Chemistry of Fire

by Laurence Gonzales

  In the years since the Blowdown, fire agencies have gradually worked—through prescribed burns and logging—to isolate the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where most of the trees were felled, from the larger area of the Superior National Forest and in particular from the Gunflint Trail.

  Between two thousand and four thousand people come here in the summer, many of them to canoe and camp in the wilderness, days away from civilization, and I wondered what would happen to them if a fire started.

  In fact, a fire did start inside the Boundary Waters wilderness area in the summer of 2011. It smoldered in a bog for days before anyone even noticed. Begun with a lightning strike, it was merely an ember. Then the wind kicked up, and humidity dropped to 18 percent. The fire burst into the crowns of the trees and grew from a quarter of an acre to 130 acres. As in Peshtigo, the people in the area expected at least two inches of rain and 30 percent humidity at that time of year. But they were headed into the driest autumn in 140 years. Firefighters began burning forest ahead of the fire to try to contain it. But winds kicked up again and blew the fire up to 4,500 acres. By the second week in September, crown fires were running toward Insula Lake. Late on the morning of September 12, firefighters were hiking in to warn campers to get out. The fire that is now known as the Pagami Creek Fire blew up and overran six of the eight wilderness rangers. Wildland firefighters are required to carry fire shelters. They are made of aluminum foil and woven silica cloth, which reflect heat and trap air inside for the firefighters to breathe. They are also lined with fiberglass for insulation. The six firefighters survived. But that afternoon, the wind shifted again, and the fire ran six additional miles to the east. It then turned and ran ten more miles northwest and escaped the BWCAW. The Pagami Creek Fire covered 93,000 acres by September 13 and burned on into October.

  Ellen Bogardus-Szymaniak, the fire expert, told me that the only way to get rid of the danger of explosive fire is to wait until all this burns. “I’m feeling much better about most of the Gunflint Trail. If we do get a fire, and it’s ripping for the boundary, we’ll be able to slow it down enough to get folks out of the way. We’re not going to stop it, but I think we’ll be able to evacuate everybody.”

  I asked her what they’d do about the people far out in the wilderness, where fires were most likely to burn. She said they’d try to fly over and warn them somehow, “depending on the weather. But before they go out,” she added, “they’ll just have to understand that they’re on their own. You smell smoke, you see smoke, you have ash falling on you, it’s not a good time to go walking in the woods to see what’s going on.”

  8

  ValuJet Crash

  IN THE ANNALS of transportation history, such a flight would not have rated more than a log entry:

  Left Miami 1:00 p.m.

  Arrived Atlanta 2:55 p.m.

  But before sundown, the go-teams, tethered by their pagers to calamity, were converging on a spot in the swamp where ValuJet Flight 592 had failed in its attempt to return to Miami after broadcasting a Mayday emergency to air traffic controllers.

  The plane had departed on a scheduled flight but minutes later had reported smoke, bad smoke, first in the cabin, then in the cockpit. The white ship with a sky-blue tail had turned back toward the field. Controllers in a darkened radar room watched the plane on the screen and heard the voice of the captain, a woman named Candalyn Kubeck: “We’re on fire! We’re on fire!” Then they watched as the plane’s neat identifying data block dropped from their scopes.

  It was a hot and sunny day with a sky the color of polished chrome and cumulus clouds like herds of sheep. A man sat in his bass boat, fishing near Canal L67-A beside a levee. He was a private pilot and had been watching the northbound jets when he saw something amazing—a large jetliner turned on edge, one wing pointing at the ground. The fisherman knew it was a big jetliner and would accurately describe it to police as having two engines on the fuselage, none on the wings. Coming more or less straight down in knife-edge flight from seventy-five hundred feet, a sweptwing DC-9, capable of flight at nearly Mach 1, will gather speed quickly. Later its terminal speed would be estimated at 352 miles an hour. The fisherman watched in disbelief as the plane flung itself headlong into the Everglades not a mile from where he stood in his bass boat.

  The explosion was tremendous. A black cloud obscured the chromium sun. There was a gap in time, a silent, searing moment before the concussion reached him and threw him back. He understood that this glittering craft with many, many human lives on board had just cast itself onto the naked rind of the earth, where it had burst and scattered and disintegrated. An immense dragon of smoke and matter blossomed on the flat, hot horizon. It bloomed and spread and then settled again, heavy with the oil of life and commerce. Smoke drifted slowly as the waves of water on their return to the swamp rolled out in curling, mirrored ripples and tilted his boat gently back and to like the weight on a pendulum.

  The fisherman, his heart hammering like mad, picked himself up and reached for his phone. When he stammered that an airliner had gone down in the swamp, the dispatch officer in the Broward County Sheriff’s Office was forced to ask, “This is not a hoax, you say?” Now the ripples would spread outward, taking in wildlife, families, towns, Indian tribes, and businesses and shaking the government officials who oversaw the business of airline travel, even ending some careers. But through it all, ValuJet would continue, eventually changing its name to AirTran to conceal its past from travelers in search of a deal.

  For several minutes, helicopters and squad cars, boats and airplanes, and even people on foot on the levee searched without finding any trace of a wreck. The radio chatter carried the same message over and over: there was no plane. And if there had been a plane, there were no survivors. It appeared that an airliner full of people had been swallowed whole by the swamp.

  By and by, a rescue pilot saw from his helicopter what may have been scraps of paper floating on the surface of the swamp, and there, look: where in every direction nothing but lily pads and saw grass stretched away in flat monotony, there was a sort of Rorschach inkblot. Everyone would see something different: a teardrop, a candle flame, a silhouette like those in Hiroshima after the first atomic bomb—a child, arms akimbo, flashed out of existence one sunny afternoon and stamped forever on a clock tower wall like a pressed flower. That beckoning shadow in the middle of five thousand square miles of wilderness moved people like a sign in the heavens. And people came from everywhere.

  A Metro-Dade policewoman told a reporter, “This is Dade County. If it’s going to get weird, it’s going to get weird here.”

  By nightfall it was impossible to avoid the impression that a circus had come to town, what with police and fire and rescue vehicles spinning their party lights on the Tamiami Trail. The helicopters rippled man-high waves of saw grass. The go-team members from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) marched around looking like astronauts in their blue jumpsuits and Ray-Bans. TV trucks with their satellite dishes spawned scrub-cheeked newscasters, who looked like dissipated Ken and Barbie dolls. And all the while, discreet little medical examiner’s vans went in and out of the deeper swamp across the top of the levee.

  The police staging area was at the intersection of Canal L67-A and the Tamiami Trail, one of only two highways that run straight through the swamp past such curiosities as Indians who wrestle alligators and “Frog City,” once a community, once a restaurant, and finally a business—just a man and his wife, really, who used to sit around a big bloody tub of frogs, stripping off their skins with pliers to sell the carcasses to restaurants. In this part of the Everglades, it is not unusual to find people sitting by the side of the road, drinking beer, relaxing on an exploded couch, as if they were in their living room watching TV. Now suddenly disaster had cobbled together this new and festive city beside the road.

  By morning great white tents had bloomed like overnight mushrooms, stenciled with mysterious legends and crypto-military names, over which Ame
rican flags drooped in the windless heat. Men with radios and guns bicycled in and out on knobby tires. There was the departure and arrival of helicopters, and the air was filled with the smell of kerosene from their turbines. A levee stretched out to within three hundred yards of the crash site, but the rough drive took an hour, so most workers went back and forth by helicopter and boat. Salvation Army trucks dispensed free food and drinks and a lot of bottled water through steamy ninety-degree afternoons.

  A sign was posted in the area: “Everglades Wildlife Management Area—Please Help Keep Your Area Clean.” But trash and cables were strewn everywhere, and yellow police line tape added a gala touch amid scores of squad cars, dozens of trucks, RVs, and vans. A yellow Metro-Dade fire truck bore a bumper sticker that read, “The Dudes of Hazard.” Already the trappings of tragedy had been laid over the event to begin the long process of concealment. A wreath on a wire stand had been jammed into the mud by the water’s edge, festooned with a white ribbon imprinted with “ValuJet Flight 592.” So effective and seductive is the concept of tragedy that few would ever know (or even want to know) the criminal negligence that had gone into creating the slaughter.

  The rocky roadside site abutted a shifting curtain of green and brown grass and cattails, where a sudden breeze could change the color of the landscape in undulating waves. Dragonflies hung in the air. Wild bay threw off an aromatic spoor. Cypress, palm, and live oak punctuated the sameness of this wilderness, which ran unbroken for a hundred miles to the north. Lily pads grew in flowering profusion, and mangrove formed dense undergrowth. Alligators would come up to the encampment to beg like dogs, their sad red eyes drooping, their stinking, prehistoric mouths hanging open, until someone would throw in a corned beef sandwich, whereupon the alligator would close its mouth with a wet slap and appear to dissolve back into the black water. There was nothing else to film, so TV crews set up and filmed the alligators. It would serve as “B-roll” for their broadcasts.

  The US Air Force arrived. The Army Corps of Engineers arrived. The US Navy sent in special salvage teams. There was sonar, radar, loran, GPS, and every kind of communication device known. BellSouth put up a mobile phone booth, and local calls were free. Some of the experts considered sinking caissons and diking off the swamp and draining it to get at the airplane. But local engineers, old-timers, informed them of the power of this swamp and its underlying base of Loxahatchee peat. “You think you can beat this swamp, you got another think comin’,” one of them said.

  “I don’t hold any hope we’ll find any recoverable, large parts of people,” Joseph Davis, a retired medical examiner, said at a press briefing. He was skeptical about ever identifying most victims. A Metro-Dade police lieutenant said, “You’re dealing with a very big site and thousands of parts.” He meant body parts, not airplane parts.

  The father of one victim said, “It’s hard for me to accept that over a weekend trip his life is terminated and they can’t even find him,” expressing a fundamental lament: that a trusted airline had caused him to vanish forever from the face of the earth, leaving not even a scrap to bury or a watch or ring to keep as a memento.

  Cameramen had set up lean-tos of plastic tarp on aluminum poles and kept their cameras pointed up the canal, a waterway about as wide as the two-lane Tamiami Trail. You could tell the power of the station by the quality of its shelter. CNN had a beautiful white tent such as might be used for a backyard garden party, and its talking heads were known to exaggerate wildly when reporting the day’s events.

  Some days whole families of curious tourists or locals would come and set up picnics and sit with us, their children squeaking with joy as they kicked a ball or threw a Frisbee, while in the background the rescue workers carried stretchers to unmarked vans and then sprayed Clorox on their rubber boots to decontaminate them.

  Canal L67-A led north, diminishing in silver-gray reflections to the crash site eight miles distant. Now and then boats would come back with gray body bags, and we could see them loading the rubber cerements onto stretchers and then into ambulances. The bags were never very full. They hung limp. I was talking to one TV producer with my back to the waterway when, in the middle of a sentence, she shouted, “Body bag!” then stormed off to her cameraman, shouting, “Goddamn it! I can’t believe we missed it. Where’s our fabulous crew?”

  There had been some thought of triage at first, and lots of body bags had been marshaled, while the radio frequencies had carried messages alerting local hospitals to expect a large number of major injuries. But there was no triage. There were no wounded. Most of the body bags went unused. We sat around, increasingly mystified that the proud ship, packed full of friends and family and driven by the most sophisticated navigation and transportation technology ever devised, could simply disappear without a trace.

  Well, there were traces. They had pinned it down to a particular area of swamp, and once they looked more closely, they could fly over it and see that carrion-bird shape, like one of those enormous ancient designs that are found stenciled on the sides of mountains in Peru. They saw a crater in the mud, a welling up of the muck, made in those first moments when the fisherman in his bass boat felt the waves. It was a concavity such as we might expect to see if a meteor hit the earth. The workers quickly gave it a name: the Pit.

  At first as the airboats crisscrossed the Pit without finding anything, there was a pause in the search, because quite literally, no one knew what to do next. A plane had never vanished quite like that. Men began wading through but soon found that the jet fuel was burning their skin. Now the area around the Pit was being searched by men in rubber waders with masks and goggles and Tyvek suits, which they wore with the notion that the whole swamp had become this sort of fecal soup of 110 exploded bowels. There was concern at first that the roughly eight tons of fresh meat that had been thrown into the swamp by the crash would result in a feeding frenzy among all the ragged claws and snapping jaws that dredged this gumbo of growing things, and Dade County kept its trained snipers in place on the off chance that a beast might return to take down a rescue worker. But after a few days, word filtered out that the crash site was devoid of interested life-forms. In fact, it appeared to be devoid of most everything except buzzing flies and the heat and the lonely sound of a boat returning now and then with a disembodied human arm.

  With nothing really solid to stand on, then, the searchers moved five abreast, working only twenty minutes at a time in the heat. Beyond the kerosene spilled by the crash, which burned the skin and eyes, heat exhaustion and dehydration were the primary dangers. Workers wore white Tyvek bodysuits under dark green waders such as fishermen wear. They wore bowlers and fedoras, panamas and crush hats—anything with a brim to keep the sun off the ears and face. With suspenders holding up their waders and their heads bowed, a net and hook in either hand, they looked like members of a lost tribe of Cajuns hunting dinner in the knee-deep mud.

  The searchers would call out “Body part!” when they felt a piece of human flesh, and an airboat, which was following along behind, would move up to retrieve it. Each bit of flesh was bagged and tagged. Once on dry land, or what passed for dry land in the Everglades, those remains were removed, photographed, and put in a bag with a bar code label. The new bags were placed together in a larger body bag for removal to the medical examiner’s office in Miami.

  Monday, May 13, late afternoon. Two days after the crash, searchers found the flight-data recorder, one of the so-called black boxes. That happens to be a metaphor with an enigmatic meaning—the boxes are actually painted with orange stripes to make them easier to find. Searchers also removed seven body bags containing “hundreds of small pieces” of human flesh, some so small that it was impossible even to tell what part of the anatomy they had come from. The flight-data recorder turned out to be of the older type, which recorded only eleven flight parameters, not the hundred or so that the new instruments can track. The plane had been old and had had a history of mechanical troubles. ValuJet had purchased it from Tur
kish Airlines as a castoff, a “roach,” as pilots call such a plane.

  They had done it before. On a mild summer evening in Atlanta on June 8, 1995, ValuJet Flight 597 was barreling down Runway 27 Right on its takeoff roll. Everyone on board heard the loud bang as the right engine exploded, sending shrapnel into the cabin. One piece seriously injured the flight attendant in the rear jump seat. Another severed the main fuel line. Jet fuel sprayed into the cabin, setting a flight attendant and others on fire.

  Another flight attendant rushed to the cockpit to tell the captain. Having stopped the plane, the captain punched the mike button and ordered his fifty-seven passengers to evacuate, but his voice never reached them. The electrical power had had been cut. The NTSB had been after the airlines for two decades to provide the PA system with its own power supply, but the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) “indicated that it had determined that the cost of compliance with such a rule would outweigh any identifiable safety benefits,” according to the NTSB. The passengers were on their own.

  As soon as a flight attendant opened the front exit door, smoke rolled in, filling the cabin up to the ceiling. Passengers are told to follow the strip of lights along the floor in an emergency. No one had turned them on.

  With toxic smoke rising around her from the flaming cabin furnishings, the injured flight attendant in the back found herself unable to open the tail-cone exit. It wasn’t because of her injuries. She’d never actually opened one. It wasn’t required training.