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Megafire

Page 34

by Michael Kodas


  “Those guys don’t even know what’s coming,” Ward said when he saw the truck once driven by his boss and friend Eric Marsh. “Most of them are about to lose their jobs.”

  The one-year anniversary of the tragedy, rather than bringing Prescott, its fire department, the families of the fallen hotshots, and the town they died protecting closer together, just seemed to highlight the rifts growing between them. Hundreds gathered in front of the Yavapai County Courthouse for the city’s official ceremony, but the firefighters’ families held their own private service at the hotshots’ graves in the small memorial park built for them in the Arizona Pioneers’ Home cemetery. The town of Yarnell held its own memorial ceremony in a small park along U.S. 89. The large placards that had been set up near the Ranch House Restaurant immediately after the disaster had been dismantled. That early memorial had included large photos of the hotshots; dozens of flags, flowers, toys, and other photos; and a pair of binoculars that allowed visitors to see the canyon where the crew had perished. New displays in the town’s park had no view of the site and were bare but for a few plastic flowers and a firefighter’s boot.

  A coincidence of legal and government timing heightened the tensions. Family members and homeowners who intended to sue had one year to initiate their legal actions, and the hotshots had died on the last day of the fiscal year. So the hours leading up to the one-year anniversary of the tragedy were filled with a cascade of lawsuits, along with the announcement of how the city would fund the fire department going forward. Not only would the Prescott Fire Department not rebuild the hotshot crew, but it also would shutter the Wildland Division that just one year earlier had been a model for the nation. Even the city’s structure firefighting operation would feel the pain. By the end of 2015, “rolling brownouts” would close city fire stations for a day at a time to save money.

  Darrell Willis watched as the city dismantled most of the 20 years of progress he had made in protecting Prescott from wildfire. He retired in March 2015, but not before accusing the city of tampering with the report used to justify getting rid of the Wildland Division by removing parts of the report that warned of the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in damage to Prescott from a wildfire.

  “I have continued with my commitment to do everything in my power to protect the citizens of Prescott from their greatest danger or risk: Wildfire,” Willis wrote in a letter explaining his decision to resign. “It seems the handwriting is on the wall, and the city wants to take a greater risk than any year previous by doing away with the Division that mitigates this great risk of catastrophic wildfire.

  “. . . Certain people within leadership would even go so far to do away with the Division that they would stoop to the point of tampering with the [International City/County Management Association] Report on the Wildland Division.”14

  That, however, was not his most incendiary claim.

  IN OCTOBER 2014, more than 15 months after the Yarnell Hill Fire, Brendan McDonough called Willis. It would be six months before the rest of Prescott heard a version of what the lone survivor of the Granite Mountain Hotshots shared with the man who had created the crew, and that story would be twisted by the tensions between the municipal government and its firefighters when the city attorney, Jon Paladini, put it on the record.

  With the potential of Donut’s revelations to upset both the wrongful death lawsuits and the workplace safety fine against the state forestry department, Willis said he couldn’t sit on them. Willis gave Donut the weekend to consider how he would share the information, after which Willis told what he had learned to the city attorney and the state forester.

  According to Paladini, Donut told Willis that while he was moving the Granite Mountain buggies after he retreated from his lookout post, he heard communications between Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed. Marsh had made it to the safety zone of the ranch and told his second-in-command to bring the rest of the crew there.

  “My understanding of the argument between Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed . . . was that Steed did not want to go down,” Paladini told the Arizona Republic.15

  The attorney reported that members of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, the federal crew that wouldn’t talk with state investigators, also heard the radio traffic. They continued to decline comment after Donut’s revelations.

  Steed followed the order, Paladini claimed, but protested that it was a very dangerous plan. Marsh headed back into the canyon to help his crew, but by then they were probably already in deep trouble.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Steed radioed to Marsh, according to the attorney.

  “Yeah, I know,” Marsh allegedly responded. “I’m sorry.”16

  Both Willis and Donut vehemently disputed how Paladini presented the conversation. Willis told me that Donut had recounted a discussion, not an argument, and that Paladini may have been taking vengeance on the wildland chief for supporting the seasonal hotshots in their fight for city benefits. After the city attorney’s disclosure, Donut wouldn’t discuss what he had heard again, even with Willis. Nonetheless, the disclosure set off a cascade of reports to the Arizona State Forestry Division, the Prescott City Council, and the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Donut received a subpoena to testify but retained a lawyer and didn’t appear at three scheduled depositions. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he said, would make it difficult to talk with the attorneys about his fallen friends.

  ON JUNE 29, 2015, the day before the second anniversary of the tragedy, 12 families of the hotshots and the Arizona State Forestry Division announced a settlement. Each of the families who had sued the state for millions would receive only $50,000. More important to them, they said, was a list of 32 changes the forestry division would make, or had already made, in the way Arizona fights wildfires, including new training for incident commanders and firefighters, national education about the changing nature of fires in drying and warming landscapes, and research into devices to track firefighters.

  The forestry division, in lieu of the $559,000 fine assessed by ADOSH, would pay each of the seven families not involved in the lawsuit $10,000 each.17

  At the press conference in Phoenix announcing the settlement, Roxanne Warneke, the wife of hotshot William Warneke, held their daughter, Billie Grace, who had been born six months after her father’s death. She and the mother and wife of deceased hotshot Andrew Ashcraft announced that they would donate their portions of the settlement to a new nonprofit they were forming to promote wildland firefighter safety and fund independent investigations into firefighting accidents. (Amanda Marsh also created a nonprofit to serve wildland firefighters.) Warneke recalled visiting the site where the hotshots had deployed their shelters two weeks after the tragedy and knowing that her husband, a former marine, would never have gone there unless he was ordered to.

  “As I stood at that flagpole, I was able to see charred cacti, blackened boulders, and blackened dirt. But what took my breath away was the topography,” Warneke said. “I had remembered a saying that my husband had once told me when we were deer scouting two years before. He said to never go into a canyon. That inside the canyon would be thick brush, and how wind travels through a canyon. I know my husband’s military and firefighter training. Descending into that canyon went against everything that he had ever been taught . . . I was enraged.

  “It prompted me and my family to file a suit against the State of Arizona to prevent another tragedy like this from happening. To prevent Yarnell Hill. To prevent the Dude Fire, the South Canyon Fire, the Thirtymile Fire, the Esperanza Fire, and the Cramer Fire from ever happening again.”

  Why had her husband descended into that death trap?

  “Orders,” she said. “He was a marine who was used to taking orders.”18

  Firefighters note that wildland fire crews don’t operate like the marines, and every member of a crew is encouraged to speak out about safety issues and decline assignments they believe are too dangerous. Yet many in the firefighting community also were enraged, in their c
ase that a $220 million lawsuit was settled for $670,000 and “good faith” commitments to improve some of the situations that brought on the disaster. With the primary question of what had led to the deaths of the Granite Mountain Hotshots—why they had moved from the black into the peril of the canyon—still largely unanswered, the settlement may have brought closure to the families, but it also may have closed the door on the possibility that there would be “lessons learned” to prevent similar firefighting disasters in the future.

  By the time of the second anniversary of the disaster, Donut had missed those three depositions in which he would have told attorneys what he had heard and seen in the moments before his crew was killed. At the press conference announcing the settlement Pat McGroder, the attorney representing the 12 families in the lawsuit, expressed uncertainty as to whether Donut would one day tell what he knew. But he reserved his disdain and anger for the U.S. Forest Service, which forbade its employees to talk to the lawyers and investigators.

  “The idea that the federal government is withholding information . . . speaks to the lack of understanding and empathy that they should have for these families,” he said. “We would publicly call for . . . the national Forest Service to let their people talk.”

  Ten months after the press conference announcing the settlement, even Donut was asking for the investigation to be reopened.

  “I think with the investigation . . . there’s definitely some things that have been found since then, since the investigation. I believe it needs to be opened up again,” he said on a Phoenix news radio program. “Some . . . certain things need to be added to it because . . . any decision that was made that day led to their death . . . and we need to learn from that . . . and the wildfire community needs to have those answers and those lessons so that we can prevent this again.”19

  WILDFIRE TRAGEDIES ARE RARELY the result of one person’s decisions, and that was certainly the case in Yarnell. Yet much of the scrutiny of that disaster has focused on one man who isn’t alive to explain or defend his actions. Whatever misjudgment Eric Marsh may or may not have made, he also exhibited a heroism that, to me, seemed to bookend the myth of “Big Ed” Pulaski from a century before. Pulaski is legendary for sticking with his crew through the Big Blowup, leading them to a mine shaft, and saving most of their lives by holding them at gunpoint inside it. Marsh, at least some evidence indicates, had parted from his crew, and he would have survived had he stayed at the ranch. Instead, somehow, he rejoined his men as the fire engulfed them.

  But whereas Pulaski’s crew was retreating from a burning forest, one of the few explanations for Marsh’s crew exposing themselves to such avoidable peril was that they were trying to head off an inferno before it destroyed a town. If no homes had been threatened, it’s hard, at least for me, to imagine the hotshots would have taken the path that led to their deaths.

  But while they saved little in Yarnell, Marsh and his crew made a big difference in other forests and towns across the country. In addition to the hundreds of homes his crew made safe in Prescott with their efforts to reduce the fuel load in the city, his dogged work to create the Arizona Wildfire Academy, and the lives he changed as leader of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, I found another gift Eric Marsh gave to communities confronting fire.

  The seed of mythology planted a century ago in the wreckage of the Big Blowup grew into a deeply rooted tree with myriad legends branching off it. One was that we could eradicate natural fire from forests and fields as if it were an unwanted pest. Another, written in the sky over the flames, convinced the public and politicians that planes and retardant could contain every forest fire. Yet another was that new technologies—better fire shelters, more powerful computers—could allow men and women to stand up to conflagrations that were growing larger, faster, and hotter. Then there was the dogma that loggers and grazing animals could take the place of flames in maintaining the forest. And finally there was the delusion that we could build our homes ever deeper into the nation’s most flammable landscapes without facing any consequences.

  If the deaths of Eric Marsh and the Granite Mountain Hotshots trimmed a few branches from that tangled tree of legends, it could save lives and homes in the future. Cutting down that towering tree altogether, however, will require America to see past the fantasies inspired by the dancing flames.

  Epilogue

  A YEAR AFTER THEY BURNED, most of the homes destroyed in the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest Fires in Colorado Springs and the High Park Fire above Fort Collins had already been rebuilt or were under construction. But in Jefferson County, where the controlled burn set by Colorado state foresters blew up into the Lower North Fork Fire that destroyed 23 homes and killed Ann Appel and Sam and Moaneti Lucas, the burnt Kuehster Road neighborhood was still largely barren. Two years after the fire, only five homes had been rebuilt.

  The survivors, however, felt like they had been repeatedly burned. A total of 132 claims had been filed against the state, but Colorado law allowed for only $600,000 total in compensation. That led to a two-year battle between the Colorado attorney general, who fought any settlement above that amount, and the families, several judges and legislators, and the state claims board. Nearly 30 months after the fire, surviving families began receiving their portion of the $18.1 million the Colorado legislature finally approved to compensate them.1

  Dave Brutout, the firefighter who took it upon himself to warn the residents of the Kuehster Road neighborhood, gave up fighting fires after more than 20 years. Rather than being honored for getting people out of the path of the blaze, he was crushed by grief and lawsuits over the lives and property he couldn’t save.

  Despite the chaos the under-resourced Elk Creek Fire Department experienced in the blaze, Chief Bill McLaughlin, who had hoped to update his department’s radios and maps even before the fire, seemed forced to take one step back for every step he took to improve the department. Ongoing economic difficulties cut his budget by 12 percent the year after the blaze and, while he received a substantial budget increase the year after that, local and state politics presented his department with almost annual financial uncertainty.

  COLORADO, HOWEVER, took one of the most expensive options to protect against future blazes.

  After the disastrous 2012 wildfire season, several legislators argued that the state’s losses from wildfires would have been lower if it had had its own fleet of aircraft to fight them. The following year Steve King, a Republican state senator, pushed for the state to invest in helicopters, large air tankers, and single engine retardant bombers. The legislature approved a $17.5 million bill to create the Colorado Firefighting Air Corps.

  Governor John Hickenlooper resisted the idea, largely because of its cost, and the bill provided no way to fund the fleet, leaving the plan effectively dead in the air. Opponents noted that during Colorado’s most destructive fires in 2012, when aircraft weren’t fighting the fires, it wasn’t because they weren’t available, but because high winds made aerial attacks unsafe and ineffective. Aerial resources were almost always available from private contractors for considerably less than the Colorado fleet would cost.

  King, however, found an unusually persuasive ally. Bill Scott lived outside Colorado Springs when the Waldo Canyon and Black Forest Fires destroyed nearly 1,000 homes there. He worked for the American Center for Democracy, a conservative think tank. He was also a former bureau chief for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine and a member of the blue-ribbon committee convened 10 years earlier to study aerial firefighting after a series of deadly air tanker crashes.

  Just before the fires, Scott saw the article in Al Qaeda’s online magazine that promoted igniting forest fires as a tool of terrorism. He used the article as the foundation for a congressional briefing in Washington, D.C., titled “Fire Wars,” in which he wondered whether America was under seige by terrorists starting forest fires and if the Waldo Canyon Fire that devastated Colorado Springs was one of their successful attacks. He recommended everythin
g from satellites to “fire combat air patrols” to fight the pyro-terrorists. A video of the talk got more than half a million views on YouTube, one of which was by King, who recruited Scott to help push the Colorado Firefighting Air Corps to state legislators in Denver.

  “Bill,” Scott recalled King telling him, “your job is to scare the hell out of them.”

  The following year the proposal to create the Colorado Firefighting Air Corps was back, and this time Governor Hickenlooper and the legislature funded a $20 million plan for aerial firefighting. It provided the state with a small plane equipped to locate fires within an hour after they were reported, helicopters, single engine air tankers, and funds for the Center of Excellence for Advanced Technology Aerial Firefighting. The bill didn’t budget for large air tankers, of which King wanted four, but he hoped to coax the state to bring these on board in future years.

  The high-tech reconnaissance plane, which can see not only a campfire in the forest from thousands of feet in the air but also all of the hunters gathered around it, seemed like a worthy tool to most firefighters, but the value of the state fleet of firefighting aircraft was questioned by many.

  “Colorado must have a lot of money . . . to waste,” said Andy Stahl, the executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

  Stahl noted that state officials were in much the same position that leaders of firefights find themselves in when they are pressured to fight fires with aircraft that they know won’t make a difference. “All of the incentives are geared to cause you to throw everything in your tool kit at the fire,” he told me. “Because there are no cost controls whatsoever.”

 

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