Smokejumper

by Jason A. Ramos

  Yarnell wasn’t a big wildfire. When it was fully contained on July 10, it had burned only eighty-four hundred acres and destroyed 127 homes. But it was the sixth deadliest for American firefighters in history. The nineteen hotshots were the highest number of paid wildland firefighters ever to die in a single event—although the seventy-eight firefighters killed during the Big Burn of 1910 would have been paid if they’d survived.

  IN THE FIRST FIRE investigation report, the Arizona Department of Forestry said the disaster was the result of poor communications combined with a catastrophic fire situation. It emphasized that the events leading up to the deployment would never be fully known because there were no eyewitnesses left alive.

  Nonetheless, nobody knew exactly where the crew was or what their plans were. They were eventually hidden by smoke and couldn’t call on air attack for a retardant drop or directions to safety.

  That’s part of the story. But it doesn’t answer the big question: why they left the safe zone at all. A second report commissioned by the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health offered one explanation. Among other things, it said, the Arizona Department of Forestry had “prioritized protection of non-defensible structures and pastureland over firefighter safety.”

  In fact, fire managers had surveyed Yarnell, Glen Ilah, and Peeples Valley the night before the burnover and decided they were “indefensible.”

  The next day nineteen firefighters died trying to do just that.

  The result? A fine of $559,000 against the Department of Forestry, including $25,000 for each of the victims’ families. An appeal is pending.

  It’s true that no one will ever know exactly what the Granite Mountain Hotshots were thinking as they started down that ridge to their deaths. We can make a pretty good guess, though.

  Odds are they wanted to get back in the fight. It’s perfectly understandable. “Life and property” is our creed as firefighters. It’s programmed into your brain from day one. It’s what we do: we provide a service to the people of the United States.

  No one wants to be benched. You want to be in the shit, to be able to say “I was there.” That’s human, the lure of action. It’s like dreaming about making the winning touchdown or beating the buzzer with a fadeaway three-pointer. This game, though, can cost you your life, and that’s the fine line: to dance, or to step back and take the next song.

  I’m not making any judgments about their decision. They were taking a calculated risk and they knew it. I’ve done it myself, especially when I was younger. I’ve gotten myself in situations I never should have been in, ones that I look back on now and cringe. I’ve had crew members get so excited to get in the fight I’ve had yell at them to calm down, relax, remind them we’re getting paid by the hour and we’re all going home tonight.

  There has always been an implicit understanding that firefighters have an obligation to fight harder when homes are at risk. Depending on the mission, if those buildings are empty, that needs to change.

  And it is: after Yarnell, Lewis and Clark County in Montana passed a resolution explicitly saying that firefighter safety takes precedence over saving homes or structures. Other counties have followed its lead.

  If that ranch in the canyon had been an elementary school, hell yeah, go down and save those kids. Otherwise a building is just a building. Life and property—but property second. It’s easy to say after the fact, but it’s something we need to drum into our operators in the field.

  We’re not fire shepherds or fire scientists, we’re firefighters. Anyone who fights for a living knows you can’t win every time. Boxers will get hit, matadors will get gored. The list goes on.

  The more we understand that in the fire service, the better off we will be. We walk around with a false sense of security that some agencies pound in our brain: If you just pay attention in safety class, nothing will go wrong and you’ll always be safe.

  But that’s not the way it always works in the real world. In my opinion, we should have continuing education and frequent, graphic reminders that show us what happens when careless or stupid mistakes are made, and things go terribly wrong—things that only emergency or military personnel would normally see. We all need to remember the fire service is a dynamic and sometimes hazardous occupation.

  The Yarnell fire couldn’t have just been allowed to burn. When you’ve kept fire out of a system for long enough, it’s not safe or practical to turn around and let it right back in again.

  One way to ease the transition is by selectively removing the most flammable fuels, like dense underbrush and insect-killed trees, through cutting or controlled burning.

  Thinning isn’t cheap, though. The Forest Service spent over $300 million on thinning barely 1 percent of its land in 2013. Budgets are tighter every year. And if a fire is big enough, it doesn’t matter if a forest was thinned or not.

  A controlled burn is faster and requires fewer resources—as long as it stays controlled. In May 2000, a controlled burn at Bandelier National Monument in northern New Mexico escaped and turned into a forty-eight-thousand-acre blaze that destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Alamos and buildings at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Luckily none contained any nuclear materials.)

  Some people worry that “selective fuels reduction” could actually lead to more development in danger zones by making them seem less dangerous. It’s like the idea that seat belts encourage more reckless driving.

  Development in the wildland-urban interface isn’t going to stop overnight. But local governments can look carefully at zoning laws and building codes, and consider raising taxes on homes in fire-prone areas.

  We already factor in the risk of natural hazards like floods, earthquakes, and storms in land-use decisions. Why not fires? California’s new fire hazard severity zone maps are a good start, used for guiding building codes, though they’ll be better once they incorporate local wind patterns.

  Crazy weather events are already starting to make insurance companies raise homeowners’ rates. Some companies are even getting into the firefighting business themselves. In some parts of California, AIG’s Wildfire Protection Unit will spray the homes of high-end customers with foam or fire retardant, before or even during a wildfire. They emphasize it’s a “loss mitigation service,” not a private fire department, but it doesn’t sound that far off to me.

  Homeowners should take responsibility for choosing to live in fire-prone areas. They should never expect firefighters to risk their lives without question, especially if homeowners haven’t done anything to prepare.

  Your local fire department will be more than happy to do a property inspection, test your smoke alarms, and much more. They should be able to tell you how to install an outdoor sprinkler system and clear a safety zone around your property, and give you a long list of things you can do to make your house more defensible before the flames are right around the corner.

  In the end, it’s up to firefighters whether or not to engage. In the fire service, at least in the United States, we all operate under a set of safety rules and guidelines based on lessons learned from decades of deadly fires.

  The Ten Standard Firefighting Orders were created in 1957. They have been updated since then, and now range from specific (post lookouts, identify escape routes) to general (be alert, act decisively).

  The Eighteen Watchout Situations, added later, are times firefighters should be extra vigilant: when they’re building fire line downhill with fire below, when their overall assignment isn’t clear, when they can’t see the main fire, things like that. Even taking a nap near the fire line.

  The “10 & 18” are the closest thing firefighting has to a holy scripture. They’re drummed into us during training and often posted on station walls or even in the head, so we can review them while attending to other duties. I was trained at Kernville to know them verbatim; get any wrong during an inspection and you’d be hating life.

  These checklists have saved lives. That’s not debatable. Memorizing them isn’
t enough, though. Firefighters need to do more than just obey a set of rules. We need to know how to operate safely and effectively in intense situations.

  People don’t think clearly when they’re tired and stressed, let alone panicked. Our minds naturally go into tunnel-vision mode and start to cling to plans, any plan, even if the situation has changed dramatically.

  The Forest Service offers great classroom education and hands-on training. Instructors from the military and retired fire personnel teach things like leadership and decision making, risk assessment, how to work in collaborative settings, and understanding the difference between managing and leading.

  We have very smart, highly educated people in the fire service, and many of them are not being used to their full potential. After the fact, after a fuckup, everyone suddenly has the fix for what went wrong.

  Not enough attention is being paid to those who are trying to bring awareness to new, better technology and solutions that could help keep some of these disasters from happening.

  And paradoxically, “back to the basics” is something we neglect every day in our profession: things like how to take care of personal protective gear, basic compass and radio skills, and first aid and survival techniques.

  If you don’t want to be a tech geek, fine—but don’t let your pride get in the way of asking someone else how to use your gear. Try to learn everything you can and refresh your knowledge as often as possible. Be part of the solution, not the problem.

  Hands-on training in the field under experienced professionals is especially important for new firefighters. Learning skills like mindfulness and situational awareness help you stay aware and adaptable—and in a dynamic situation like a wildfire, that means alive. It would be good to have classes on common sense and accountability.

  They’re hard things to teach, but critical.

  One thing that isn’t hard is giving people the best tools for the job. If the Granite Mountain crew had had some of the safety technology that is already available, who knows, things might have turned out differently.

  CHAPTER 16

  REMEMBER WHEN BEING CALLED a nerd was an insult? Now there’s a supercomputer in every purse and pocket, and Silicon Valley is way cooler than Wall Street.

  Tech nerd, gearhead, whatever you want to call it, I’m a proud member of the tribe. I’m usually the guy on the plane with the most gizmos. I love testing out new tools, textiles, anything that might make firefighting safer and more effective.

  This isn’t a high-tech profession. Much of firefighters’ gear hasn’t changed in decades. Sometimes it’s fine to hold on to things that work, like the parachute or pulaski. But there is a lot of advanced gear already available or on the horizon that could help crews do their job even better.

  When I was at Kernville in the mid to late 1990s, we were one of the few helitack bases that had mobile phones. We were always the coolest guys at the fire because we had those big old brick-sized cell phones. They were a great communications tool, but we didn’t keep them very long because we had to pay the charges (two or three hundred dollars a month, plus insane roaming fees) out of our own pockets.

  The pocket-sized phones were just taking off when I started jumping. Now it seems like every fifth grader has an iPhone, and you can get phone service if not data on most fires.

  It’s a mixed blessing. Being able to call and send weather and intel back and forth from the field can be a huge operational benefit, depending on who’s on the receiving end. Cell phones can save your ass. They can also leave you hanging at the worst possible moment. We’re still a long way from guaranteed connectivity everywhere, especially in the wilderness. In the meantime, jumpers are trained not to depend 100 percent on any devices beyond our arms, legs, and brains. Every piece of gear ever made craps out at some point.

  That doesn’t mean you should leave equipment or devices behind. Along with my smartphone, I jump with a portable solar system (powermonkey) to charge my gear and a compact point-of-view video camera like a GoPro. I also carry a portable weather station (Kestrel), a handheld unit that measures and records everything from relative humidity to altitude, barometric pressure, and wind speed.

  Depending on the mission, I might take a night-vision monocular or a handheld thermal camera, which comes in handy when you’re searching for hotspots during a mop-up. Some of these devices can pick out a single lit match on a paved road in full sunlight.

  One of the biggest challenges on a fire is keeping track of people. Sometimes I carry a GPS satellite communicator that can send and receive text messages and trigger an SOS (inReach). You can send your loved ones a ping to let them know you’re okay. In track mode, the party on the other end can watch your every move, which can be critical if you get hurt or stuck in a bad spot.

  GPS tracking systems have been around for a long time—I’ve been playing with them since the early 2000s, and they’re getting cheaper every day. You can walk into Walmart and buy a tracking collar for your hunting dog for under $200.

  Some people hear the words tracking system and think Big Brother. Nevertheless, the technology can be a lifesaver in certain situations. When a fire grows quickly from a small blaze to a large, complex conflagration, its command structure also changes, from initial attack to extended attack. The IC can become overloaded and may not always know where all the resources and personnel are located. GPS trackers would let the IC know the locations of the Type 1 and 2 crews that are already on scene.

  The government already mandates a type of global positioning system (GPS) called Automatic Flight Following for aircraft. On fires, jumpers call it “Tanker TV” and use it to see who’s in the air, where assets are, and what’s going where.

  Some departments thinking outside the box are beginning to use trackers already. The Orlando district of the Florida Forest Service was the first in the country to put GPS trackers on its bulldozers and fire engines after two veteran bulldozer operators were killed in a burnover in 2011. Their vehicles became hung up on stumps and they couldn’t be rescued in time.

  Now the agency is equipping vehicles across the state with GPS receivers and radio transmitters. Florida state officials say this “asset tracker system” lets supervisors see a vehicle’s location, speed, and direction on a laptop up to two miles away. It’s not dependent on cellular or Internet connection and only cost about $2 million—a small price to pay to ensure drivers are safe. This is starting to take hold in other agencies as well. I was a guest speaker last year in a safety meeting at the Forest Service in Flagstaff, Arizona, and proud to see a local employee there had done the research and purchased a few personal tracking systems to use for their crews.

  GPS receivers are getting better and better at getting a signal even under dense tree canopies and rugged terrain. Working with some of the leading companies, I’ve been able to field-test new units that work even in the worst terrain we encounter. Still not perfect, but far better than what we had years ago.

  Imagine if the location of all crews at Yarnell had been visible to overhead on the fire.

  THE ONE PIECE OF gear a firefighter depends on above all the rest is his or her emergency fire shelter. The ones we’re issued are better than nothing, but as I’ve explained, they still aren’t nearly good enough.

  A former aerospace engineer named Jim Roth is trying to fix that. Jim’s younger brother Roger, a McCall jumper, was one of four people who died at Storm King inside a fully or partially deployed shelter.

  One of the last times they were together, Roger showed his brother a fire shelter for the first time. “I said, man, whatever you do, don’t trust that thing,” Jim says. “It sounds like a death trap.”

  After the fire, Jim Roth was frustrated by the MTDC’s lack of hard data on shelter performance. He decided to start his own company, Storm King Mountain Technologies, to invent a better one.

  When the Forest Service put out its call for new designs, Roth presented four prototypes that he and his team of volunteer experts had
created. They were all lighter than the old ones, cost the same, and could withstand 2,000 degrees of direct heat. The National Interagency Fire Center and Forest Service went with an MTDC design anyway.

  Roth kept working, experimenting with new materials that can withstand up to 3,000 degrees. His latest design is more angular than the jellybean-shaped New Generation shelter, designed to trap more air inside. It’s also much faster to deploy, folded in a way that makes it pop open almost like pulling a rip cord on a parachute.

  Roth is having the design tested under laboratory and actual field conditions. (Fire shelters, incidentally, are one of the few pieces of gear the National Fire Protection Agency hasn’t set a performance-based standard for, but that’s another issue.) His goal is to have a shelter than can withstand 2,000 degrees while staying 200 degrees or less on the inside for two minutes, all with a weight of two pounds (half the weight or those we carry today).

  That’s a generous margin of error. Most burnovers are over much faster; flames that are moving too fast to outrun at least pass quickly. At Yarnell, the flame front probably blew over the deployment site in twelve seconds or less. The problem is, the hotshots’ shelters came apart in the first few seconds.

  Not every burnover is survivable in a shelter. At Thirtymile, temperatures on the rock slope were probably lethal for close to an hour. There’s still a big gap between conditions firefighters encounter on a regular basis and what our standard fire shelters can withstand. That’s why I’m helping Jim with the crowdfunding side of his project.

  Roth’s shelter should be ready for direct sales in time for the 2016 fire season. Firefighters (or their loved ones) can decide if they want to buy them.

  It’s like when the families of soldiers in combat zones buy ballistic vests and send them over because the government-supplied armor isn’t enough. Except in this case there’s an extra hitch: technically a firefighter can’t carry a shelter on a federal fire until it gets approved by the MTDC. It’s going to be up to the firefighting community to fight for the right to carry a better, more protective fire shelter.