The fire was “still burning very hot” even though there were not a lot of active flames. “There are so many striking parallels between this tragedy and what happened on Storm King in 1994, it’s almost haunting,” he said. Firefighters were unable to escape, as a wall of fire raced up a hillside. In the Storm King tragedy, a rapid change in weather sent winds raging, creating 100-foot tongues of flame.
“The reforms after Storm King were collectively intended to prevent 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. Investigators uncovered numerous errors in how that blaze was fought. Forest Service adopted the guidelines after 14 firefighters died in 1994 on Colorado’s Storm King Mountain. Official standards say fire crews battling a wildfire should identify escape routes and safe zones and that crews should pay attention to weather forecasts and post lookouts. Ward did not address how the 19 others responded after McDonough’s warning or how much time they had to act. “He did exactly what he was supposed to,” Ward said of McDonough, who was in his third season with the unit. He notified the crew of the changing conditions before leaving his post, said Wade Ward, a Prescott Fire Department spokesman who relayed McDonough’s story at an afternoon news conference. Violent wind gusts Sunday turned what was believed to be a relatively manageable lightning-ignited forest fire in the tiny town of Yarnell into a death trap that left no escape for the team, who had long proved they were willing to work in the hottest parts of blazes.īrendan McDonough was assigned to give a “heads-up on the hillside” for the team on that fateful afternoon.
will examine what caused the nation’s biggest loss of firefighters since 9/11. Investigators who arrived from around the U.S. The deaths raised questions over whether the crew should have been pulled out much earlier and if standard precautions would have made any difference in the face of triple-digit temperatures, erratic winds and tinderbox conditions. The harrowing experience of the elite crew’s lone survivor was detailed Tuesday by a Prescott fire official, who also defended his department’s actions in the tragedy that killed 19 firefighters. Shortly before flames engulfed his comrades, the Hotshot firefighters’ lookout radioed his team that the blaze had shifted direction with the wind and that he was fleeing for safety.
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