On the Burning Edge (9 page)

With no time to de-rig the hose-lay, the captain pulled out a knife and was madly sawing at the hose when the first wave of Navajo Scouts and Perryville inmates sprinted from the canyon and pulled themselves onto the sides of his engine. Around thirty firefighters clung to the vehicles, and every one of them seemed to be yelling, their voices quavering in panic—
Keep going! The flames are on you!
The engines started to pull out. They’d run out of time.

The last of the Perryville crew members to escape Walk Moore ran onto the Control Road through a wall of smoke; the flames were so close that they left second-degree burns on his neck. The inmate got himself onto the engine as it pulled away, and flames rushed across the Control Road. Had he been just thirty seconds slower, he too would have been trapped in the horror unfolding above.

Despite what Hoke thought,
LaTour and the eight others hadn’t been killed. As the inmate deployed his fire shelter, the firefighters uphill from him stopped before the flames hit and started retracing their steps. LaTour heard yelling, then saw his crew coming toward him. A cyclone of flame—roaring and billowing black—spun clockwise behind the men. He dropped the water can.
Get your shelters!
LaTour yelled.

Bachman’s was snagged on something. One inmate stopped to help her as LaTour and the others continued their flight uphill. Some three hundred yards above the site where Hoke deployed, LaTour stopped. Flames blocked their escape route. The main blaze had nearly caught up to the spot fires downcanyon. Perryville had nowhere to go. LaTour gave the order to deploy.

Ten firefighters climbed under their shelters. At first, as they had been trained to, they remained optimistic.
We’re Perryville. We’re tough. We’re going to make this!
they yelled.

LaTour, who was the last under his shelter, took one last look around: It wasn’t the ideal place to deploy. Brush and trees grew tightly around the site, making it a dangerous place to try and weather the firestorm, but deployments are never planned. It was the best LaTour could do. He radioed out. “Perryville has deployed,” he said, unaware of Hoke’s position down the valley. Then, one by one, LaTour counted off the number of firefighters with him: “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.”

The screaming started when
the flames hit. By then the column’s collapse was complete. The winds exceeded seventy miles per hour. One gust momentarily lifted LaTour’s shelter, and smoldering debris shot under the gap. His legs burned. Through pinholes in the aluminum he saw flames outside. He heard the horrifying crinkle of aluminum foil as the firefighters around him shifted. “Stay in your shelters!” LaTour yelled. “Stay on the ground!”

The winds raked embers across the canyon floor, and dark smoke filled the canyon. The shelters’ aluminum exteriors became superheated. When one inmate touched the wall, it burned his elbow, even through his fire-resistant clothes. Lying beneath the shelters was torture, more than some could take.

Geoff Hatch, who’d deployed just below LaTour and the others, couldn’t stand the pain any longer. He stood into the heat and stumbled uphill through smoke too thick to see beyond his feet. The embers bounced off his legs, face, boots, hands. Out of earshot from the crew, as pines burned around him, Hatch fell to his knees and pleaded for God to end it all.

At the deployment site, Curtis Springfield, who was near LaTour, screamed, “I can’t take it anymore!” He, too, got up. A few inmates echoed Springfield’s howls of pain. He made it 150 feet before collapsing on his back and rolling downhill over glowing coals.

LaTour again yelled—pleaded—through the roar of the wind, “Stay in your shelters!” His crew was dying.

The pain overwhelmed James Ellis and Denney. Both stood up.
When Denney shucked off his shelter, the wind stripped it from his hand. Screaming and tottering, he followed the shelter downcanyon. According to research conducted after the incident, Denney’s clothes had reached 824 degrees before another inmate, Joseph Chacon, stood up, tackled his friend, and forced him beneath his still-intact sheet of aluminum. They were found dead, Chacon lying atop Denney, both men severely burned.

When the second flaming front came through, LaTour’s shelter delaminated from head to toe. The right side of the aluminum exterior folded over onto the left and beat against itself like a wind sock. LaTour covered his face in the crook of his arm and put his back toward the thin sheet of cloth separating him from the flames. Experts would later determine that the temperatures inside LaTour’s shelter soared to six hundred degrees.

LaTour and the others
lay in the dirt for forty-five minutes before the Dude Fire cooled significantly. Outside, as the winds died down, the demonic roar of a thousand trees burning at once slowly calmed to the pop and crackle of countless campfires. Just uphill of LaTour were the three inmates who had stayed under their shelters and survived the burnover. One called to the superintendent, asking if it was okay to get out. LaTour said to stay in. If it still felt as hot as it did inside the shelter, the outside could only be worse. Help was coming. It had to be.

But help didn’t arrive. The fire had pushed into Bonita Creek, burning most of the subdivision’s homes, and the hotshots in the safety zone were waiting for the fire’s intensity to die down. Realizing Perryville would have to save themselves, LaTour eventually emerged from his shelter. The forest had become a wasteland of black ash and red heat. The burned bodies of his crew members lay scattered around him. Some of the fallen inmates were completely under the shelters, others half exposed. Bachman was dead. She lay faceup and twisted, with the homes Perryville had worked to save scorched above her.

LaTour told the three surviving firefighters, those still under their shelters, to get up. “But don’t look,” he said. “A tragedy has happened. We have to get out.”

Ten minutes after Perryville
was burned over, three hotshot superintendents tried to make their way out of the safety zone and into Walk Moore Canyon to help. One of them was Paul Gleason of Oregon’s ZigZag Hotshots. He’d already fought six blazes in which firefighters had died, but in his twenty-six years on the line, he’d never experienced anything as horrific as the Dude Fire.

Gleason and the others made it just 150 yards before they saw Geoff Hatch, the Perryville inmate who’d pleaded for God to take him. God hadn’t, at least not yet. For more than half a mile, Hatch had stumbled up the dozer line through pulses of fire. Burns covered 60 percent of his face, and folds of skin hung off his body. When the superintendents found Hatch, he mumbled, “Those damn fire shelters didn’t work.”

A few minutes later, EMTs and a stretcher arrived on scene, but the fire behavior was still extreme, and when Hatch saw flames leap the canyon and rush toward him and his rescuers, he kept repeating the same six words: “It is going to get me. It is going to get me. It is going to get me…” Gleason thought Hatch might be right. The fire came so close that at one point he briefly considered telling the others to run.

“I had a shelter, and there might have been room for the both of us,” Gleason said later. “Whatever happened next would be between me and Hatch and God.”

It never came to that. The EMTs loaded Hatch onto the stretcher and rushed past the still-burning skeletons of destroyed houses and into the safety zone. Inside the clearing, hotshots, some weeping, were already clearing a landing pad for a helicopter. Hatch was airlifted to the nearest hospital. He faced a long recovery, but he’d ultimately survive. Others weren’t so lucky.

Hoke, the first inmate
to deploy, lay beneath his shelter a few hundred yards downcanyon from LaTour’s group. During his deployment he had heard, amid the gusts of howling wind and the roar of flames, what must have sounded like an aberration. James Ellis, one of his crewmates who had abandoned his shelter, was outside. Ellis had stumbled almost three hundred yards downcanyon to where Hoke had deployed alone in the creek bed.

“My shelter didn’t work,” Ellis said.

Hoke stayed beneath his shelter. It was still far too hot to leave. “Get the water from my pack,” he told Ellis. He heard his crewmate shuffling around.

“It’s burned up,” Ellis said. Then, just as quickly as he’d come, he walked away, leaving Hoke alone.

The next time Hoke saw Ellis was when LaTour and the three other survivors, who had been under their shelters for more than forty-five minutes, walked down the canyon with their shelters wrapped around them like capes—using them as shields against the heat. Miraculously, Ellis was with them: burned from head to toe and barely alive.

In a loose group, the six survivors walked out the dozer line. LaTour, exhausted and fighting the urge to sit down, again took his place at the back of the group. For a half-mile, they tripped and stumbled through burning stumps and white ash toward the Control Road. Ellis didn’t make it.

A few hundred yards from the end of the canyon, he muttered, “I’m dead.” Then he lurched toward a log, sat down, and died. The others walked on.

Gleason, ZigZag’s superintendent,
continued alone into Walk Moore Canyon, following the route Hatch had taken out. He returned to the dozer line. Through residual heat, Gleason walked down the line until he saw a man’s body through a window in the smoke.

“I rolled him over. I put my cheek right up to his nose and his mouth to see if there was any air,” Gleason said. “A tear rolled off my eye and fell on his cheek. I saw it. I thought it was his tear, and for just a fleeting second I thought that this guy was alive. And then it settled on me. I was in a canyon with a bunch of dead people.”

Gleason tried to radio his crew to tell them he was all right and to relay that they had fatalities, but he couldn’t move. The aging superintendent sat on his knees over the fallen and wept—for five minutes or fifteen, he didn’t know.

“I love fire. I like lightin’ it. I like fightin’ it,” Gleason said. “And I’m there with this guy, but this was not what I had signed up for. I’m trying to tell myself that this part doesn’t exist, that I had seen Hatch before and that was as bad as it could get.” But it wasn’t. Gleason spent the rest of the evening loading six blackened bodies into bags.

S
cott Norris had been on summer break from elementary school back when the Dude Fire exploded in 1990, but he knew the story. When Scott worked for the Payson Hotshots, Superintendent Mike Schinstock took the crew to the fire site to see how “a bad day ends,” as he’d tell his hotshots. They walked the route that Bachman and five others had followed to their deaths two decades earlier. In the wake of the tragedy, the residents of Bonita Creek subdivision planted six cottonwoods among the bleached ponderosa stumps that now fill Walk Moore Canyon, and in the shade of those trees are six stone crosses, each one marking the place where a firefighter died.

Standing before the crosses, it’s hard not to imagine the canyon engulfed in flames. Schinstock asked his hotshots to do more. He passed around a picture taken the evening of June 26, 1990. It showed burned and twisted bodies, smoke still rising from the ash around them.
Think about what choices the Perryville crew made and why they made them
, Schinstock asked of his men.
And what, if anything, you might have done differently to change the outcome
.

Since then, Scott had studied tragedy fires. At home on his shelves, beside the books he devoured during the rare quiet moments of
summer—Cervantes’s
Don Quixote
, Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
, Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
, and the
Reloading Guide to Handgun Accuracy
—were copies of hundred-page investigations into firefighter deaths. State or federal agencies fund these reports, which are compiled by teams of dozens of subject-matter experts ranging from psychologists to weathermen and fire-behavior experts. They use dozens of witness testimonials to piece together the events that led to the fatalities.

Though these reports are filed every time a firefighter dies on the line, Scott’s interest lay specifically in burnovers, the grisly deaths that occur when flames overtake firefighters. He knew the details of the Dude Fire and most of the other historically significant mass tragedies: the Mann Gulch grass fire that overran thirteen firefighters, including twelve smoke jumpers, in Montana in 1949; the Loop Fire that exploded and trapped twelve hotshots in a narrow gulch in California in 1966; the blow-up that sent a wave of flame over fourteen elite firefighters in Colorado in 1994.

Men and women have died on the fire line every year since federal agencies started keeping track of deaths in the 1930s. Yet an expectation remains among the Forest Service and the other largest employers of wildland firefighters that it can be a zero-casualty war. The simplest way to stop firefighters from dying on the line would be to stop fighting wildfires and let them burn unchecked in America’s wilds. That outcome seems highly unlikely, given—among other things—America’s many billion-dollar investments in fighting fires and the many billions in private property that would be destroyed if we simply stopped. Instead, the reaction by fire agencies to deaths has almost always been the same: provide firefighters with additional rules, better equipment, and a more comprehensive education.

“We can’t really make the job safer with more policy and rules,” says Jim Cook, a former hotshot superintendent who went on to help found the Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program, an institution that strives to make firefighting safer by improving leadership skills and decision-making on the line. “There’s an expectation that we can have a fire season where no firefighters die. But there’s no evidence to suggest that we can actually pull that off. What we do after
each major incident is go back and examine why we had such a bad outcome. Each time, we get incrementally better at fire-line safety.”

The tradition of institutionalized learning after mass-casualty fires dates back to 1956. After the rapid succession of three mass-casualty fires left thirty-nine young men dead, the Forest Service commissioned a task force of experts to investigate why so many firefighters were dying and “materially reduce the chances of men being killed by burning.” The task force’s findings were distilled into ten Standard Firefighting Orders:

Shortly after the investigators issued the ten Standard Firefighting Orders, they released the “13 Situations That Shout Watchout”—specific, cautionary environmental and human factors often present in tragedy fires. By the 1980s, after ten more mass-casualty fires, the name had been shortened to just “Watchout Situations” and the list expanded to eighteen. A few examples:

Unburned fuel between you and the fire.

Cannot see main fire, not in contact with anybody who can.

Wind increases and/or changes direction.

Terrain and fuels make escape to safety zones difficult.

The ten Standard Firefighting Orders and the eighteen Watchout Situations are known by firefighters as the Ten and Eighteen, and these rules of engagement provide the basis for all fire-line decisions. Most firefighters carry a laminated list of the orders in their breast pocket. Scott did. He could also recite the directives from memory.

Superintendent Mike Schinstock was disappointed when Scott told him he was leaving the Payson Hotshots. He saw in Scott the trappings of a career fireman and had started grooming him for a leadership position shortly after Scott started with Payson. By the time Scott came to Granite Mountain, his fire-line qualifications rivaled those of the crew’s squad bosses.

Though he often said, “That’s not how we do things on Payson,” he was thrilled to get the job, and he came to greatly respect Steed in the months he worked under him. Scott didn’t talk much about his previous experience. But his quiet confidence and amiable personality made him a natural role model for Granite Mountain’s rookies. Kevin Woyjeck, like many of the younger guys on the crew, looked up to Scott. Woyjeck reminded Scott of a younger cousin—eager to the point of annoyance, a little brother he couldn’t help but like.

Woyjeck had peppered Scott with questions throughout the season, but the queries reached a dizzying barrage before Granite Mountain left for its first extended fire assignment:
Seven pairs of underwear
—
that’s too few? What, really? Too many? Extra bootlaces, hooded sweatshirt, beanie—need those for sure…right?

Dusk had fallen over
the Mogollon Rim when Granite Mountain pulled into a gravel cul-de-sac across from the Hart Fire. Scott, Grant, Renan, Donut, and the others on Alpha squad poured from the back of their buggy and took stock of their task: a ridge awash in orange.
At that point, the Hart Fire had spread across a couple of acres of pine saplings and long-dead trees—both logs and still-standing snags. Occasionally, flames climbed into low branches and—
whoosh
—a shower of embers arced skyward as a single tree combusted. The little timber burn was far more impressive than the prairie fire weeks earlier, but the Hart was still just a preview of the fires to come. A few shifts and Granite Mountain would be heading home. But the best thing about the assignment was that Granite Mountain was one of only a few resources on the Hart, and working outside the purview of an incident management team brought out the hotshots’ lighter side.

While working an even more remote fire, in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters in 2011, Granite Mountain canoed into their piece of fire line and spent a week camping out alone on a beach. Scott wasn’t on Granite Mountain for the Minnesota trip, but he’d been on plenty of similarly slow assignments.

On Payson, he’d seen guys jump fully clothed into Pumpkins, the inflatable orange five-hundred-gallon water tanks that are staged along fire lines. He’d taken part in the impromptu competitions that develop between crews working the same isolated piece of line. On one fire, an elected representative from each crew packed an entire can of Copenhagen into his lower lip, sprinted around a predetermined course, and did as many push-ups as possible. The first to vomit lost. Scott himself had tried and lost the 4:4:40, a challenge to drink four quarts of water in four minutes and hold it down for forty seconds. He loved the antics on slow fires. The playfulness was a perk, but Scott also enjoyed the work.

That night, the hotshots constructed line steadily but without any great urgency. Between the reservoir and the creek, water surrounded the Hart on three sides. To complete the box around the fire, all Granite Mountain needed to do was punch in a quarter-mile piece of line from the lake, up and over the ridge, and back down to the creek.

It was the type of quiet and cool evening that kept hotshots returning to the job for decades. As darkness came to the Mogollon Rim, the humidity climbed and the fire pulled back into the heaviest
logs scattered about the forest floor. Some of the men turned off their headlamps and swung their tools by the fire’s warm glow. Bats strafed the lake, and the muffled thud of the hotshots’ tools striking dirt could be heard from the campsites across the water. Granite Mountain finished lining the fire that night, and at around 2
A.M
. the men spread out their sleeping bags and fell asleep under the blue light of a half-moon.

The next morning,
Steed and Clayton tapped Renan to join them on a burnout operation. Renan’s heart jumped. “To be a rookie with Steed and Clay? I was like,
Oh shit, this is awesome!
” he’d tell Grant later.

The three hotshots hiked along a cobbled beach beside the reservoir. At that point, the Hart Fire smoldered in the cliff bands above them, even less of a threat than it had been the night before. Still, spot fires always remained a concern. To widen the fire’s black edge and ensure the blaze was controlled, Steed wanted Renan to burn off a corner of willows and grass between the completed line and the lake.

Usually stoic, Renan could barely contain his enthusiasm. Burning out with Steed and Clay was surely a sign that they were considering him for Rookie of the Year. The rest of the crew faced the drudgery of mop-up, and Renan had drawn the most fun job on the line—legitimized arson.

“All right, dude,” Steed said to Renan. They were ready to burn out the Hart Fire. “You’re up. Don’t breathe the smoke in. It’ll stay with you all day.”

From his pack, Renan grabbed a fusee, one of the dynamite-like sticks used as road flares. He twisted the top, breaking the paper between the chemical fuel in the tube and the igniter, and uncertainly flicked the two slate ends together. The stick hissed, and a foot-long orange flame and a cloud of sulfur erupted straight into Renan’s face. He coughed and gagged. Steed boomed with laughter and showed
him how to use the fusee to start burns in the undersides of bushes, where, sheltered from the rain, the pine needles and leaf litter were driest. By day’s end, the low-intensity fire inside the box was nearly forty acres—twenty times larger than when the crew had first arrived the night before. That knowledge gave Renan no small amount of pride.

While Renan was clearly
enjoying himself, the fire was testing Grant. Up on the ridgeline between the creek and the lake, he and the rest of Alpha squad stacked smoldering logs into piles to concentrate and burn down the heat. The bone piles, as the hotshots called them, were scattered around the forest. For Grant, the work amounted to a game of pick-up sticks. He paced the area closest to the line, seeking out burning logs that were small enough to move and, with his tool and gloved hands, dragging them into various burning piles.

Ash and soot smudged Grant’s face, and streaks of black colored his yellow shirt. Renan hiked up from the lake, his burnout now complete.

“Best day of my life,” Renan said, beaming. “Seriously, dude. That was fucking awesome. I just got paid to light the side of a mountain on fire.”

“That’s awesome, man. That’s so cool,” Grant said. But it was clear he was bored.

Once the bone piling was finished, Grant started mopping up. He dug a quick pit in the ash near the fire line they’d built the night before. With his rhino, he scooped up a smoldering twig, dropped it into the hole, and, to ensure a gust of wind couldn’t rekindle the embers, ground the wood into the cooler dirt until no remnant heat remained.

“I’ve been standing here in the sun and mopping up this fucking hillside all day,” Grant said. He hadn’t slept well the night before. At home, he always put a funny movie on the TV
—Tommy Boy
was his favorite—and fell asleep to the noise. Last night, when Granite Mountain finally did go to bed, all he heard was snoring so loud it sounded
painful and millions of chirping crickets or frogs or whatever they were.

Another smoke tendril twisted up from the ash at Grant’s feet. He covered the smoldering twig with more cold dirt and stirred again. Down below, four or five of the other hotshots whooped as they dove into the creek. The line was in, and the work that was left wasn’t pressing. In small groups, Steed gave the men a few minutes to relax and enjoy the place. The veterans had been whispering among themselves about how cool it was that Steed was letting them swim—it wasn’t something Marsh had ever allowed. Donut took the time to tie a rock to a length of parachute cord and toss the makeshift lure toward the crawdads teeming in the shallows. When one crawdad latched a claw onto the stone, its natural defensive mechanism, Donut lifted the crustacean from the water, grabbed its body behind its flailing pincers, and pushed the animal into his breast pocket. It stayed there until he released it later that afternoon.