by Kyle Dickman
The DC-10 lumbered over a ridgeline off to Willis’s right and, flying bizarrely slowly for such a massive aircraft, dropped to only a few dozen feet above the tops of the squat juniper trees. It laid a mile-long strip of slurry between Willis and the unburned chaparral. Shortly after, a second heavy air tanker reinforced the retardant line along a similar path. For the first time that day, Willis had a line between himself and the flames. But whatever relief that small safety net provided was short-lived.
Willis watched the fire collide with the first retardant line. For a long moment, the flames sat down, and it looked as though the slurry had broken the fire’s advance. But the gusts of wind that came over the next few minutes breathed life back into the embers and, like a stumbling but still-dangerous boxer, the flames rose again and worked through the brush covered in red slurry. Once on the far side of the retardant line, the fire’s intensity resumed as if it had encountered no retardant at all. Willis had run out of ways to stop the fire. Flames would be at Double Bar A within the hour and at the doorsteps of fifty or so other homes in Peeples Valley within two.
“Get him out of here,” Willis said to the enginemen, referring to the caretaker at Double Bar A. The ranch hand, like many stubborn homeowners in Peeples Valley, had willfully ignored the evacuation orders already in effect, preferring instead to stay and do what he could to help the firefighters save the ranch. Even after Willis pointed to a pair of side-by-side tennis courts and told him that if the fire burned into the ranch, that was their last resort, the caretaker decided to stay. But his fortitude cracked after he saw the fire’s intensity up close. With no interest in finding out what it felt like to ride out a firestorm on a pair of tennis courts, the man fled.
Shortly after, so did Willis and the firefighters he commanded.
“Everybody out! Just everybody get out of here,” Willis screamed.
—
Scott texted Heather. “So this is how my morning’s going. Structures threatened in Peeples Valley!”
She was at the vet, getting Riggs his rabies shot, when she got his text. The photo showed a ripping fire in the distance, but she couldn’t see the homes through the smoke. Either way, Scott’s assignment didn’t look good. It looked hot. Scott hated hot. He wouldn’t be happy.
Granite Mountain took lunch at a group of large boulders on the slope where they’d been cutting line. The fire still chugged along steadily to the north, and in the distance the men could see cauliflower clouds hung on the peaks of the Bradshaw Mountains outside Prescott. The clouds cast dark shadows over the distant hills. Drenched in sweat from running saw all morning, Scott cut open the rubbery packaging of his MRE lunch with his pocket knife and leaned back into his pack as the men around him traded for preferred food. Pound Cake for Patriotic Cookies, anybody? Who doesn’t want their Tabasco?
Scott’s phone vibrated. “I had a weird dream that I proposed to Scott.” Then a few seconds later: “Oh hi. That was meant for Sarah. Lol.”
Delighted, Scott thumbed out a reply to Heather.
“Well, that’s better than the last one”—the last time, she’d dreamed that Scott was shoplifting. “I’m a little old fashioned. I think I’d like to be the one to propose. ☺”
“LOL. Okay. ;)” Heather answered.
Minutes later, the screaming of the DC-10’s jet engines broke up Scott and Heather’s digital moment. Scott looked up to see that the plane was on what looked like a collision course with a Type 1 helicopter, a Skycrane outfitted to carry water. The DC-10 crested the ridge, and the pilot must have seen the helicopter flying in from the northwest, but the jet couldn’t change course. It was too big and already flying too slow to maneuver rapidly. The helicopter’s pilot had to move, but its best option seemed to be an impossibly narrow draw that drained into the valley Donut sat in.
Donut, who’d arrived at his lookout nearly an hour earlier, was certain he was about to witness a midair collision. He had the wherewithal to pull his phone from his pocket and shoot video. Just a few hundred yards away, the helicopter pilot banked hard, then harder still. The Skycrane dived deep into the V-shaped valley, its nose still pointed directly toward the ground. Sixty, fifty, forty feet from the rocks.
I’m about to pick up a body, Donut thought. The helicopter’s blades thwapped the air as the pilot pulled out of the maneuver and the DC-10 blasted overhead. Rotor wash kicked up plumes of dust as the helicopter pilot pulled the ship’s belly parallel to the slope and regained control near the bottom of the gulch.
The DC-10 never altered its course. A moment after passing above the Skycrane, the pilot opened the bay doors and dropped an 11,119-gallon strip of retardant across the valley floor between Donut and the strap of flames that Steed had warned him about earlier that day. The safety buffer was comforting, but Donut was still shaken up.
On the ridge, Scott thumbed out another text to Heather.
“We just watched a DC-10 slurry bomber almost collide midair with a Sikorsky helicopter!”
“Holy hell! That certainly would have made the news,” Heather replied.
—
Watching two multi-million-dollar aircraft nearly smack into each other stood out as ten seconds of terror in Donut’s otherwise slow afternoon. He’d picked a trigger point—if the fire hit a drainage about a quarter-mile away, Donut would flee—and listened to Marsh and Steed chatter about the aircraft’s near disaster and the chaos unfolding at the fire’s head.
Donut ate his Beef Stew MRE for lunch, not bothering to use the chemical heater to warm the meal in the day’s excessive heat. He sat just below the top of the blanched knoll. The winds blew at his back, where the long valley funneled the breeze rising off the desert floor to the north. But outside the valley’s microcosm, the terrain shaped the winds differently. At around 1 P.M., the dominant breeze over the fire began shifting to the east, and after burning four of the seven buildings at Double Bar A Ranch, the flames took a hard right. The fire’s head now spread directly toward Highway 89 and the houses in Peeples Valley. Roy Hall’s management team was already talking about shutting down the highway and using it as a line to burn off. None of the smaller residential roads seemed to be holding.
From the ridgetop, Marsh could see the fire’s development, but in the valley, Donut couldn’t. Donut’s job was simple: In the event that a spot fire appeared beneath Granite Mountain’s midslope line, he was to warn Steed and the crew. No spots had. As the crew ate their lunches on the ridge that formed the valley’s northwestern boundary, Donut watched the strap of fire now backing toward Yarnell on the opposite ridge. The flank hadn’t advanced more than fifty feet in the hour since Donut had been at his lookout, but the twitchy way the flames moved was fascinating. Rather than a steady creep, they throbbed in temperamental pulses.
One moment, the black edge was calm—almost no smoke at all. The next, the embers glowing at the trunk of a scrub oak warmed the lower branches, and in a flash of flame the whole bush combusted as if torched by a lighter. Then, just as quickly as the little conflagration had come, the flash smoldered. The effect was biblical.
As part of Donut’s job to keep an eye on the fire, he “slung weather” at the top of every hour with a paperback-size kit every lookout carries in his or her line gear. At 1:50, he pulled out a thermometer on a small chain. Over the thermometer’s bulb was a cloth wick. Donut dipped the cloth into his water bottle. Wetting the cloth provided both temperature and humidity readings. Then he held the end of the chain at arm’s length and swung the thermometer in a circle for a timed minute.
Donut scratched the readings into a log used to keep track of hourly weather changes. “Cloud build up SW,” he wrote. Out over the desert, Donut could see small, white puffs of clouds starting to pull together into thunderstorms. Then he finished the entry: “104 degrees, 10 percent humidity, 5–10 m.p.h. with gusts of 15 from the south.”
CHAPTER 19
WIND SHIFT
Studying his radar in Albuquerque, Chuck Maxwell saw th
e wind shift coming long before anybody else did. A hundred-mile line of scattered thunderstorms had hung up on the Mogollon Rim and the Bradshaws. At shortly before 3 P.M., Maxwell watched a few of the clouds puff up like popcorn above a sea of white, a sign that the storms were reaching maturity.
“See that?” Maxwell asked a former hotshot who was now working as a dispatcher at the SWCC. The weatherman pointed to an eyebrow of shifting pixels on the southwest side of the thunderstorms looming over Prescott. “It’s an outflow boundary. Exactly the stuff we teach in weather classes.”
Rain now fell over the Bradshaws. Even if most of the raindrops evaporated in the fifteen thousand feet of hot and dry air that sat between the cloud’s base and the ground—a phenomenon called virga—the moisture cooled the surrounding air and caused it to sink, pushing out a wave of winds. Meteorologists refer to this as an outflow boundary.
Maxwell was witnessing not the collapse of a single thunderstorm, but the collapse of many. What had been a line of mushrooming cumulus clouds, their tops reaching nearly thirty thousand feet, was now generating thirty-five- to forty-five-mile-an-hour winds. The clouds were pancaking out into a thin layer of overcast spreading to the south. Like tributaries strengthening a river, drainages and mountain arroyos funneled the winds created by the dying storms, and they eventually became a single gust front, now moving straight at Yarnell.
“This is going to get interesting quick,” Maxwell said. “When it hits the fire, it’ll turn back on itself and blow up. On the ground, there will be fire behavior that’s about as extreme as it gets.”
Maxwell would have been more worried had he not been in contact with Hall’s management team all day, telling them directly that an outflow wind reversal was coming. His job wasn’t to advise on tactics, but Maxwell’s advice was implicit in the way he worded his warnings. When the winds hit, the firefighters and civilians needed to be well out of harm’s way.
The dispatchers behind Maxwell fielded calls at an increasingly frantic pace. Incident commanders throughout the region knew of the coming storms, and to help mitigate the impending surge in fire behavior, they wanted more engines, hotshot crews, and, most pressingly, aircraft. In the past hour, the Albuquerque dispatchers had been inundated with requests: Yarnell Hill alone wanted six more large air tankers. The SWCC, already out of aircraft in the region, relayed the incident commander’s request to Boise.
By that point in the afternoon, the State of Arizona had upgraded Yarnell Hill to a Type 1 incident, and new commanders were en route to relieve Hall and his team on July 1. In just a couple of days, the fire had gone from an errant lightning strike to the nation’s highest-priority blaze. Still, when NIFC got Hall’s management team’s requests for more aircraft, they were promptly denied.
“Very limited availability of air tankers with increasing activity in the western states,” came the response. “Unable to fill at this time.”
Nine aircraft were already committed to Yarnell, and to provide Hall’s team with any more air resources would mean risking disaster by pulling tankers and helicopters from the dozens of other quickly evolving fires around the West. NIFC couldn’t do it. The planes couldn’t be spared.
—
Around 3:30 P.M., Donut was slinging weather in preparation for his hourly report to Granite Mountain when another weather update came over the command frequency. The National Weather Service had announced the imminent wind shift. Storms building over Prescott had reached maturity.
Abel, the operations chief, radioed each unit under his command to confirm that they’d received the update. Division Alpha replied that it had.
“Have you got eyes on both of the cells?” Abel asked.
“Affirmative,” Marsh said. Except for Air Attack, Marsh had the best view of the fire. Abel intended to use his vantage as an asset.
“Okay, watch that one to the north. It’s making me nervous. It’s collapsing and building,” Abel said. “I watched it do it two or three times.”
Granite Mountain was eating at its lunch spot when the weather update came through. Scott immediately texted Heather. “This fire is going to shit burning all over and expected +40 hr wind gusts from a t-storm outflow. Possibly going to burn some ranches and house.”
When Heather got the text, she was at home refilling the dogs’ water bowl. It was her day off, but she was catching up on the paperwork she’d abandoned the night before to spend time with Scott. The storms were already hitting Prescott. Outside, the winds blew so hard that she worried for a moment that the quaking windows might crack. They seemed to bend inward as the gusts buffeted the house. She grabbed her phone off the kitchen counter and texted Scott back, “I love you baby. Talk to you later!”
—
At 3:30, the flames pulled harder than ever northeast into Peeples Valley, and the brush was torching just a few hundred yards from the Incident Command Post, which had been moved to Model Creek Middle School, in Peeples Valley, to accommodate the incident’s increasing size and complexity. The vehicles at the command post were pulled farther back into the safety zone, while the engine crews set fire to the last road between it and the flames.
The burnout wasn’t an ideal plan. The backfire would almost certainly impinge on the already evacuated structures to the south, but the firefighters hoped the action would trade a few homes for many. Keeping the fire from jumping Model Creek Road would stop it from crossing into a subdivision of modular homes just past the safety zone at the middle school. The barter wasn’t working. As soon as the torches were set to the ground, embers began sparking tiny fires on the north side of the line. Engine crews bailed into the brush and hosed down the spots, but there would soon be more flames than water.
The shift came in stages. The band of cooler, moist air—the outflow boundary—that had originated from the thunderstorms over Prescott moved south down the back side of the Bradshaws and across the arroyos and parched fields of Skull Valley. Like the small wake that breaks off a ship’s bow, the front pushed forward the slowly moving air ahead of it. The weak waves sheared and angled as they hit pressure and temperature changes. When this confused front hit the bubble of hot air rising off the fire and the daily winds blowing off the desert, the air masses battled, creating an atmospheric instability that effectively canceled out the winds. A moment of calm fell over the area.
Rather than spreading aggressively forward, as the fire had been doing all day, the flames flickered and stood and worked their way through the already ignited brush. In the calm, the smoke column, which had been lying down to the northeast, was freed from the influence of the desert winds and billowed skyward. Firefighters stopped and looked at one another in disbelief. The calm was momentary and duplicitous, but it allowed the engine crews working on Model Creek Road to pick up spots threatening to overrun their line. The burnout, which had seemed destined to fail, turned and slowly blackened its way south, and the threat to the middle school and the Incident Command Post was nullified. Peeples Valley was spared.
But like a tide moving from north to south, the full force of the outflow boundary overpowered the desert winds. It first hit the flames on the blaze’s north end, whipping the fire into a frenzy. Like a bloodhound picking up a new and stronger scent, the flames pivoted and ran hard to the south. Truman Ferrell was still on Highway 89 when he saw what had been the fire’s smoldering southeast flank jump to life.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “That don’t look good. That’s going right to Glen Ilah.”
—
To keep himself entertained on the lonely knoll on the valley floor, Donut started spinning the thermometer on its chain fifteen minutes earlier than normal. That would give him time to check and double-check his readings. It was just before 3:30 when Steed called on the crew network.
“Donut, you up?”
“Go, Steed.”
“There’s a weather report coming in on the radio”—it was the second one in as many hours. “Spin your weather and listen to crew. I’ll tell you
what’s going on.”
Donut checked to make sure his radio was properly set up, then he went back to spinning the thermometer.
Marsh was among the first firefighters on Yarnell Hill to feel the shift. He radioed Todd Abel and told him that the “winds are getting squirrelly” on the ridgetop.
“Copy that. Are you in a good place?”
“Affirmative, in the black,” Marsh said. “And trying to work my way off the top.”
It wasn’t clear if Marsh meant that he was trying to work his way off the summit of the Weavers, which was a half-mile or so to the north of Granite Mountain’s position, or the ridge itself, which extended in a long arch back toward Yarnell and the Helms’ place. For the moment, Marsh’s position didn’t concern Abel. He’d heard what he needed to: Granite Mountain was safely in the black.
“Okay, I copy, just keep me updated,” Abel said to Marsh. “You guys, you know, hunker in and be safe, and we’ll get some air support down there ASAP.”
Meanwhile, Donut kept swinging the thermometer. He glanced back up at the ridge to see if the crew were still at their lunch spot, but they’d since left the fire’s creeping edge and moved deeper into the black on the ridgetop. By the time Donut looked back to the fire, a ten-to-twelve-mile-per-hour wind was blowing into his face.
As Donut watched, the flames instantaneously jumped to life. What moments earlier had been a three-mile-long smoldering edge suddenly became a three-mile flaming front that was burning directly at Donut and the town of Yarnell. It was just what Steed had warned him about. Donut stopped spinning weather. Just seconds after the wind shifted, the fire started racing through the unburned chaparral on the valley floor. The flames jumped a drainage a quarter-mile to the north.