Heat (10 page)

The men, feeling the wind and seeing the flames, realized that their situation had suddenly gone from routine to potentially dangerous.

Somewhere ahead of them, the bulldozer was cutting trail, blading in the firebreak intended to surround this fire, to complete its containment. The men at this point were still thinking of catching up to the bulldozer, of completing their assignment. The machine was out of sight, behind the next hill.

Also out of sight was a tight gully. This gully became a chimney, sucking flames and heat upward. The fire erupted up the chimney with flames twenty-five feet tall. At the same time, the fire came across the hill, toward the men. The plants—first under the sun and now under the heat of the fire—had dumped natural vapors. Flames ripped through the vapors, flashing across the hillside.

As the men watched, within minutes, possibly within seconds, the potentially dangerous erupted into dangerous.

Ahead of the men, the bulldozer operator realized that the fire would overrun him and his machine. He took a few seconds to dig out a haven, four blades wide, pushing away dry shrubs, exposing bare earth, plowing away fuel. He parked his machine in the middle of this tiny haven. The air grew hotter and thick with smoke. As the smoke shifted and danced in the wind, a hot orange glow appeared and disappeared. The bulldozer operator lowered fireproof curtains over his windows. He wrapped himself in a fire blanket. And then, terrified, he let the fire burn across his machine.

Afterward, miraculously with only minor injuries, he described flames thirty feet tall burning across his position. The paint on his dozer had wrinkled. His radio antenna had melted.

The fire jumped the ridge without hesitation. Hot embers and burning leaves, caught by the afternoon wind, now supplemented by the fire’s own wind, blew onto fresh fuel. Spot fires ignited. They grew with tremendous speed into a wall of flame. The crew, still making its way toward the bulldozer, was surrounded. They were contained by the fire. The dangerous had erupted into the deadly.

Later, from his hospital bed, Scott Cox described what had happened. The men trying to catch up with the bulldozer knew they were surrounded. Like the bulldozer operator, they knew that the fire would overrun their position. “We all lay down on the dozer line,” Scott Cox said. “We all lay down on the trail.” They had decided to tough it out, hunkered down in their fireproof clothes, lying flat against the bare earth of the dozer line.

“It got too hot, and it began to burn us,” Cox said. “We got up again and ran.”

Cox’s three colleagues ran uphill. They probably died within seconds from inhaling superheated air, before their bodies were badly burned. Cox ran downhill. He covered his face with his hands and ran into the flames, hoping to break through to the other side, to where the fire had roared through and burned itself out, hoping to break through into a landscape of scorched but cooling earth, into the black. In doing so, he became a fire artifact, burned over 60 percent of his body. His rescuers described him as bent over like “ancient man,” the classic posture of the badly burned. They cooled his body with water and wrapped him in a burn bag. He looked up and said, “I’m gonna make it.”

My guide shows me a photograph of Cox’s Nomex shirt. Nomex is flame resistant. Exposed to extreme flames, it absorbs heat and swells, closing off spaces in the weave and further insulating its wearer. The Nomex shirt in the photograph is charred. It is a fire artifact, but one that lacks anything resembling aesthetic beauty.

Scott Cox, in the hospital, told a doctor, “I didn’t think Nomex would burn.”

Sixteen weeks after the fire, Cox’s colleagues were shaken by his appearance. The athlete they had known, the twenty-six-year-old man who had stood six feet, two inches tall and weighed 220 pounds, who had played college football, who was more than capable of fighting wildland fires day after day, was gone. “It was a shocking experience,” one of the men said of the visit.

Cox died three months later.

With the firefighter, I stand in a parking lot next to a green fire engine similar to the one that was burned over in the Jesusita Fire. It is, in fact, the firefighter’s engine, the engine with which he fights fires.

It is packed with gear: an organized rack of brass fittings, hoses of different sizes and lengths, special packs that ride low on the hips for wildland firefighters who spend most of their days bent over and hacking away at the ground, other packs built to hold hoses that uncoil behind firefighters as they walk or run from the engine toward the fire. There are special wrenches for joining one piece of hose to another. There are drip torches for lighting backfires, the controlled fires set by firefighters to burn out a piece of ground, to destroy fuel before the main fire arrives. There is an assortment of hand tools—shovels and hoes and a specialized rake called a McLeod and the most famous of all tools for wildland firefighters, the pulaski.

The pulaski is the wildland firefighter’s tool of choice, half ax, half mattock or pick, the ideal hand tool for cutting a firebreak or for mopping up. The Forest Service owns thousands of pulaskies, and it may be said that no wildland fire engine rolls without at least one pulaski on board. It was invented by Ed Pulaski, a forest ranger in Idaho at the time of the nation’s greatest fire, the Great Fire of 1910, also called the Big Blowup or the Big Burn. An area about the size of Connecticut burned in Idaho, Montana, and Washington, torching three million acres, killing at least eighty-seven people. Pulaski—the man, not the tool—led his crew of forty-five ill-trained firefighters through a fire that was long past the point of unpredictability.

During the Great Fire of 1910, winds exceeded fifty miles per hour and carried with them ash and embers and smoke. Sap boiled in trees just before the trees ignited. Creek water warmed up and steamed and flowed hot and full of dead fish. Columns of what looked like smoke and steam occasionally flashed into flame.

During that fire, ranger Ed Pulaski led his shaken men into an abandoned mining tunnel. To control his half-panicked crew, he drew his revolver. He made the men lie facedown, like one of Houdini’s initiates in a burning cage. The fire sucked the air from the tunnel. To sit or to stand was to suffocate. Timbers shoring up the tunnel’s entrance ignited. Pulaski himself eventually lost consciousness. His hair and face and body were burned, but he and most of his men survived.

His wife, seeing him after the fire, said that he staggered. His eyes were covered by bandages. His hair and hands were burned. His body was burned. In all likelihood, his lungs were burned. Breathing itself would have been a source of pain.

The government turned its back on the injured. Pulaski and other rangers used their salaries and savings to pay for medical treatment, both their own and that of some of the firefighters. And Pulaski, when he recovered, went into a blacksmith shop and made a pulaski. Among wildland firefighters, the story of Pulaski, the man, is almost as well known as the feel of the pulaski, the tool.

The four men who died at Spanish Ranch likely had among them a pulaski, but it can be said with certainty that they did not have fire shelters. Almost everything written about the fire suggests that they may have survived had they carried fire shelters on their belts. Now, because of what happened at Spanish Ranch, all wildland firefighters in California carry a fire shelter on the job.

My firefighter, my guide, pulls out a fire shelter. It is a tightly packed cube of folded foil and fabric, wrapped in plastic. The firefighter’s first line of defense is to avoid being caught by fire, but these shelters have saved the lives of more than 250 firefighters who were surrounded and burned over.

The shelter, opened, is shaped more like an oversized sleeping bag than a tent. The fabric is aluminum glued to a fiberglass frame. The idea is simple: when surrounded and at risk of being overwhelmed by fire, find a firebreak, set up the shelter, crawl inside, and hope for the best.

The shelter will not survive direct contact with flames. Surrounded by fire but untouched by flame, the shelter reflects 95 percent of the fire’s radiant heat. Still, the inside of the shelter will grow hotter than a dry sauna.

From the fire shelter manual: “When you are inside a fire shelter, breathe through your mouth, stay calm, and above all, stay in your shelter.” To step outside, to panic and run, is to die.

The shelter, in direct contact with flame, fails. The conductive heat that comes from contact with the hot gas and glowing soot of the flame itself destroys the shelter. Flames in wildland fires average 1,600 degrees but can spike to temperatures much higher. The glue bonding the fiberglass flame to the aluminum foil breaks down at just less than 500 degrees, and the shelter delaminates. The aluminum melts at 1,200 degrees. The shelter can fill with smoke and fumes from glue and aluminum. The fumes can explode.

From a survivor: “The right side of my shelter delaminated, and the foil flipped over onto the left side. I really started to get burned at that point because the only thing that was on that side of my shelter was the glass mesh. There was still a tremendous amount of radiant heat coming off the surrounding area, a wind blew the shelter half back on to the other side, back to where it belonged, and it was like somebody closing a door on the oven.”

I take the shelter from my firefighter and imagine myself in a fire, scrambling to find a clearing, somewhere without fuel, somewhere that will be beyond reach of the flames themselves. By now, I have ditched most of my gear, dumped it and run. If I am still thinking clearly, I have water with me, and my radio, and maybe my pulaski. Time allowing, I might use the pulaski to cut in a safe zone. Or, even better, I might find a bulldozer line or a gravel creek bed or a swath of burned-out forest or a broad ridgetop. I imagine smoke and heat and chaos and the knowledge that I may soon be dead. This close to the flames, strong winds will tug at the shelter. The noise of the fire will be disconcerting. The heat will burn my earlobes and blister exposed skin.

From the fire shelter manual: “The end facing the advancing fire will become the hottest part of the shelter. It will be easier to hold that end down with your feet than with your hands and elbows. Keeping your head away from the heat as long as possible will better protect your lungs and airways.”

Firefighters are trained to deploy a shelter in less than twenty seconds. I shake mine open, use one foot to pin the shelter’s lower wall to the ground, and pull the rest of the shelter over my torso and head, as if donning a hooded parka. I lie facedown on the ground, surrounded by the shelter. With my elbows and knees, I pin the shelter to the ground. I am following Houdini’s orders, lying low in the cage, imitating Pulaski and his crew in the cave that saved their lives. I cup my hands around my face and breathe close to the ground.

From a survivor: “If you look at the burn injuries that I received, anything that was off the ground and certainly the things that were higher up in the shelter were the areas where I received the most significant burns.”

From the fire shelter manual: “At a fire’s peak, the noise will be deafening. You may be unable to hear anyone. Keep calm.”

To the extent that it is possible, the manual encourages users to talk to their colleagues, to reassure one another.

From a survivor: “If you hear anything at all, the things you hear you don’t want to hear, you wish you’d never heard.”

Survivors report thinking that they would die in their shelters. They have compared the experience to that of being in a nuclear blast. They pray. They think of loved ones.

From the fire shelter manual: “No matter how bad it gets inside, it is much worse outside.”

Typical burn-overs, typical entrapments, last fifteen to ninety minutes.