On the Burning Edge (23 page)

S
tudying his radar in Albuquerque, Chuck Maxwell saw the wind shift coming long before anybody else did. A hundred-mile line of scattered thunderstorms had hung up on the Mogollon Rim and the Bradshaws. At shortly before 3
P.M
., Maxwell watched a few of the clouds puff up like popcorn above a sea of white, a sign that the storms were reaching maturity.

“See that?” Maxwell asked a former hotshot who was now working as a dispatcher at the SWCC. The weatherman pointed to an eyebrow of shifting pixels on the southwest side of the thunderstorms looming over Prescott. “It’s an outflow boundary. Exactly the stuff we teach in weather classes.”

Rain now fell over the Bradshaws. Even if most of the raindrops evaporated in the fifteen thousand feet of hot and dry air that sat between the cloud’s base and the ground—a phenomenon called virga—the moisture cooled the surrounding air and caused it to sink, pushing out a wave of winds. Meteorologists refer to this as an outflow boundary.

Maxwell was witnessing not the collapse of a single thunderstorm, but the collapse of many. What had been a line of mushrooming cumulus clouds, their tops reaching nearly thirty thousand feet, was now
generating thirty-five- to forty-five-mile-an-hour winds. The clouds were pancaking out into a thin layer of overcast spreading to the south. Like tributaries strengthening a river, drainages and mountain arroyos funneled the winds created by the dying storms, and they eventually became a single gust front, now moving straight at Yarnell.

“This is going to get interesting quick,” Maxwell said. “When it hits the fire, it’ll turn back on itself and blow up. On the ground, there will be fire behavior that’s about as extreme as it gets.”

Maxwell would have been more worried had he not been in contact with Hall’s management team all day, telling them directly that an outflow wind reversal was coming. His job wasn’t to advise on tactics, but Maxwell’s advice was implicit in the way he worded his warnings. When the winds hit, the firefighters and civilians needed to be well out of harm’s way.

The dispatchers behind Maxwell fielded calls at an increasingly frantic pace. Incident commanders throughout the region knew of the coming storms, and to help mitigate the impending surge in fire behavior, they wanted more engines, hotshot crews, and, most pressingly, aircraft. In the past hour, the Albuquerque dispatchers had been inundated with requests: Yarnell Hill alone wanted six more large air tankers. The SWCC, already out of aircraft in the region, relayed the incident commander’s request to Boise.

By that point in the afternoon, the State of Arizona had upgraded Yarnell Hill to a Type 1 incident, and new commanders were en route to relieve Hall and his team on July 1. In just a couple of days, the fire had gone from an errant lightning strike to the nation’s highest-priority blaze. Still, when NIFC got Hall’s management team’s requests for more aircraft, they were promptly denied.

“Very limited availability of air tankers with increasing activity in the western states,” came the response. “Unable to fill at this time.”

Nine aircraft were already committed to Yarnell, and to provide Hall’s team with any more air resources would mean risking disaster by pulling tankers and helicopters from the dozens of other quickly evolving fires around the West. NIFC couldn’t do it. The planes couldn’t be spared.

Around 3:30
P.M.
, Donut
was slinging weather in preparation for his hourly report to Granite Mountain when another weather update came over the command frequency. The National Weather Service had announced the imminent wind shift. Storms building over Prescott had reached maturity.

Abel, the operations chief, radioed each unit under his command to confirm that they’d received the update. Division Alpha replied that it had.

“Have you got eyes on both of the cells?” Abel asked.

“Affirmative,” Marsh said. Except for Air Attack, Marsh had the best view of the fire. Abel intended to use his vantage as an asset.

“Okay, watch that one to the north. It’s making me nervous. It’s collapsing and building,” Abel said. “I watched it do it two or three times.”

Granite Mountain was eating at its lunch spot when the weather update came through. Scott immediately texted Heather. “This fire is going to shit burning all over and expected +40 hr wind gusts from a t-storm outflow. Possibly going to burn some ranches and house.”

When Heather got the text, she was at home refilling the dogs’ water bowl. It was her day off, but she was catching up on the paperwork she’d abandoned the night before to spend time with Scott. The storms were already hitting Prescott. Outside, the winds blew so hard that she worried for a moment that the quaking windows might crack. They seemed to bend inward as the gusts buffeted the house. She grabbed her phone off the kitchen counter and texted Scott back, “I love you baby. Talk to you later!”

At 3:30, the flames
pulled harder than ever northeast into Peeples Valley, and the brush was torching just a few hundred yards from the Incident Command Post, which had been moved to Model Creek Middle School, in Peeples Valley, to accommodate the incident’s increasing size and complexity. The vehicles at the command post were
pulled farther back into the safety zone, while the engine crews set fire to the last road between it and the flames.

The burnout wasn’t an ideal plan. The backfire would almost certainly impinge on the already evacuated structures to the south, but the firefighters hoped the action would trade a few homes for many. Keeping the fire from jumping Model Creek Road would stop it from crossing into a subdivision of modular homes just past the safety zone at the middle school. The barter wasn’t working. As soon as the torches were set to the ground, embers began sparking tiny fires on the north side of the line. Engine crews bailed into the brush and hosed down the spots, but there would soon be more flames than water.

The shift came in stages. The band of cooler, moist air—the outflow boundary—that had originated from the thunderstorms over Prescott moved south down the back side of the Bradshaws and across the arroyos and parched fields of Skull Valley. Like the small wake that breaks off a ship’s bow, the front pushed forward the slowly moving air ahead of it. The weak waves sheared and angled as they hit pressure and temperature changes. When this confused front hit the bubble of hot air rising off the fire and the daily winds blowing off the desert, the air masses battled, creating an atmospheric instability that effectively canceled out the winds. A moment of calm fell over the area.

Rather than spreading aggressively forward, as the fire had been doing all day, the flames flickered and stood and worked their way through the already ignited brush. In the calm, the smoke column, which had been lying down to the northeast, was freed from the influence of the desert winds and billowed skyward. Firefighters stopped and looked at one another in disbelief. The calm was momentary and duplicitous, but it allowed the engine crews working on Model Creek Road to pick up spots threatening to overrun their line. The burnout, which had seemed destined to fail, turned and slowly blackened its way south, and the threat to the middle school and the Incident Command Post was nullified. Peeples Valley was spared.

But like a tide moving from north to south, the full force of the outflow boundary overpowered the desert winds. It first hit the flames on the blaze’s north end, whipping the fire into a frenzy. Like a bloodhound picking up a new and stronger scent, the flames pivoted and ran hard to the south. Truman Ferrell was still on Highway 89 when he saw what had been the fire’s smoldering southeast flank jump to life.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “That don’t look good. That’s going right to Glen Ilah.”

To keep himself entertained
on the lonely knoll on the valley floor, Donut started spinning the thermometer on its chain fifteen minutes earlier than normal. That would give him time to check and double-check his readings. It was just before 3:30 when Steed called on the crew network.

“Donut, you up?”

“Go, Steed.”

“There’s a weather report coming in on the radio”—it was the second one in as many hours. “Spin your weather and listen to crew. I’ll tell you what’s going on.”

Donut checked to make sure his radio was properly set up, then he went back to spinning the thermometer.

Marsh was among the first firefighters on Yarnell Hill to feel the shift. He radioed Todd Abel and told him that the “winds are getting squirrelly” on the ridgetop.

“Copy that. Are you in a good place?”

“Affirmative, in the black,” Marsh said. “And trying to work my way off the top.”

It wasn’t clear if Marsh meant that he was trying to work his way off the summit of the Weavers, which was a half-mile or so to the north of Granite Mountain’s position, or the ridge itself, which extended in a long arch back toward Yarnell and the Helms’ place. For the moment, Marsh’s position didn’t concern Abel. He’d heard what he needed to: Granite Mountain was safely in the black.

“Okay, I copy, just keep me updated,” Abel said to Marsh. “You guys, you know, hunker in and be safe, and we’ll get some air support down there ASAP.”

Meanwhile, Donut kept swinging the thermometer. He glanced back up at the ridge to see if the crew were still at their lunch spot, but they’d since left the fire’s creeping edge and moved deeper into the black on the ridgetop. By the time Donut looked back to the fire, a ten-to-twelve-mile-per-hour wind was blowing into his face.

As Donut watched, the flames instantaneously jumped to life. What moments earlier had been a three-mile-long smoldering edge suddenly became a three-mile flaming front that was burning directly at Donut and the town of Yarnell. It was just what Steed had warned him about. Donut stopped spinning weather. Just seconds after the wind shifted, the fire started racing through the unburned chaparral on the valley floor. The flames jumped a drainage a quarter-mile to the north.

“Steed, Donut. It’s hit my trigger point. I’m heading back to the safety zone.”

As soon as Donut dropped off the back side of the knoll and started running toward the old road grader, he lost sight of the fire, but he knew it was taking off. The smoke leaned over Yarnell and billowed white and heavy off to his left. For the second time in as many weeks, Donut found himself in a footrace with flames.

The branches whipped his face, and Donut wove through the path choked by the fewest bushes. As he raced off the knoll, he considered his options. The thin road that led back up to Granite Mountain wasn’t one. Fire burned fastest uphill, and with the crew being a half-mile away, the risk was too great to even consider. Same with the buggies parked in the flats a third of a mile from his lookout. On foot, there was no way he could beat the wind-driven flames to the buggies. That left two options: Call Blue Ridge’s superintendent, Brian Frisby, and hope he was nearby with his ATV; or deploy his fire shelter. The thought of having to weather the storm in an aluminum tent produced a wave of nausea. A line of thirty-foot flames was sweeping toward him.

He broke out of the brush thicket into a world of disappointment. The clearing wasn’t nearly as big as it looked from the ridge—it was a little larger than a tennis court. This wouldn’t work as a safety zone; it may not even have been large enough for Donut to safely deploy his fire shelter, a reality that, regretfully, he had overlooked when he was dropped at the lookout hours earlier. The wind beat the thick walls of brush surrounding the grader.

“Donut, I can see you in the dozer push,” Steed called. Even over the radio, Donut found it comforting to know that Steed and all the hotshots were watching him.

“I’m calling Blue Ridge,” Donut said.

“Total nonstop chaos” is
what Brian Frisby, the superintendent of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, called June 30. Highway 89 was packed with media and civilians. The radio traffic from the Peeples Valley end of the fire was a constant flurry of such-and-such compromised house or such-and-such compromised line, and the tactics seemed to be changing as quickly as the blaze itself. When the danger became too high, Frisby considered houses just another fuel type—not something worth risking lives to save—but he knew that the presence of homes sometimes prompted otherwise logical firefighters to make higher-risk decisions. Wildfires near towns were always the most complicated.

Blue Ridge was working on Yarnell’s Shrine Road, near the marble statues of Jesus. The thin paved street ran perpendicular to Highway 89 and up Harper Canyon, a dry wash on the town’s north end that was shaded by oak trees and packed with homes. The Shrine Road completed the contingency line the dozer had started building that morning. If the fire threatened Yarnell, Blue Ridge could keep the flames away from town by burning out, but the crew wasn’t finished with the line and wouldn’t be for some time.

Just before the weather update about the wind shift, Marsh had called Frisby requesting another face-to-face meeting. Things were
changing quickly. He wanted to coordinate Blue Ridge’s and Granite Mountain’s efforts. Frisby agreed and took off in the Razor to meet with Marsh on the ridge for another talk. He never got there.

When he rounded a corner on the two-track, Frisby saw thirty-foot flames jumping from the fire’s previously sleepy southern flank.
God dammit
. Granite Mountain’s lookout was in serious trouble. Smoke cloaked the north side of the knob where he and Frisby had dropped Donut off earlier in the day. Frisby accelerated, bouncing the ATV over the rutted and dusty bulldozer tracks.

By the time he reached the little clearing, Donut was standing by the grader with his radio in his hand, looking stunned. He’d just keyed the mic to call Blue Ridge—the only way for Donut to be extracted from hell—when he saw that Frisby was already there. Frisby whipped the Razor into a U-turn. Donut handed him the radio and said, “Talk to Steed and Marsh.” Donut wanted them to hear from Frisby that he was safe.