I tell everyone that each and every wildland fire out there is not the same, there is always something different in each one. I know that during these close calls, I had good situational awareness, but I also know that sometimes nature and fire will do something unpredicatable. I can see who actually gets it and who doesn’t. I also discuss past close calls that I have had during my summers of wildland firefighting.
I know that some newer wildland folks do not know what happened or why. I still play and discuss the VHS tape for my firefighters in July, so that they can remember or learn from it. I watched the ABC news cast Turning Point, Inferno on Storm King Mountain, which came out later that year. I heard about the helicopter crash in the Gila NF later that year. We just kept working throughout the day and several days afterwards. Our hotshot crew got the news while we were at a fire. I remember the day well, It was my tenth summer of wildland firefighting. I hope we don’t passively resign ourselves, thinking that this is inevitable.ĭammit guys and gals…. And… dammit, we can still lose 95 percent of a hotshot crew in a matter of minutes… in 2013. We are still fighting fire with sharpened pieces of metal attached to the ends of sticks, under, in many cases, aircraft built for the Korean War. But fark, we have not grown and learned beyond that. We’ve grown and learned beyond that, I told myself, refusing to believe it.Īnd this past Sunday, I had the same feeling - 19 firefighters dead? That can’t be true. In this day and age, we no longer have large groups of firefighters being killed at the same time. After I hung up I thought that can’t be true.
If you are over 40 years old, do you remember where you were when you heard about the 14 deaths? I heard about it on a phone call from Steve Creech, the Fire Coordinator for the State of Indiana. The firefighters who lost their lives that day:
The remaining 35 firefighters survived by escaping out the east drainage or by seeking a safety area and deploying their fire shelters. Two helitack crew members on top of the ridge also died when they tried to outrun the fire to the northwest. Failing to outrun the flames, 12 firefighters perished. Within seconds, a wall of flame raced up the hill toward the firefighters on the west flank fireline. On the afternoon of Jthe fire spotted across the drainage and beneath firefighters, moving onto steep slopes and into dense, highly flammable Gambel oak. With the recent deaths of 19 firefighters on the Yarnell Hill Fire, we must remember the deaths of 14 firefighters 19 years ago on the South Canyon fire near Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
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