On the Burning Edge (26 page)

In the nine seconds
since Steed had made his mayday radio transmission, a sixty-foot wall of flames had swept across the canyon’s mouth and advanced some 150 feet closer to the men. At a glance, the crew comprehended the horrors about to unfold. Fire blocked their escape from the basin. The wind seemed to be throwing the flames, and the fire leaped between bushes as it rushed toward the hotshots with the fluid intensity of a breached dam. The hotshots could not outrun the flames. The fire was spreading at ten to twelve miles per hour, and the wall they’d just hiked down—the only escape not blocked by flames—was too steep to run up. Their only chance for survival lay in deploying their fire shelters.

Steed ordered the men to cut a deployment site at a slight depression where the vegetation grew thinnest, near two swales that drained out toward Yarnell. Scott, Andrew, and Wade ripped their chainsaws to life and fanned out into the chaparral surrounding the depression. Their saws screamed, and Grant and the swampers followed behind, frantically tossing brush into wind so strong it swept the cut bushes clear of the deployment site before they could hit the ground. The scrape raked the flammable leaf litter off the deployment site, and every glance down the basin affirmed dark fears. The flames grew to eighty feet long and tilted nearly horizontal to the ground. Debilitating blasts of heat rushed uphill. Behind the hotshots, a deer tried to scramble up the canyon walls.

“Air Attack, Granite Mountain 7.” This time it was Bob calling
Bravo 33, using a stress-driven amalgamation of Crew 7 and Granite Mountain. “How do you copy me?!”

Firefighters in Yarnell heard in the background of Bob’s transmission the sinister screaming of chainsaws, which a few recognized as a sign that the crew was cutting a deployment site.

When Burfiend finally responded to the calls, he followed the chain of command. His reply to Todd Abel carried the clinical tone a 911 dispatcher adopts to calm down a panicked caller. It came across as long-winded.

“Okay, I was copying a little bit of that, uh, conversation, uh, on Air to Ground,” Burfiend said. “We’re—we’ll do the best we can. We got the Type 1 helicopters ordered back in. Uh…we’ll see what we can do.”

“Bravo 33, Operations on Air to Ground.” Abel was getting irritated now. He wanted Air Attack to address Granite Mountain.

No response for six more seconds. Bravo 33 was still fielding other radio traffic. Finally Burfiend responded to Abel: “Operations, Bravo 33.”

Now Bob broke in, his voice betraying intense frustration. “Air Attack, Granite Mountain 7!”

A minute and a half after Steed made the mayday radio transmission, Burfiend responded to Granite Mountain. The flames were within a couple hundred feet of the men now.

“Okay, unit that’s hollerin’ in the radio,” Burfiend said, “I need you to
quit
.” Then he took Abel’s call.

“Granite Mountain 7 sounds like they got some trouble,” Abel said, and Burfiend immediately responded that he’d “get with Granite Mountain 7 then.”

But Burfiend never talked to Steed or Bob. As the flames rushed closer, it was Marsh who finally contacted him.

“Bravo three
thrrreee
,” Marsh said, drawing out the last word. He sounded completely composed at first. “Division Alpha with Granite Mountain.”

“Okay, Division Alpha, Bravo 33.”

“I’m here with Granite Mountain Hotshots,” Marsh said. His
voice grew shaky. “Our escape route has been cut off. We are preparing a deployment site. We are burning out around ourselves in the brush. And I’ll give you a call when we’re under the—the shelters.”

“Okay, copy that. So you’re on the south side of the fire then?” His tone changed. Burfiend understood now.

“Affirm!”

Steed yelled the order to deploy against winds howling so loud, they stole all other sounds. Embers, riding debilitating blasts of heat, struck the men with the velocity of quarters thrown from a speeding car’s window. Out of time, Scott and the other sawyers pulled back into the deployment site they were able to clear in the three minutes they had. It was half the size of a tennis court. As they ran back toward the site, most of the hotshots threw their chainsaws, tools, and packs, but Scott kept wearing his. As he sprinted into the tiny clearing, he unclipped his waist belt, dropped the pack, and pulled the shelter from its red-cloth casing.

Steed was just in front of Scott on the far right edge of the deployment site. To his left was Joe Thurston, Zup was behind him, and Bob was to his right. All of them were wrestling with their shelters, which thrashed into one another like wind socks in a hurricane-force gale. Scott put his back to the fire, grabbed the shelter’s handles, and flicked out the aluminum tent. The wind tried to rip the shelter from Scott’s hands. He pulled the metal sack over his head and fell face-first into the granite cobbles. Inside the tent, he had shelter from the wind. In the scramble, a small yellow-handled hand tool one of the swampers had carried in his pack had dropped to the ground, and Scott fell on top of it. He put his feet toward the flames and, with his elbows and boots, pinned down the aluminum flaps on the shelter’s underside. He held tight to the handles on the inside and cursed himself for taking his leather gloves off earlier in the day.

The flames rushed up the basin, only feet away now. Inside the shelters, it glowed orange, and the superheated wind slapped the aluminum tent against Scott’s helmet and back. In his group, the men now lay so close that Scott’s feet brushed against Joe Thurston’s, his right shoulder nearly touched Bob’s left, and his head was just a foot
from Steed’s hip. They huddled there together, nostrils filled with dust and heat, and maybe yelled encouragement to one another.
Hold on! No matter how bad it hurts, stay in your shelter! We got this!
Or maybe they simply clenched their jaws.

Grant was almost six feet uphill from Scott’s group. He was alone and deploying farther from the flames than any of the others. He dropped his pack beside himself, tugged the shelter from its sleeve, and watched in despair as it snapped out into the wind. He struggled to pull the heat shield back to his body. The flames roared closer. Grant turned away from the fire, and again the shelter leaped from his hands. He pulled it close again, and this time slipped his left foot inside the aluminum sack. By then the flames were already lashing at the crew. The fire first hit Marsh, who had deployed closest to the canyon’s head, and in seconds it rolled over Scott’s group before finally consuming the brush surrounding Grant.

O
ver the next six minutes, Burfiend made seven attempts to reach Division Alpha and Granite Mountain 7 while he simultaneously tried to guide a helicopter to drop water on their site. But he didn’t know precisely where the men were. The deployment’s effect on the firefight was immediate; saving Granite Mountain became the sole focus. At 4:40 on June 30, some 340 firefighters were battling Yarnell Hill, and the radio traffic was unrelenting. Cell phones became the firefighters’ most reliable method of communication. Everybody wanted to reach somebody who could tell them something about what was happening. But the only thing anybody knew for certain was that Granite Mountain had deployed during the most maniacal fire most of the firefighters had ever seen.

Darrell Willis was still up in Peeples Valley when Todd Abel called him and gave him the news. Willis handed off his structure-protection duties and headed straight for Yarnell.

The scene in town made it clear just how unhinged things had become. A pair of panicked horses galloped down the middle of Highway 89 while a shocked engine company stood on the edge of the road. The fire, of course, hadn’t stopped advancing after Marsh’s last radio communication. Dozens of homes were on fire, and the flames
reached nearly to the antiques stores in downtown Yarnell. A helicopter tried flying straight through the column to locate the men on the opposite side of town, and the DC-10 flew in a holding pattern overhead. The hope was that 10,743 gallons of retardant dropped directly on the crew could save their lives, but with fifty-mile-per-hour winds coursing through the canyon, it would have been nearly impossible for a DC-10 to drop accurately. Even if the pilot hit his target, the gale would likely blow the liquid away before the slurry landed on the shelters.

After the burnover, the Ranch House Restaurant became the Incident Command Post for managing the rescue. The safety zone was a somber scene amid the chaos. Across the street, a long line of cars, the Ferrells among them, exited Glen Ilah. Each driver paused dutifully at the stop sign while in their rearview mirrors they could see houses engulfed in flames and the fire steadily approaching. Granite Mountain’s and Blue Ridge’s buggies, along with almost thirty other fire vehicles, were parked in the restaurant’s lot.

Abel and Musser were in their trucks looking out at Glen Ilah. Flames and smoke blocked their view of the long ridgeline of the Weavers. Somewhere out there, they knew, Granite Mountain lay burned beneath their shelters, no doubt with critical injuries and very possibly worse.

“What’s going on?” Willis asked when he pulled in.

“We can’t get ahold of them on the radio,” Abel said. He switched frequencies on his truck radio and tried again. “Granite Mountain, Operations.” Every few minutes, he repeated the process. Trew, the Blue Ridge captain, sat nearby in one of Granite Mountain’s trucks, trying to hail the men on the crew’s personal radio network. Abel heard nothing back. The only response Trew got was the pulsing static of a keyed mic.

Abel and Musser pulled out a procedural guide for managing an incident within an incident. They needed to keep fighting fire while organizing a rescue mission that required first responders to head directly into a firestorm. They’d already divided up the responsibilities. Musser would run the firefight while Abel managed the rescue under
the title Granite Mountain IC. He’d already notified the Phoenix burn center and had five medevac helicopters, plus ambulances, en route to transport survivors. At that point, Abel had three goals: Find the men, get them to a hospital, and prevent anybody else from getting injured in the process.

“You got a crew member over there with Blue Ridge,” Abel said to Willis, nodding toward Granite Mountain’s buggies.

A few of Blue Ridge’s guys sat outside Marsh’s superintendent truck, toying with the loose stones at their feet. Donut was with them. The Blue Ridge hotshots had turned their radios off to shelter him from any more news, but Donut had already heard the deployment traffic en route from Harper Canyon to the Ranch House Restaurant.

Donut’s first thought was
Why am I here?
Followed closely by
There’s no way they could survive that
. His immediate duties provided some distraction. He kept driving, following the glowing brake lights of the Granite Mountain buggy in front of him. Once they’d pulled into the Ranch House, the Blue Ridge guys asked him to get the medical kits and oxygen bottles off Granite Mountain’s rigs. But that flurry of activity was short-lived, and, in the absence of a job, Donut was left with time that refused to pass.

A medical team assembled near Donut’s truck. He could hear a supervisor addressing a group of EMTs.

“If you do not feel comfortable going in, I need to know right now,” the supervisor said. A propane tank vented by one of the burning houses, and a spindle of flame, whistling like an exponentially more powerful bottle rocket, shot thirty feet into the air.

Willis hugged Donut.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“All right,” Donut said.

A long moment passed, but neither said anything. Donut was in shock. Willis wasn’t far from it. He squeezed Donut’s arm and walked away to call Prescott’s fire chief. The uncomfortable truth was that the City of Prescott needed to ready itself for a coming storm of a completely different nature.

Meanwhile, the flaming front
slammed into Glen Ilah. A few houses down from where the Ferrells lived, Bob Hart, ninety-four, thought little of the fire. He hadn’t received the reverse 911 calls that went out that afternoon warning the citizens to evacuate, no fire or police personnel or neighbors had stopped by to tell him of the coming storm, and though it’s possible he’d seen the fire glowing on the hillside at some point during the three days it had been burning, Bob, unlike the Ferrells, never considered it a real threat. That is, until he went to the kitchen and saw through the window flames consuming trees and homes. He called to his eighty-nine-year-old wife, Ruth, and they rushed out of the house, but the garage door opener didn’t work.
Click, click, click
: Nothing. Together, Ruth and Bob managed to push open the garage door and they climbed into the truck.

Bob couldn’t see through the smoke. He kept bumping into the trees and brush on the sides of their driveway. Then he put the truck’s right wheel into a ditch. The tire exploded. Around them, dozens of propane tanks sent columns of flame shooting into the air like fires off an oil derrick. The Harts could drive no farther, but because the truck’s engine was still running and the air-conditioning kept working, they opted to stay inside the truck. For a moment, it seemed like the best option. But when the flaming front swept through the Harts’ backyard, Ruth, still not more than a few hundred yards from their home, decided to walk out of the situation or die trying. She refused to burn while sitting passively in the truck.

Cordes, the structure-protection specialist, was driving through Glen Ilah in search of civilians. When he found the Harts, they were walking hand in hand through the smoke, wearing only pajamas.

“Could we please get a ride?” Ruth asked him. Cordes took the couple back to the Ranch House, where they sat on a bench for the next hour and a half. Cordes turned around and drove back to Glen Ilah.

He’d first entered the subdivision shortly after hearing about Granite Mountain’s deployment. While Abel dealt with the logistics of the rescue, and most other firefighters waited with dread for news
about the hotshots, Cordes went back to Glen Ilah to help civilians still in the subdivision.

He took a different road on his second trip. People were everywhere. Cordes pulled up alongside them and yelled from his window what seemed plain: “Leave the area immediately!”

Many simply refused, their reasons bizarre. One man pushing a goat into his car told Cordes that he wouldn’t escape until the animal got inside. Another man ran back inside to fix a sandwich. A sixty-year-old woman and her thirty-eight-year-old daughter told Cordes that their neighbor had thirty-five cats and dogs locked in the house, and if the pets were going to burn, so would they.

“You
are
going to die if you don’t exit the area immediately,” Cordes told them, exasperated. “I cannot emphasize that enough.”

Cordes made a final plea, which they refused, and he headed deeper into Glen Ilah. He was nearly to the place where he’d shown Marsh the safety zone that morning when a man waved him down. When he opened the window, smoke burned Cordes’s eyes.

“I can’t leave the area,” the man said, yelling over the wind. “My neighbor’s still in there. She’s handicapped. I can’t carry her any farther.”

The storm’s full force was now upon Glen Ilah. Forty-mile-an-hour winds hammered the subdivision. At points, the flames curled over the road, and Cordes drove on below them. Through a window in the blowing smoke he saw in his high beams the old woman lying on the ground. Cordes got out of the truck and picked her up. He carried her along the side of the truck to shelter her from the wind and, with one hand, opened the door and set her inside. Meanwhile, the man he’d just talked to opened the opposite door.

“Shut the fucking door!” Cordes yelled. Like a vacuum, the calm air in the cab sucked embers into the truck, and they landed on the old woman’s chest, face, and lap. She screamed, but Cordes couldn’t help with the pain. The fire was still pushing toward them. He slammed the door shut.

“Get in!” Cordes said to the man. Already blisters boiled where the embers had struck his face. Cordes raced out the roads, past lingering
civilians, to the Ranch House, where the burn victims were loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. Once again, Cordes tried to head back into Glen Ilah, but he couldn’t. Flames had jumped Highway 89 and surrounded the Ranch House. By night’s end, whatever the fate of Granite Mountain, Cordes was certain he’d be pulling bodies from Glen Ilah.

Trew and Frisby were
at the Ranch House with three other firefighters from the Prescott National Forest. They had three ATVs and planned to drive into the blaze to find the hotshots. For the fourth time in thirty minutes, the fire bumped into Highway 89, and an engine crew was spraying foam on the restaurant.

At the first sign of calm, Trew, Frisby, and the men on the other two ATVs headed back into Harper Canyon, where St. Joseph’s Shrine and its marble statues of Jesus were blackened but still standing. Winds whipped the tallest trees, and the fire had burned a few houses nearly to the ground—their chimneys now rose above piles of smoldering ruins. Metal wind chimes clacked in the front yards of torched homes. Trew and Frisby stopped at a wide point in the road with fire on all sides and looked across at the dozer line that led out toward Donut’s lookout and the saddle beyond. It was too hot to proceed.

For six minutes, they waited in the pseudo safety zone. The fire was slowly calming down, and the road formed a keyhole through the flames, which were no more than a hundred yards deep. Just beyond the venting propane tanks and smoldering brush lay the cooler black, and their only chance at finding Granite Mountain soon.

“Fuck it,” Trew said finally. “Let’s go.”

He stomped on the gas, and they tore up the dozer line. Burning trees had fallen across the road, and Trew and Frisby ducked under low-hanging power lines. Not far beyond Harper Canyon, the road opened up into the long valley. It was a moonscape. Small braids of white smoke rose from a sea of black that stretched from ridge to ridge. Donut’s lookout, the grader’s aged metal, the slopes where
Steed and the crew had been cutting line—all of it was blackened. What remained were hot embers glowing in pits of heat and the twisted and grotesque spent matchsticks of the oldest oaks and chaparral. The three ATVs entered the great emptiness in a caravan.

Back at the Ranch House,
Donut called his mom. He didn’t know what else to do. He told her something had happened. That it was bad and it could get worse but that he was okay.

He couldn’t talk yet about what had happened. He simply wasn’t capable of comprehending it himself. But even if there was nothing to say, just having his mom on the phone was grounding. Donut was in the front seat of Alpha’s buggy when a firefighter he didn’t know asked him for the crew’s manifest, the names and weights of everybody on Granite Mountain. He handed them a list, which had been compiled during the Doce Fire, from the clipboard in the center console.

Eric Tarr was the medic in the front right seat of Ranger 58, a helicopter dispatched from Peeples Valley to locate the hotshots. Tarr had spotted yellow packs on the ridgetop near the saddle where Marsh had met with Trew and Frisby, who were now racing toward the ridge on their ATVs. He radioed to them the coordinates of the packs, and when the road became too rough to proceed, the five men jumped from the vehicles, grabbed a backboard and medical kit, and ran three hundred yards up toward the yellow bags. But this didn’t seem to Tarr like the right place.

The site didn’t fit with what he’d heard Granite Mountain describing on the radio before they’d deployed: that they were on a two-track that ran to the south, that some safety zone was a half-mile out, that structures were nearby. None of the transmissions had been particularly clear, but they pointed to somewhere other than the ridgetop.

It was just after 6
P.M
., almost an hour and a half after Granite Mountain had deployed. In the distance, flames were still working through homes in Yarnell. Up until then, the smoke to the southwest had been too thick to fly through, but as the winds ceased, the smoke began to disperse, and in a fleeting window Tarr saw the Helms’ place
appear. He nudged the pilot to fly south along the two-track, and where the thin road hooked to the right and the canyon fell away beneath the helicopter, Tarr saw the glint of aluminum: the shelters.

He radioed the coordinates to Air Attack. The spot where the helicopter managed to land was four to five hundred yards from the shelters. Eddies of swirling ash were kicked up by the rotors as Tarr exited the helicopter.