WHEN BRENDAN MCDONOUGH HEARD the news about his crew, he sat alone in one of Granite Mountain’s buggies in the restaurant parking lot until the phones some other members of the crew had left in the truck started ringing with family and friends trying to reach them.
In Prescott, J. C. Trujillo, the old bronco rider, was helping a crew set up a tent for the opening of the Frontier Days rodeo the next day when a hard wind nearly blew it away. He looked at the smoke in the distance and wondered what the weather was doing to the fire.
The storm blew clouds over the city, and rain sprinkled on Claire Caldwell, who was out watering her garden. She texted her husband. “I hope this rain is helping you guys out,” she wrote. “Maybe you’ll get to come home tonight.”
She went in, had dinner, and was watching a movie when she heard someone yelling in her living room. A friend who worked for the Prescott Hotshots was standing there. Claire knew he was supposed to be on a fire.
“Granite Mountain had a burnover today,” he told her.
Claire collapsed. She knew what that meant.
He drove by one of the city’s fire stations, and then to Prescott High School, where the families of the firefighters were gathering. She saw the men and women from her wedding. Big firefighters were weeping.
Although the crew had perished together in seconds, to Claire it seemed like they were falling one at a time. Claire kept asking Amanda Marsh what was happening.
“We lost Clayton,” Amanda responded, and Claire went to comfort his wife.
When Claire saw Amanda again, she begged for more information.
“We know we lost Grant,” she said.
Grant was Robert’s cousin. Claire had worked with him. The tragedy was closing in on her, but she kept expecting the buggies to show up and the rest of the crew to get out. Finally, she grabbed an official.
“Is my fucking husband alive?” she yelled.
He asked her name, checked a list.
“No,” he told her.
Grief therapists tried to hold her, but she shook them off and ran into a stand of trees by the school. She wanted to find a stream to lie down in.
“Now we really are the Granite Mountain Girls,” she thought.
IN PEEPLES VALLEY, CONRAD JACKSON got another call.
“They’re all dead.”
Jackson was numb when he arrived at the fire camp. Nobody would look at him as he walked through. Men had died doing what he had taught them to do in high school.
Then Donut stepped out from behind a fire truck.
“Oh, it’s all bullshit!” Jackson thought for a second. “There’s my guy!”
But of a crew of 20 that had marched up the mountain, he realized there was only one left.
He and Donut buried their heads in each other’s shoulders and sobbed.
“I thought I lost all my boys,” Jackson whispered to him.
33
Blowback
WHEN I ARRIVED IN ARIZONA the day after the Granite Mountain Hotshots died, the world seemed to embrace Prescott. Tributes hung on the fence around Station 7, eventually arriving from as far away as Australia. In the coming weeks thousands of items would cover every inch of the chain-link fence and spill out across the ground in front of it.
The crew’s bodies returned from Phoenix through Yarnell and then back to Prescott in 19 white hearses, behind a convoy of wildland buggies, fire trucks, and motorcycles. When the escorts pulled up on Whiskey Row, the crowds along the street cheered, but with the appearance of the first white hearse, they fell silent.
The impromptu memorial gathering that I attended in the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University gymnasium, exactly 24 hours after the hotshots had deployed their shelters, was followed by more formal services. One filled Prescott High School’s football field and bleachers, where residents and family members sat in their shirtsleeves listening to guitars and ministers as the setting sun and smoke turned the sky red. A week later Vice President Joe Biden joined Arizona’s governor, senators, and dozens of other officials at the arena where Wade Parker had had tickets to see a Christian rock band on the weekend he and his crew perished. They addressed the crowd that filled the 5,100-seat arena to capacity from a stage overlooking photos of the hotshots, 19 shovels and Pulaskis, and 17 hard hats. The day before the service more than 100 bagpipers and drummers had marched up the timeline in front of the Yavapai County Courthouse—the largest gathering of its kind since 9/11, marking the largest loss of life of U.S. firefighters since the terrorist attacks. Just a single piper marched through the arena during the memorial.
At the podium Donut, the lone survivor of the crew, shared his first words with the public since the tragedy, a reading of the Hotshot Prayer.
When I am called to duty, Lord . . .
To fight the roaring blaze . . .
Please keep me safe and strong . . .
I may be here for days.
Be with my fellow crewmembers . . .
As we hike up to the top.
Help us cut enough line . . .
For this blaze to stop.
Let my skills and hands . . .
Be firm and quick.
Let me find those safety zones . . .
As we hit and lick.
For if this day on the line . . .
I should answer death’s call . . .
Lord, bless my hot shot Crew . . .
My family, one and all.
Before he returned to his seat, he choked back tears.
“I miss my brothers,” he said.
Outside, more than 20,000 people filled the parking lot in the 100-degree temperature to watch the service on giant television screens. When it ended, hundreds of firefighters lined the drive into the arena and came to attention as the remaining members of the Prescott Fire Department marched out in their green pants and black T-shirts in front of buses that carried hundreds of family members and friends of the fallen firefighters.
By the box office, posters of the 19 fallen firefighters adorned with purple ribbons stood behind the giant bronze sculpture of a firefighter carrying a Pulaski. Once part of the Wildland Firefighters Monument that’s adjacent to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, the sculpture would now reside in Prescott. Another poster nearby advertised the next event at the arena—the Doomsday Prepper and Survivalist Expo. Across the street, bikers in leather adorned with skulls and flames handed out doughnuts.
Across the country, the disaster spawned hundreds of fund-raisers. Rallies of Harley-Davidson riders; Cub Scout car washes; CrossFit competitions; concerts; sales of T-shirts, stickers, and jewelry honoring the hotshots; and firehouse “fill the boot” collections. Larger gifts arrived from Arizona’s 100 Club, which supports the families of fallen police officers and firefighters, and the Wildland Firefighter Foundation, which received more than $2 million in donations after the tragedy and transported the statue of the firefighter that now stood in front of the arena. In all, these fund-raising efforts raised some $13 million by the end of the year, with more than $11 million earmarked for the hotshots’ families and much of the rest going to the Yarnell community.1
But by then the tragedy that had brought the community together was tearing it apart. The hotshot crew that had seemed such a clever solution to the city’s wildfire hazard ended up surrounded by burnt bridges.
The hotshots left 10 wives, 3 fiancées, and 16 children—three of them unborn. While all of the families would receive at least $328,000 in federal Public Safety Officers’ Benefits, only the families of the six full-time hotshots qualified for benefits such as pensions, health insurance, and life insurance. Widows who were unaware before the tragedy that they were ineligible for the city’s benefits were outraged. Their husbands had worked the same number of hours during the fire season as the full-time hotshots had.
Reclassifying the seasonal employees as permanent would violate state law, the city argued. It would also devastate the city’s finances. An assessment of the cost of the
hotshots’ benefits determined that if the seasonal firefighters received the benefits given to the permanent employees, it would cost the city at least $51 million over 60 years. As a onetime payment, the liability would add up to three times the Prescott Fire Department’s budget.2 Some city officials said they were unaware that Prescott even had a hotshot crew and would never have approved it had they known the potential costs.
Juliann Ashcraft, Andrew’s slender, demure wife, and the mother of his four children, was the first to speak out and became the face of the aggrieved families.
“As shocked as I was that my husband went to work and never came home, I’m equally shocked in how the city has treated our family since then,” she told CBS News. “. . . I said to [city officials], ‘My husband was a full-time employee, he went to work full-time for you.’ And their response to me was, ‘Perhaps there was a communication issue in your marriage.’ ”3
She held a press conference on the Yavapai County Courthouse steps with other widows and was the first of them to threaten a lawsuit against the city.
“Quite literally, my bills are being paid by the good people of the world who are giving donations, because the city of Prescott isn’t doing anything for us,” she said. “Now I have four kids and myself, and I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
The city pushed back.
“She’s a neat little lady . . . but the money took hold in this situation real fast,” Prescott mayor Marlin Kuykendall told the Prescott Daily Courier barely a month after the hotshots’ deaths. “This is big bucks, when it’s all over, big bucks. And the money seems to be leading some of the battle over the city’s participation.”4
Ten months after the disaster, Prescott’s Public Safety Personnel Retirement System board voted to award full benefits to Ashcraft’s family. The city council appealed the board’s decision, claiming it was based more on emotion than the facts of the case, but after another eight months, a superior court judge upheld the board’s decision. The board eventually did award full benefits to Ashcraft’s family, as well as to those of Sean Misner and William Warneke. The city declined to appeal again.5
In the meantime, 12 families of the firefighters jointly sued the state, asking for $10 million for each firefighter’s wife, $7.5 million for each surviving child, and $5 million for each of the parents filing suit. In Yarnell more than 160 people who lost property sued Arizona, claiming that negligence in the firefighting operation led to the loss of their homes as well as the deaths of the hotshots.6 While most Yarnell residents felt nothing but sadness about the men who had perished trying to save their town, and sympathy for their families, conspiracy theories abounded.
In a bar outside of town, I sat with one resident who told me that the firefighters had let the fire burn intentionally. “That’s how they get more funding,” he argued. “By letting the fire get big.”
In other corners, the legal battles of the families and homeowners alienated community members who noted that they had raised millions of dollars for the firefighters’ families and for Yarnell residents who had lost their homes and that the lawsuits and fights for benefits were hurting the city and the state. For the hotshots’ widows who fought for benefits for their families, accusations of being greedy and opportunistic added to their grief. Juliann Ashcraft moved her family away from Prescott to escape the stinging criticism.
They weren’t the only ones angered by the response to the tragedy.
In September, two months after the Yarnell Hill Fire, the Serious Accident Investigation Team, organized by the Arizona State Forestry Division but made up primarily of firefighters from outside the state, released its 116-page report.7 While filled with documents and details about the firefight, right down to the condition of each of the fallen hotshots’ fire shelters, the report was cripplingly incomplete, due in large part to the investigators’ two-month deadline, which left them with only a fraction of the time they needed to do a more thorough job. The team concluded that the actions of incident management were “reasonable” and “found no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.” In short, nobody had done anything wrong. Outraged firefighters across the country argued that the failure to attribute errors all but guaranteed more death and destruction like that on Yarnell Hill.
In early December the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) released a report produced by Wildland Fire Associates, a private wildfire investigating company. That report concluded that the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management, which oversaw both the firefighting effort and the first report about the tragedy, prioritized protecting private property over firefighter safety. ADOSH fined the Arizona State Forestry Division $559,000 for “serious, willful” safety violations.8
Both investigations resulted in more questions than answers. The lack of survivors or witnesses to the hotshots’ last hours was compounded by a lack of cooperation between federal and state authorities, preventing most of the people who last saw the crew alive from being interviewed in detail by ADOSH investigators.
Immediately after the tragedy, the U.S. Forest Service sequestered the Blue Ridge Hotshots. The federal crew had been working closest to the Granite Mountain Hotshots on Yarnell Hill and were in a better position to see what led up to their deaths than anyone else on the fire. The feds allowed the Serious Accident Investigation Team to interview the hotshots, but only as a group. Even the names of the hotshots who spoke during the interview were redacted from the transcripts shared with investigators. The U.S. Forest Service refused to allow the hotshots, or any of its employees, to be interviewed at all for the ADOSH investigation. Documents provided by the Forest Service had so much detail blacked out that investigators complained they were “useless.”9
The Forest Service’s reticence can be traced back to the 2002 Cantwell-Hastings bill, passed as Public Law 107-203, which requires the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to investigate burnovers that kill Forest Service employees.10 That law led to 11 felony charges being filed against the crew boss of four firefighters who perished in a Washington State wildfire. Although the boss was found guilty of only two counts of making false statements, the prosecution of the firefighter made many others, and the organizations they work for, gun-shy about cooperating with investigators.
Investigators found no radio calls from the Granite Mountain crew for 33 minutes before their cry for help and presented the hotshots’ last half hour alive as an unknowable mystery and the gap in communications while the crew was moving as a blunder on the part of its leadership. But as soon as the investigations were completed, the hotshots seemed to speak from the grave, as they would for more than a year. Their first shouts were channeled by Holly Neill, a former wildland firefighter who lives in New Mexico. She listened to hundreds of hours of radio traffic after the tragedy and found a few muffled calls from Eric Marsh in the background of recorded radio conversations from an air tanker that was being filmed for Forest Service research. The calls are extremely difficult to understand and there is great disagreement about what Marsh says and uncertainty about what his words may mean, but Neill and some others believe he reported that he was “at the house,” presumably indicating he was in the vicinity of the Boulder Springs Ranch safety zone.11 But then how was he back with the crew when they were overrun?
IN THE YEAR AFTER THE TRAGEDY, the city, fire department, and family members debated whether to rebuild the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Amanda Marsh argued her way to the microphone at a city council meeting to plead for the city to rebuild the hotshots as the best way to honor their legacy. Others, including many wildland firefighters, contended that creating another crew, after all but one member of the original crew had been killed, would just put more firefighters’ lives at risk. Some worried that having a wildland crew as part of a department of structural firefighters couldn’t help but bias the forest firefighters toward protecting structures—something that they are neither equipp
ed nor trained to do, and that ADOSH had cited as a leading cause of the tragedy. It’s reasonably easy to walk away from a bunch of burning trees when things get too dangerous, but much more difficult to step back from burning houses, particularly when they are in a community where the firefighters might know the residents. And with many members of the Granite Mountain crew moving on to the structure firefighting side of the department, it is easy to see how some of them might have wanted to prove their ability to save homes while working in the Wildland Division.
In the end, the decision about whether to rebuild the crew was taken out of the city’s hands. Prescott’s insurance pool announced that it would drop the city if it had a hotshot crew.12 A few months later the Northwest Fire District, outside Tucson, Arizona, disbanded its Ironwood Hotshots.13 The district denied that the destruction of the Prescott crew was a factor in its decision, citing instead the expense, despite the fact that, like the Granite Mountain Hotshots, they were nearly cost neutral.
“I DIDN’T NEED TO SEE THAT,” Wade Ward, a former member of Prescott’s wildland team who had moved to the structure firefighting side, told me as we drove into the Cathedral Pines suburb of the city exactly a year after the Yarnell Hill Fire had exploded. Ward was the spokesman for the fire department during the tragedy, until city politics and the stress of constantly having to talk about his fallen colleagues drove him back to working on a fire truck and eventually to leave the fire department altogether.
Ponderosa pines and chaparral grew thick among many of the large homes. As we crested a hill, we came upon a group of men in fire department T-shirts dragging brush and tree limbs to the curb. Next to them was the Granite Mountain supervisor’s truck, which had been reassigned to the fuels crew—all that remained of Prescott’s wildland firefighting operation. Even it was looking at cuts.
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