My lost brothers : the untold story by the Yarnell Hill Fire's lone survivor

199 Pages·2016·2.39 MB·English

by  McDonough

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To my brothers
PROLOGUE: GRANITE MOUNTAIN
It was about nine thirty a.m. when we tramped into the station, back from a six-
mile run in the hills. The desert was starting to cook and the run had been
grueling. We grabbed our water bottles and pulled the gunmetal-gray chairs into
a semicircle and just sat there, dazed, chugging water, saying nothing at all.
This was a time when the crew ragged on each other and tried to get someone
going. Workingman’s theater. The basic horribleness of us all as rookies was a
popular subject. Today was my turn.
“Donut,” Chris said, looking at me, sweat running down his face, “you
remember your first week? You ran like old people fuck. Sloooooooooowly.”
Laughter rang off the corrugated roof of the station. I smiled. Hell, it was
true.
“Looks like a gazelle, runs like Chris Farley, that’s me,” I shot back. Never
let them know it hurts.
Just then I heard Jesse call out something. “Smoke.”
That got all our attention. Smoke? Here in Prescott? We walked outside.
Jesse pointed to Granite Mountain, northwest of us. There it was, on the left-
hand shoulder. Light gray, not moving.
“Jesus, not now,” someone mumbled. We were drained. A six-mile run in the
desert heat will wear you out.
We started getting ready, putting on our yellow long-sleeve Nomex shirts and
our Nomex pants and our handmade leather boots. We were willing the smoke to
turn white, which would mean the fire was losing power. But it kept getting
darker, bit by bit. It was moving, too, to the east, by the looks of it. Which meant
the fire was getting bigger and stronger and it was coming toward us.
We all knew the names of wildfires that hadn’t ended well: the Great
Hinckley Fire in Minnesota, where a “fire tornado” burned so hot barrels of nails
melted, train wheels fused with the steel rails, and 418 people died. Or the 1990
Dude Fire, which turned from a nothing blaze to a thirty-foot wall of flame
moving at sixty miles per hour before it chased down and killed a crew of five
inmate firefighters and their guard. The Oakland Firestorm, driven by a dry
Diablo wind, jumped an eight-lane freeway, burned a house every eleven
seconds, and killed twenty-five people. It came close to burning down Oakland
itself. Mann Gulch, where a blowup cost thirteen smokejumpers their lives. In
Esperanza, it was five firefighters, dead trying to protect a house.
Each one had different causes, different conditions, different terrains. But
they all shared one factor: tinderbox dryness in the brush and wood that fueled
them. And that sure as hell was true for Prescott, Arizona. It was drought
conditions here.
We’d been in towns after the inferno had gone through. They were sad, bitter
places, places that had been erased, just like the memories and keepsakes that the
fire had claimed. I thought of my two-year-old daughter at home with her mom.
What game was she playing right this minute? Was she gazing out the window,
watching the smoke approach? I thought of the pictures of her taped to our
fridge.
In my two years with Granite Mountain, I’d walked past many homes just
like mine, but gutted and seared. The people traumatized, searching for scraps of
their former lives. You never get back everything you lose in a fire. It’s a bad
time. It hurts.
But as much as I’d dreaded this moment, I’d been waiting for it, too. Now I
could show my family what I’d been doing for two years, show them I was
putting my life on the line to keep them and Prescott safe. One final proof that I
wasn’t the old Brendan anymore.
The radio began heating up. The whole town—cops, structure firemen,
Forestry—was watching the fireline and waiting to see which way the smoke
moved. It was turning darker and creeping eastward, ever so slightly. The flames
even had a name: the Doce Fire, after a local landmark.
“Let’s get ready,” Jesse said. “And listen up. Eat now. If we’re working
Prescott, we sure as shit won’t have time to eat lunch.”
Peak burning time in the Southwest is from noon to five p.m. Temperatures
rise, relative humidity drops, winds pick up. Those five hours are the ones you
live for.
We refilled our water canisters, then found our chairs again and sat
simmering in the ninety-five-degree heat. We waited and watched the smoke
plume.
Dark gray now. We couldn’t go until we were called in. And the darker the
smoke got, the greater the chance that call would come.
It went to black against the dome of blue sky. Then it started moving to the
northeast, faster. The radio crackled. “Crew Seven.”
That was us. We started the buggies, big white Ford F-450 trucks with
equipment lockers above our heads that held our packs, bins on the side of the
trucks that held all our other gear, and captain’s chairs for us to sit on during the
drive to the fire line. The drivers revved the engines and tore out of the station’s
driveway.
The adrenaline was just about lifting me out of my seat. “Gonna get some!” I
yelled out as we sped off down Sixth Street. “Woooohoooo!” Air gusting
through the windows, wheels squealing around the corners, headed right at
Granite Mountain. It was about twenty minutes to the fire line.
The smoke was moving all the time. We swiveled our heads to keep it in
sight as the buggy took corners.
We were driving down a two-lane highway now. As we got close, the houses
on the other side of the mountain were being evacuated. They sat abandoned,
some with the doors left wide open. Not a soul to be seen. The place was under
mandatory evacuation. But that didn’t mean everyone was out.
We headed toward a checkpoint with a wooden barrier thrown up across the
road; it was there to keep non–emergency personnel from getting near the fire.
The guys manning the barrier saw us coming and pulled it back, shouting to each
other that we were the last car getting through before the road closed.
They don’t close roads unless the fire is moving fast. From that alone, we
realized things were heating up. I knew there were people in cars going the other
way on the phone with their insurance companies, watching the fire approach
and thinking, My house is gone.
We switched to an old dirt road that would take us toward the fire line. It was
rutted and pitched, and the buggy swung left and right as we drove down it.
Jesse was on the radio trying to get a grip on where we should be. What’s the
strategy? Who’s supervising? Where do we engage? You need to fight a fire
from the heel, set an anchor, outflank it, and put it to rest.
But this was Prescott and everyone wanted in. There were cop cars screaming
past and fire companies and dudes in white shirts running around yelling into
their radios. It was chaos. Jesse was asking people what the plan was and they
were telling him: We’re working on it. The fire was out of control, zero percent
contained. Everywhere you looked it was going off.
My heart was revving so high my veins ached. Chris slowed the buggy and as
soon as it came to a stop, we jumped out.
The guys were amped. You could feel it. It reminded me of those soldiers at
Stalingrad: The fire was threatening our homes, our families. It was time to
fight.
Jesse went off and got the plan of attack before returning to give us a quick
briefing. When Jesse left, we grabbed our saws and hucked our packs out of the
back as if they were brown-bag lunches and strapped them on. Then we hustled
out toward the brush. Chainsaws were going off one after the other, rawwwrrr-
rawwwrrr-RAWWWRRR. Fifty pounds felt like five. And in the distance, we
could see the fire sucking in air.
The blaze was coming down a slope three-quarters of a mile ahead of us.
Jesse called out a basic strategy. “For now,” he yelled, “it can cross the highway
to the north. But we can’t let it cross west of the dirt road. Everyone got it?”
Jesse set the anchor—the barrier from which we’d start building the fire line
—then pointed out spots for me and Chris to burn. I didn’t even have time to put
a piece of chaw in my cheek before we were hiking down the highway, looking
for a place to go in.
Chris and I found a gap in the brush and he went first. It was half-dark in
there. The branches scraped along the nylon of my pack as I ducked to get
through, pinging on my helmet. I slotted my sunglasses and grabbed my drip
torch, pulling a lighter out of my pocket. A drip torch is a gallon-sized metal can
used to burn brush and deprive the wildfire of fuel. It drips out a 70/30 mix of
diesel and gasoline through a wick, which is lit at the end. The burning mixture
falls onto the grass or brush or what have you and sets it alight. Crews attach
torches to trucks and even helicopters, but mostly it’s hotshots out there burning
shit up. No time to cry about the lost wildlife, just light it up and keep moving.
I was trying to light the wick with a Bic lighter, but the damn thing wouldn’t
catch. Chris had his lit and was waiting for me, impatience written all over his
face.
“Come on, damn it,” I said, and flicked the lighter again. Nothing. Once
more. The wick lit and I tucked the lighter away. I gripped my Pulaski in my
right hand and my drip torch in my left, and Chris and I moved into scrub oak.
As soon as we got past the brush to a small clearing, we saw the fire a half
mile away. It was cooking, the smoke pitch black.
Chris and I began burning, one eye on the flames and one on the ground
ahead of us. We were carving a burned-out barrier to stop the flames before they
reached town.
When you use a drip torch, whatever you drip it on will usually take a while
to catch, like a birthday candle struggling to light. Not now. Drip, poof! Drip,
POOF! The ground was hot, the air was hot, the fuel was tinder dry. The flames
sprouted full-grown, with that velvety sound a stove burner makes when you
light it. The whole damn desert floor was aching to go up.
Sweat popped on my forehead and rolled down past my Ray-Bans. The heat
was pressing through my yellows, unusually strong. Your body is like a
thermostat; it can sense when heat is about to inflict serious damage. There
wasn’t a lick of cool in the air.
The other bell ringing in my head concerned the brush to our right, the patch
we’d just come through. It was double overhead, twice as high as me, and it was
thick. I didn’t like the look of it. As a hotshot, you have to know where your
escape route is. But just charting a burn line through this stuff was tough going.
The flames were pouring down the hill to our left. Chris and I were lighting
the oak brush, drifting south, trying to keep ahead of the line. But the inferno
was shooting through the stuff horizontally, just eating the brush.
The fire was moving so damn fast. It was two hundred yards away now and
the noise was building. A mountain-sized lion roaring, that’s what it sounded
like. Burning embers flew through the air, lighting up spot fires ahead of the fire
wall.
I was dripping gas to my left when something happened. Suddenly the torch
was spitting out flames and brush was lighting off in front of my face. The air
was catching fire. I knew this happens when there’s too much gas in the mix, but
it was still unnerving.
Panic was shooting through my brain. In my shaking peripheral vision, I
could see that the fire line was now fifty yards away.
I heard Chris yelling behind me.
“Ditch it!” he yelled. “DITCH! IT!” I froze for a half second. Is he really
saying…? I turned to see Chris put out the wick on his torch, then draw back his
right arm as if in slow motion, the torch hanging off his fingers. Then his arm
whipped forward and he heaved the thing toward the wall of flames. Its red
metal spun against blue sky.
Only in the most dire circumstances do you ditch your drip torch. It’s what
keeps the flames off you. It’s what kills the fire. Dropping it is like handing your
gun to the Nazis. But I did’t want the torch to explode and cover me and Chris
with fuel.
The oak brush was angling in from our right. It was as if the landscape were
closing in on us, wrapping us up, delivering us to the fire. Twenty yards away
was a modern two-lane highway that takes you straight to Phoenix, where the
world is modern and safe. But in this tiny little closed-off space Chris and I were
alone. No helicopters, no tankers, no other crew. Just the fire and us.
The blaze was thirty yards away now, the flames two or three stories high. I
snuffed the wick on my drip torch, reared back and launched the thing straight at
the fire.
“Gogogogo!” Chris yelled. I turned and ran, Chris five yards behind me.
I began to hear a particular sound. The sound of a freight train. Fuck no, I
thought.
An out-of-control wildfire that is bearing down on you makes a sound like a
freight train, or really a hundred freight trains shooting out steam at high
pressure. Not only that, but each burst of sound seems to spawn three more, until
there’s this infinitely expanding roar ripping in your ears.
That’s what I was hearing now as I scrabbled toward the brush.
Hotshots believe that once you hear that sound, you’re nearly out of time. If
the wildfire caught Chris and me, we’d either be dead or suffer 100 percent body
burns. There were no other options.
I had a crazy thought: What if I turned, sprinted toward the wall of flame, and
jumped through it. If you’re lucky, you come out the other side with 30 or 40
percent burns across your body. Better than 100 percent. Better than death.
But I couldn’t do it. I had a fast image of bending down to pick up Michaela
and her seeing my face and my hands being patchworks of keloid scars and her
screaming. When you jump through, you have to give up your face. There’s no
way to protect it.
I kept running.
I hit the oak brush at full sprint and threw my left shoulder into it, nearly
losing my balance and toppling over. The brush was just so strong. I began
bulling my way through, grunting and breathing hard. The roar behind me made
it hard to think. The thicket was like a living thing and I couldn’t get through it.
“Push, Chris!” I shouted.
“What?” he yelled.
“Push, motherfucker!”
I felt Chris smash his forearm into my pack and begin shoving me forward.
He grunted. As I barreled ahead, my sunglasses were ripped from my face. Oak