Instead of flocking to the rodeo grounds, reporters and photographers crowded in with weeping and stunned residents lined up against the fence that surrounded Station 7—the humble gray shack that served as the Granite Mountain Hotshots’ home base. Memorabilia hung from the chain-link fence and piled up on the ground below it gradually obscured the view of the station. Within days the entire fence would turn into a wall of framed and laminated photos of the hotshots, T-shirts and baseball caps from fire departments across the nation, banners from departments in other countries, axes, boots, toy fire trucks, firefighter figurines, 19 crosses, 19 American flags, 19 shovels, 19 baseballs, 19 Frisbees, 19 teddy bears.
Television networks set up tents in the street, and satellite trucks filled up nearby parking lots. There were three crews from Al Jazeera, the news network from Qatar.
A few miles away, inside the gymnasium at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, family members of the fallen firefighters sat in the front rows of the bleachers or stood on the floor in the crush of television cameras, reporters, and fire crews. Prescott firefighters and former members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots sat stone-faced at the back of the stands as leaders from the city, county, state, and Navajo Nation spoke. But at the end of the ceremony, when called into the TV lights in the packed gym, the firefighters couldn’t remain stoic. Dozens of them clutched one another in a scrum of wailing grief. Faces buried into shoulders; tears dampened black T-shirts, many of which had designs noting the 10-year anniversary Prescott’s wildland fire crew was celebrating when the fire overran it.
Nobody inside the university auditorium, outside Station 7, or in the ash of Yarnell had more than the barest of details about the burnover that in a matter of seconds had killed nearly a quarter of the firefighters in the oldest fire department in Arizona. Some quietly wondered who would protect the city from the hazard growing around it now that the hotshots were gone.
“We’re going to have to ask ourselves a set of broader questions about how we’re handling increasingly deadly and difficult firefights,” President Barack Obama told the nation in an address from the White House praising the Granite Mountain Hotshots on the day of the memorial.
A YEAR LATER, DESPITE TWO INVESTIGATIONS into the tragedy, millions of dollars in fines and lawsuits, and as much media scrutiny as any wildland firefighting disaster anywhere in the world had received, the details of what led to the hotshots’ deaths remained largely unknown. But the devastated Prescott Fire Department and the ruins of Yarnell, when added to the decadelong list of wildfires that the disaster climaxed, provided answers to many larger questions.
The chain of events that led to the disaster on Yarnell Hill began not on the day that the hotshots arrived on the fire line, nor with the lightning strike that ignited the blaze, but in the weeks, months, and years leading up to the tragic blaze. By the same token, the wildfires that have overwhelmed the United States since the turn of the millennium grew out of economic, political, and social decisions stretching back a century. For me, comprehending the crisis began not in a flaming forest with elite, professional firefighters, but in the grasses of the Colorado plains with members of the nation’s first line of defense against wildfires—a family of volunteers. One woman among them gained some small understanding of what the Granite Mountain Hotshots endured in their final minutes.
PART II
Our Greatest Ally, Our Fiercest Foe
4
Heartstrong
Wages, Colorado—March 18, 2012
JENNIFER STRUCKMEYER WAS HOME ALONE when she heard the alarm, but she knew most of her family heard it, too. Her husband’s two brothers and their parents all lived in houses around the Struckmeyers’ ranch near the ghost town of Wages, on Colorado’s eastern plains. Their homes were almost close enough for her to shout the news to them, but they all had fire radios, so she was certain they knew about the fire as soon as she did.
It was about one in the afternoon on March 18, the last Sunday of the winter of 2012. The one person she normally would have told about the fire—her husband, Del—wasn’t within earshot. Their son Austin would turn nine the next day, so Del had taken him and their 16-year-old son, Brandon, shopping with the boys’ aunt in Sterling, a town 40 miles north of the ranch.
Jen had signed on to the Wages Volunteer Fire Department less than a year earlier, joining an important but overlooked demographic in Colorado, where about half of all firefighters are volunteers and all-volunteer departments protect 70 percent of the state’s area.1 Before that, she’d sometimes needled Del, who had volunteered with the department since he was a teenager, when he raced out of the house to fight fires at all hours.
“You can’t go out there,” she’d tell him. “You’re risking your life . . . and what for? Your family’s at home!”
Then she joined him on a fire call.
“I didn’t understand it until I got into it,” she told him afterward. “No wonder you do it. It’s fun and exciting.”
The sense of community was akin to that at the dances in Holyoke, Colorado, in between her hometown of Imperial, Nebraska, and the Struckmeyer ranch. She’d met Del at one of those dances. Some of the same people who attended the hoedowns also showed up as volunteer firefighters at burning houses and car crashes to do intricate dances with trucks and hoses, sometimes lit by flames in the night.
Jen’s sister-in-law, Pam, was an emergency medical technician, and Jen had decided she was drawn to medical care, too. Together they would be sisters of mercy. She’d completed her certification as an EMT just a week before the alarm sounded.
Del had his fire radio with him, but Jen knew it would take him more than an hour to get to the blaze, and grass fires need a faster response than that. So Jen would fight her first fire without her husband.
A MILE AWAY JEN’S MOTHER-IN-LAW, Bev, heard the fire call and responded as she had for decades. She prayed.
Bev’s husband, Lee, still went to many of the fires that the volunteer fire department he’d founded fought. But now that he was in his 70s, he wasn’t the first to arrive. Their eldest son, Damon, was on his way even before the call went out. He dropped by his folks’ house to say he was going in to the firehouse after hearing radio traffic about fires on the plains. He knew it was only a matter of time before the Wages department got called in, and was still in his parents’ driveway when his pager went off.
Both as a fireman and a farmer, Damon’s biggest worry was the weather, which seemed more like early summer than the waning days of winter. March is usually the snowiest month in Colorado, but NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information reported 2012’s to be the driest in the state’s history, drier even than 2002, which tree rings showed had the lowest Front Range stream flow since 1685.2 The state’s snowpack was already less than half of what it was normally and would melt to 1 percent of average by June.
It was also the warmest March on record. Fruit trees across the state were budding months early.3 Ranchers wondered what to do with their livestock if the drought kept them from raising enough hay and grain to feed the cattle. The University of Illinois reported the most unfavorable growing season for corn and soybeans in 25 years.4 Grass refused to green up on the parched ground, and what did grow was as dry as paper. The sun baked the dirt of farm fields into a powder that the winter’s relentless winds blew away in dust storms. Farmers complained that they wiped more topsoil from their eyes than they could see in their fields.
“If we don’t get any moisture,” Damon thought, “it’s going to be a short season.”
For farming, but not for fire. Increasingly hot and dry weather had extended the annual wildfire season in Colorado by two months. Damon and his brothers had noticed. That morning the wind, drought, and heat prompted the National Weather Service to issue a Red Flag Warning of high wildfire danger.
“Until the last few years, we didn’t know about red flags,” he said. “Now we hear about ’em more and more.”
Lee started the d
epartment in 1985, after a number of houses near the Struckmeyer spread burned to the ground. It took so long for distant fire departments to arrive that locals joked, “Save the foundation when you get there.”
Damon had joined the force the year after its founding and was on the truck that responded to the department’s first fire—a burning combine. The family manned hoses when the Radio Shack burned in Sterling, an hour to the north, and fought a grass fire so far away in Kansas it took them half a night to drive to it. In 2012 the department was made up of 19 volunteers, eight of whom belonged to the Struckmeyer family. Damon, Del, and their brother Kip often rotated through yearlong terms as fire chief, on top of working the Struckmeyer ranch.
With the family making up 40 percent of the Wages department, the Struckmeyers, like many volunteers, struggled to balance their service and their family business. One fire on the family’s ranch mustered the department on Christmas night, and they snuffed another that broke out during their grandmother’s funeral.
“But we had to bury Grandma first,” Damon recalled.
At times it seemed the Struckmeyer brothers put as much into building the fire department as they did into running their farm. Kip studied firefighting at Morgan Community College, and when the school replaced the extrication equipment it used to train firefighters to rescue victims from car crashes, the Struckmeyers bought the old gear. A few years later the boys picked up a five-ton six-by-six tanker truck on eBay. They spent nights building a catwalk on it and welding the fittings for the hoses and tanks together.
“We’d show up at the fire hall at five or six [in the evening] and work until nine, ten, eleven,” Damon said. Jen and Pam joked that their husbands must be sharing their late nights with another woman and named the truck Leslie in her honor.
Damon’s daughter, Mariah, had just turned 18—old enough to join the department. She was waiting for the meeting that would approve her coming onto the force.
Damon, at 42, was a gregarious, slightly pudgy goofball. “You can laugh, or you can cry, or you can laugh until you cry,” he quipped when describing the family’s struggles.
His brother Del is built like a bulldozer—six feet two and 280 pounds. A mustache droops on either side of his mouth, which holds its tongue as often as his older brother’s makes wisecracks.
When Damon dropped by his parents’ house on the day of the Red Flag Warning, Darin Stuart, his nephew, was visiting. Also a member of the fire department, Darin was eager to answer the call with his uncle.
A PERIMETER OF WRECKED CARS and a log-framed sign announcing “Wages Fire Department” indicated that the building Damon and Darin pulled in beside wasn’t just another farm shed, but the heart of emergency response for some 30 square miles of fields and 200 miles of roads. They walked inside, leaning against winds that were gusting to 60 miles per hour, grabbed their gear, and loaded up the department’s fast-attack truck—a four-by-four with a platform behind the cab where two more firefighters could strap in. A control panel on the platform ran the pumps and hoses connected to the 500-gallon water tank on the back half of the truck. Damon tossed his heavy fire-resistant bunker coat into a compartment in the back because it cramped him when he was driving. It would be easy enough to put it on before he got into the action. They pulled out before anyone else arrived at the firehouse.
Damon’s wife, Pam, heard the same call that Jen did. They’re sisters by marriage but could easily have been born that way. Both God-fearing and irreverent, they share brown hair, a boisterous sense of humor, and hardy laughs. They spent years together cleaning houses and raising kids, and were looking forward to working together at emergencies. Pam, a medic, decorated her fire helmet with glue-on pearls, flowers drawn with colored Magic Markers, and the balloon-shaped letters “EMT” in gold glitter. It looked like a schoolgirl’s notebook, but she figured the decorations might calm some of the injured people she helped. Jen hadn’t had time to decorate her own helmet. These are stout women—strong enough to handle livestock or help carry accident victims, and good-natured about the hard work that comes with life on a farm and a volunteer fire department. Neither had ever fought a wildfire.
“I’m glad to see you here!” Jen shouted when she walked into the firehouse a few minutes after her sister-in-law had arrived. The women grabbed their flame-retardant coats, pants, boots, and helmets and pulled out in the department’s ancient gray Suburban as fires erupted all over the Colorado plains.
Damon and Darin doused a farmer’s burn of some felled trees that the wind was blowing out of control, but soon everyone who was available was called to the first fire that came across their radios. The blaze was named for the town that had once existed 60 miles south of Wages, where the wind had blown down a power line that had then snapped sparks into the dry grass—Heartstrong.
A MAP ON THE WALL of the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office described Heartstrong as also having the names Headstrong and Happyville. Cleve Mason was living up to the first of those alternate names in 1920 when he opened a post office there—without permission from the postal service. He used the second name for his office. The next year Mason’s stubbornness paid off when the postal service approved the Happyville Post Office, which distributed mail until 1940. Today there’s no sign of a town with any of those three names. “There’s nothing there,” Sheriff Chad Day said. “Nothing.”
Wintertime wildfires threatening invisible towns were just the latest surreal development in Day’s service as Yuma County sheriff. “Nothing about me in this job makes sense,” he said.
At 34, Day was the third-youngest sheriff in Colorado history. He grew up on his family’s farm in the county and studied agriculture at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins. After graduation he worked at the Larimer County jail, got promoted to deputy, and won a hard-fought campaign against the sitting sheriff. He moved his wife and kids back to his family’s farmstead near Wray, taking a $20,000 pay cut and a big increase in responsibilities. But things started to fall into place. His wife, who had once resisted even visiting the northeast corner of Colorado, embraced the move. They found a palatial house and made an offer that they considered insulting but was what they could afford. The sellers accepted, citing the young sheriff’s reputation and his family’s long legacy in the county as the reasons. Sheriff Day’s new home had a full-sized racquetball court in the basement.
Short and fit, with a close-cropped beard and hair, the sheriff still looks like a college athlete. He wears his sheriff’s office coat like a letterman’s jacket. He’d been in office just over a year when, while he was coming home from church with his family, the dispatcher called in the Heartstrong Fire.
He headed for the fire, then saw a wall of smoke rising in the distance and turned back to set up a command post next door to the Yuma Police Department. By then his radio had announced the first farmhouse burning down.
Duaine and Lucie Eastin’s farm was at County Roads 26 and M. The fire came on so fast that when their son and daughter-in-law came to help them prepare for it, they could do little but pack a few things and “get mom and dad out of here.”5
Less than an hour later the blaze rolled over George and Florence Pletcher’s farmstead, three miles north of the Eastins’ at County Road 29, bringing down the home, barns, and sheds like a wave washing away sand castles on the beach.
Elmer Smith had been chief of the Yuma Volunteer Fire Department since the first of the year and was one of its 34 firefighters before that. Smith drove a truckload of water and air packs to firefighters trying to protect the Eastins’ home. The fire was already leaping out of the eaves and curling the tin roof.
“We gotta get these guys out of here,” he announced.
After convincing Eastin and the six firefighters trying to save the home he had lived in for 75 years to retreat, Smith drove out in front of the blaze to figure out how to fight it. “I had no idea where this fire was,” he said.
It was like trying to drive through a black and gray blizzard. H
e could hardly see through the cloud of sand, dirt, smoke, burnt grass, and cornstalks flying in the relentless wind. On a road that should have held back the fire, the flames just leapt over Smith’s car to ignite the field on the other side.
Smith found himself coordinating 84 fire trucks with volunteers from different departments. Others from Nebraska and Kansas backed them up. The fire burned to within two miles of the town of Eckley, and deputies and state troopers coordinated the evacuation of the town from the Silver Spur Bar and Grill.
Sheriff Day called for a mandatory evacuation over about 40 square miles, but it seemed that most people were headed the wrong way. Deputies and firefighters couldn’t get to homes that needed protecting fast enough because the roads were so choked with people and cars. Some left their vehicles on the road and ran into fields to help farmers round up livestock, but most were rubbernecking at the oncoming fire. Drivers blinded by the blowing sand and smoke, or distracted by the spectacle, crashed into ditches. One car rear-ended a fire truck. As the blaze overtook the Pletcher farm, their cattle joined the cars filling the road.
“WE’RE NEVER GOING TO GET ANYTHING DONE but driving today,” Jen Struckmeyer said in the passenger seat of the Suburban as her sister-in-law navigated the chaos. “Let’s get this thing done!”
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