Eleven months ago, 19 fire fighters from Arizona disappeared without warning into a wildland blaze. Hundreds of people in the U.S. die every day in a variety of ways, many by murder and violence, but nothing seized the national attention more than these firemen caught without warning out in the bushland surrounding Yarnell, Arizona.
Twelve days before they were dispatched to Yarnell Hill, I watched the same men from a distance as they fought a fire threatening my childhood home in Williamson Valley, Arizona. On June 18, 2013, I was packing to travel to a wedding when I saw the foreboding smoke puffing up from one of the deep valleys behind Granite Mountain, which lies to the northwest of the city of Prescott. Every Arizonan knows that smoke in wildland areas means nothing but trouble, and in a panic, I began stuffing my belongings into suitcases, wrapping my grandmother’s china in towels and searching desperately for family photo albums.
Over the course of the next 12 hours, I watched in horror as flames leached across the mountain I grew up beside, consuming everything their path and screening the normally sapphire-blue sky with a thick veil of cloying orange smoke. The light turned to a threatening filter of hot yellowish-red that seemed to pervade my every sense—namely, the color of fire. Wildfire is not the same kind of fear as a house fire. Those end quickly with the fire engines and hydrants. Wildland fires can take weeks to put out and dance at the whim of the unpredictable desert winds.
However, the 20 men—part of a special crew called the Granite Mountain Hotshots—and a huge force of firefighters from across the state responded quickly, and the state supplied raucous air support throughout the fire that came to be known as the Doce Fire. The night advanced, and I stood on the edge of my road staring at the small flames lighting up the dark surface of the mountain I knew so well. It resembled a volcano now, biting a vicious chunk out of the normally clear Milky Way, black as hell despite the firelight. Later that night, we were informed that we would not have to evacuate, and my mother and I boarded a plane mourning the mountain’s twisted pine forests, serene granite boulderscapes and quiet hiking trails.
The fire was still burning when the news broke that the Hotshots were gone.

“The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘What in the hell were they doing here?’”
Marty Cole, the former supervisor for the Granite Mountain Hotshots and a freelance contractor for the Arizona State Forestry Division, was waiting at the edge of the narrow valley road with a radio the day the crew of elite firefighters disappeared into the flames.
Of the crew of 20 first-responders, 19 perished in the blaze; one man, who was picked up by another forestry department officer, made it out. Brandon McDonough, the only survivor, sat shellshocked in Cole’s truck just after the radio hissed that the Hotshots had deployed their heat shelters. McDonough had been away from the crew when the fire turned suddenly, forcing them to deploy their emergency shelters. The small tents, designed to withstand 500 degrees, were not enough to shield the men entirely from the more than 2000 degree flames.
Cole, who lives in the small neighboring town Chino Valley, drove to Yarnell that day because he knew the temperamental summer winds from the desert rains, called monsoons, could increase the severity of the fire. In his 35 years working on fires, he has seen a variety of different fires, noting that the biggest danger with the one threatening Yarnell was the storm-driven change in air currents. The weather service had put out a warning, but someone still had to respond to the fire, and the Hotshots were first on the job.
As he drove through the low-lying roads in the neighboring ranching communities of Kirkland and Peeple’s Valley, he saw the smoke column increase and it occurred to him that the coming rainstorm could affect on the direction of the fire—sudden temperature changes can drastically change the wind patterns and drive the fire into unexpected locations. Cars were lined along the edge of the road, and when he reached Yarnell, he pulled off alongside some other fire officials he knew. One of them called him over and pointed to the blackened figure of a firefighter standing nearby.
“He says, I got Brandon [McDonough] here, what do you wanna do with him?” Cole said. “And I said, ‘First of all, tell me what the hell’s going on.’ He says, ‘Granite Mountain’s deployed.’”
Cole took a deep breath, remembering the next few short minutes. The fire was beginning to consume the buildings at the edge of Yarnell, McDonough was the only Hotshot who was separated from the crew and the rest had deployed their last-resort heat shelters reserved in case of disaster.
After a few minutes of listening in to a colleague’s radio, Cole made out a voice amid the smoke-fuzzed static.
“One of the guys that went looking for them says on the radio, ‘19 confirmed, no [Emergency Medical Services] needed,’” Cole said. “I said, ‘What does that mean?’ And he says, ‘19 confirmed fatalities, no EMS needed, copy.’ And from that point on, time stopped.”

In a small, tight-knit community like Prescott, the blow fell heavily.
The town, situated in the mountains approximately 100 miles northwest of Phoenix, is home to approximately 40,000 people, according to the Census Bureau’s 2012 population estimates. Banners bearing the cheerful slogan “Everybody’s Hometown” fly on light poles around the limestone courthouse, and on Sundays most of the residents attend one of the town’s multitude of churches, temples or mosques. The city mission statement includes values such as “being nice.” At the July 2 public vigil for the firefighters, thousands of people listened as community members read Bible verses and prayed.
And in the fire department, morale sank to a historic low.
Brian Burch, a 14-year veteran of the Central Yavapai Fire District, said he remembered seeing the 19 members of the Hotshots in the several days leading up to the fire. Many of them lived in the city, so when the crews would return to the station in the evenings, he would see the Hotshots playing with their children and greeting their wives in the parking lot, he said. That image lingered in his mind as he helped carry out 12 of the 19 funerals.
“We’re still dealing with grief issues,” Burch said. “I think everybody has their own level of grief, if you will, and they’re working through that. Very honestly, I had very severe grief issues for the first few weeks and I had to get away.”
Burch said the men were well known and respected in Prescott, especially after the Doce Fire. The Hotshots shared their crew name with the mountain, and amazingly, not a single structure burned down despite the dry, sap-rich pines and scrub oak that fill the valley and the proximity of the homes. The fire, which lit up one of the highest mountains in the Prescott area, was visible across the entire tri-city area and consumed more than 6,000 acres in a 12-hour period. However, with aerial support and extra personnel, the force was able to preserve the inhabited areas.
The low ranch-style fences soon bore wreaths, ribbons, streamers and banners full of grateful messages from residents across the city. Burch said that for a brief moment, seeing the community’s appreciation was a reminder that what they do really affects the town on a ground level, making the job worth all the effort. But on July 1, the day after the news broke, the memorials became ones of grief. Three days later, the Independence Day fireworks would shoot off 19 solemn rocket blasts in memorial, a punctuation of the sudden shock felt in the town.
“But I think … people sometimes forget how dangerous fire is, as in the case of Yarnell,” Burch said. “So people forget about us; [the firemen] are always there, kind of like that insurance policy always in your pocket, and if something does happen, we’re there to act. But sometimes, in our daily lives, we just forget about that.”

After the flames around the 649-person town of Yarnell faded, the Arizona State Forestry Division ordered a Serious Incident Investigation, published Sept. 23 to the public. The report concluded that ultimately no one was directly at fault for the accident. The shift in the weather due to monsoon rain activity, causing cold air to rush into a high-pressure zone, changed the wind and drove the fire into the steep canyon toward where the Hotshot crew stood. Radio interference could have negatively affected communication, but it was ultimately not a deciding factor, the report said.
An eerie passage in the report quietly answers the question the media has been asking since the first report of the deaths:

There is a gap of over 30 minutes in the information available for the Granite Mountain IHC. From 1604 until 1637, the Team cannot verify communications form the crew, and we have almost no direct information for them. There is much that cannot be known about the crew’s decisions and actions prior to their entrapment and fire shelter deployment at around 1642.

Cole, who was interviewed for the report, echoed the sentiment that some of the details can never be known and the continual search for blame is useless.
However, that report acquitting the fire department did not satisfy the media. More articles came out highlighting the radio interferences that occurred the day of the fire. International media outlets told the tearful stories of the firefighters’ widows and children, wondering who was going to pay their bills and whether the city would provide them a pension.
Cole said the media has circled around the idea of radio interference being the culprit for the tragedy and implied that the Arizona State Forestry Division was at fault for not warning the firefighters sooner about the dangerous weather conditions. But he was not so certain that any party was directly to blame for what happened that day. “I’ve been on many fires over 30 plus years, and it’s usually pretty easy to pick out somebody to blame when there’s somebody at fault. And this one… I just can’t pick that out and even though I know the guys, I just can’t pick out the blame,” Cole said. “It was an accident and those guys were at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Not two months later, in September, the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health announced a fine of $559,000 levied against the Arizona State Division of Forestry.

In a state hit hard by wildfires each year, the Forestry Division uses every cent it has. In 2011, the Wallow fire that raged across northeastern Arizona cost approximately $5.3 million to fight, and the Doce fire of June 2013 cost $3.24 million, according to the state forestry department reports.
And there seems to be no end in sight to the growth of the fires. As the damage becomes more extensive, the budgets become more brittle, even without the economic downturn. $559,000 is a large percentage of the department’s already constrained budget. The Arizona State Forestry Division receives about $27.2 million in total from the state government, but that includes its operating budget and other activities besides fire suppression. The state budget committee provides about $4.7 million for fire suppression. The funding dropped slightly during the economic recession but has remained fairly stable because state law guarantees at least $3 million in funding.
Not only are large fires annual and largely inevitable, they have grown in size and severity over the years, ballooning costs. Burch said much of the internal discussion among fire professionals and city officials after the Yarnell Hill fire was about the dangerous conditions surrounding the town, outlining the excess of burnable fuels and dry conditions. The area around Yarnell had not burned in 46 years, he said.
The Southwest region has had a regular cycle of 50-year megadroughts over the past 2000 years, making the area particularly vulnerable to wildfires, according to a January 2013 report by the National Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee. Since the mid-1990s, Arizona has been in a drought period that has enhanced severe dust storms and made vegetation brittle and dry for lack of snowmelt in the spring, according to Nancy Selover, the state climatologist.
“If those trees aren’t picking up that moisture every winter and spring when that snow melts, they become heat stressed,” Selover said. “They become subject to the diseases. The drought is a big part of that whole process. And I think the drought certainly impacted [the Yarnell wildfire].”
Cole said that when he started as a firefighter, big fires were about 600 acres. Today, fires ranging from 1,000–30,000 acres are considered normal, he said.
The Rodeo-Chediski Fire, which burned across central Arizona in 2002, consumed more than 468,000 acres, and was the largest fires in Arizona history until the Wallow Fire of 2011 raged across 535,000 acres in the northeastern White Mountain area, according to a July 29, 2011 U.S. Forestry Service report.
But it is a tenuous balance, this cycle of burning and extinguishing. The whole Southwestern region depends on wildfires to an extent. The pine forests need wildfire heat to germinate new trees, and the old growth can be burnt away to renew the soil, according to the NCADAC report. But in the 1910s and 20s, the federal government dictated that all fires had to be extinguished rather than allowed to burn until naturally spent. This allowed dead wood and fuel to build up in the forests, particularly in the Southwest, where a warming climate over the following century killed more trees and allowed bark beetles to survive through the warmer winters, leaving more trees like standing matchsticks in the way of fire.
Fire crews deal with the excess fuel by executing what is called a “controlled burn,” but the burns require funding, which is in short supply after the economic meltdown of 2008. Yarnell, which is in a grey zone between the Yavapai and Maricopa County fire districts, was at the back of the priority list, Cole said.
“There’s state land all around [Yarnell],” Cole said. “If you look at the resources there in Yarnell, they don’t have the money to do those kind of burns. Sure, it needs to be protected, but it’s just not something that you’re going to spend a lot of money doing.”
The fire departments are subject to city and state budgets, which have steadily shrunk and fallen into deeper debt as Arizona’s economy continues to contract after the housing bubble collapse. The state’s 2013 outstanding debt rang up at $8.6 billion; Prescott’s municipal deficit is $69.4 million, according to the 2014 budget. The fire department in the city receives about $7.7 million in the city budget but usually overspends. Central Yavapai Fire District, which Burch works for, lost more than $1 million in funding from 2013–2014.
But even if firemen don’t get raises or pension benefits, fires still have to be put out, Burch said.
“Even on our side, at Central, we had wage freezes for three years,” Burch said. “You just try to stay ahead of the curve, if you will.”

In November, 16 residents of Yarnell and the surrounding area filed a notice of claim against the Forestry Division for the loss of their homes.
Yarnell’s residents are mostly retired and is not a major moving destination, according to Frances Lechner, director of communications for the Yarnell Hill Recovery Group. However, the ones who are there want to rebuild the town as quickly as possible. The group has only identified 10 homeowners who were uninsured at the time of the fire, Lechner said. Eight of those homes are already rebuilt and occupied, largely with volunteer help from religious groups and charities from across the country, she said. Because most of the town is retired and the main employers are a community center and a water system, many of the town’s resources come from elsewhere.
“Yarnell thrives on volunteer efforts,” Lechner said. “Just when we think things are starting to die out, we get an offer of assistance. We haven’t been forgotten.”
But the claimants said that the fire fighters did not respond quickly enough to the magnitude of the fire and their homes could have been saved. Scottsdale lawyer Craig Knapp, who represents the Yarnell residents, said the suit is still being organized for official filing.
“There are some people who feel anger,” Lechner said. “There are some individuals who feel like the fighting of the fire wasn’t done properly—that it should have been done differently, better.”
Relative to its size, Yarnell has received a great deal of charity support after 129 structures were destroyed. The Yarnell Hill Recovery Group, a nonprofit focusing on social programs and taking care of those made homeless by the fire, raised $700,000 by October 2013, and the Arizona Community Foundation raised $749,000 for its Yarnell Disaster Relief Fund.
Megan Brownell, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Community Foundation, said the fund received numerous contributions for immediate relief in Yarnell, and a number of others wanted to contribute to the long-term costs for the families of the Hotshots, so the Foundation established a Yarnell Memorial Scholarship Foundation for the firemen’s bereaved families.
“A fire creates a certain amount of community response, but the 19 firefighters and the national headlines that that made on the Monday morning really spurred a type of giving we have not seen ever before,” Brownell said. “Everybody’s got a son or a brother or a neighbor right around [the Hotshots’] age, these young men who were so brave doing their jobs, and to have this happen was just devastating.”
The Arizona Community Foundation is aware of the pending lawsuits, but because it is committed to serving the community interests of Arizona, had no comment on the litigation, Brownell said.
The Hotshots’ families have also received charity benefits. The Arizona Community Foundation also raised $459,000 for the Yarnell Memorial Scholarship Endowment, a dedicated fund for the children of the fallen firefighters. Numerous other fundraisers within Prescott and independent churches have chipped in over the year since. Out of the $559,000 fine the ADOSH leveled against the Forestry Division, each family is set to receive $25,000.
Burch said the fire department has been actively participating in improving the lives of the children of the Hotshots who were lost.
“We’ve made donations and whatever they need to help make it,” Burch said. “I think that was part of the process of learning to heal. That’s kind of what I had to learn through this, but I got stuck in a certain phase of grief.”

In wildland firefighting, direct access to the blaze is often limited. Water is scarce and roads are often far away, so to battle the flames, crews have to literally battle fire with fire. Using specially designed rakes, the crew gathers burnable material and performs a quick controlled burn to deprive the fire of extra material, creating a black buffer zone. The technique, known as backburning, helped stop the Doce fire’s path two weeks before the Yarnell Hill fire.
But the potential damage of backburning is if the controlled burn catches too strongly and joins with the main blaze, changing direction.
The Hotshots believed they were safe in the black, making their decision to move into an unburned canyon a mystery to veteran firefighters and incident analysts alike, according to the incident report. The final photos from Grant McKee’s camera, which surfaced in September in Prescott’s Daily Courier, showed the crew framed against granite boulders and brittle grasses. One caught Robert Caldwell, one of the members, framed against a smoky sky with a torch in hand just after lighting the backfire to protect Yarnell.
Burch said it was possible that the traditional techniques the firemen used were unpredictable in those weather conditions, unique to Arizona and quickly changeable in the wind and temperature drops of mid-summer in the high desert.
“We haven’t had any natural fires within the [Yarnell] area, our fuels are dry and we have a lot of undergrowth,” Burch said. “There are a lot of things that add up to faster-moving, hotter-burning fires. And if you look across the United States, other people are going to echo that change as well.”
Selover said the winds around wildfires can happen so quickly that even the incident meteorologists that the weather service sends to monitor the fire cannot keep up with the changing weather patterns. A characteristic Southwest region storm will raise clouds that drop their rain some distance away, and the resulting rush of cool air can disperse so quickly that it can completely shift the wind in an unpredictable direction, she said.
“Sometimes these things happen fast enough that you can’t always predict which way it’s going to go or where it’s gonna happen,” Selover said. “Winds just get really squirrelly in a wildfire, particularly in that kind of terrain.”