"An Arizona forestry official says 19 firefighters have died battling a fast-moving wildfire here.
Forestry spokesman Art Morrison said the firefighters were caught by the fire Sunday afternoon near the central Arizona town of Yarnell. He says they were forced to deploy their fire shelters.
The Arizona Republic confirmed the deaths with a high ranking official who asked not to be named."
Some video:
Damn, that hits so close to home. My heart goes out to those firefighters, their families and brethren, and all of the affected residents. It’s a difficult, dangerous job, but oh, so important.
Another video:
These firefighters were killed by the developers who built houses in the middle of the Arizona forest (which is a tinderbox after decades of fire suppression) and the yahoos who bought those houses. If you want to build a house amid giant piles of kindling, fine–but none should pay with their lives for your stupidity.
Let the forest burn–it’s healthier in the long run (for millions of years, no one put out forest fires), and let the artificial houses burn along with it. Then maybe fire insurance rates will reflect the true cost of protecting those houses, and their cost will prove prohibitive. After all, if somebody decides to live in Phoenix and then buys a second home up in the high forest because they can’t stand the heat, should we have young men pay for that with their lives?
Here is a description of the group who died:
http://www.cityofprescott.net/services/fire/hotshots/
Horrible. A cousin is a firefighter in California, and I have the utmost respect for the profession.
Even the emergency shelters couldn’t save them? 
Thats horrible. What a tragedy.
flatlined mentioned in the Pit that one of those guys was her former “minion” (subordinate at work) and how proud he was to get the new job. 
This thread is about young people who died. If you want to debate the wisdom of developing forest land in the West, do so in the Pit or Great Debates.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
Article with pictures of the team before the tragedy. They were elite and experienced firefighters. 
Doing very dangerous work.
My sister spent a summer as a firefighter for the federal government. One of her coworkers died that way the next summer.
At the risk of sounding maudlin:
“May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love”
Into the Fire - Bruce Springsteen
Horribly sad, young people in their prime taken in the pursuit of noble deeds. Many of you have probably read Young Men and Fire by Norman MacLane of A River Runs Through It. If not, it’s one of the better reads on how demanding and dangerous this work really is.
Did those guys dig their own graves??
Here’s a video on deploying a fire shelter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_hpYdFjf2s
Here’s a video of a more realistic exercise deploying a fire shelter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krt5z4eIHnE
Yeah, you are in full gear, running like hell to a designated “safe zone” so you can deploy on mineral soil. And f*cking scared the whole time.
When you watch these bear in mind:
[ul]
[li] Real fire shelters are heavier than this and have an external reflective coating.[/li][li]When fully deployed they look like giant, aluminum-covered baked potatoes (inside joke).[/li][li]You’re supposed to fully deploy in less than 30 seconds; 20 seconds is better.[/li][li]You are positioned face down, feet holding down the rear corners, all tucked in all around, your face in the dirt breathing through the dirt. The risk isn’t the heat. The risk isn’t the flames. The risk is breathing in hot gases that will burn your lungs in seconds and you’re dead.[/li][/ul]
The second video exercise would have been better if there were more people yelling and the deployment location had giant industrial fans blowing at you while the instructors threw dust and wood bits into the fan stream.
[quote=“Duckster, post:15, topic:662314”]
[li]You are positioned face down, feet holding down the rear corners, all tucked in all around, your face in the dirt breathing through the dirt. The risk isn’t the heat. The risk isn’t the flames. The risk is breathing in hot gases that will burn your lungs in seconds and you’re dead.[/li][/QUOTE]
The air volume inside the enclosure is certainly enough to keep them alive for several minutes before too much CO2 builds up and they must let in outside air. So if they can keep the edges of the enclosure snugly against the ground to keep outside air from intruding, in theory they should be able to let the blaze pass by without damaging their lungs.
Of course that’s the big “if.” Is it the case that the winds/turbulence are so violent as the blaze passes by that one edge or another is guaranteed to get ruffled up and admit dangerously hot air?
Thanks for the vids. The Chief in the article that aceplace linked to said that you dig and then cover yourself, which sounded horrifying (hence the vision of digging one’s own grave) but now seeing these in action it’s still terrifying without the digging, as the bags look like body bags.
This is all crazy tragic
Tragic.
In their memory, one of the most haunting songs in my library - Cold Missouri Waters
I didn’t mean “minion” with any disrespect. That was a running joke over my plans to dominate the world, one abandoned storage unit at a time.
The young man who worked for me wanted that so much. He worked so hard. When he thought he had a chance, he started training. Every day at lunch, he would put on his 40 lb. pack and run, jog, walk the mountainous sidewalks of Prescott. When we were standing around and waiting for people, everyone but him would pull out tech toys. He’d pull out a text book or do pushups.
Those guys were highly trained, seriously buffed and none of them were “greenhorns”. I think that when we find out how it happened, it will have been the nature of wildfires and the weather.
The wind in Arizona this time of the year is really strange. Its monsoon season and Arizona has dust devils and microbursts, which are basically mini and very short lived tornados. A microburst sending the fire at and around them would happen so fast that…well…at least it was fast.
This hits hard for me. Living in the land of wildfires, we loved our firefighters. They were the ones who saved our homes. I knew one very well and probably know all the rest by face, small community and all.
This is a true example of the word “tragedy”. These sort of things are not supposed to happen.
I call excessive moderation. The title of the thread does NOT say that the discussion would/should be restricted to the young firefighters and their deaths; rather, it refers to an incident. Yes, the thread’s discussion so far has been confined pretty much exclusively to the young people who died. But that wasn’t a stated stricture. My comments were germane to the discussion, in that unwise building policies put these young men in harm’s way.
The Straight Dope message boards in general are a bit fussbudgety about their moderation procedures. You’re out of line here–my comments were relevant, and I was entitled to make them. Please don’t be so knee-jerk.
