Two residents of Yarnell, Arizona hiked into the area of the Yarnell Hill Fire and talked with and shot photos of the Granite Mountain Hotshots hours before the crew became entrapped and died. Joanna Dodder Nellans of the Daily Courier has the story of how Joy Collura and Sonny Gilligan began their hike at 4 a.m. on June 30 to get a closer look at the relatively small fire to see how close it was to their town. Later that morning they saw a lone firefighter tying flagging onto the brush as he made his way toward the fire. Here is an excerpt from the article, which has many of the photos they took.
…When they got closer and began talking, they were struck by the firefighter’s friendly, laid-back demeanor.
“He was really a gentleman,” Sonny said. “He didn’t seem to be really concerned with us being there, or the fire either.”
While some firefighters might have been more gruff when asking them to leave the area, the man said good morning and politely asked them if they’d be in the area long. Joy replied that they wanted to see if the fire was burning on the Yarnell side of the mountains. The man asked them for suggestions about the best way to continue up the mountain that was thick with overgrown vegetation between huge boulders. Sonny pointed to an old trail or fire line obscured by brush.
They didn’t know it at the time, but they were talking to Granite Mountain Hotshots Superintendent Eric Marsh, who would perish alongside 18 of his crewmembers later that afternoon when a storm system abruptly pushed the fire south in the opposite direction.
Joy asked Eric why he was placing pink ribbon on the bushes, and he said it would help his crew find the best way up the mountain.
Joy and Sonny saw Eric on the other side of the mountain about an hour later. He told them that pilots were planning to drop retardant soon, so they should leave for their own safety. He asked which way they were headed.
Joy took some photos of Eric and another hour later, they saw the rest of the crew hiking up the mountain so she shot some photos of them, too.
Check out the new article over at Fire Aviation about MAFFS, broken CV-580 nose gear, an update on next-gen air tankers, Neptune’s grid test, U.S. Forest Service C-27s, a shortage of lead planes, and an update on the 20,000-gallon 747 Supertanker
Senator Harry Reid talks about fighting fire “on the cheap”
It’s probably not likely that the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate reads Wildfire Today, but if he had he would have found that we have something in common, an aversion of trying to fight fire “on the cheap”. We have used that phrase many times, and Senator Harry Reid uttered the words Wednesday, according to an article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in which he was discussing the Carpenter 1 fire just west of Las Vegas:
WASHINGTON — As firefighters head home from Southern Nevada, U.S. Sen. Harry Reid on Wednesday blamed “climate change” for the intense blaze that consumed nearly 28,000 acres and drove hundreds of residents from their homes around Mount Charleston this month.
Reid said the government should be spending “a lot more” on fire prevention, echoing elected officials who say the Forest Service should move more aggressively to remove brush and undergrowth that turn small fires into huge ones.
“The West is burning,” the Nevada Democrat told reporters in a meeting. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a fire in the Spring Mountains, Charleston range like we just had.
“Why are we having them? Because we have climate change. Things are different. The forests are drier, the winters are shorter, and we have these terrible fires all over the West.”
“This is terribly concerning,” Reid said. Dealing with fire “is something we can’t do on the cheap.”
“We have climate change. It’s here. You can’t deny it,” Reid went on. “Why do you think we are having all these fires?”
The thrill of covering a wildfire
Jay Calderon, a photographer for MyDesert.com, wrote an article in which he wrote, “Covering a wildfire is one of the more exhilarating things I get to do as a photojournalist.”
A premature and shallow examination of the Yarnell Hill Fire
I have mixed feelings about mentioning a report that has just been released about the Yarnell Hill Fire that killed 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. But, it is already being referenced in articles, so you may hear about it regardless.
An official investigation is going on now. After it is released we will have much more information about what did, or did not happen that resulted in the tragedy. In spite of the lack of details available, an organization called Pacific Biodiversity Institute wrote a 34-page document expressing the opinions of the authors, Peter H. Morrison and George Wooten. Mr. Morrison’s expertise, according to their web site, is in “conservation biology and ecology with additional expertise in GIS, botany, conservation planning and management”, while Mr. Wooten is described as a “botanist and website developer”.
Their report is shallow, relies on cliches, summarizes the fire behavior describing it multiple times by saying the fire “exploded”, does not understand the nuances of fighting fire or fire behavior, and reaches very detailed and specific conclusions about the vulnerability of hundreds of individual structures based solely on satellite imagery.
So even though they quoted our analysis of the facts about the weather that was recorded by a nearby weather station, and how that could have affected the fire behavior, we can’t recommend their report as authoritative.
Families of Granite Mountain 19 to receive large sums of money
The families of the firefighters that were killed on the Yarnell Hill fire could each receive payments of close to half a million dollars, according to an analysis by NBC News. They came to that conclusion after considering the donations that have been received, the U.S. Justice Department’s Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Programs for law enforcement and fire officers injured or killed in the line of duty, plus Workmen’s Compensation benefits. Hopefully this will do a lot toward taking care of the wives and surviving children.
Unusually high wildfire danger in Scotland
Due to very hot weather (for them) Scotland and other parts of the UK are experiencing many more wildfires than usual. Scotsman.com explains:
Devastating wildfires have ripped through parts of Scotland as the longest heatwave for seven years spread across Britain and forecasters warned temperatures could climb as high as 35C [95F].
Mountain blazes tore across the south Wales’ valleys while flames devastated swathes of Tentsmuir Forest in north east Fife, Scotland, last night, and London experienced its worst grass fires since 2006.
The spate of hot weather is believed to have caused up to 760 premature deaths already and weathermen today warned that the hottest day of the year is yet to come.
John Mayer’s Wildfire
I sometimes check out the hashtag #wildfire on twitter, but for the last few days it has been flooded with something about John Mayer and “Wildfire”. So finally I checked it out, and it’s the name of a new song which has the line “…You and me are catching on like a wildfire”. The video is below.
You may remember that a John Mayer concert in Livingston, Montana earlier this year raised more than $100,000 to help firefighters who battled the 2012 Pine Creek Fire that burned through the community of Pine Creek seven miles south of Livingston August 29, 2012. He owns a home there but was not in the area when five homes and 8,500 acres burned.
So in my book, he gets a break when he sings about “Wildfire”.
Kelly pointed out to us today that when she read our article about the “tar balls” that were discovered in smoke from the Las Conchas Fire and followed the link to other articles tagged “Las Conchas Fire”, she recognized a name, Andrew Ashcraft.
One of the articles with the “Las Conchas” tag had a photo that was taken by Mr. Ashcraft. In 2011 he sent us three photos that he took at the fire, apparently using his cell phone. Even though it was four months after the fire, we published one of them on October 17, 2011, the day he sent them to us. It is the one at the top of this article. The other two are below.
He was 29 when he died, in his third season with the Granite Mountain Hotshots after having won Rookie of the Year honors in 2011. He loved running a chain saw.
According to the New York Times, on the evening of June 29 “he returned home from two weeks fighting another fire, arriving just in time to tuck the children into bed. The next morning at 5:20, he kissed his wife goodbye and headed back to the station.” That was the last time they saw each other, but he texted her several times that day, and attached photos of the fire he took with his cell phone.
We embedded a very moving interview with his wife on July 2. She is now a single mother of four children all under the age of six. The Daily Mail has a long article about the tragedy, with much of it being about the Ashcraft family. The story has a copy of another cell phone photo Mr. Ashcraft took that you probably have seen — the one of the Yarnell Hill Fire that he texted to his wife about an hour or so before the 19 firefighters were overrun by the fire.
The Arizona State Forestry Division has issued a report that summarizes information about some of the major events and the firefighting resources that were deployed for the Yarnell Hill Fire on which 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshot crew were killed.
A very quick summary: according to the report, 24 hours after the Yarnell Hill Fire was reported, it had burned only 6 acres — 23 hours after that 19 firefighters were dead. It seems too unlikely to believe.
The fire, caused by lightning, was reported at 5:40 p.m. The Yarnell Volunteer Fire Department responded, but they were not sure they could access it. The fire was not staffed at night for safety and lack of access reasons. The last reported size that day was one acre. Air Attack flew over the fire but there was no mention of any helicopters or air tankers being used. There were multiple lightning-caused fires in that part of the state.
A spot weather forecast from the National Weather Service predicted for Saturday, hot (102-104 degrees), dry (10-11% relative humidity), winds light (W-SW 6-10 gusts to 14 m.p.h.), very little relative humidity recovery at night, and the possibility of high based showers or thunderstorms with a slight chance of moisture. If thunderstorms developed, the fire area could experience gusty winds.
Most of the funerals are over for the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots that were killed on the Yarnell Hill Fire June 30. From information provided by the incident management team that organized the services, the firefighters are listed below.
The incident management team has posted hundreds of photos of the memorial service, the procession, and the planning for the events.
If you did not get a chance to see it live, or would just like to see it again, below is a video recording of the two and a half hour June 9 memorial service for the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots who were killed June 30. The video is made available by Azfamily.com.
