Aren’t they pretty much supposed to happen, in that firefighters are sent into extremely hazardous situations all the time, and regardless of whatever training they receive or equipment they are supplied with, some situations will prove fatal? In other words, if we truly didn’t want people to die fighting forest fires, would we send them in there in the first place?
The point I was trying to make when the moderator sat on it, is that we as a society have made the largely conscious choice that saving property is worth a certain amount of human lives. Many firefighters have died trying to save the lives of others. Should any firefighters die trying to save houses, which, unlike these young men’s lives, are replaceable? (I don’t know, but am assuming, that the area they were in had already been evacuated, since it was in an extreme fire danger zone and the temperatures there were well over 100 F.)
Would it be possible for you to wait until they are at least buried before you start pointing fingers?
No, they weren’t supposed to die, they were supposed to use their good training to go in safely and save people. Kinda how the fire fighters in New York ran into burning buildings on 9/11.
If you had bothered to read the reports, you would have known that the fire was small until something happened. My guess is a microburst. Then the fire went out of control, killed the Hotshots and burned people’s homes. People fled with only the their pets and the clothes on their bodies.
While I agree with you that land management has been bad as far as fire control, I just do not think that this is a good time to rant about it. Oh, and while you are telling everyone how to fix all the damage caused by years and decades of ignorance, please tell us all how to control the weather.
If you have any complaints or comments about the moderation here, ATMB (About This Message Board) is the place to do it. Take the questions/concerns/complaints there and out of this thread.
You were already told not to try to turn this into any kind of debate. Great Debates or the BBQ Pit are where you should take rants if you want to do that. That means end it in here now.
Some occupations are inherently dangerous. It is the nature of the beast. We can provide training, equipment, etc., to minimize the danger, but the danger remains. That’s because there is always at least one X-Factor that cannot be mitigated. We know it exists. Sometimes we know what it is. We can train for it. We can plan for it. But we cannot predict it with absolute certainty all off the time. Sh*t happens and when it does, people die.
Wildland fire fighting is inherently dangerous. It’s also a hellova lot of fun. It’s mind-blowing to watch a 200-foot conifer explode as the sap vaporizes in the intense heat. It will scare you shtless watching a brush fire, driven by winds, run the prairie faster than an antelope can run it in winter. It’s also mind-fckingly boring being on your hands and knees for hours on end, with gloves off, as you hand sift the ash 12 inches deep looking for hot spots that just might flare up if you don’t find them. Under a hot Sun, with no wind. Been there, done that.
We manage wildland fires for a variety of reasons. Sometimes to improve wildlife habitat and vegetation. Sometimes to prevent loss of life and threats to property. Sometimes because some politician with a big ego just demands it because politics plays a role all the time in wildland fire. (I’ve always hated political fires and arson fires. They put people in danger who should never be there in the first place. But I digress.)
And all the time, safety sits at the top of the heap because we all want to go home. But sometimes that X-Factor creeps in. We catch it and fight back, and win. You never hear about those. They never make the news. What you do hear about is when the X-Factor hits and someone dies. Months later we find out if we missed the signals that it was there. We call it blame. But sometimes the X-Factor strikes too fast. You can be part of the Elites and still get caught, as the 19 were on Sunday.
“It’s worth pondering that the 19 firefighters who died Sunday battling a huge wildfire near Prescott, Arizona, presumably were motivated by something other than rational self-interest. Like the first-responders to 9/11 and other emergencies, and members of the armed forces, they put themselves in harm’s way (or chose a job that did so) because they wanted to serve. Economics, and much of public policy and political strategy, assume that people are motivated by self-interest, that the definition of acting rationally is to maximize what you want for yourself, and that other values – service, duty, allegiance to others, morality, and shared ideals – are either irrelevant or negligible. Yet shared values are the essence of a society. They fuel not only acts of valor, such as those of 19 firefighters, but also social movements – abortion, women’s suffrage, civil rights and environmental protection. Human beings want to be apart of something larger than themselves. They crave moral purpose and social solidarity. If we overlook this, we fail to understand the means of social progress.” - Robert Reich
Note:
“The report doesn’t address the question of why the fire crew was still on the mountain above the town more than an hour after the winds shifted about 180 degrees and brought the fire back toward them. It also wasn’t immediately clear whether the Hotshots were warned of the erratically changing weather before they were forced to take shelter and were killed.”
There’s an extensive new report out in the Tucson Sentinel about the group and the factors that may have led to the tragedy. The main points seem to be:
[ul]
[li]Arizona’s attempt to fight the fire “on the cheap” led to a manageable fire becoming unmanageable.[/li][li]The Granite Mountain crew was trained in and given two priorities: wildfire fighting and structural protection. This is apparently a bad idea, but I leave it to those who understand both types of fire control to comment on that.[/li][li]The crew was also relatively inexperienced and did not have the required minimum number of full-time/permanent members (7). At least one senior member did not meet the requirements to be rated as a senior. Nine of the members had a year or less experience.[/li][li]The crew was probably at or past its maximum deployment limit. The Southwest Coordination Center had refused multiple requests from AZ officials to deploy that crew or a second crew. AZ officials eventually bypassed the center and talked to the superintendent directly.[/li][/ul]
Poor bastards.
I hope the people in charge of budgets feel very guilty over the lack of GPS locators for the hotshots, and that the people in charge of organizing communications feel very guilty over the fact that they were repeated and widespread failures in communication on just about every level possible.
God only knows whether there will be any official repercussions. I think there OUGHT to be.
Dense woods and a decent breeze and you have natures own blast furnace.
The nickname for those emergency fire shelters I always heard in my EMS days was a “Shake and Bake” because its what you do inside them even under the best possible outcome.
