On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

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  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 hous
es 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.

  CHAPTER 15

  HOMETOWN PRIDE

  Donut picked a new theme song for Alpha. Chris MacKenzie was back as Alpha’s lead firefighter, and Donut, once again in the back of the buggy, reclaimed his role as deejay. The tune was Rammstein’s “Du Hast,” a thrashing metal song that riffs on traditional German wedding vows and repeats “until death separates” ad nauseam. Nobody in the buggies, of course, knew what the foreign lyrics meant. What they liked was how the pulsing bass line psyched them up for the task at hand. Not long after noon, the hotshots arrived on scene. The wind blew the smoke north across Iron Springs Road, and the column was lying almost parallel to the ground. As they drove through the plume, the hotshots on the left side of the trucks could see a line of flames ten feet tall, maybe higher, churning through the brush and coming straight at the highway.

  Donut turned around to the other hotshots in Alpha. “Get your fucking shit together,” he said. “This is what we signed up for.”

  Steed rearranged Alpha and Bravo after Bunch’s and Renan’s departures, and Granite Mountain was a slightly different crew than they had been on Thompson Ridge. Marsh, who was getting his truck fixed and not with the hotshots when the Doce broke, was back in his superintendent’s position on Granite Mountain. Steed stepped back to captain, and Tom Cooley returned to structural firefighting.

  Clayton Whitted had moved Sean Misner, a twenty-six-year-old rookie from California with a new baby on the way, to Alpha to be Grant’s new “battle buddy.” Scott Norris and Joe Thurston shifted to Bravo to replace Bunch. John Percin, who had hurt his knee during the first week of the season, wasn’t currently in Alpha but was expected to be back soon. Since his injury, Percin had been a “chip bitch,” doing defensible-space work with the three other guys Marsh and Steed hired each year to keep the projects going while the crew was on the line. That morning, when Steed asked Percin how he was doing, Percin said, “Better, but I’m not a hundred percent yet.” After two weeks on Thompson Ridge, few of the guys felt 100 percent, and with Renan and Bunch gone, the crew was now shorthanded and needed Percin back as soon as possible.

  The buggies took a left down a dirt road toward the fire’s starting point, where a spark from a bullet had ignited the chaparral beside a rock fence set up to keep ATVs out of the desert. The blaze burned so hot it looked as if the chaparral’s stems had been blackened and then shorn with a razor, but the flames were already long gone. There was no chance the crew could cut direct line around the fire: It had aligned with the wind, and with the gentle rise in the terrain, the fire’s head had already grown to a few hundred yards across. The firefighters would have to link together a series of roads to contain the Doce.

  Granite Mountain backtracked on the dirt road, which was now stacked with arriving fire engines. Every available firefighter in the area had been pressed into duty. The plume was throwing embers across the road, and engine crews hurriedly hosed down the flames before the fire could get established on the wrong side of the impromptu containment line. Overhead, a single-engine air tanker strafed the unburned side of the road with retardant.

  The roads between the flames and town were the firefighters’ last hope for keeping the Doce from knocking on the doorsteps of the town’s sixty thousand homes. If it crossed either road, flames would be running wild through ranchland with nothing between them and Williamson—and, by extension, Prescott—but a few hundred heads of longhorn cattle and a five-mile strip of junipers and tangled brush that hadn’t burned since the last Doce, twenty-three years earlier. To widen the line, Steed quickly planned to burn out a patch of chaparral that grew in the corner where the dirt road intersected the paved Iron Springs Road. With the flames spreading so quickly, it was a risky assignment. Steed needed experienced hands to pull it off.

  “Chris, Donut—I want you to get into the interior and dot-light every twenty-five feet,” Steed said. “This stuff is flashy. We just need to blacken the corner before the flames hit.”

  Chris and Donut would enter the chaparral alone and, parallel to Iron Springs Road, spark a small fire every twenty-five feet. The rest of the hotshots would spread out along the road to watch for spots.

  The two men grabbed the torches from Steed’s truck and waded into head-high thickets of brush. They could see the flames chugging toward the highway from the south. The boughs raked across their helmets, and they held their arms across their faces to block the whiplash of branches. Chris, the more experienced of the two, went deeper into the thickets than Donut. Forty feet off the highway, he came to a barbed-wire fence that ran parallel to the road. He pushed it down, stepped over it, and kept going, while Donut stopped at the fence, to stagger their burning positions.

  “You ready?” Chris yelled to Donut.

  “Affirm!”

  They lit their torches in brush so thick it blocked their view of the road. Pretty quickly, Donut recognized the impossibility of the task. As he plowed through the brush, the burning end of his torch kept accidentally touching the chaparral. He was igniting the brush not every twenty-five feet, but with every other step. The tiny fires climbed down the branches, spreading from limb to limb until, within a matter of moments, the entire oak shrub was engulfed in flames and spreading in the adjacent brush.

  “This is nuts!” Donut yelled. “These spots are right on my ass!”

  “We gotta get the fuck out of here!” Chris yelled back.

  They used their gloved hands to snuff out their torches and, just minutes after wading into the brush field, started back out toward the highway. But in the short time Chris and Donut had been burning, the Doce had accelerated, and the wall of flames now pushed even harder toward the road. Smoke was steaming through the chaparral. As Donut crashed through the brush, he could hear the popping of spark
s, the roar of fast-approaching flames, and the superheated water in the plants whistling like a teakettle as it vented from the shrubs’ woody stems.

  Chris caught up to Donut and slammed into his back, and they both tumbled to the ground. On their hands and knees, they scurried over shotgun shells and empty Coors bottles and through the openings near the foot of the brush. Still, they weren’t closing the distance to the highway fast enough. Here in the dense brush, their shelters would do nothing. If the fire caught them, they’d be severely burned or, more likely, worse.

  “Throw the torches!” Chris yelled, hoping to lighten their loads. They heaved the gas-filled canisters up and over the brush and kept going.

  By now they were nearing the highway, and the hotshots spread out along the road watching for spots turned to see Chris and Donut stumble from the brush and onto the safety of the blacktop. Behind them, the fire overtook the drip torches and the canisters exploded. The main blaze, meanwhile, was bucking into Iron Springs. The flames curled over the road, and the fire kept marching directly at town.

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  By evening, smoke filled the Prescott suburb of Williamson. Flames threatened more than two hundred homes on the outskirts of town. A Type 1 incident management team was brought in immediately, and within just a few hours of its start, the Doce became the highest-priority fire in the country. Tony Sciacca, a former hotshot superintendent who lived in Prescott, was the incident commander. By 5 P.M., Sciacca had assumed control of the Doce and was scouting the fire from the passenger seat of a small helicopter. He could scarcely believe what he saw.