Some criticize fire department's early response to fatal blaze.
PHOENIX -- Residents of Yarnell, Ariz., are trying to rebuild their homes and lives, but many are stuck wondering why a small brush fire on June28 was allowed to grow large enough two days later to destroy a quarter of the small community and kill 19 firefighters.
Many had hoped the release of the official investigative report on Saturday would answer questions about the early attack on the fire. It did not. And now anger is building.
"We find it to be just garbage," said Jim Kuempel, 66, a retiree who lives in Glen Ilah, one of the two communities devastated by the blaze. "They spent all this time and probably a lot of money to do this investigation, and they leave out the beginning. What kind of investigation is that?"
The report and its authors said very little about the early assault on the Yarnell Hill Fire on Friday evening, June 28, and the next day. Investigators said the initial lightning strike sparked a small, remote blaze. Yarnell's fire was a lower priority than others in the area and investigators said it would have been dangerous to send ground crews in the dark, over rugged terrain.
But other veteran wildland firefighters say they were trained to aggressively put out small fires, particularly at night when they are easy to battle, so that they don't become more threatening.
Some say the early response to the Yarnell Hill Fire fell short. On June 28, the Yarnell Fire Department decided not to go up the hill to fight the fire. The next day, the Arizona State Forestry Division was slow to mobilize resources, critics said.
"It was a timid, inadequate response on day one and day two," said Bill Gabbert, who, after a 30-year career as a wildland firefighter and a hotshot crew member, launched wildfiretoday.com. "To not send firefighters at night and not attack it with force the next morning is offensive to firefighters who know what they're doing."
Accident reports after some, but not all, of the deadliest wildfires in recent U.S. history point to a poor early response as one contributing factor in accidental deaths.
On the late afternoon that lightning ignited a corner of Yarnell Hill, six similar fires flared up in Yavapai County. All of those were put out. The volunteer Williamson Valley Fire Department sent a squad to one such fire. The crew watched it until state and federal forestry crews showed up, and together they contained the blaze.
At the Yarnell Fire Department, only Capt. Ryan Gardner and 73-year-old volunteer Bob Burkhardt were on duty that day. They went to the base of the hill and called the U.S Bureau of Land Management and Arizona State Forestry Division to let them know they would check out the blaze. They called their chief, Jim Koile, to keep him informed, and he told them to carry on.
But no one went up the hill. Koile decided conditions were unsafe, he said in a July interview with The Arizona Republic.
Veteran Arizona firefighter John Flynn, who now runs a consulting firm, said it's easy to second-guess the decision of the Yarnell Fire Department.
"You can what-if this all day. What if they had had 10 guys? They didn't. That's reality. They turned it over to another agency and the other agency said we'll get there in the morning," he said.
However, firefighters in neighboring Peeples Valley said they called to offer help that night.
"We were told to stand down. Yarnell told us that. They handed it over to BLM," then-Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray said, remembering what Koile said. "After the fact he told me that in fact BLM had nobody on scene, that they had merely been notified."
Koile could not be reached to comment on the report.
Fire moves
Yarnell chief Koile came to work early Saturday morning, June29, and saw a small fleet of emergency vehicles in his parking lot. He went to his office and started calling out-of-town reserves.
"I didn't really focus much on the fire because the forest division was here," he said, adding he didn't want to interfere with the command system.
During the day, a prison crew had failed to stop the fire crossing a dirt track, which had acted as a fuel break. The fire began to spread.
At 3:49 p.m. Koile snapped a picture of the fire station. It shows, barely, a puff of smoke on the hill behind town.
An hour later, incident commander Shumate radioed: "No structures threatened at this time. If it burns to the northeast in the next 24-48 hours, Peeples Valley and Yarnell are possibly threatened."
The National Weather Service on Saturday morning had predicted 100-degree temperatures and that 5 mph winds out of the east that would shift to 20 mph gusts from the southwest in the afternoon. Those gusts would blow the fire northeast — toward town.
Another photo taken an hour after Koile's clearly shows fire and smoke on the hill.
"The fire was going away from us and was in a position where I thought Yarnell was not in any danger. There wasn't a sense of urgency, but there was of concern," Koile recalled.
By dusk on Saturday, a photo shows flames marching steadily into the boulders at the foot of the hill. Pilots had reported 37 mph wind gusts. Hand crews were reported as "ineffective" in the face of 30-foot flames. By 10 p.m., the conversation about evacuations had begun. The forecast for Sunday was ominous.
Sometime after nightfall, Koile drove home, thinking, he said, the fire "looked pretty containable."
But by Sunday morning, the fire had grown to between 300 and 500 acres. Later, the winds shifted as predicted and flames tore through the communities of Yarnell, Glen Ilah and Peeples Valley, destroying 127 homes and killing the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
Differing views
When the Serious Accident Investigation Report came out on Saturday, none of the 16 conclusions addressed events before the Yarnell Hill Fire blew up June30. None of the seven recommendations dealt with the early attack.
The Yarnell community is divided over how fire agencies responded to the wildfire.
"You can't blame humans when Mother Nature takes over," Yarnell Fire District Board President Arlon Rice said.
But tensions remain high.
"Had I been fire chief, that fire would have been out Friday night," former Yarnell chief Peter Andersen said.
Lightning sparked flames 2 miles from the nearest building in Glen Ilah. All that lay in the path was dense, tinder-dry chaparral that hadn't burned in 45years and was measured at record drought and fuel levels.
A "let it burn" approach was unacceptable, Andersen said.
Many in the area don't know who to direct their anger toward.
"I don't know who is to blame," said George DeLange, a retiree whose 1,800-square-foot house in Glen Ilah burned to the ground. "They just didn't handle it properly to begin with. They could have put it out, but they didn't."
Nearby resident Roberta Era agreed.
"It never should have happened, and many of us down here watched this thing from the start. We watched the fire grow and grow," said the 69-year-old, who barely got out alive.
Yarnell Fire District Board member Frances Lechner said she is "completely confident" that the Yarnell Fire Department acted appropriately.
"It was on state land. We don't have a helicopter. We don't have the crew to go into where it started so it was instant hand-off," she said.
Carl Gossard, the BLM's state fire manager for New Mexico, also found no fault in the early approach.
But fire reports and other experts say that's the wrong approach.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal-Fire, has a policy of containing 95 percent of all fires, regardless of where they start, to within 10acres.
"We have a very aggressive initial attack," spokesman Daniel Berlant said, explaining air drops would have been ordered immediately if a blaze like Yarnell's started in California. "We will pull resources off a large fire to put out the small fire because we'd rather fight one large fire than two small fires."
Gabbert, the hotshot-turned-blogger, agreed.
"My philosophy is to attack a fire early with overwhelming force," he said.
Fatal-fire reports generally support the aggressive approach.
In 1991, fire crews failed to completely put out a small fire in the wooded hills in Oakland. The fire reignited and by the time it was out, 25 people were dead and nearly 3,000 homes destroyed. Failure to properly monitor the small fire was cited as a cause.
In 1994, the South Canyon Fire erupted near Glenwood Springs, Colo. The fire was assigned a low priority and it wasn't attacked for three days. Ultimately the fire trapped and killed 14 firefighters. Poor initial response was cited as a cause.
But Arizona's Dude Fire in 1990 had numerous weather similarities to the Yarnell blaze. Thunderstorms spread the flames quickly and ultimately trapped and killed six firefighters. But the fire broke out in the afternoon and initial responses were not a cause.
Lechner, who is also a member of the Yarnell Hill Recovery Group, wants to hold a community meeting to air grievances.
"Part of our rebuilding effort is going to have to be finding some ways to come to peace with this," she said.
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