No one is to blame for the deaths of 19 firefighters who perished in the Yarnell Hill fire in June. That’s the gist of a long-awaited investigation report, released on Sept. 23, from the Arizona State Forestry Division that examined what lead to the deaths of the Granite Mountain Hotshots team in June.
“The judgments and decision of the incident management organizations managing this fire were reasonable,” the report’s executive summary states. “Firefighters performed within their scope of duty, as defined by their respective organizations. The Team found no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.”
The report’s conclusion doesn’t satisfy everyone. “The investigators emphasized that they were unable to answer one of the most-asked questions about the fatalities—why the crew left the safety of the already burned area, the black [the safe zone], to attempt to walk 1.6 miles mostly through unburned brush to another safety zone, the Boulder Springs Ranch,” wrote Bill Gabbert in Wildfire Today.
The Yarnell Hill fire was started by lightning strikes at about 5:00 p.m. local time on June 28. The area is mountainous, with elevations ranging from 4,500 to 6,000 feet. It hadn’t burned since 1966. The area was very dry, with “chaparral brush, ranged in height from one to ten feet, in some places, was nearly impenetrable.”
On June 30 at about 3:30 p.m. local time, the Granite Mountain group was the only crew out on the ridge, which was on the southwest perimeter of the fire.
“Personnel who communicated with the Granite Mountain IHC knew the crew was in the black at that time and assumed they would stay there. No one realized the crew left the black and headed southeast, sometime after 16:04. At 16:30, thunderstorm outflows reached the southern perimeter of the fire. Winds increased substantially; the fire turned south and overran the Granite Mountain IHC at about 16:42,” the report states.
“There is a gap of over 30 minutes in the information available for the Granite Mountain IHC. From 16:04 until 16:37, the Team cannot verify communications from the crew, and we have almost no direct information for them. There is much that cannot be known about the crew’s decisions and actions prior to their entrapment and fire shelter deployment at around 16:42,” the report says.
Had the crew stayed in the black, however, they likely would have survived. The way in which other fire investigations have been handled might be one of the reasons so many questions remain unanswered, according to a blog post by Cally Carswell in High Country News. The 2001 Thirtymile Fire in Washington, for instance, resulted in an incident commander originally being charged with manslaughter in the death of four firefighters.
“The manslaughter charges were reduced, but he pled guilty to the false statements indictment. This hadn't happened before and it sent shivers through the firefighting community,” Carswell writes. This criminal investigation was the result of changes in investigative procedures in such cases to see if crimes were committed, and whether firefights should be charged.
*Wildfire Today’s *Gabbert wrote that the potential for criminal charges may have led to a lack of cooperation by firefighting personnel in the aftermath investigations. The forestry division report concludes with a few recommendations, including a “cooperative effort to reduce hazardous fuels and improve overall suppression efforts for communities that are at high risk from wildfire.”
The report also found some problems with radio communications during the fire, and suggested a review of state wildfire communications plan and program, along with several other reviews.