Fire by Sebastian Junger Read Free Book Online Page A

hard to stop because the fire moves from tree to tree without ever touching the ground. You can stop a crown fire only by cutting a lot of trees down, and after a certain point it becomes a case of cutting down the forest to save it.
    The Union crew spread out in pairs to hit the spot fires and Miranda and I climbed on to the crest of the ridge. Below us, an entire river drainage of charred trees stretched away to the west. Occasionally a solitary tree torched down in the valley and sent up a tremendous plume of smoke. A temperature inversion had trapped the smoke low in the valley, and Miranda said that when it lifted—when the smoke started to rise—that meant that the air was turning over, and convection would invigorate the fire. At that point they would probably call in a substantial air attack in an effort to keep the fire contained on the west side of the ridge.
    We followed the ridge, which climbed toward a peak that we had seen above camp. Below us on our right, the forest smoked. Below us on our left, hotshots worked the spot fires in small groups of three or four. An enormous Siller Brothers Skycrane helicopter with a bucket clattered up and down the valley, unleashing two thousand gallons of Smith Creek Lake water at a time. Four sawyers from the Smokey Bear crew dropped a flame-gutted ponderosa and then called in a water drop, and the Skycrane responded in minutes. Two thousand gallons, hitting a hillside from a hundred feet, is practically enough water to body surf downhill through the trees. When the water subsided, the sawyers bent over and began grubbing through the wet soil for embers.
    Twenty minutes later, as they were finishing up, a message came over their radio from the fire camp: “Steve Shaeffer, Steve Shaeffer, Smokey Bear, your wife is in the hospital at this moment having a baby.” The sawyers grinned at one another; it was rare that overhead called with personal news that wasn’t bad. Shaeffer was farther up the ridge, hitting spots alongside the Negrito crew. He wasn’t able to go home, but at least he’d gotten the news.
    At the top of the ridge we were met by the branch director, a strapping dark-haired man with a white-flecked beard and wind-burned face named Mike Rieser. He had fought fires since 1973 and was now fire control officer for the BLM Craig District in Colorado. We sat down and opened our lunches on a rock outcrop that overlooked the burning valley.
    Rieser has personally known eight people who died on fires. “Wildland fire fighting has one of the highest incidences of fatalities and injury in the country,” he said. “In 1990 twenty-three people died, out of ten thousand active fire fighters. Six died on the convict crew at the Dude fire in Arizona, and that same week two were burned over in California. I saw a film of the first walk-through after the Dude fire; the heat varied so much that one shelter would be fine and the next one would have started to disintegrate.”
    The Dude fire happened along the Mogollon Rim, on the north side of the Grand Canyon. It was a classic plume-dominated fire, but the topography of the rim served to intensify the downdrafts. Moments before the fire blew up, the Prescott Hotshots noticed a strange calm that often precedes a plume-dominated situation and radioed the overhead team that they were pulling out. The Perryville inmate crew and the Navajo Scouts crew were warned of the danger as well, but they were in exactly the wrong spot. The downdraft hit right in front of them and, funneled by the contours of the canyon rim, drove the fire straight toward them. Half the inmate crew escaped, as did the entire Navajo Scouts crew. The rest of the fire fighters dived into their shelters and waited for the flame front to pass over them.
    From laboratory tests, researchers know that the adhesive that holds fire shelters together starts to melt at six hundred degrees Fahrenheit. That causes the fiberglass and