by Kyle Dickman
Battersby noticed the collapsing column first, at 8,000 feet. His helicopter jolted to a stop. The pilot let out a grunt as he was suddenly lifted off his seat. The hands of the altimeter pinwheeled—7,500, 7,000, 6,500 feet—and in his rearview mirror Battersby saw the lunches, carried in a sling load that usually trailed a hundred feet behind the chopper, suddenly float directly beneath the JetRanger. He was plummeting in a descending column of air.
As the ground rushed up at him, Battersby raised the helicopter’s nose while simultaneously redlining the power. He instinctively banked the JetRanger into a U-turn—the direction he’d come from provided the fastest escape from the downdraft. As the helicopter came around, Battersby scanned the forest below for a soft spot to crash: Trees, always look for trees. Open ground and water have no give, but branches break.
The JetRanger jumped and shuddered as Battersby flew into the safety of the calm air just beyond the downdraft. He dried his palms, climbed up to the top of the Mogollon Rim, and delivered the brown bag lunches. By the time he finished, forty-mile-per-hour winds were stoking the Dude Fire.
—
Just a few miles away and not far from the lunch spot, LaTour was scouting for spot fires when the smoke surged into the canyon. The descending column hit the Dude Fire uphill of LaTour. The winds fanned every flank and tossed embers in all directions, but in Walk Moore the walls channeled and accelerated the gusts from forty to sixty miles per hour. The gray overcast light suddenly turned an eerie and muted orange as embers the size of pinecones rained down upon LaTour and kindled in the pine needles with a sizzling hiss. He raced back to find Bachman, Springfield, Ellis, and the rest of the crew.
They were still at the water cans when the fire exploded. It was as if a heavy stone had been dropped into an already overflowing pot. The fire rolled over the top of the forest and jumped the two-foot flames that had been backing down the canyon—the hotshots’ burnout. In an instant, entire stands of trees combusted, and embers were thrown far down the canyon.
“Get the fuck out!” somebody on Perryville yelled.
The crew were fleeing in a tight group before LaTour reached them. As he passed the forty-pound water cans, LaTour grabbed one—why, he’ll never know. He put himself last in a long line of forty Perryville crewmen and Navajo Scouts now hurrying downhill toward the vehicles parked on the Control Road. Many ran. LaTour chose not to. He didn’t want to incite panic. He felt it, though. From behind him, he could hear the roar of flames—half again as tall as the pines—and the trees, cooked from the inside, exploding like artillery fire.
Meanwhile, a squad boss and an inmate who had gone downcanyon to fetch water were still picking their way back toward the crew when they heard a wind they described as sounding like a locomotive. Three Perryville crew members sprinted past them. The inmates said nothing when they passed—nor did the next three. The squad boss asked one fleeing firefighter, “Are you the last person?”
The inmate didn’t answer. Instead, he started yanking at his fire shelter while running. In his fluster, he stubbed his toe on a rock and flew headfirst into the creek bed, bruising his ribs. Five Perryville crew members hustled past him as the flames and the panic closed in. The squad boss ran. Bachman fell down. James Denney, an inmate in for burglary, picked her up. An elk with fire just feet from its rear hooves hammered past them down the canyon. One crew member didn’t put down his Pulaski. Another ran with a chainsaw. Burning debris landed under one man’s shirt, and without time to pull out the embers, his chest burned as he sprinted beneath a ceiling of flame.
Greg Hoke ran in the middle of the pack—tenth in the line of twenty Perryville firefighters. Just as those ahead of him rounded a bend, a tongue of fire swept across the dozer line. Hoke, aghast, stumbled to a stop feet away from the flames blocking his escape. He turned around, ready to run uphill, and watched in horror as a second finger of flame crossed the canyon between him and LaTour, Bachman, and the eight other members of Perryville attempting to escape. Hoke presumed they were dead. He stood alone in the middle of a dry creek bed with flames curling around him. Out of time and options, he threw his pack aside and deployed his fire shelter.
—
Almost a mile downcanyon, an engine crew was eating lunch where the Control Road crossed Walk Moore. To support the burnout operation, they’d spent the morning running a hose-lay up the canyon and along the fire line, but after finishing, the crew took it easy and watched the burnout. The captain described it as looking nice—controlled, slow, exactly the way the incident commander intended it to be.
Things started unraveling when the same eerie hush the hotshot superintendents had felt settled over the Control Road. Moments later, a fifty-mile-per-hour blast of wind slammed into the enginemen, and two-hundred-foot flames appeared on the western edge of Walk Moore. Get in the trucks! the captain yelled. The fire would be upon them in minutes.
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.
CHAPTER 9
LESSONS LEARNED
Scott 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 mad
e 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.