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"  It started with a thunderstorm. Around 5:40 pm on Friday, June 28, residents of the sparsely populated mountains 75 miles northwest of Phoenix reported a wildfire sparked by lightning. The burn grew slowly at first. On Saturday morning, a helicopter crew documented the affected area at 8 acres. At 7:38 pm, the fire was 100 acres\u2014tiny as Western wildfires go. It was still 2 1/2 miles from the closest town, the isolated community of Yarnell, population 650. By Sunday morning, a couple of hundred firefighters were on the scene. Among them were the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a municipal team out of nearby Prescott. The men were highly trained and meticulously fit, one of 110 specialized hotshot crews in the country. The 20-person squads are expert in manipulating the path of wildfire\u2014often battling to protect homes and businesses built as close as possible to some of the country&amp;#039;s most scenic but fire-prone landscapes. For both their expertise and the dangers they face, hotshots are often referred to as the Navy Seals of their field. Fifteen of the 20 Granite Mountain Hotshots were in their 20s, three just 21. Several had firefighting in their blood. Wade Parker, 22, was the son of a local fire captain. Thirty-year-old Chris MacKenzie and 21-year-old Kevin Woyjeck, both from California, had followed their fathers into the profession. Capt. Jesse Steed, 36, was a former Marine who had worked as a municipal firefighter. Superintendent Eric Marsh, 43, the crew&amp;#039;s leader and oldest member, was originally from North Carolina; he caught the firefighting bug while attending college in Arizona. Collectively, the men were fathers to a dozen children, with three more babies on the way. For much of the year they trained together, lugging their heavy gear on conditioning runs and competing for bragging rights at Captain CrossFit, a gym near the fire station. During the summer fire season, they spent weeks at a time on the road, logging 16-hour days in blistering heat as they swung axes and worked chain saws to cut fire lines, bare strips of earth meant to halt approaching flames. The hotshots reported for duty at 8:00 am. After weather, operational, and safety briefings they were assigned to cut fire lines along the southern flank of the fire, far from the active, northern side of the burn. That would protect Glen Ilah, a neighborhood of modest homes about a mile west of central Yarnell and closer to the blaze. They parked their white &amp;quot;buggies&amp;quot;\u2014boxy trucks that doubled as portable toolboxes\u2014near Route 89, the main road through town, and hiked up into the hills. The men skirted boulders and pushed through dense chaparral and pinyon\u2013juniper stands (PJ, firefighters call it), scrub growth that can burn hotter and faster than a forest. The temperature was edging above 100 F, and the relative humidity was only about 10 percent. The men carried 40-pound packs that held their line gear\u2014tools, gas for the saws, food, water, and, attached to the outside for quick access, a 4.4-pound shelter nicknamed the shake-and-bake, to be used only as a last resort if they were being overtaken by fire. These high-tech blankets of layered aluminum, silica, and fiberglass reflect 95 percent of radiant heat and trap a bubble of breathable air for an hour or more. Such shelters have saved firefighters&amp;#039; lives in the past, but they have their limits. If the temperature directly outside the shelter reaches 500 F, the glue holding the layers of material together breaks down and the insulating air gap between them is compromised. The shelters, the hotshots understood, were something you always needed to have but never wanted to use.  Nobody saw the hotshots die. The exact circumstances of their deaths will be pieced together from forensic evidence, which at press time was being analyzed\u2014along with the chain of decisionmaking that led up to their final moments\u2014by an independent investigative team appointed by the Arizona State Forestry Division. What is understood is that 19 men were trapped and burned by a rush of wind-fueled flame that consumed the landscape with a speed that few firefighters have ever witnessed. And that they were fighting to protect a town located in the heart of terrain that was highly vulnerable to fire. When they died, the men were only about a half-mile from the outskirts of Yarnell. The burn was compact\u2014about 3 percent as large as this summer&amp;#039;s California Rim Fire\u2014but it caused the largest death toll of professional wildland firefighters in more than a century. Only the Great Fire of 1910, which charred large swaths of Idaho and Montana and killed dozens of firefighters, was deadlier. That disaster provided the fledgling U.S. Forest Service with an overriding purpose\u2014the elimination of wildfire\u2014that resonated with the public but ironically helped lead to the volatile fire conditions we face today. The following decades saw a steady stream of casualties, punctuated by disasters. The 1949 Mann Gulch fire in Montana, made famous by the book Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, overtook 13 smoke jumpers, many of them just teenagers, as they raced up a steep slope trying to escape. More recent tragedies include the 1990 Arizona Dude Fire, which took the lives of six firefighters, and Colorado&amp;#039;s 1994 Storm King Mountain blaze, in which 14 firefighters died. After each of those disasters, officials tried to improve the tools and tactics of firefighting to prevent further deaths. That process will be repeated with the Yarnell fire tragedy. But the discussion shouldn&amp;#039;t stop there. Wildland firefighters die every year\u201474 of them in the five years ending in 2012\u2014even when there is no large-scale disaster such as Yarnell. A painful question looms over these losses: Are wildland firefighters dying because of where people choose to build their homes? In the United States, wildfires are becoming bigger, more extreme, and more expensive. The average length of the summer fire season has increased by about 75 days since the 1970s, and the total area burned each year has more than doubled in just the past decade. In the 1980s, about 600 American homes were lost to wildfires in an average year. Since 2000, the average has been closer to 2700. One reason is that a century of aggressive fire suppression has resulted in an unprecedented fuel buildup that feeds larger, more violent blazes. Decades of rising temperatures across the West\u2014a climate trend that is expected to intensify\u2014have made matters worse. (Some blazes may be bigger, as officials withhold firefighters from the most dangerous situations, a reform put in place after 1994&amp;#039;s Storm King disaster.)  Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to what may be the greatest hazard to property and lives: housing developments encroaching on what used to be considered wilderness. Between 1990 and 2008 there were about 17 million homes built in the United States. Ten million of those were constructed in the dangerous frontier between developed land and fire-prone open space, a boundary that policy experts call the wildland\u2013urban interface, or WUI. Stephen J. Pyne, an Arizona State University historian, worked 15 seasons as a wildland firefighter. He has authored a dozen books on the topic and has become a leading authority on Western fire management. &amp;quot;We all want dispersed communities so we don&amp;#039;t have to deal with neighbors,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But if you&amp;#039;re in town then the only structures that are really at risk are the ones on the outer perimeter. If you took that same number of houses and you scattered them equally through the scrub, then they&amp;#039;re all at risk.&amp;quot; The most effective way to tamp down wildfire risk would be to stop building in dangerous locations. A more palatable step for many people would be for vulnerable communities to speed the adoption of urban-style building codes and zoning rules. In the 19th century, conflagrations tore through places such as Chicago and Boston, eventually leading to universal fire regulations. &amp;quot;We don&amp;#039;t have cities burning anymore,&amp;quot; Pyne points out. &amp;quot;For a city to burn it has to be either an earthquake or a war.&amp;quot; Of course, the freedom to live and build without following a lot of rules is one of the reasons people move to remote areas in the first place. New regulations could reduce fire losses, but they might not be popular.  Three days after the hotshots died, on the morning of Wednesday, July 3, I stood at a roadblock on Route 89, about 4 miles south of the charred remains of Yarnell. I was one of a couple of dozen journalists scattered along the blacktop&amp;#039;s edge. On the other side of the road were a long line of TV news trucks, a half-dozen sheriff&amp;#039;s deputies handling the road closure, and a couple of A-list Forest Service public-affairs specialists brought in from as far away as Wisconsin and Oregon. Beyond the roadblock, the fire still burned. Six hundred firefighters were working an 8400-acre blaze that was just 8 percent contained. Right now, though, they were standing down, observing a few moments of silence in tribute to their fallen brothers. Finally, we saw the first of the hotshots&amp;#039; empty buggies. The officers stood at attention, hands in salute above tear-welled eyes, as a procession of municipal trucks escorted the vehicles out of the fire zone and home to Prescott. The human remains had been removed two days earlier. Once the procession had passed, the PR folk handed out green Nomex pants, canary-yellow shirts, and matching helmets\u2014the same clothing worn by firefighters. I layered the protective gear over my own clothes and joined a chaperoned caravan into the fire zone. We stopped along a dirt road that connected a handful of homes, each spaced at least an eighth of a mile apart\u2014part of a subdivision northeast of Yarnell called Model Creek. There were no visible flames, but all around were burned slopes and the blackened skeletons of trees. Wisps of smoke and ash rose in the light breeze. The neighborhood was empty of residents, but for the past five days firefighters had been working to save the homes. Scattered firefighters were visible in the distance, specks of yellow against a black horizon. They were mopping up\u2014methodically treating remaining hot spots that might be prone to reignition if the wind were to pick up. It was hard not to feel like the entire region was one big funeral pyre. Firefighter Todd Pederson had been working in this area on Sunday afternoon, when the Granite Mountain Hotshots died. &amp;quot;Everybody wants to know why, why it happened,&amp;quot; he told a handful of journalists staring up at the scorched hills. He didn&amp;#039;t know those men personally, but he did know they were skilled professionals with years of training and experience. &amp;quot;It puts you in one of those positions where you&amp;#039;re like, would we all have chosen to do what they did? It&amp;#039;s obviously not just part of doing business for us,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;People shouldn&amp;#039;t be dying doing this job.&amp;quot;  Throughout Sunday afternoon, 19 of the hotshots worked establishing fire lines high in the rocky, scrub-filled hills about 11/2 miles west of Glen Ilah. On a ridgetop to the north, closer to the active fire, was the last member of the team, 21-year-old Brendan McDonough. It was standard procedure for a hotshot crew working in active fire conditions to designate a lookout, and McDonough, who was in his third season with the hotshots, was on the job, charged with ensuring the safety of the crew by watching and reporting the movement of the fire. Each team was also expected to designate at least one safety zone, an area of retreat if the work area became too dangerous. Later reports speculated that the Granite Mountain Hotshots had chosen a cleared area around a small ranch located down the ridge from their work zone, about a quarter-mile west of Glen Ilah. Around 3 pm, McDonough and crew captain Jesse Steed had a radio conversation about the changing weather. &amp;quot;The captain said to expect 180-degree wind shift and that we could expect gusts up to 50 to 60 mph,&amp;quot; McDonough later told the Prescott Daily Courier. As wildland firefighters reach a new work zone, they&amp;#039;re required to set trigger points\u2014geographical conditions under which they agree to retreat to their safety zone. Soon after his conversation with the captain, the shifting winds caused McDonough to reach his own trigger point. Both he and his supervisors could see the edge of the active fire to the north, and could tell that the wind had changed direction. McDonough radioed to crew superintendent Eric Marsh, and told him that he was moving out. &amp;quot;Call me if you need anything,&amp;quot; McDonough said. Then he walked down to a dirt road, where he was picked up by the superintendent of another hotshot crew. It wasn&amp;#039;t until McDonough was off the hill that he looked back up at his lookout spot. It was already burned over. Everything was gone. At 4:04 pm, the Granite Mountain Hotshots were still on the ridge above Glen Ilah. Soon after that, they headed downhill into a narrow box canyon that was smothered with dense, 10-foot-high chaparral. The hike from the ridge to the floor of the gully would have taken about 20 minutes, Darrell Willis, a division chief with the Prescott Valley Fire Department, later estimated. Though it&amp;#039;s clear that the hotshots were aware of the forecast calling for high winds moving in their direction, there is no indication that any of them hesitated before descending the slope. The growing winds were the result of seasonal thunderstorms that locals refer to as monsoons. The storms typically make June and early July the worst fire months in Arizona and New Mexico. By mid-to-late June, a hot, high-pressure system typically builds to the north. That ridge of high pressure causes prevailing winds in the region to shift from the southwest to the south-southeast and to drag in subtropical moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of California. That Sunday, strong winds heightened the danger, but there was also another factor, explains Michael Crimmins, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona. The moisture was concentrated at 15,000 to 25,000 feet in the atmosphere. Precipitation fell, but it never reached the ground. &amp;quot;That rain would evaporate and then become very cold air, and that cold air was heavy, so it would fall to the ground and spread out in every direction,&amp;quot; Crimmins says. Heavy air flows through complex topography the way that water would, and creates complicated wind patterns, including outflows, the outdoor equivalent of what city firefighters know as a backdraft: a rush of fresh air that feeds and propels the flames. It was around 4:30 when it became obvious from radio transmissions that something was going horrifically wrong on the south end of the Yarnell fire. &amp;quot;You could hear the guys trying to get Air Attack\u2014the aerial supervision of the fire,&amp;quot; says Pederson, the firefighter who was working Model Creek. &amp;quot;They wanted those guys because they can get you help in the way of helicopters or retardant. They wanted them to know where they were at because they were in trouble.&amp;quot; By the time the hotshots reached the floor of the canyon, their mistake must have been clear. They started cutting out an emergency safety zone, a patch of bare earth that they hoped would protect them from the fire that they could presumably see approaching the mouth of the gully from the northeast. They had enough time to cache their saws and fuel outside their safety zone, just as their training had taught them. A final radio transmission revealed that they intended to &amp;quot;burn out&amp;quot; around them, purposely setting a smaller fire that would consume some of the surrounding chaparral and manzanita shrubs and\u2014they hoped\u2014lessen the intensity of the approaching blaze. Finally, they clustered close together inside their safety zone, and the men deployed their emergency shelters. At 4:47 pm, Air Attack reported what no incident commander ever wants to hear: &amp;quot;Have a deployment\u2014unknown how many shelters at this time,&amp;quot; the air crew told their supervisors. Incident commanders waited until the thunderstorms had passed to allow a helicopter, carrying an EMT, to take off and land inside the charred canyon. At 6:35 the medic reported that he&amp;#039;d counted 19 shelters. And 19 bodies. Just minutes later, at 6:39, the fire jumped Route 89 and invaded the town of Yarnell.  By midnight on Sunday, the fire had expanded to 8400 acres\u2014about 13 square miles. One hundred and fourteen buildings had burned. Then it stalled: There were no additional casualties or homes lost. By week&amp;#039;s end the fire was contained. By size, it doesn&amp;#039;t rank in the top 50 fires of the 2013 season. &amp;quot;Almost all mass-fatality fires are small fires, or they are small portions of large fires,&amp;quot; says Pyne. &amp;quot;But they&amp;#039;re in circumstances where the vegetation fuels can react very quickly to a change, particularly a change in wind.&amp;quot; The deaths often occur in what can be thought of as topographic chimneys, he says. &amp;quot;People are moving across in a gully, across a mountain up top, and something blows up below them and they can&amp;#039;t get out. It just roars up like it&amp;#039;s going up a flue.&amp;quot; Three weeks after the fire, Darrell Willis stood at the site where the 19 hotshots had died, surrounded by a cluster of journalists. The encounter was recorded by reporter John Dougherty of investigativemedia.com. A flagpole had been erected, and a chain-link fence protected the site. It was still a couple of months before the final investigative report would be released, but it was already clear that the Granite Mountain Hotshots had taken a series of calculated risks. And, tragically, on that day, in those fire conditions, their calculations had been wrong. Willis was one of the founders of the municipal hotshot team, and he knew the men well. His gut is that they left the ridge not to retreat to safety, as some have suggested, but to protect homes. &amp;quot;I believe that they felt that they weren&amp;#039;t doing good where they were,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;They had to abandon their tactic of trying to anchor and flank the fire and go into what we call point protection, and that&amp;#039;s to move fire around houses and protect structures.&amp;quot; From the ridge the men could see the vulnerable homes in Glen Ilah below them\u2014the houses they&amp;#039;d been working all day to protect. Willis believes they felt an impulse, perhaps a duty, to save them. &amp;quot;They were in a safe location,&amp;quot; he says, but &amp;quot;they were not satisfied . . . sitting there and watching the fire progress without taking some action.&amp;quot; At the time of their deaths, the hotshots had strayed from several of the tenets of wildland firefighting: After they left the ridge, they entered a confined area of dense vegetation even though they knew a fire was approaching. They couldn&amp;#039;t see the fire but no longer had a lookout. Willis described that situation as common. Nevertheless, it&amp;#039;s likely that the investigation will look hard at the team&amp;#039;s decisionmaking. Willis himself\u2014a man heartbroken for widows, children, and the loss of 19 men he considered adopted sons\u2014was already looking for lessons from the tragedy. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want them to have died in vain,&amp;quot; he said, after describing how he spent the night of June 30 in the canyon with the bodies. The next morning, after county authorities documented the scene, Willis and fellow firefighters\u2014including Danny Parker, the father of one of the victims, Wade Parker\u2014personally transported the men, whose remains had been draped with American flags, back to town. After the fire, some local residents angrily questioned whether state and federal authorities had failed to react aggressively enough in the earliest hours, before the blaze became a threat to homes and lives. It became clear that on June 29 and 30 some of the air resources requested were refused or delayed, which wasn&amp;#039;t necessarily a surprise; there were other wildfires burning in Arizona at the time, and the national shortage of firefighting planes and helicopters is a well-known problem. What the country may need to ask is how well residents of such communities are preparing for the inevitable. Yarnell, for instance, was surrounded by low desert scrub, much of it dead growth that was preserved from year to year by the arid climate. The region was experiencing a decade-long drought and had not been cleared by a wildfire in 45 years. The landscape was just waiting to ignite. Surprisingly, it&amp;#039;s not that hard to prepare a home to withstand most wildfires. Stephen Pyne&amp;#039;s home weathered the Wallow Fire that burned 540,000 acres in eastern Arizona in 2011. &amp;quot;Despite the graphic photos we see, houses are not taken out by a kind of tsunami of flame rumbling across the landscape unstoppably,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They are consumed by small embers, what the Aussies call ember attacks, what you might think of as a shower of sparks.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s plenty that can be done to prevent those embers from destroying homes. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;ve got a combustible roof, just forget it,&amp;quot; Pyne says. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve known that for 10,000 years.&amp;quot; If you want to protect houses, he argues, you&amp;#039;ve got to put your effort into hardening the structure, essentially taking a hurricane-like approach to fire preparation. A simple task is to remove flammable vegetation and to clean out gutters. &amp;quot;Those become points of ignition, or infection, if you will, for the fire to spread,&amp;quot; he says. Australia, which has experienced drought and fire problems far greater than those in the U.S., has for two decades taken an approach that relies on homeowners to prepare their property to survive a wildfire. In addition, during all but the most catastrophic blazes, Australian policy permits, even encourages, residents to remain in place to knock out the embers that cause buildings to ignite, often hours after the primary fire has passed. &amp;quot;If you mass-evacuate, you eliminate that possibility,&amp;quot; Pyne says. U.S. officials have rejected the idea of encouraging people to stay in place and defend their homes. However, a small but growing number of American communities are taking other lessons from the Australian strategy. Over a decade ago, the Forest Service embraced an interagency program called Firewise, which helps towns and cities develop wildfire protection plans\u2014everything from taking steps to make houses more resilient and defendable, to establishing public safety zones where residents can retreat. Of the estimated 70,000 U.S. communities identified as being in the wildland\u2013urban interface, 943 of them have now prepared to survive a wildfire, up from 400 in 2008. Unfortunately, Yarnell wasn&amp;#039;t one of them. A few weeks after the tragedy, scientists from the Pacific Biodiversity Institute in Washington state conducted a limited analysis of the area&amp;#039;s homes. Using Google Earth images from before the fire, they studied the 503 structures in Yarnell, including Glen Ilah, and determined that just 53, or 11 percent, met the most basic fire-safety standards, with no vegetation overhanging structures and a minimal buffer zone between buildings and nearby plantings. Only 14 of those 53 buildings met the official Firewise criteria, which call for a full 30-foot buffer zone around each structure.  After they&amp;#039;d completed their online analysis, the researchers reviewed the destruction caused by the fire. Forty-seven percent of the town&amp;#039;s 503 structures had sustained fire damage. Of the 53 structures that were better prepared, the figure was less than 10 percent. Not a single one of the 14 buildings that met the Firewise criteria was damaged. &amp;quot;We have this attitude that the firefighters are going to come and rescue us and we don&amp;#039;t have to take responsibility,&amp;quot; says Peter Morrison, one of the researchers behind the study. That stance worked better before the mass migration into the chaparral, the grasslands, and the forests that has taken place over the past several decades, he says. Focusing on preparedness and self-defense doesn&amp;#039;t eliminate the need for firefighters. &amp;quot;But it means that they&amp;#039;re going to be much more successful in doing their job and much less likely to put their lives at risk.&amp;quot; Wildfires are unlikely to diminish on their own. A recent National Research Council report concluded that the amount of land burned in the western U.S. could double or even quadruple for every 1.8 F rise in global average temperature; even optimistic temperature projections have that increase occurring by 2050. Programs like Firewise may only be the start. We also need to consider disincentives to building in such areas in the first place. Like the flood insurance shoreline residents are increasingly required to carry, specialized wildfire insurance could be mandated for people moving into fire-vulnerable areas. Some experts have suggested that the mortgage-interest tax deduction should be denied to residents of highly dangerous areas. Such actions, like erecting regulatory barriers to rebuilding in hurricane zones, are likely to be wildly unpopular. They would also be likely to save the taxpayer heaps of money and to preserve lives. After all, if we don&amp;#039;t want men and women to be killed protecting us, we can help by staying out of harm&amp;#039;s way. Many of the homes in Glen Ilah were reduced to ash and rubble. But the ranch that the Granite Mountain Hotshots had been approaching did not burn. On my dirt-road tour of the Model Creek subdivision, I saw an uneven pattern of destruction. The homes had been sprayed and prepared by firefighters, and most of them were intact. But then we rounded a corner and were feet from the gutted remains of what appeared to have been an average-size, single-family house. There was little left but the chimney. What made this home burn and not the others, I wondered. Was there brush pressed up around the house? Clutter filling the yard? What if the home had been built from the ground up to resist fire\u2014would that have made a difference? What if every homeowner in and around Yarnell had hardened their homes against fire\u2014been required to, even fined if they failed to do so? What if our national fire policy put more onus on the homeowners who choose to live in fire zones, and less on the firefighters who rarely hesitate to rush in to protect them? Maybe then, 19 men would be out there today, swinging, sawing, sweating, and living to fight another day. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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