On the Burning Edge (13 page)

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“The worst wildfires on record are coinciding with a time when suppression force has never been greater, technological advantage has never been better, and suppression spending has never been higher,” Williams wrote. “Mega-fires challenge the commonly held notion that increasing wildfire threats can be effectively matched with greater suppression forces.”

Williams’s report isn’t the only one to put forward these views. In the past few years, one Forest Service–funded report suggested that fully three-quarters of air-tanker drops are ineffective during the initial attack phase of the firefight. Rapidly spreading fires burn straight through the slurry, which is exactly what Todd Lerke saw on Thompson Ridge. Yet because the tactic is widely and perhaps erroneously
recognized as effective, incident commanders drop retardant on the vast majority of quickly spreading blazes. Another report found that the costs of fighting fires fall by half when the new blazes burn into the blackened fuel left behind from previous fire scars. In other words, when
more
fires are allowed to burn, fire size regulates naturally, and controlling blazes becomes
cheaper
. It’s likely to take many years for this information, and other studies like these, to drastically reshape the way we deal with wildfires in America, but the fact that critical research is forthcoming is a sign that the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and state forestry agencies are open to adapting their management policies to the new realities of wildfires. The change hasn’t happened yet, and in the meantime, firefighters are still stopping 98 percent of burns in the initial-attack stage.

The eighteen Granite Mountain
Hotshots remaining on the Thompson Ridge Fire had little time to process Renan’s departure. No one knew whether he would live, or the extent of his injuries if he did, but the men were clearly disturbed by what they’d witnessed. After the ambulance rushed toward an emergency room two hours to the south, they clumped together in knots of twos and threes before pulling apart and lying back down for another few hours of rest. Grant was inconsolable. He called Leah, sobbing. Bob pulled him aside and told him to settle down.

“I know this is hard, but you’ve got to get over this,” he said.

“We go back to work? That’s how we deal with this?” Grant asked.

The simple answer was yes. Granite Mountain still had seven more shifts before Day’s team would release them from Thompson Ridge, and the crew’s trials were far from over. A few days after Renan’s incident, Steed called the men together beside the barn in the meadow. It was after another night shift, and the hotshots, still trying and mostly failing to sleep in the campground, looked exhausted. Ash and charcoal colored their scruffy faces gray, and dried sweat left behind rings of salt on their black T-shirts. They all wanted an update on Renan.
Steed knew only that Renan was going to live, but he didn’t know the details about his condition. He did have other news, though, and it wasn’t good.

That day, a twenty-eight-year-old smoke jumper in California, Luke Sheehy, had died on the line. He and two other jumpers had parachuted into a single-tree lightning fire in Northern California’s South Warner Wilderness. A burning branch had fallen sixty feet and struck Sheehy in the head. Despite his fellow jumpers’ attempts to resuscitate him, he died before arriving at the hospital.

Steed and the crew took a moment of silence. The more religious hotshots hung their heads in prayer, and the others just shook their heads. None of them knew Sheehy personally, but the news still hit close to the heart. Sheehy had died doing what Granite Mountain was doing every day on Thompson Ridge: work that wasn’t exceptionally hard or patently dangerous. But his death made it difficult to ignore the reality that, in one dark moment, the same fate could befall any of the hotshots.

Granite Mountain loaded into the buggies, and as the men headed back to the campground, they steeled themselves for another shift on the line. By the afternoon of June 8, Thompson Ridge had roughly doubled in size since the hotshots’ arrival. The blaze now spread across 18,500 acres and threatened another subdivision on its southern edge. To protect the homes, Day’s team called for a second burnout. This time, the objective was a four-thousand-to-five-thousand-acre pocket of pines and aspens adjacent to the homes. If Day’s team successfully orchestrated the burnout behind the houses, Thompson Ridge would be nearly contained.

The operation was controversial with the public from the outset. One of the homeowners’ major concerns was mudslides. Normally, when rain falls on unburned forest, 98 percent of the water soaks into the ground. But the blast-oven heat of an intense wildfire changes the soil’s composition and leaves behind a hydrophobic layer. When the monsoon rains come, the water streaks off this waxy film, carrying with it whatever ash the fire leaves behind. After one particularly intense fire in the Jemez Mountains, the rain from a single thunderstorm
moved thousands of tons of ash—five inches deep in some places—off the mountains. As black torrents cascaded down toward the Rio Grande, they picked up boulders and logs, and in the deluge, orchards and farms that had been spared from the flames were destroyed by the floods. The aftermath made it look as if the Jemez Mountains had erupted.

Mudslides were one concern. But for homeowners, the greater issue with Day’s burnout plan on Thompson Ridge was its echoes of 2000’s historically destructive Cerro Grande Fire. Started as a prescribed burn intended to thin out the increasingly thick forest near Los Alamos, the blaze escaped and led to a nuclear scare when flames jumped onto the National Laboratory’s property, where all manner of explosive and radioactive materials are used, tested, and stored.

The fire burned for three months, and firefighters were able to contain Cerro Grande only after the weather changed. By then the blaze had razed 235 Los Alamos homes and caused $1 billion in damages. In its aftermath, the name Cerro Grande became shorthand among both firefighters and the press for an increasingly accepted reality: man’s reign of controlling wildfire was quickly coming to an end.

An AStar helicopter took
off from Thompson Ridge’s fire camp shortly before dark. The helicopter banked over the tops of the pines and flew straight toward a patch of unburned forest that sat between a small group of houses and the wildfire. When the pilot looked down and saw the line of flames advancing through the sea of trees, he signaled to a crew member who sat in the wind near an open side door in the back. Balanced on the edge of the fuselage, extending just over the helicopter’s skids, was a waist-high box filled with plastic spheres about the size of Ping-Pong balls. The firefighter flipped a switch on the top of the box, an electric motor whirred to life, and every few seconds a ball injected with a highly flammable combination of chemicals rolled down a tube, dropped from the helicopter, and burst into flames just above the forest floor.

From where Granite Mountain was spread out along a road, holding the burnout operation’s southern edge, it looked as if the helicopter were firing tracer bullets into the hillside. It didn’t look quite right. The smoke was too black, and the fire much too hot, as though the ignition boss in the helicopter hadn’t fully accounted for just how dry the forest was. After seeing the flames, firefighters on scene estimated that rather than dropping six hundred balls, as it was supposed to, the helicopter had dropped six thousand.

Within the hour, thousands of tiny blazes climbed up brush and saplings and into the forest’s crown, where the flames caught gusts of wind and grew into one massive front. Like massive ocean waves, flames crashed through the forest. One of the fire’s heads raced toward the line where Granite Mountain was holding line. It hit so hard that the flames jumped a thirty-foot-wide road and divided another hotshot crew that was spread along the road uphill of Granite Mountain. The fire cut off a few hotshots from the rest of their crew. They abandoned their heavier gear and rushed west to safety while the rest of their crew fled east into the valley. When Bunch and his swamper, Parker, saw the hotshots racing toward the line, they shared a quick and concerned glance: Thompson Ridge was off and running.

When the temperature inside the smoke column exceeded four hundred degrees, whatever bits of aspen leaves, pinecones, or needles were caught in the rising air combusted and became natural-born incendiaries that rode gusts of wind up and away from the main fire. From the valley floor, the rising embers looked like endless strings of Christmas lights wrapped around a rotating smoke column. The effect was supernatural.

The most remarkable story of a fire’s behavior comes from the horrific Peshtigo Fire, a blaze that killed an estimated fifteen hundred people in Wisconsin’s North Woods in 1871. On the Peshtigo Fire, the temperature difference between the smoke and the cooler air on the blaze’s perimeter was so extreme that a tornado formed in the turbulent interface. The fire spun into a cyclone that rose hundreds of feet above the forest. As it twisted through the logging town of Peshtigo, the tornado incinerated grain elevators and lifted locomotives
completely off the railroad tracks. The heat became so intense that silicates that had melted out of the soil were sucked into the air. When the firestorm produced a thunderhead, the silicates became molten glass that rained down from the skies. In the aftermath, a thin sheet of glass encased everything—from the thousands of birds suffocated midflight by the fire’s insatiable appetite for oxygen to the fleeing family killed atop their horse-drawn wagon.

On Thompson Ridge, there were no flaming tornadoes, but many of the same conditions were present. Like a volley from archers, embers caught in the smoke were shot well ahead of the main fire. Some fizzled and died in rocks or ponds, but others landed and found life in the fertile bed of cured pine needles. Within a half-hour of the helicopter’s burnout, the fire had jumped well beyond its lines and kept running. Commuters could see flames from Albuquerque, seventy miles to the south.

Clayton Whitted, who was still serving as task-force leader, was working closely with Allen Farnsworth, who was in charge of Division Zulu. They were together when the fire took off.

“Sure as shit that’s gonna jump the line,” Clayton said to Farnsworth.

Shortly after the flames crossed the road, they took stock of the damage and drove up to the saddle where the fire had broken through the lines. Hoses lay smoldering beside a melted gas canister and a few charred boxes of MREs and Gatorade. Plumes of smoke corkscrewed into the sky around the truck, and embers bounced off the cab. There were trees torching and dead trees falling around the saddle.

“What do you think, Clay?” Farnsworth asked.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about this now,” Clayton said. “I think we should wait.”

“Right answer,” Farnsworth said.

But it wasn’t the answer the day shift’s operations chief, Darrell Willis’s counterpart and the architect of the burnout, wanted to hear. The management team had already racked up a cost of more than $9 million, and this preemptive fire was supposed to end Thompson
Ridge—not revive it. If another man-made burn spiraled out of control and wreaked havoc on Los Alamos, and this time because some airborne pyro had mistakenly launched ten times more flaming Ping-Pong balls into the forest than he was supposed to, it would blacken the eye of the federal and state firefighting agencies in the area. Somebody was going to have to fix the mistake immediately. And the only somebodies who could do it were the hotshots.

If Clayton didn’t like the assignment, Steed liked it less, especially in light of how smoke jumper Luke Sheehy had been killed. The fire was moving quickly in a patch of dead but still-standing trees that, weakened by the fire and burning, could easily be knocked over in a strong wind. Steed felt that chasing the slop-over that night violated or compromised too many of the Ten and Eighteen:

In country not seen in daylight.

Unfamiliar with weather and local factors influencing fire behavior.

Getting frequent spot fires across line.