midst of the unburned fuel in the valley. The knoll was just to the north of the old road grader with the
EXPLOSIVES
sign behind it. If it put him in a sea of green and unburned chaparral, it also offered an unbroken view of the slopes beneath the crew. As long as the winds remained favorable, Marsh agreed that it was a good place for his lookout.

“Watch out for that finger,” Steed warned Donut before he left. “It’s got potential.”

As the fire’s head ripped toward Double Bar A Ranch, a strap of flame had broken off and run up a ridgeline on the opposite side of the valley from Granite Mountain. That strap was now backing slowly south toward Yarnell. It wasn’t much of a threat to the scrape and sawyers cutting line on the long ridgeline where the overhead now sat, but the finger could prove dangerous to Donut. If the winds did shift and the fire turned to the south, his lookout would sit right in the path of the flames. Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.

Donut nodded his acknowledgment to Steed’s warning, then pulled the extra water out of his pack and gave it to Steed. As a lookout, he wouldn’t need it. He’d be monitoring the fire’s progress, which meant sitting. Then Donut climbed into Blue Ridge’s Razor with Trew and Frisby and rolled away from Granite Mountain.

“God, it’s awful,”
Truman Ferrell said to his wife, Lois, the woman who had first spotted the fire two days earlier. Like many Yarnellers, the Ferrells had gone out to Highway 89 to join the groups of worried locals watching the blaze grow.

Truman, who had the fading tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, came to a vantage on the highway with his neighbors Dan Schroeder and Dorman Olson and their two Scottie dogs. They wanted to see if anybody’s house was going to burn. Truman lit a Marlboro Light.

Truman had served in both Vietnam and Desert Storm. To him, Yarnell Hill looked like a war zone. Single-engine air tankers dive-bombed
the fire. Helicopters dropped buckets of water on the flames. Local news crews were stacked up along the highway reporting on what looked to be an impending tragedy. At around 1
P.M.
, a reporter tweeted, “Yarnell Hill Fire forces evacuations of Model Creek subdiv. & Double A Bar Ranch area, shelter set up at Yavapai College in Prescott #fox10.”

The whole town had smelled like woodsmoke for two days now, but Truman didn’t become deeply concerned about the fire until Saturday afternoon. All night on the 29th, he could see the fire glowing on the ridge above town, and when he woke on the 30th, most of the ridge had turned black. Like many residents in Yarnell and Peeples Valley, Truman and Lois responded by packing up their lives’ valuables in case of evacuation. Insurance documents, jewelry, the nine-millimeter pistol he’d gotten in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm—Truman and Lois stashed it all in the motor home and made plans for how they’d get out if it came to that. Truman would drive the Winnebago, towing their purple Honda CR-V behind, and Lois would take his pickup. Fortunately for the Ferrells, it didn’t look as though evacuating Yarnell would be necessary.

“I think we’re about to watch Peeples Valley burn,” Truman said.

Not long after noon,
few things could have sounded sweeter to Darrell Willis, who was still working at Double Bar A Ranch, than the low roar of the DC-10’s jet engines coming down from the north. Albuquerque’s SWCC had forced the fire outside of Kingman to release the aircraft. Yarnell Hill, having grown to more than fifteen hundred acres, now claimed the unfortunate title of the country’s highest-priority blaze.

The fire leaped in bursts between the junipers and scrub oaks a half-mile from the homes in Peeples Valley. Small cyclones laced in ribbons of flame formed at the interface between the calm air and the upwafting smoke on the fire’s edge. Like dust devils, they twisted into the unburned brush, igniting shrubs as they turned, dissipated, and formed again. The fire had already reached the first homes in Peeples Valley.

The DC-10 lumbered over a ridgeline off to Willis’s right and, flying bizarrely slowly for such a massive aircraft, dropped to only a few dozen feet above the tops of the squat juniper trees. It laid a mile-long strip of slurry between Willis and the unburned chaparral. Shortly after, a second heavy air tanker reinforced the retardant line along a similar path. For the first time that day, Willis had a line between himself and the flames. But whatever relief that small safety net provided was short-lived.

Willis watched the fire collide with the first retardant line. For a long moment, the flames sat down, and it looked as though the slurry had broken the fire’s advance. But the gusts of wind that came over the next few minutes breathed life back into the embers and, like a stumbling but still-dangerous boxer, the flames rose again and worked through the brush covered in red slurry. Once on the far side of the retardant line, the fire’s intensity resumed as if it had encountered no retardant at all. Willis had run out of ways to stop the fire. Flames would be at Double Bar A within the hour and at the doorsteps of fifty or so other homes in Peeples Valley within two.

“Get him out of here,” Willis said to the enginemen, referring to the caretaker at Double Bar A. The ranch hand, like many stubborn homeowners in Peeples Valley, had willfully ignored the evacuation orders already in effect, preferring instead to stay and do what he could to help the firefighters save the ranch. Even after Willis pointed to a pair of side-by-side tennis courts and told him that if the fire burned into the ranch, that was their last resort, the caretaker decided to stay. But his fortitude cracked after he saw the fire’s intensity up close. With no interest in finding out what it felt like to ride out a firestorm on a pair of tennis courts, the man fled.

Shortly after, so did Willis and the firefighters he commanded.

“Everybody out! Just everybody get out of here,” Willis screamed.

Scott texted Heather
. “So this is how my morning’s going. Structures threatened in Peeples Valley!”

She was at the vet, getting Riggs his rabies shot, when she got his
text. The photo showed a ripping fire in the distance, but she couldn’t see the homes through the smoke. Either way, Scott’s assignment didn’t look good. It looked hot. Scott hated hot. He wouldn’t be happy.

Granite Mountain took lunch at a group of large boulders on the slope where they’d been cutting line. The fire still chugged along steadily to the north, and in the distance the men could see cauliflower clouds hung on the peaks of the Bradshaw Mountains outside Prescott. The clouds cast dark shadows over the distant hills. Drenched in sweat from running saw all morning, Scott cut open the rubbery packaging of his MRE lunch with his pocket knife and leaned back into his pack as the men around him traded for preferred food.
Pound Cake for Patriotic Cookies, anybody? Who doesn’t want their Tabasco?

Scott’s phone vibrated. “I had a weird dream that I proposed to Scott.” Then a few seconds later: “Oh hi. That was meant for Sarah. Lol.”

Delighted, Scott thumbed out a reply to Heather.

“Well, that’s better than the last one”—the last time, she’d dreamed that Scott was shoplifting. “I’m a little old fashioned. I think I’d like to be the one to propose. ☺”

“LOL. Okay. ;)” Heather answered.

Minutes later, the screaming of the DC-10’s jet engines broke up Scott and Heather’s digital moment. Scott looked up to see that the plane was on what looked like a collision course with a Type 1 helicopter, a Skycrane outfitted to carry water. The DC-10 crested the ridge, and the pilot must have seen the helicopter flying in from the northwest, but the jet couldn’t change course. It was too big and already flying too slow to maneuver rapidly. The helicopter’s pilot had to move, but its best option seemed to be an impossibly narrow draw that drained into the valley Donut sat in.

Donut, who’d arrived at his lookout nearly an hour earlier, was certain he was about to witness a midair collision. He had the wherewithal to pull his phone from his pocket and shoot video. Just a few hundred yards away, the helicopter pilot banked hard, then harder still. The Skycrane dived deep into the V-shaped valley, its nose still
pointed directly toward the ground. Sixty, fifty, forty feet from the rocks.

I’m about to pick up a body
, Donut thought. The helicopter’s blades
thwapped
the air as the pilot pulled out of the maneuver and the DC-10 blasted overhead. Rotor wash kicked up plumes of dust as the helicopter pilot pulled the ship’s belly parallel to the slope and regained control near the bottom of the gulch.

The DC-10 never altered its course. A moment after passing above the Skycrane, the pilot opened the bay doors and dropped an 11,119-gallon strip of retardant across the valley floor between Donut and the strap of flames that Steed had warned him about earlier that day. The safety buffer was comforting, but Donut was still shaken up.

On the ridge, Scott thumbed out another text to Heather.

“We just watched a DC-10 slurry bomber almost collide midair with a Sikorsky helicopter!”

“Holy hell! That certainly would have made the news,” Heather replied.

Watching two multi-million-dollar aircraft
nearly smack into each other stood out as ten seconds of terror in Donut’s otherwise slow afternoon. He’d picked a trigger point—if the fire hit a drainage about a quarter-mile away, Donut would flee—and listened to Marsh and Steed chatter about the aircraft’s near disaster and the chaos unfolding at the fire’s head.

Donut ate his Beef Stew MRE for lunch, not bothering to use the chemical heater to warm the meal in the day’s excessive heat. He sat just below the top of the blanched knoll. The winds blew at his back, where the long valley funneled the breeze rising off the desert floor to the north. But outside the valley’s microcosm, the terrain shaped the winds differently. At around 1
P.M
., the dominant breeze over the fire began shifting to the east, and after burning four of the seven buildings at Double Bar A Ranch, the flames took a hard right. The fire’s head now spread directly toward Highway 89 and the houses in Peeples Valley. Roy Hall’s management team was already talking about
shutting down the highway and using it as a line to burn off. None of the smaller residential roads seemed to be holding.

From the ridgetop, Marsh could see the fire’s development, but in the valley, Donut couldn’t. Donut’s job was simple: In the event that a spot fire appeared beneath Granite Mountain’s midslope line, he was to warn Steed and the crew. No spots had. As the crew ate their lunches on the ridge that formed the valley’s northwestern boundary, Donut watched the strap of fire now backing toward Yarnell on the opposite ridge. The flank hadn’t advanced more than fifty feet in the hour since Donut had been at his lookout, but the twitchy way the flames moved was fascinating. Rather than a steady creep, they throbbed in temperamental pulses.

One moment, the black edge was calm—almost no smoke at all. The next, the embers glowing at the trunk of a scrub oak warmed the lower branches, and in a flash of flame the whole bush combusted as if torched by a lighter. Then, just as quickly as the little conflagration had come, the flash smoldered. The effect was biblical.

As part of Donut’s job to keep an eye on the fire, he “slung weather” at the top of every hour with a paperback-size kit every lookout carries in his or her line gear. At 1:50, he pulled out a thermometer on a small chain. Over the thermometer’s bulb was a cloth wick. Donut dipped the cloth into his water bottle. Wetting the cloth provided both temperature and humidity readings. Then he held the end of the chain at arm’s length and swung the thermometer in a circle for a timed minute.

Donut scratched the readings into a log used to keep track of hourly weather changes. “Cloud build up SW,” he wrote. Out over the desert, Donut could see small, white puffs of clouds starting to pull together into thunderstorms. Then he finished the entry: “104 degrees, 10 percent humidity, 5–10 m.p.h. with gusts of 15 from the south.”