On the Burning Edge (17 page)

Clayton was also slow to leave. He’d been Bunch’s squad boss for two of his four years, and Clayton and his wife had been the only two guests at Bunch and Janae’s wedding. Before that fire season started, Bunch had mentioned to Clayton that he and Janae were eloping.

Even though it wasn’t technically an invitation, Clayton took it as one. Just moments before the ceremony started, he and his wife, Kristi, ran into the courthouse. “No way I was letting you get married alone,” he told his buddy.

Saying goodbye was as hard for Clayton as it was for Bunch. When he saw Bunch head out to his black Toyota pickup, he whistled to him across the parking lot and jogged up.

“Hey…” he called. “I’m proud of you for leaving the crew for your family.” Then Clayton gave Bunch a hug. Bunch, shorter than Clayton by a head, gave him a half smile and turned his head into Clayton’s shoulder to hide welling tears. The goodbye had a formality to it that made Bunch’s departure uncomfortably real. He pounded Clayton’s back hard several times and quickly left the station.

While Grant and his crewmates finished up their duties, Leah had rushed out to get a manicure and pedicure and was a few blocks from
home when Grant pulled up behind her in his Dodge Neon. Her heart fluttered. He was leaning entirely out of the window, waving with his left hand and driving with his right. Fifteen days was the longest they’d been apart.

For the couple, Grant’s two days off were bliss. They slept late and ate real food, heading to dinner at a local restaurant where Grant, now old enough to buy alcohol, splurged on microbrewed beers and ate the better part of two meals for dinner. At home, Grant nested. He built a fire pit in the backyard and spent the afternoon stacking wood in a pleasant rhythmic delirium. When he was done, he put on the Forever Lazy onesie—blue adult pajamas complete with booties, which Grant’s grandma had given Leah for Christmas. Leah didn’t like wearing them. But being swaddled in fleece helped Grant relax. He tried to forget the stress of the past couple of weeks and tried hard not to think about the fact that he’d be back at work on Tuesday. That night, he fell asleep to
Tommy Boy
.

The days off weren’t so different for the other guys. Each man tried to squeeze two weeks of normal life into two short days. Scott met his nephew for the first time. He held the baby like a vase he was afraid to drop while his sister laughed at how uncomfortable he looked. “I’m going to teach him to shoot a gun when he’s three,” Scott declared.

Donut spent time with his young daughter, Michaela, a toddler now, towheaded and fast learning to abuse the power of the word “no.” He had dated Michaela’s mom during high school, and they were no longer on the best of terms, but she watched Michaela full-time while he was away on fires, and they shared custody of the little girl when Donut returned home.

One night, after dropping Michaela off at her mom’s, Donut went out to Whiskey Row. A friend of his, a semi-professional mixed-martial-arts fighter, had just gotten out of the military. After hours of partying, hopped up on cinnamon-flavored whiskey and testosterone, the two ended up in a fight with six guys. Donut fought two of them while his friend apparently took care of the other four, and they ran back to Donut’s apartment higher still on adrenaline.

One corner of the living room was dedicated solely to Michaela’s toys, but the place was surprisingly clean, considering that the only people who ever lived there were two young hotshots and a baby girl. Chris was trying to sleep back at home when Donut and his friend bounded up the stairs and pounded on Chris’s bedroom door.

“Dude, get up!” Donut said. “It was fucking crazy.”

He swung open Chris’s door and immediately began pantomiming the motions of the fight—pushing, ducking, punching—so frenetically that it took him a long moment to realize that a woman was in bed beside Chris. When he finally did, Donut slammed the door shut and buckled over in laughter.

O
n June 18, the hotshots were back at work and had barely finished their first run in weeks when somebody spotted white smoke curling over the Bradshaws, to the west.

“That’s not a good place for a fire. There are million-dollar homes up there,” Donut said to no one in particular. “If they don’t catch that in an hour it’s gone.”

It was 11:30
A.M
. and already well into the eighties, with winds gusting to nearly thirty miles per hour. The fire was burning in chaparral, a mix of five or six oak-related species that cover parts of the Southwest and Southern California. When it’s dry and windy, as it was now, chaparral, with its woody trunks and light and flashy leaves, acts as both the metaphoric wick and the dynamite.

Chuck Maxwell, the forecaster in Albuquerque, was watching the factors—drought, grass growth, temperatures, the monsoon—align over the Prescott area. Two days earlier, on June 16, he’d issued a warning to all firefighters in the Southwest. The season had shaped up more or less as he’d predicted it would back in May. Monsoonal thunderstorms had already extinguished the large fires in parts of New Mexico and southern Arizona, but the north and central part of the
state had just entered its terrifying prime. Prescott hadn’t seen a drop of rain, or cloud cover, for that matter, since the beginning of May.

The monsoon rains were still weeks out, and until they arrived, fire danger would only get more volatile. Since the 1st of June, temperatures had climbed past the high eighties every day, and the humidity consistently hovered in the teens but at times dropped as low as 4 percent. The National Weather Service had issued a Red Flag Warning, the first of many to come in the weeks ahead, and the ponderosa pines and chaparral surrounding Prescott were so dry that the probability of ignition—a calculation that measures the chance that a spark will kindle into a blaze—was at the exceedingly rare 100 percent.

Maxwell was unequivocal about the dangers. “Firefighters should acknowledge that the fire growth and fire behavior they encounter this year may exceed anything they have experienced before,” he had written. “Normal strategies and tactics may need to be adjusted to account for the drought factor.”

“Fucking send us already,” Donut said. He ran inside to use the bathroom, and by the time he was out, Steed was yelling for the hotshots to load up.

Once on the road, Grant texted Leah.

“We’re on a fire in town. I won’t have my phone.”

“OK be safe. I can see the smoke.”

Bunch could see it, too. He was on the way to his new job, screwing cabinets together. Janae’s dad had gotten him the position, which he already found boring, and, watching the column rise, milk white and growing fast, he felt a flash of guilt. He wanted to be there with his crew.

The new start was called the Doce (pronounced “
doh
-see”), after the shooting range it had started beside. It was the same name given to a blaze outside Prescott that the Perryville handcrew had fought in the same area in late June 1990, shortly before six of them died on Arizona’s Dude Fire. The new fire was burning in a contiguous chaparral-and-juniper thicket that ran from its ignition point, six
miles to the north, up and over the crew’s namesake Granite Mountain, and straight onto the flats near the Prescott suburb of Williamson Valley. With conditions so extreme, the Doce could close that distance in a matter of hours.

Prescott has always had
a fire problem. Founded in 1864, for the gold in the Bradshaw Mountains, the town in its early years claimed the precarious distinction of being the only one in Arizona built entirely of wood. (Others usually had more adobe or brick structures.) As a result, Prescott burned—regularly. During its first thirty years of existence, three separate fires razed entire sections of the town.

The city established a fire department in 1885, with four twenty-five-man volunteer brigades—the Toughs, the Dudes, the O.K.s, and the Mechanics Hook & Ladders—and installed surface wells on each corner of the courthouse square a few years later. The wells and dedicated bucket brigades still couldn’t tame the flames that unnerved the miners and cowboys every summer. Doc Holliday lived in Prescott before the infamous shootout in Tombstone, and during his time there, he often knocked back bourbon in the bars on Whiskey Row. Every one of those forty bars eventually burned, but it didn’t matter much. With so much gold in the hills and so many miners eager to spend it on drink and women, Whiskey Row was quickly rebuilt after every blaze.

The burns got to be so regular that when a fire sparked outside town in 1900, the drinkers at one lavish hotel lounge took the time to remove the hand-hewn oak-and-maple bar and stash it next to the slate courthouse across the street. The brick pub, known at the time as the only “absolutely fireproof building in town,” scorched from the inside out. Its bar was reinstalled in the Palace Hotel, where it’s still in use today. Legend has it that the same patrons who saved the bar snatched a bottle of booze on the way out, and when the flames hit they sat by the courthouse and passed the bottle while watching their watering hole burn.

By 2013, it had been more than a decade since the last serious fire, when, in one unsettling May afternoon, more than a thousand homes were threatened and 2,500 people evacuated. Flames that dwarfed three-story houses were visible from the courthouse, and glasses of bourbon and antiques store transactions were left unfinished as patrons fled beneath smoke that blotted out the afternoon sun. Ash fell so heavily it collected against curbs like blowing snow, but this time downtown’s bars stayed standing through the summer of 2002.

The reason Whiskey Row was spared was Crew 7, the predecessors of Granite Mountain. They’d spent that winter cutting a fuel break on the southern edge of town. When the flames hit the defensible space, the fire sat down just long enough for air tankers and hotshot crews to lasso the blaze with line. Back then, Crew 7 could only stand by and watch. It was their first year on the job, and they weren’t yet certified to do anything but thin the dense underbrush and pines on the outskirts of Prescott. But because of their work, the blaze that the incident commander predicted would destroy the town’s famous strip of bars and thousands of houses was caught at just thirteen hundred acres. Only five homes were lost.

The town owed its survival to Crew 7 and, by extension, to a little-known organization called the Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission. The twenty-to-thirty-member group was a consortium of the Forest Service, the BLM, and state, county, and city firefighting agencies. For the past two decades, “PAWUIC” had been working behind the scenes to prepare for future fires. Among its founding members was Darrell Willis, who would go on to become the department’s Wildland Division chief—the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ boss.

As is usually the case with natural disasters, it took a near catastrophe to finally spur Willis and PAWUIC’s efforts to make the city defensible. The fire that changed the city’s fuels-management direction started in 1980, and though it didn’t burn the town, it helped Willis recognize that with every passing fire season, the stakes increased. Droughts were becoming more common, and Arizona’s population
was exploding. Between 1970 and 1980, Yavapai County, of which Prescott is the seat, nearly doubled in size, from thirty-six thousand to seventy thousand. Statewide, eighty thousand new homes sprang up in rural areas. There were no codes requiring that homes be made firesafe, and most were built with wood siding and shake roofs, all too often in brush fields or beneath ponderosa pines that gave homeowners the feeling that they owned a small piece of wilderness. In one very important way, they did: The new homes were more fuel for the inevitable wildfires.

Nationwide, seventy thousand communities—some 140 million people and 40 million homes—sit in the path of fires. Though state and rural fire agencies contribute immensely, the burden of protecting these towns has fallen largely on the federal government. Once responsible for managing lands for timber, recreation, wildlife, and watersheds, the Forest Service and the BLM, the two biggest players in the wildfire business, have now effectively become federal fire agencies that watch over 180 million acres of once-rural land that development is steadily encroaching upon.

“Homeowners expect fire protection, and the government—the Forest Service, the BLM—is the only firefighting agency that’s big enough to stand between the flames and their houses,” said Harry Croft, the former deputy director of the Forest Service’s fire and aviation program. “Politically, we have to fight fires. People see the smoke and demand to see helicopters and hotshots. And the Forest Service wants to send them in. This is an agency run by people who were raised fighting fires. They like it. It pays more than office work. It’s more fun, and there’s a clear case of good versus evil. They get to play hero.”

Croft tells a story about a wildfire burning in wet leaves on Long Island one fall in the late nineties.

“It was out. There was no threat at all, but the public wanted to see somebody fight it. I got a call from the governor himself. He told me, ‘I want to see some
fucking
air tankers.’ So I put in a call to our base in South Carolina, they loaded up one tanker with a bellyful of
slurry, and he flew up, dropped it on what was at that point a pile of smoldering leaves, the crowds cheered, and the fire was just as done as it had been before the air tanker was sent.”

The tanker flight cost around $4,000.

“Wildfires are the only natural disaster we think we can control,” said Chuck Womack, who runs the dispatch center at the NIFC in Boise. It’s not a rational notion. “If the federal government gave us all the money in the world, we’d still fail to control all the blazes.”

Federal agencies don’t have unlimited budgets to fight fires, but they do spend a lot of money keeping flames away from houses. As recently as 1991, stamping out backcountry fires took up just 13 percent of the Forest Service’s annual budget. Today the agency, the biggest in the wildland fire business, has assumed the role of preventing wildfires that start on publicly held lands from crossing boundaries into municipalities or privately owned property. Fighting fires now consumes nearly half of the Forest Service’s annual budget, which most years approaches or exceeds $5 billion. Every year since 1999, the agency has overspent its suppression appropriations and has had to borrow millions from its other programs—timber, recreation, fisheries—to meet the need. Though Congress has reimbursed the Forest Service for up to 80 percent of the fire program’s overspending, calling it disaster relief, the cannibalism of other program budgets has become so bad that it amounts to an identity crisis for the agency: Is the Forest Service’s primary purpose fire suppression or managing the lands it oversees? The way things stand, there doesn’t seem to be enough money for it to do both.

With this question unresolved, fire seasons are expected to grow 50 to 142 percent larger by 2050, and the population expansion is likely to keep pace. The Forest Service predicts that by 2030, 40 percent more homes will be in the path of wildfires. Right now, with federal, state, and local government spending included, one study puts the total annual cost of the grand experiment to control the flames at $4.7 billion, and there’s little reason to believe that that figure will do anything but rise.

Yet there’s no evidence that the increased spending is doing much
to make towns that abut the forest safer. The flames are natural; the homes aren’t. And with denser forest, drier climates, and more people living in the wildlands, wildfires are burning houses with a frequency never seen before. In the 1960s, just a hundred homes went up in smoke every fire season; today the number is close to three thousand.

Of course, these costs don’t compare to those from a massive hurricane or tornado—Katrina cost $125 billion. The difference is that the threat wildfire poses to houses and towns can be mitigated—through forest thinning, prescribed burns, and defensible-space work. Yet western towns remain inexplicably ill-prepared for lurking catastrophe. In 2013, fewer than 2 percent of America’s communities had done any defensible-space work at all. One retired incident commander says it’s a small miracle when a year passes without an entire town or city burning. The miracle seasons are becoming rare, though. In back-to-back years, a pair of wildfires burned more than three hundred homes in the city of Colorado Springs.

Willis and PAWUIC’s critical contribution to Prescott was that they recognized impending disaster and took action to mitigate it. At first, the community wasn’t motivated to allocate sufficient funds. If there wasn’t smoke, there wasn’t fire to worry about.

With little local support, PAWUIC did what it could, like buying chippers for disposing of the trees and excess brush on the edge of town and spreading the motto “Living on the Edge” to convey the importance of proactively protecting homes from wildfires. As soon as PAWUIC drummed up enough federal and state grant money, it hired Crew 7 and two full-time employees to identify the most threatened parts of the city. Still, the town hall meetings PAWUIC held once a year to encourage homeowners to preemptively help fireproof their own homes went almost unattended.

The 2002 fire changed everything. Some eight hundred people showed up for the meeting after the blaze. By the time the second Doce Fire struck, more than two hundred thousand people lived in Yavapai County, and Willis’s program was recognized as the country’s “gold standard” by the National Fire Protection Association. The city was the first in the state to adopt a wildland-urban interface
code: No new houses could be built without meeting code. Since Marsh and Crew 7 started their defensible-space work, they’d successfully protected eighteen thousand homes and more than $3.1 billion in property. At least on paper, there was no American city better prepared for wildfires than Prescott.