Firefighting Team Perish in Arizona

 

 



An elite team of 19 firemen were killed on Sunday in one of deadliest U.S. firefighting disasters in decades as flames raced through dry brush and grass in central Arizona, destroying scores of homes and forcing the evacuation of two towns. It was the greatest loss of life among firefighters from a single wildland blaze in the United States in 80 years, since 29 men died battling the Griffith Park fire of 1933 in Los Angeles.

Art Morrison of the Arizona State Forestry Commission told CNN the firefighters, members of a specially trained “hot shot” team who serve as the shock troops of a firefighting force, were killed on Sunday afternoon when they were overtaken by flames.“It was a hand crew, a hot shot crew,” he said. “In normal circumstances, when you’re digging fire lines, you make sure you have a good escape route, and you have a safety zone set up. Evidently, their safety zone wasn’t big enough, and the fire just overtook them. By the time the other firefighters got in, they didn’t survive,” Morrison said.

The crew was initially reported missing before the U.S. Wildland Fire Aviation service said the team had perished in the blaze, which erupted on Friday near the small town of Yarnell about 125 kilometres northwest of Phoenix, the state capital.

President Obama says the deaths of  the 19 firefighters  are a heartbreaking reminder that emergency personnel put their lives on the line every day while rushing toward danger. Obama, who spoke from Africa on Monday, added that America’s thoughts and prayers go out to their families.
“We are heartbroken about what happened,” he said.
Obama says his administration is prepared to help Arizona investigate how the deaths happened. He predicted the incident will force government leaders to answer broader questions about how they handle increasingly destructive and deadly wildfires.

Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo called the tragedy “one of the worst wildfire disasters that’s ever taken place.”  He said one member of the 20-man crew had been in a separate location and survived. There was no immediate information on his condition.
“We teach our people to be safe, to take safety precautions. Sometimes, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work out,” he told reporters at a news conference after darkness fell. He said the unpredictable weather paired with tinder-dry conditions can be a volatile mix for those on the front lines of wildfires.

More crew members and a top-level management team were headed to the site Monday. A total of 250 firefighters and support personnel were assigned to the fire in Yarnell as of Sunday. Fire managers say another four Hotshot crews are on the way. They typically have 20 members each.
Hotshot crews go through specialized training and are often deployed soon after a fire breaks out. Sometimes they hike for miles into the wilderness with chain saws and backpacks filled with heavy gear to build lines of protection between people and fires. They remove brush, trees and anything that might burn in the direction of homes and cities. This crew had worked other wildfires in recent weeks in New Mexico and Arizona.

As a last-ditch effort at survival, hotshot crew members are trained to dig into the ground and cover themselves with the tent-like shelter made of fire-resistant material, Fraijo said. The hope in that desperate situation is that the fire will burn over them and they will survive.
“It’s an extreme measure that’s taken under the absolute worst conditions,” Fraijo said.
The blaze, ignited by lightning and stoked by strong, dry winds and a heat wave that has baked the region in triple-digit temperatures, has charred more than 405 hectares of tinder-dry chaparral and grasslands, fire officials said.

Authorities ordered the evacuation of Yarnell and the adjoining town of Peeples Valley, alerting residents through reverse 911 emergency calls to homes and sending sheriff’s deputies door to door.
“We’re an organization and a city that’s in grief,” Fire Chief Fraijo told reporters late on Sunday. “We grieve for the families, we grieve for the department and we grieve for the city.”
The men’s families “are in terrible shock,” he added. “This is as dark a day as I can remember.”

The Yarnell Hills fire was one of dozens of wildfires in several western U.S. states in recent weeks. Experts have said the current fire season may be one of the worst on record. The National Fire Protection Association lists just seven previous incidents in the United States during the past century that killed as many or more firefighters than on Sunday in Arizona, topped by the loss of 340 firefighters in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
The only U.S. wildland blaze that surpassed Sunday’s disaster was the so-called Devil’s Broom fire in Silverton, Idaho in 1910, in which 86 firefighters perished, according to the association.

Witchy and The Genie send heart-felt sympathy to the families of these brave men.