Inspectors to see why 19 died in fire

Probe begins into why 19 firefighters died in Arizona.

Examiners arrive in Arizona to see if 19 fallen firefighters followed safety rules,

PRESCOTT, ARIZONA — Fire crews battling a wildfire should identify escape routes and safe zones. They should pay close attention to the weather forecast. And they should post lookouts.

Those are standards the government follows to protect firefighters, which were toughened after a wildfire tragedy in Colorado nearly two decades ago. On Tuesday, investigators from around the U.S. arrived in Arizona to examine whether 19 firefighters who perished over the weekend heeded those rules or ignored them and paid with their lives.

In the nation’s biggest loss of firefighters since 9 /11, violent wind gusts Sunday turned what was believed to be a relatively manageable lightning-ignited forest fire in the town of Yarnell into a death trap that left no escape for a team of Hotshots.

The tragedy raised questions of whether the crew should have been pulled out much earlier and whether all the usual precautions would have made any difference at all in the face of triple-digit temperatures, erratic winds and tinderbox conditions that caused the fire to explode.

In 1994, 14 firefighters died on Colorado’s Storm King Mountain, and investigators afterward found numerous errors in the way the blaze was fought. The U.S. Forest Service revised its firefighting policies.

“The reforms after Storm King were collectively intended to pre- vent that from happening again, which was mass entrapment of an entire Hotshot crew,” said Lloyd Burton, professor of environmental law and policy at the University of Colorado.

“There are so many striking parallels between this tragedy and what happened on Storm King in 1994, it’s almost haunting.”

Those changes included policies that say no firefighters should be deployed unless they have a safe place to retreat. They must also be continuously informed of changing weather.

“If you don’t have those things in place, it’s not advisable to deploy a team in the first place, because you can’t guarantee their safety,” Burton said.

The Hotshot team from Prescott entered the smoky wilderness over the weekend with backpacks, chainsaws and other heavy gear to remove brush and trees and deprive the flames of fuel.

But the blaze grew from 200 acres to about 2,000 in a matter of hours as “the wind kicked up to 40 to 50 mph gusts and it blew east, south, west — every which way,” said Prescott City Councilman Len Scamardo.

“What limited informa- tion we have was there was a gust of wind from the north that blew the fire back and trapped them,” Scamardo said.

The fire crew had posted firefighter Brendan McDonough, 21, as a look- out on a hillside to relay information to them, Wade Ward, a Prescott Fire Department spokesman, said Tuesday. He said McDonough “did exactly what he was supposed to” when conditions changed as his team fought the blaze, notifying them that the weather was changing rapidly and that the fire had switched direction because of the wind. He also told them he was leaving the area and to contact him by radio if they needed help, Ward said.

He said McDonough, the sole survivor of the 20-man company, was “trying to deal with the same things that we’re all trying to deal with” Tuesday and did not want to speak to reporters.

Retired smoke jumper Art Morrison, a spokesman for the Arizona State Forestry Division, said it’s essentially a judgment call as to whether there is somewhere safe to retreat to if the flames suddenly blow toward crews and they have to flee for their lives.

“Whatever they used as a safety zone just didn’t work” he said.

Dick Mangan, a retired U.S. Forest Service safety official and consultant, said it is too early to say if the crew or those managing the fire made mistakes.

“The fact that they’re dead and that they had to deploy fire shelters tells us that something was seriously wrong,” Mangan said. But then again, he said, they may have been doing everything right, and “this just might have been a weather anomaly that nobody saw coming that happened too quickly to respond to.”

CONTRIBUTED BY JULIANN ASHCRAFT Firefighter Andrew Ashcraft and members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots watch a wildfire that later swept over and killed the crew of 19 firefighters near Yarnell, Ariz., on Sunday. Violent wind gusts created a death trap.

JULIE JACOBSON / ASSOCIATED PRESS Stephen Grady reads various notes left at the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew fire station Tuesday, in Prescott, Ariz., in memory of the 19 firefighters killed.