On the Burning Edge (7 page)

Donut and the veterans hung around the spots of cooling ash, loud and laughing, as they poked fun at one another and agreed that mopping up, slow as it was, was a lot better than running chainsaws at J. S. Acker Memorial Park. The prairie fire was little more than a welcome smell on their clothes. Not even Renan was terribly impressed. But as the sun slid beneath the horizon, Renan, working amid the twists of light smoke with ash covering his hands, couldn’t help feeling pleased.

E
arly one Sunday in May, little Ben and his big brother, Jacob, climbed out of their new race-car-shaped beds and picked their way through the flotsam of Tonka trucks and open books in the hallway. The boys pushed open their parents’ bedroom door and crawled into bed with Brandon Bunch and his wife, Janae. Bunch groaned. He was twenty-two, with the dark-haired good looks of a NASCAR driver, but at five-eight and 140 pounds, the fourth-year sawyer was one of the smaller guys on Granite Mountain. He liked sleeping in on his days off. The boys curled into balls against their parents, and for a few short moments the family lay quietly. Then Jacob asked when Garret was coming.

“Not yet, Jakey. He’ll be here in a few hours,” Bunch muttered with a slight lisp.

Janae, who was seven months pregnant, got out of bed. She knew Jacob was too excited to stay quiet. Garret Zuppiger, one of Bunch’s closest friends on the crew, was coming to breakfast before church. Janae led her boys to the kitchen—Jacob first, Ben dragging his blanket behind—put on coffee, popped bread into the toaster, and tuned the TV to the Cartoon Network. Bunch emerged from the bedroom
shortly after. Sleeping through the shrieking of
Dora the Explorer
wasn’t possible.

One perk of the season’s slow start was that the hotshots had more time with their families. Considering the hotshots’ youth—their average age was twenty-seven—Granite Mountain was more family-oriented than most crews. Whether they were from Prescott, like nine of the guys, or were recent transplants, most of the hotshots shared small-town values. Many of the men went to church together. Eleven of the hotshots were married, three more were engaged, and nine had kids. Collectively, the hotshots had fathered fourteen children, and by year’s end four more, including the Bunches’, would come into the world. If the hotshots hadn’t already sunk their roots deep in Prescott, many were starting to.

The Bunches owned a two-bedroom home in a new subdivision twenty miles north and east of Prescott and rarely locked their doors. When Zup arrived a few hours later, he walked right in. Jacob sprung up from the TV.

“What’s up, buddy?” Zup said as the boy attached himself to Zup’s leg. The hotshot, who had cropped red hair, freckles, and
ZUPPIGER
tattooed across his stomach in ornate script, pulled off his Seattle Mariners cap and twisted it onto the two-year-old’s head.

With Jacob still fastened to his leg, Zup hugged Janae, who was grilling chocolate chip pancakes and bacon at the stove, and poured himself coffee. He took a seat at the table with Bunch.

“Boys are good, I see,” Zup said. “And that one?” He pointed to Janae’s stomach. Janae had recently learned that she was having another boy.

As the adults caught up about parenthood, Ben, the youngest, perched on the counter in the kitchen and Jacob sat cross-legged on a pillow eight inches from the TV screen. He worked the better part of his fist into his mouth. The cartoons still blared.

“Jakey, dude, can you sit on the couch, please?” Bunch asked. Jacob was Janae’s child from an earlier relationship, but before they married, two years earlier, Bunch had insisted on adopting him as his own son. Jacob looked at his dad for a long moment, then pulled himself
far enough from the TV to spare his retinas. The boy had showed signs of autism, and the Bunches were still figuring out how to cope with the possibility that their son might have the condition.

“It’s hard enough having two normal kids,” Bunch said. “And now we’ve got another coming…”

Zup was single but empathetic. At twenty-seven, he couldn’t yet imagine raising kids or the turmoil the Bunches must have felt. He knew what it was like to get hard news, though. Not long before starting his rookie season in 2012, Zup’s girlfriend at the time had taken her own life in the Prescott apartment they shared. He rarely spoke about that dark period of his life, and that morning at the breakfast table he steered the conversation to lighter topics.

Garret told the Bunches about his new girlfriend, and a story from a few nights earlier, when Garret had gone to a bar with Donut, Chris MacKenzie, and the young rookie Kevin Woyjeck. After a few drinks, Chris had started frisbeeing the rookie’s hat across the bar. Woyjeck would pick it up and sit back down, only to have Chris rip the hat back off and once again fling it across the bar. Zup, who had a business degree from the University of Arizona, was a gifted writer and a quirky storyteller, even keeping a lighthearted blog,
I’d Rather Be Flying!
His recounting of the bar scene made Bunch feel like he was on the barstool, laughing with the other veterans as Woyjeck’s hat floated across the pub.

Bunch had been with
Granite Mountain since 2010, the crew’s second year as hotshots, and he remembered the men back then being “nasty dudes who never took their yellows off. We were proud to be hard.” Marsh’s standards were high, and Bunch did everything he could to meet them. He was a quiet person to begin with, and nervousness scared him nearly silent for the first few months of his fire career. In an attempt to prove himself, Bunch once worked himself to heat exhaustion and had to spend an hour sitting in the shade. He returned to work that same afternoon.

His tenacity seemed to leave an impression on Marsh. Later in his
rookie year, Bunch was arrested for drinking and driving, an offense severe enough to merit his firing. The only reason he kept his job was because Marsh convinced the department chiefs to give him a second chance. Bunch was nineteen at the time, and Marsh forgave his recklessness.

“It’s nice to see you’ve got a little life in you,” Marsh told Bunch.

The fact that Eric had stood up for him made Bunch even prouder to work for Granite Mountain. Marsh, though, remained an enigma to him. Bunch never felt he had a good read on his superintendent, but then, few people who worked with him did. One former colleague called him an “onion with layers he doesn’t let most people see.” He was typically serious, but he had a sharp wit and could be funny. The hotshots called Marsh’s lingo “Eric-isms,” and they included quips like “It’s hotter than two rabbits screwing in a sock.”

Marsh was a polymath and a bit of a snob. He took pride in understanding his pursuits well, and whether it was music, bikes, his tattoos, or his books and coffee (always locally roasted and shade-grown), Marsh enjoyed the finest things he could reasonably afford. His discerning taste gave Bunch the impression Marsh was cerebral but often lacking in the real-world experience to back up his ample theoretical knowledge. Whether it was mountain biking, riding horses, or firefighting, he knew all the right terms and the way to present himself. He also seemed to be searching for identity and affirmation.

The more seasons Bunch worked for Granite Mountain, the more he felt that under Marsh’s command, the hotshots were always having to prove themselves. Some hotshot crews required their men to shave regularly, wear clean shirts, and keep their hair short. Granite Mountain was this way, and to Bunch, who was in the minority of the guys on the crew with no aspirations of becoming a structural firefighter, the crew’s straitlaced vibe seemed at odds with the realities of a job that required digging line in hundred-plus-degree temperatures, camping out for two weeks at a time, and doing so with scant access to running water. By the end of the 2012 season, Bunch, who’d been raised on a ranch and spent his childhood riding bulls, had grown tired of “dressing up like a schoolboy to work in the woods.”

That winter, he applied to two federal hotshot crews, in hopes of finding a crew culture that aligned more closely with his love of the woods. Then Janae got pregnant again. She didn’t want him to go back to hotshotting at all. Raising two boys while he was away on fires was already testing his family, but planning for a third child changed everything.

Money was tight, and the Bunches had few options. With a high school education and no job experience outside of the hotshots, Bunch knew that fighting fires was the best way he had to make money quickly. If the crew hit a good assignment, he could save $2,500 in two weeks. Working for Granite Mountain would keep him close to home when he wasn’t on fires. He and Janae decided that the best option was for him to return to the crew for another season. He’d leave just before Janae’s due date. Marsh agreed to let one of his best sawyers leave early, and they set Bunch’s last day for the first week of July.

A
merica’s fire season usually starts in the Southwest, where desert winds and warming temperatures have primed the brush and pine forests for flame by early May. Wildfires then follow summer’s heat counterclockwise, moving north and west up through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada before establishing themselves in the big timber in Idaho, Montana, and the Pacific states by August. Come October, the season has begun to slowly wind down in much of the West, but only now does it get going in Appalachia’s oaks and the great spruce forests of Minnesota. Some years, an early storm drowns the sparks by November. Other years, the season ends with a flash in December, when the Santa Ana winds rake across Southern California’s San Bernardino Mountains and push fires into Los Angeles and San Diego suburbs. But in the driest seasons, wildfires can burn straight through the winter.

The progression of the fire season is tracked out of Boise, Idaho, at the National Interagency Fire Center. Effectively, NIFC is the Pentagon of wildland firefighting. It dispatches nationally shared resources to the forty-five thousand to ninety thousand fires that ignite in America each year. NIFC, or simply “Boise,” as it’s often called by firefighters, sits adjacent to the airport and has the look and operational
feel of a military base. The fifty-five-acre compound of drab buildings houses staff from the eight federal agencies—the Forest Service, the Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management, and others—that collectively manage more than seven hundred million acres.

One building on campus is dedicated to managing one of the world’s largest civilian caches of radios. There’s enough communications equipment to support thirty-two thousand firefighters. On-site inspectors ensure that the agency’s fire vehicles are up to snuff near a smoke-jumping loft where soon-to-be-airborne firefighters sew and repair parachutes. There’s a Costco-size warehouse that stores an enormous volume of fire equipment, and on the campus’s perimeter waits a Boeing 737 that the fire agencies contract to fly firefighters to the most pressing blazes. There are no flight attendants on board; passengers must provide their own midflight snacks.

The brain of the wildland firefighting organization resides in NIFC’s command center, a nondescript glass-paneled building in the center of the compound. Every morning during peak fire season, the fire directors of each agency meet around a long table surrounded by pictures of air tankers and flames. The directors’ task: set the day’s National Preparedness Level, a sliding scale that takes into account the percentage of available firefighters committed to blazes and the likelihood that new fires will spark. On one end of the spectrum is Level I—ample resources, few fires—and on the other is Level V: many fires, few available resources to fight them. In 2002, the directors placed the national preparedness at Level V for more than sixty days. That year, one battalion of troops from the Department of Defense was trained to fight fires, and firefighters from Canada and Australia were enlisted to add more able bodies to the effort. Over twelve months, more than seven million acres in all fifty states burned.

To compartmentalize how fires are managed nationally, NIFC, which was founded in 1965 in response to a need for cohesion among the many agencies battling wildfires, broke the country into eleven different fire regions. The boundaries were drawn to meet the particular challenges a certain area’s fire regime poses to firefighters. Containing
blazes in the vast wilderness of Alaska (Region 10) requires a response different from what’s needed to fight fires in the brush, high winds, and dense subdivisions of California (Region 5). Geographic Area Coordination Centers were placed inside each region to act as the area equivalent of NIFC. At each GACC are smaller, though still incredibly extensive, caches of firefighting equipment. Each GACC staffs analysts and scientists who study the weather and fuel conditions to predict the region’s fire severity for the day, week, month, and year.

Boise compiles all eleven regions’ fire severities into a national forecast that’s used to place resources in the regions that, because of drought or predicted thunderstorms, need firefighters most. NIFC and the GACCs make up the arm that moves the hammer in a highstakes game of whack-a-mole.

Through the winter of 2012–13,
the Southwest was dry enough to kindle a fire at any point, but the sparks didn’t arrive until May 30, when a downed power line ignited a blaze near three small fishponds in Pecos, New Mexico. Twenty-four hours later, two thousand acres of ponderosa forest were burning and the season had begun.

Chuck Maxwell, a fire weather meteorologist, watched the blaze spread from his office at Albuquerque’s Southwest Coordination Center, the home base for Region 3. As the lead fire weatherman for Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas, and the panhandle of Oklahoma, Maxwell indirectly determines where to send resources and when to order more for an area that covers 250,000 square miles. He’s good at his job. Over the past fourteen years, he’s predicted with almost 70 percent accuracy where and when to expect the biggest of the region’s five thousand annual fires.

May 31 was the first time in 2013 that the SWCC felt hectic. To find the resources needed to contain the fire developing outside Pecos, a couple dozen interagency dispatchers called BLM, Forest Service, and Park Service offices throughout the region. Whether the dispatcher’s specific job was logistics (caterers, Porta-Potties), communications (radios), operations (engines, hotshot crews), or aviation (air
tankers, helicopters), the question they ask at a local, regional, or national level is almost always the same: What can your fire district spare?

Once the SWCC had exhausted the supply of available firefighters in the region, the resource order was bumped up to NIFC, which passed the request to the ten other geographic regions. Montana (Region 1) and the Northwest (Region 6) were already sending crews. By midmorning on the 31st, some two hundred firefighters and support staff were already en route to the new fire. Still, Maxwell thought they’d need more. A Red Flag Warning had been issued for that day, and dry and windy conditions were likely to fan the flames.

In his usual uniform of denim on denim, Maxwell stood before a fifty-five-inch monitor, watching a radar image of digital clouds drift over a black-and-white terrain map of the West. From this same spot, he’d watched more than a dozen blazes set and reset the record for the largest and most destructive fires in New Mexico and Arizona history. One fire he tracked developed into the largest recorded in the history of the lower forty-eight states.

That morning, dozens of wind barbs—tiny witch’s-broom-shaped icons that indicate wind speed and direction—textured Maxwell’s monitor in the area of the southern Rockies. Warm air on the desert floor colliding with cool air in the mountains formed an atmospheric instability, and already wind, nature’s tool for creating equilibrium, was gusting at seventy miles per hour above the fire site.

Maxwell, who had spent two decades studying Southwest weather, wasn’t too concerned about the blaze burning outside Pecos. It was the fires that hadn’t started yet that really worried him. To predict where and when big fires are most likely to spark, Maxwell factors in drought, temperature, precipitation, the amount of fine fuels (like grass and brush), and the monsoon, a pulse of moisture that settles over the Southwest from early July to September and often ends the Southwest’s fire season. Accounting for all of these variables, Maxwell saw enormous potential for large fires in 2013.

That summer’s drought was the determining factor. The entire
Southwest was in year thirteen of a hot-and-dry spell that scientists were already comparing to the 1500s, when drought killed most of the region’s forests. It’s for this reason that few trees older than five hundred years can be found anywhere in the Southwest. The current dry spell was exhibiting the potential to be just as severe. Climatologists at Los Alamos National Laboratory predict that by 2050 we’ll see a three-to-five-degree temperature increase over the Southwest and an even more parched clime. The effect a warmer and drier environment will have on fire seasons is predicted to be dire. Some scientists project 142 percent more acres burned every year in the Southwest and 50 percent more nationwide.

Because of the drought, Maxwell forecast that fires could become big and unruly almost anywhere in Arizona and New Mexico. The four other factors helped refine his predictions. The Prescott area concerned him greatly. The fall 2012 monsoon season had been wetter than average over the city, providing the area’s wild grasses with plenty of water. By spring, the hills were cloaked in a vibrant green. As the summer warmed and the grass dried to straw, the fine fuel would become like a wick on dynamite, allowing flames to spread quickly between pockets of denser fuel like trees and brush. The combination of drought-cured forest and copious light and flashy grasses created potential for the most explosive fires in Arizona’s history. But as Granite Mountain knew from the prairie burn just a few weeks earlier, the fuels weren’t dry enough to support volatile blazes yet. Maxwell knew that the Prescott area wouldn’t come into its prime until late June.

In the meantime, fire season in New Mexico’s forests had already begun. The 2012 monsoon that watered the grass near Prescott missed much of New Mexico. So did the snow. The parched winter led to very little grass growth—no wick—but it turned New Mexico’s forests into a tinderbox.

“Got a smoke report
on Forest Road 105. Would like 301-UT to respond. Also 302 and Chase,” radioed Todd Lerke to the local dispatch
center as he raced his pickup toward the start. Lerke was the Jemez Ranger District’s assistant fire management officer for New Mexico’s Santa Fe National Forest.

Shortly after noon on May 31, high winds knocked down a power line in a subdivision six miles north of Lerke’s office in Jemez Springs, a predominantly Native American and entirely adobe town at the base of the eleven-thousand-foot Jemez Mountains. An hour out of Albuquerque, the state had a new large fire. Called the Thompson Ridge Fire, it was northern New Mexico’s second start in as many days.

Lerke ordered every resource in his New York City–size district to respond. Considering the area they covered, Lerke’s force was tiny: ten firefighters and two small engines that together carried five hundred gallons of water—a little more than the average U.S. household uses each day and a fraction of what’s used to handle most fires. It was all Lerke had. After getting the day’s Red Flag Warning, he put his engine captains on high alert. But it wasn’t the weatherman’s prediction that put Lerke on edge as much as the forest itself. Already, pine needles crackled underfoot. He’d never seen the trees so dry so early in the season.

By the time Lerke arrived on scene, the Thompson Ridge Fire had jumped from the ground to the crowns of the tallest ponderosa pines. Flames reached above the forest. A woodpile beside one home in the dispersed community had caught fire. So had a railroad tie beside another. The smoke billowing from the forest was already dark like burning coal.

It’s Las Conchas all over again
, Lerke thought when he first saw the column. In 2011, the Las Conchas Fire had burned 156,000 acres of forest, and for a short time it was the largest blaze in the state’s history. As massive as it was, the fire’s intensity was far more disconcerting. For fourteen hours straight, Las Conchas torched an acre of pines every 1.17 seconds. That’s sixty city blocks of forest up in flames in less time than it takes to microwave a Pizza Pocket. Las Conchas burned for five weeks. By the time it was over, the government had spent $48.3 million fighting it, sixty-three homes had burned, and a scar that
looked radioactive—miles upon miles of devastated forest—spanned nearly a third of Lerke’s fire district. The thought of another Las Conchas terrified him. He ordered additional helicopters, air tankers, more engines, and two bulldozers to Thompson Ridge.

As incident commander, Lerke separated himself from the action and formulated a plan for keeping the fire from marching straight into the nuclear research center at Los Alamos, a town of eighteen thousand people that sits just ten miles from where the blaze had ignited. Best case: His initial attack forces would catch Thompson Ridge in the next few hours. Barring that, he intended to form a box around the fire by linking together a series of logging roads in the area. Lerke parked in a meadow in sight of the fire and spread out a map on the hood of his truck.

A few seconds later, a propane tank exploded. When flames heated the 250-gallon tank of one of the nearby houses, a pressure-release valve opened to prevent the tank from detonating like a pipe bomb, but the sudden release of flammable gas near open fire resulted in a thirty-foot flame that looked and sounded like the roar of a fighter jet’s afterburner. It vented every few minutes.

By then, the Thompson Ridge Fire had been burning for less than an hour and spanned nearly twenty acres. Flames had crossed from the pines near the houses into a field of oak shrubs on the flank of eleven-thousand-foot Redondo Peak. Lerke recognized the field as his last best shot at stopping Thompson Ridge before it became truly disastrous. Oaks hold more moisture in their leaves than pines do in their needles, and in New Mexico the shrubs rarely burn until late summer. To reinforce the natural barrier, Lerke requested that an air tanker from Albuquerque drop a strip of retardant on the top of the brush field. The drumming of propellers signaled the massive prop plane’s approach from the south. It dipped to the height of the trees—so low that the crowns bent in the rotor wash—and dropped the retardant directly perpendicular to the fire’s spread. If the blaze was going to escape, it had to burn through a field of oaks coated in three thousand gallons of retardant first.

From the meadow, Lerke watched through a veil of gray smoke as
bursts of orange swept uphill toward the brush field. Bush to bush the fire jumped, the flames growing from ten to twenty to forty feet as they climbed upslope. It was not what Lerke wanted to see. The dampness of the oaks clearly hadn’t slowed the burn. Nor had the retardant. The fire ripped through the line without so much as a pause.
Las Conchas all over again
, Lerke thought once more.