“And then, all of a sudden,” Willis said, “the wind shifts.”
At about 3:50 the winds that had been blowing the fire to the northeast turned it hard to the southeast, shifting the fire away from Peeples Valley. The firefighters breathed shocked sighs of relief. Jackson and Matthews cheered.
But the winds that had saved one town doomed another. And the outflow boundary from the thunderstorm hadn’t yet arrived.
THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS, high in the black, were as safe from the flames as they could hope to be, but they were exposed to the forces of the changing weather and had a panoramic view of the sudden turn of the fire it drove. Many of them were in touch with their families back in Prescott.
Grant McKee’s fiancée, Leah Fine, sent him a note. “Wish I could come kidnap you and take you away,” she texted him.
“Please do,” he wrote back. “I dare you.”
She reminded him to wear sunscreen to keep from getting burned.
Wade Parker sent his mother a text with a photo. “This thing is runnin straight for yarnel jus starting evac,” he wrote. “You can see fire on left town on right.”
Parker’s photo showed a line of flame with a billowing plume of smoke leaning toward Yarnell.
Scott Norris also texted a photo to his mother. “This thing is running at Yarnell!!!” he wrote.
Sometime between 3:45 and 4:00, Paul Musser, one of the operations chiefs on the fire, requested that the Granite Mountain Hotshots make their way to Yarnell to assist in protecting structures there. Either Marsh or Steed refused this request and suggested that the Blue Ridge Hotshots were closer.18 Marsh was also part of a short conversation about trying to backburn an area next to the dozer line the Blue Ridge crew had cut that morning, but that wasn’t an option either. Still, Marsh was looking for opportunities to help.
Chris MacKenzie made a short video that panned the fire and captured Marsh speaking to Steed over the radio. “I knew this was coming when I called you and asked what your comfort level was,” Marsh said. “I could just feel it, you know?”19
He could have been referring to the weather, the pressure for them to get to Yarnell, or something else.
A few minutes later Marsh called the Blue Ridge crew. “I want to pass on that we’re going to make our way to our escape route,” he said.
“You guys are in the black, correct?” Frisby, the Blue Ridge super, asked.
“Yeah,” Marsh answered, “we’re picking our way through the black . . . going out toward the ranch.”20
One of the photos from MacKenzie’s phone, on which he also recorded his videos, appears to show some of the crew’s sawyers headed south at 3:52. The rest of the crew started down about 12 minutes later.
The Blue Ridge superintendent assumed that Marsh and the Granite Mountain crew were heading toward one of the ranches to the north, through already burnt terrain that provided their safest route off the mountain. But that route would take them away from the fire and Yarnell. In reality, they headed south, back along the two-track road where they had conducted their earlier burnouts. To the east, a little more than half a mile below the two-track, was Boulder Springs Ranch, the place they had noted as a “bombproof” safety zone that morning.
But between the safety of the black they were abandoning and that of the ranch was a steep canyon choked with boulders and thick chaparral.
31
Trigger Points
IN YARNELL, CORDES ESTABLISHED three trigger points for evacuations.1 The first was a peaked ridge about a mile north of town. If the fire reached it, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office would give residents an hour to leave. If the fire reached the second trigger, a hill south of the first, firefighters would retreat from the wildlands and pull back from the northwestern edge of town. And if it reached the third, a ridgeline near the edge of town, everyone would get out.
Since the day before, the Yarnell Fire District’s website had warned residents to be prepared to evacuate, but had presented the possibility as remote. The fire was moving away from the town, the website noted, but the potential for an evacuation “must always be considered.” By 3:30 Sunday morning, the fire was about a mile and a half from the town line. It wasn’t until late that morning that the sheriff’s office contacted residents via telephone, text, and email.
“Residents receiving this message should be prepared to evacuate due to the Yarnell Fire. Collect your valuables and make arrangements for livestock transportation. If evacuation becomes mandatory, we will send out a second notice. You will have one hour upon receipt to evacuate.”
It was more difficult to get the word out than in the past, though. Yarnell had disbanded its volunteer Community Emergency Response Team. The town’s emergency siren had been stolen, then recovered, but it was still out of commission because, according to some residents, rats had chewed through its wires. Repairing it hadn’t been a priority, due in part to noise complaints whenever it was tested.2
Written evacuation plans are standard procedure in wildfires, but nothing was put on paper in Yarnell on Sunday. To some degree that was due to the changeover of incident management, commander Roy Hall later reported.3 Through the early afternoon leaders held off ordering an evacuation for fear of starting an unnecessary panic. Many in Yarnell reported not receiving the automated phone, text, or email evacuation notice. Only landlines with listed phone numbers were automatically included in the system, and many residents with cellphones or unlisted numbers didn’t realize they had to sign up for the service.4
At 2:26 the sheriff’s office advised residents that they were on a four-hour standby to evacuate and that they would receive another notice when and if the evacuation became mandatory. But the fire was already nearing the trigger point for the one-hour evacuation.
When the winds turned, shortly after 3:30 p.m., 41-mile-per-hour gusts blew the fire fast past that landmark. Incident command requested an immediate evacuation of Yarnell, and the sheriff’s office sent an emergency alert at 4:08. Heavy ash and embers fell on the firefighters near the Shrine of St. Joseph. The blaze traveled more than a mile in 15 minutes and hit its second trigger point at 4:22. By the time firefighters around the shrine began evacuating, embers were starting fires in town. After 15 minutes more, rather than the hour that firefighters had planned on, flames overran the third trigger point.5
Officers raced through the town’s byzantine roads with sirens wailing, shouting through bullhorns for residents to get out. Less than 15 percent of the area’s homes had received automated evacuation notifications and the mandatory evacuation was delayed some 20 minutes while dispatchers gathered information to map the alert area. Some were confused by the contradictory messages. A number weren’t aware that the fire was upon them until neighbors or officials knocked on their doors.
Bryan Smith, 63 and disabled, didn’t know he needed to evacuate until he saw the fire about to climb the steps of his home in the Glen Ilah subdivision. He hosed down the stairs, then roused his 85-year-old cousin, Pearl Moore. Smith’s wife had their car, so he and Moore starting walking out of town as the trees ignited around them and embers fell onto their hair and bare skin. Both sides of the road were in flames, and they could hear tires popping on vehicles, so they walked in the middle of the road. When Moore could walk no further, she begged Smith to save himself.
“Help me, Jesus,” she told him. “I’m ready to go.”
Smith laid her down on the side of the smoky street and ran to get help. He saw a truck with flashing lights around the corner. Gary Cordes, who was overseeing the firefighters in charge of structure protection in Yarnell, had given up on saving homes but was still trying to save their residents. Moore was the last one he rescued.
Another elderly couple, Ruth and Bob Hart, were ready for bed when they saw flames in their garden. They crashed their car while trying to escape and walked out of the burning town in their pajamas, bathrobes, and slippers.
By nightfall 127 homes had burned. Smith’s still stoo
d. The Harts’ had burned.
A FIRE OFFICIAL TOLD INVESTIGATORS later that the evacuation trigger points were off by more than 50 percent. Firefighters and residents racing out of the burning Glen Ilah subdivision were convinced that people had died there. It took more than two days for officials to confirm that everyone in the town had survived.
32
Nineteen
AS YARNELL BURNED, ALREADY DIFFICULT communications fell into chaos. Firefighters who couldn’t get through on radios used cellphone calls and text messages. Few heard anything from the Granite Mountain Hotshots for more than half an hour, but tapes of radio traffic recorded several transmissions from Eric Marsh amid the static, wind, and chatter. He reported that the hotshots were headed south toward Yarnell rather than north into the safety of the black.
The pilot watching over the blaze reached his maximum allowed flying time as the crew descended. He left, and another plane, Bravo 33, which had been guiding retardant drops, put eyes on the fire.
That plane’s pilot asked about the Granite Mountain crew after hearing Marsh’s talk of moving down an escape route. “I heard a crew in a safety zone,” Bravo 33 reported to Todd Abel. “Do we need to call a time out?”1
“No, they’re in a good place, and it’s Granite Mountain,” Abel replied.
Bravo 33 then called Marsh. “Is everything OK?” the pilot asked.
“Yeah, we’re just moving,” Marsh responded.
The crew followed the two-track road until they came to the top of a box canyon. They could see the Boulder Springs Ranch safety zone at the bottom. It was just over half a mile away, but the steep bowl in between was dense with boulders and thick with brush. They took a sharp left turn off the road to drop into the canyon. As they descended, the canyon wall to their north blocked their view of the fire.
“Division Alpha, what’s your status right now?” one voice asked Marsh in radio traffic recorded in the background of an air tanker’s communications.2
“The guys, ah, Granite, is making their way down the escape route from this morning. It’s south, mid-slope, cut vertical.”
“Copy,” another voice responds, perhaps acknowledging that the crew’s ultimate plan was to fight the fire in town. “Working their way down into structures.”
The crew was cutting its way down the canyon toward the ranch. Marsh may have been leading the sawyers to cut their way through the dense chaparral, but the rest of the exchange appears to indicate that Marsh had already reached the ranch house.
The first voice asked Marsh, “On the escape route with Granite Mountain right now?”
Marsh responded, in a radio transmission that was almost indecipherable when it was discovered. “Nah, I’m at the house where we’re gonna jump out at,” he appears to respond.
At least that’s what the former firefighter who discovered the recorded radio call believes he said. Others who have heard the recordings dispute that. The contents of the nearly inaudible recordings of Marsh’s transmissions during the crew’s descent from Yarnell Hill, which are critical pieces of evidence that may establish that the leader of the Granite Mountain Hotshots had reached the safety zone and then returned to the fire to assist his crew, have been subject to heated debate.
At 4:30 another voice radioed Marsh. “Copy . . . coming down and appreciate if you could go a little faster but you’re the supervisor.”
“They’re coming from the heel of the fire,” Marsh reported, another hint that he may have moved ahead of the crew.
About that time the outflow boundary of the downdrafts hit the south end of the fire, splashing it onto the mountains and into Yarnell.3 A pyrocumulus cloud rose 40,000 feet into the sky. The Granite Mountain crew was near the floor of the bowl they were descending when the smoke column rose like a giant cobra, then struck at the Weaver range. The fire that the weather had pushed southeast toward Yarnell made another hard turn, this time to the southwest —into the canyon the hotshots were descending.
The weather alerts led the crew to expect the turn they saw the fire make when they were in the black, but they probably didn’t anticipate the second one. The natural chimney of the canyon magnified the wind like a giant nozzle. The fire that they couldn’t see during their descent was suddenly huge and on top of them. They could never outrun it up the rocky, brush-choked slope they had just descended or make their way past the flames blocking the canyon.
At 4:37 Marsh saw Bravo 33 fly over the canyon as it guided an air tanker in for a retardant drop. “That’s exactly what we’re looking for,” he called to them over the radio. “That’s where we want the retardant.”4
It wasn’t clear that he needed the retardant drop to save him and his men.
At 4:39, as the aircraft circled back over them, a static-filled and overmodulated call from someone on the crew interrupted their radio communications again. This time there urgency in the voice. “Breaking in on Arizona 16, Granite Mountain Hotshots. We are in front of the flaming front.”
The radio calls are muffled by the wind and static.
“. . . Granite Mountain, air attack, how do you read?” a crewmember called to the plane. “Air Attack, Granite Mountain 7, how do you copy me? Air Attack, Granite Mountain 7!”
With the airwaves filled with radio traffic from the firefighters trying to save Yarnell, the pilot at first thought the broken-up call was coming from there, rather than the hotshot crew that, the last he knew, was in a safety zone.
“Division Alpha with Granite Mountain,” Marsh eventually called. “Yeah, I’m here with Granite Mountain Hotshots. Our escape route has been cut off.”
Chainsaws are running in the background of the transmission.
While few people had heard Marsh’s radio calls over the previous 33 minutes, the ones the crew made to air attack were on a channel monitored by many of the firefighters. Two firefighters watching the blowup captured the calls on a helmet cam.
“Is Granite Mountain still in there?” one asked.
“Well, they’re in a safety zone,” the other responded. “In the black.”
“Air attack, Granite Mountain 7, how do you copy me?” came a Granite Mountain Hotshot’s voice over the radio.
“I hear saws running,” one of the listening firefighters said. “That’s not good.”
“Not when they’re in a safety zone.”
“Air attack, Granite Mountain 7!” came another transmission.
“This ain’t good,” one of the firefighters said.
“No, he’s screaming.”
It was hard to imagine a worse site to deploy their shelters, which are designed to be held snugly to level dirt with nothing that can burn nearby. The thick, oily brush and boulders blocking the canyon not only magnified the intensity of the fire but left the firefighters with few appropriate spots to lay down their foil cocoons. As the natural chimney sucked the flames uphill, winds greater than 50 miles per hour pushed them from behind. The crew had just minutes to clear the site for their shelters.
“We are preparing a deployment site and we are burning out around ourselves in the brush and I’ll give you a call when we are under the sh . . . the shelters.”
“Okay, copy that,” Bravo 33 responded. “So you’re on the south side of the fire, then?”
“AFFIRM!” Marsh shouted.
THE PILOT MADE SEVEN CALLS to the hotshots over the next four minutes. Below him the outflow winds blew 70-foot flames sideways into the canyon. An air tanker circled nearby, ready to drop retardant on the hotshots as soon as it found them. Despite the crew’s last calls, nobody knew where they were.
In the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot, where firefighters had retreated from the conflagration in Yarnell, the word “deployed” on radios turned heads away from the burning town. Brian Frisby and Rogers Trueheart Brown, the Blue Ridge Hotshots’ superintendent and captain, headed back into the fire on ATVs, carrying a couple of bottles of oxygen, a medical kit, and a backboard. With the fire front spreading almost parallel t
o the highway, they found their way back to Yarnell Hill blocked by exploding propane tanks, fallen power lines, and fire. They urged residents who still hadn’t evacuated to leave, then stopped at a wall of flame on Shrine Road. Frisby announced, “Fuck it, let’s go for it,” and they charged through the heat to the black, safe ground beyond. They made it back to where they had last seen Granite Mountain and then up Yarnell Hill to the anchor point the crew had cut that morning, but they found no sign of Marsh’s crew.5
In Peeples Valley firefighters were catching their breath after the fire turned away from that town. Conrad Jackson was still with his fire truck on the ridge when he got a call.
“Have you heard something about Granite Mountain?” the caller asked. “We’re hearing something bad happened on the fire.”
Mountains hindered his radio’s reception, but he eventually caught a snippet indicating that a command had been set up for a new incident tied to the hotshots. Jackson had been on fires where people deployed before, and all of those firefighters had walked away with a few burns. He kept listening, then heard “18 accounted for, no injuries,” and breathed a sigh of relief.
He texted his buddies what he had heard.
“I don’t think you’re right,” one responded. “They’ve got some pretty definitive sources up here that are saying there’s been a deployment and there may be fatalities.”
A helicopter had been prepared to launch since Marsh had first reported the hotshots were in trouble, but smoke and wind kept them grounded until 35 minutes after his last radio call. They spent an hour flying over the area where the hotshots had been working, then swooped toward Boulder Springs Ranch. Three hundred yards west of the ranch, they spotted fire shelters through the smoke and landed. Eric Tarr, a police officer and paramedic with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, hiked across the crusty, burnt ground and made his way from shelter to shelter to take each man’s pulse.
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