On the Burning Edge (28 page)

Removing all nineteen took three separate convoys, plus one more with a single truck. At the Helms’ place, Emery and others received the bodies. Then a pastor blessed each hotshot. The careful handling of the men was repeated as they were transferred to medical-examiner vans and driven ninety miles to Phoenix, where the bodies were to be autopsied and prepared for burial.

The caravan of vans and accompanying fire personnel stretched for miles. News of Granite Mountain’s deaths had spread throughout the country, and at the base of Yarnell Hill, people began appearing to watch the procession. At first, there were only a few standing along the highway, in a gesture of silent respect. But the crowds grew as the caravan approached Phoenix, where it was 112 degrees. Police cars and
fire engines were parked at intersections and overpasses, their officers and firefighters standing in silent salute as the fallen hotshots passed below. Thousands of strangers stood side by side, offering prayers and thanks to the nineteen young men who had unwillingly become heroes.

Donut went to fifteen funerals
. On July 10, he went to four: Eric Marsh’s was held at Granite Basin Lake at 8
A.M.
, Wade Parker’s at 11
A.M
. in Chino Valley, Andrew Ashcraft’s at 1
P.M
. in Prescott Valley, and Clayton Whitted’s at 2
P.M
. at the Heights Church. Jesse Steed’s was the next day at noon. Chris MacKenzie’s was two days later in his hometown in California.

Rain started falling on Prescott the day the hotshots died, and since then, the town had remained wet and brooding. Southwest fire season all but ended on July 1. The monsoon was the heaviest the Southwest had seen in many years. Most afternoons, it gave the town an appropriately damp mood. Shop owners raised banners. Soap was taken to store windows:
THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS…OUR HEARTS ARE WITH YOU…NEVER FORGET
. Granite Mountain bumper stickers appeared on the backs of cars all around the country. The City of Prescott made T-shirts in remembrance of the men, and a loop of purple ribbon with flames in the eye came to symbolize the town’s tragedy. So too did the number 19.

Donut said his goodbyes when the men were brought back from the morgue. It was Tuesday morning, two days after the deaths, and Donut went to Phoenix with the department to bring their bodies back to Prescott. This time the procession had a more ceremonial feel.

The hotshots were loaded into nineteen white hearses and lined out in an unbroken single file. Marsh’s hearse led the way. Steed’s followed. Granite Mountain returned home to Prescott along the same route they had taken to Yarnell, passing through the ruins of the town they tried in vain to save. On the night of June 30, more than a hundred homes had burned, but miraculously, no civilians were killed.
The Central Yavapai Fire District named Gary Cordes the Firefighter of the Year for his actions at Yarnell. When the procession passed through town thirty-six hours later, there was still heat in the ashes in the basin where the nineteen men died, but the Yarnell Hill Fire would grow by only two thousand more acres before it was officially declared contained on July 10.

Well-wishers and first responders lined Highway 89 all the way from Yarnell to Prescott. Fire engines pushed their ladders into a triangle over the road—another tunnel like the one the men had formed for Renan that day—and the hearses drove through it as silence fell over Whiskey Row.

At the Yavapai County Medical Examiner’s Office, a smoke-jumping plane flew overhead and dropped nineteen purple ribbons, one hotshot’s name written on each, over the hearses. Donut followed the procession in Granite Mountain’s chase truck. At the courthouse, along with four other firefighters, he helped unload the gurneys into the morgue. The bodies of his nineteen friends lined the walls of the cold and sterile room. Donut asked to be left alone with them.

Inside, it was thirty-six degrees—cold enough to slow decomposition, cold enough to see his breath. He could see a few of the men’s feet, blackened and so very naked without their boots, but blankets covered the rest of their bodies. Donut was grateful for that. He didn’t move from the doorway. He stood there quietly for a long time, looking out over the men until the tears came.

Donut hadn’t thought of what he was going to say—what could he say? So over and over again he said what he felt. He was sorry that he wasn’t there with them, that he was the one who had lived.

Nine days after Granite Mountain’s
deaths, on July 9, the City of Prescott held a memorial service for the men at a small stadium in Prescott Valley. Vice President Joe Biden came. So did Arizona governor Jan Brewer, Arizona senator John McCain, and Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security and the state’s former governor. The state fire marshal was there, as were the head of the Forest Service,
fire chiefs from around the country, and more than two hundred bagpipers who played a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” A total of eight thousand firefighters from 220 different agencies came.

Steve Emery wasn’t there. He’d taken a trip to the mountains of Colorado to cope with the fresh and painful memories. As he’d anticipated, he couldn’t get the images of the nineteen out of his head. He and the other men who had picked up their bodies agreed to meet regularly to talk about what they had seen that day. It was helping. He was functioning, managing the memories, but he was seriously considering giving up wildland firefighting. He couldn’t handle another Dude Fire or Yarnell Hill.

Pamphlets describing each man in two hundred words were distributed to the crowd, along with purple ribbons that everybody in attendance pinned to their lapels in remembrance. Outside, thousands of people who couldn’t find seating in the full stadium gathered to watch the memorial on giant screens. The ceremony lasted two hours.

Darrell Willis spoke, echoing a sentiment he would share many times in the coming months. “I would have followed them blindfolded into every place they went,” he said.

“I didn’t have the privilege of knowing any of these heroes personally, but I know them,” Joe Biden said. He told a story of firefighters saving his sons’ lives. In 1972, his wife, daughter, and two boys had been in a horrific car accident, and they pulled his sons out of the burning car, but his wife and one-year-old daughter didn’t survive the crash. “Oh, I knew those selfless heroes,” Biden said of the hotshots.

What gave Donut, Bunch, Maldonado, and Renan immense pride was that a representative from each of the 114 hotshot crews in the country came to pay their respects. It was what Marsh would have wanted. The hotshots attended the ceremony in their simple uniforms: a cotton T-shirt, green Nomex pants, and a pair of worn boots that most, as a sign of respect, had freshly oiled.

Donut spoke near the ceremony’s end. On his way to the podium, he hugged Biden, Brewer, and Darrell Willis. It took a moment for Donut to compose himself at the mic.

“My brothers, my sisters, my family, I’d like to share the Hotshot Prayer with all of you.”

Then he calmly read:

When I am called to duty, Lord
,

To fight the roaring blaze
,

Please keep me safe and strong:

I may be here for days
.

Be with my fellow crew members

As we hike up to the top
.

Help us cut enough line

For this blaze to stop
.

Let my skills and hands

Be firm and quick
,

Let me find those safety zones

As we hit and lick
.

For if this day on the line

I should answer death’s call—

Donut’s voice started to crack—

Lord, bless my hotshot crew
,

My family, one and all
.

“I miss my brothers,” Donut said. He walked offstage to a standing ovation, most of the audience in tears.

O
ver the next four months, ninety-five hundred items of tributea to the men were set by the chain-link fence outside Granite Mountain’s station: T-shirts (1,100 of them), flags (900), fire helmets (20), stuffed animals (31), Pulaskis (10), letters and cards (4,000), a picture of an ice sculpture wearing turnouts, and a large wood carving of Granite Mountain’s logo.

For months after the tragedy, at every hour of the day, visitors came to the station either to leave something or just to look. There was a lot to take in. So many items were hung on the fence that at one point, after a heavy rain, it collapsed under the weight.

The city didn’t know what to do with the shrine until a pair of retired widows volunteered to preserve it. On September 10, during a ninety-minute lull in the rain, which had been falling steadily for four days, thirty volunteers and forty firemen took down the saturated shrine. Each section of the fence was photographed, then the items removed and loaded into a box. Two trucks, one of them provided by the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, were filled. Over the course of the next months, volunteers dried out and cataloged every item. One of them is a child’s fire helmet with a handwritten letter folded up and tucked inside. Another, item 2013-27-57, is a close-up photo that shows
a Granite Mountain widow holding the blackened hand of her husband. The hope is that someday, every item will be displayed in a museum for the men. People still leave items at the fence.

Donut received countless gifts as well. The never-ending stream of letters, shirts, trinkets, and even gifts for his daughter, though absolutely well-intentioned, eventually amounted to an outpouring of compassion that he couldn’t possibly process. After the memorial, McDonough was thrust into the national spotlight. He went to New York City to appear on the
Today
show and
60 Minutes
and did dozens of interviews for local, national, and international publications. He was the guest of honor at the Dierks Bentley benefit concert for the fallen. When he was brought onstage, girls in spaghetti-strap tank tops screamed in unison, “We love you, Donut!”

He’d promised his friends they’d never be forgotten. But the reasons he spoke publicly about the event were simpler. His story could help raise money for the families of the men he loved.

“Yarnell was world news and media exposure is the single biggest driver of fundraising,” says Burk Minor, the managing director of the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, a nonprofit that raises money for the families of fallen wildland firefighters. “Most deaths on the line are like Luke Sheehy, the smoke jumper who died in backwoods California in June 2013. There’s no media and very little money raised. The families of Granite Mountain got exponentially more than those of any fallen wildland firefighters in history.”

The Dierks Bentley concert alone raised $476,000 for the families of the nineteen, which was still only a fraction of the $13 million donated to Granite Mountain by year’s end.

After funerals and worker’s compensation benefits, the tragedy is expected to cost the City of Prescott $51 million over sixty years. After much heated debate, the city council voted not to reinstate a hotshot crew. Granite Mountain would be no more. Darrell Willis was devastated. What had been one of the country’s most progressive fire departments was now a cautionary tale for every western city in the country. Tucson, home to the only other municipal hotshot crew in the nation, had founded that program using ideas first implemented
in Prescott. Though the city denies that Granite Mountain’s deaths had anything to do with the decision, Tucson disbanded its hotshot crew within a year of Yarnell Hill.

The only bright spot is that the fuels-crew-only model that Willis and Marsh helped establish is being used in a number of towns throughout the West. Santa Fe and Boulder, Colorado, both funded thinning and chipping crews to prepare their towns for the inevitable wildfires. Every year, similar initiatives are being funded by cities all across the West. Though the vast majority of western towns are still unprepared for future fires, as Yarnell was, that’s beginning to change.

Two official investigations studied
what happened to Granite Mountain on Yarnell Hill. The first, compiled by a fifty-member interagency team of subject-matter experts that ranged from meteorologists and historians to retired Type 1 incident commanders, found “no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.” The second, a smaller investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, fined the State of Arizona $559,000 for four key safety violations, including implementing “suppression strategies that prioritized protection of non-defensible structures and pastureland over firefighter safety,” when the state knew that “suppression of extremely active chaparral fuels was ineffective.” OSHA pointed out that if Brian Frisby hadn’t arrived on his Razor at just the right moment, Donut would have been Yarnell Hill’s first fatality. But the question both investigations failed to answer was the one everybody wanted to know: Why did Granite Mountain leave the black?

One City of Prescott firefighter was so confused by what happened that he took an arson-sniffing dog to the fire site. The dog found the remains of a fusee. Some took it as evidence that somebody, perhaps the Helms, had lit an intentional backfire that had trapped the hotshots. But with fifty-mile-an-hour winds funneling into the basin and already extreme fire behavior raging, it’s very unlikely that such a backfire, if one was even set, would have been responsible for the tragic outcome.

Independent journalist John Dougherty dedicated most of a year to examining the enduring mystery. He pressed both investigation teams to make public all of their raw research material. Eventually, officials from both teams agreed to release interview transcripts, videos, photos, and maps to the public. The archives, though redacted, are incredibly comprehensive.

A message board on Dougherty’s website became the de facto forum for Yarnell Hill buffs; it swelled to hundreds of thousands of comments, mostly from anonymous citizens and firefighters obsessed with the mystery surrounding the tragedy.

Dougherty and many others turned up an astonishing number of clues the investigative team had missed, left out, or possibly just ignored in their rush to release a report. Included were a few video records that contradicted the investigations’ claims that there was a thirty-minute communication gap between Marsh and the incident commanders. There wasn’t. Marsh had talked to Burfiend fifteen minutes before the burnover. Burfiend, fielding countless radio transmissions during what’s been described as the fire’s complete audio chaos, had simply forgotten the conversation and didn’t remember it until days later, when he was shaving.

This discovery, and others like it, provided more fodder for conspiracy theorists. Most people combing through the raw materials—or at least most of those posting on the message boards—seemed to be doing so in the belief that both investigation teams had willfully ignored the truth in an attempt to cover up somebody’s mistakes. Whom they accused of making the mistakes depended on the commenter’s perspective or agenda, and many of the most popular theories evolved with the research.

Some speculated that the incident commanders and Darrell Willis had ordered Marsh and the crew back to Yarnell for structure protection. Others blamed tension between Marsh and Steed for the fatal decision. One rumor emerged that the captain and the superintendent had a blowout fight on the saddle above the basin. The fight supposedly ended with Marsh, who was theorized to be at the Helms’
place or moving back up the basin toward the hotshots, ordering Steed to bring the crew down against his will.

As of yet, no radio transmissions or other evidence have surfaced to support the theory that a disagreement occurred, let alone a full-blown argument. Marsh’s location, and precisely what prompted him and Granite Mountain to leave the black, remains unknown. In all likelihood, the crew, seeing the flames bearing down on Glen Ilah, left the safety zone of their own volition, to reengage the firefight. Even after confirming receipt of the weather updates, Steed and Marsh had most likely underestimated the intensity of the wind shift, its effect on the fire, and the roughness of the terrain between the two safety zones. In the aftermath, some firefighters saw themselves as capable of making the same decision—such was the complexity of the environment at Yarnell Hill—while others saw it as an egregious and unforgivable error in judgment.

Most experts who studied the fire agreed that the decision to leave the black was ultimately made by Marsh. Jim Cook, the founder of the Wildland Fire Leadership Program, explained it this way: “As the division, Marsh was holding all of the cards. He had the power to refuse any assignments he didn’t like, and Steed would have needed to be exceptionally confident to flat-out refuse Marsh’s order. That would fracture a crew.”

Many firefighters and community members found the conclusions of the two investigations to be, in general, deficient. Twelve families of the deceased banded together to sue the State of Arizona, the Arizona State Forestry Division, the Central Yavapai Fire District, and Yavapai County for wrongful death. Listed on the claim were Todd Abel, the operations chief; Russ Shumate, the first incident commander; and Roy Hall, the incident commander during the fatalities. City of Prescott officials were conspicuously absent from the claim.

In addition to $10 million for each surviving widow, $7.5 million per child, and $5 million for each parent, the families requested an injunction requiring the state to equip all firefighters with GPS tracking devices and personal fire shelters capable of withstanding the two-thousand-degree
fire that killed the men in the basin. These shelters don’t yet exist in a portable size. The lawsuit, which will likely take years to resolve, also demanded that Arizona create a memorial to the crew at the State Capitol.

Some families are less concerned with lawsuits and assigning blame; they’re simply looking for closure. Linda Caldwell—Bob’s mother and Grant’s aunt—wanted to know everything that happened on the line that day. She asked for special permission to see her boys’ burned bodies. She felt Bob’s face through the American flag covering his body, and when she visited the deployment site, she got down on her hands and knees and collected bits of fire shelters left in the ash.

Some, like Clayton’s wife, Kristi Whitted, didn’t want to know anything at all. She took comfort in knowing that Clayton was in heaven and refused to put anything in her mind that she could never get out. Still others dealt with their grief by continuing to examine and dissect all the variables associated with the crew’s deaths.

Travis Turbyfill’s father, David, blamed his son’s death on the shelters. Had their shelters been more sophisticated, in his calculation, Travis and the others would have survived. The shelters failed because they were exposed to conditions that far exceeded what they were designed to handle. Turbyfill pressured the Forest Service to review and improve its current system, which the agency is committed to doing over the next four years.

It’s possible a redesign will emerge from this incident, but federal agencies are putting more energy toward leadership and decision-making training than into technological advancements. Along with Granite Mountain’s nineteen fallen, fifteen other American wildland firefighters died on the line in 2013—more than in any year since 1994.

“When studying these incidents, the questions we asked were: Where are the new frontiers? Where can we really make a difference?” says Tom Harbour, director of the Forest Service’s Fire and Aviation Management program. “As we talked, it wasn’t building a better fire shelter, a better Pulaski, or a smaller, more powerful chainsaw. It was—standing there on the line, aircraft above us, engines
below us, fire coming toward us, and rapidly changing dynamic weather—how do we process all this information with these wonderful brains we’ve been given? Perhaps the next great advance for our wild and prescribed fires isn’t necessarily in technology, but in how we as human beings interact within the systems of natural and prescribed fire.”

In addition to such enlightened pronouncements, Harbour and other agency directors have engaged in discussions about reevaluating the way land-management agencies mitigate, prevent, and contain wildfires. In July 2014, Senator John McCain introduced legislation requiring that at least half of what’s spent each fire season on suppression also be spent on hazardous-fuels reduction projects. Currently, only $201 million of the $4.1 billion the Forest Service requested in its 2014 budget was allocated to hazardous-fuels reduction around rural communities.

“We need to rethink the practice of throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at wildfires year after year and begin aggressively treating our forests,” said McCain. As of this book’s publication, the bill has not passed Congress. If it, or one like it, eventually does, it will still take many generations before America’s forests adapt to the current state of wildfires.

For the nineteen’s closest
friends and families, the year after the men’s deaths was filled with pain and readjustment. In February 2014, eight months after Yarnell Hill, Donut stepped down from the fire department. He was battling PTSD and, as is common with people dealing with the disorder, had turned for a time to alcohol. He took a job as an ambassador with the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, where he spoke about his experience at benefit events for fallen firefighters. Donut’s personal goal is to build an actual center in Prescott for first responders coping with PTSD. He has a blueprint, and he’s on the board of an organization working to achieve the same goal, but mostly he’s focusing on healing.

“I don’t see it getting better until I hit rock bottom,” Donut said months after Yarnell Hill. “I just can’t seem to get the negativity out of my mind.”

Some family members of the other hotshots publicly questioned Donut’s role in the Yarnell fire. Though asked by investigators multiple times, Donut has never made a direct public statement on what specifically Marsh and Steed were discussing on the crew’s private network before leaving the black. In the aftermath, “Nineteen guys made that decision” became his and the City of Prescott’s mantra.