Flagstaff, AZ — Nineteen firefighters died Sunday while battling a fast-moving wildfire northwest of Phoenix, the worst firefighter loss of life in a wildland blaze since 1933.
The firefighters went missing while fighting the Yarnell Hill fire, an out-of-control blaze that had engulfed the evacuated community of Yarnell, population 649, burning down much of the town, officials said. An estimated 200 structures were lost.
The firefighters belonged to the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, an elite unit sponsored by a fire department in nearby Prescott, where residents were grieving through social media after word of the deaths arrived Sunday night.
“This is as dark a day as I can remember,” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer said in a statement. “It may be days or longer before an investigation reveals how this tragedy occurred, but the essence we already know in our hearts: fighting fires is dangerous work.”
The blaze was sparked Friday by lightning, officials said, and remained out of control.
Officials lost radio contact with the crew at 4:30 p.m., said Steve Skurja, assistant spokesman for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. A helicopter crew spotted the bodies, he said.
He said all of the firefighters had deployed their fire shelters – an emergency measure when there is no escape.
Skurja confirmed that 19 members of the 20-person crew had died. One survivor was hospitalized with injuries, he said, but he did not know the firefighter’s condition.
“The fire was very aggressive. It just overtook them,” Skurja said.
Roxie Glover, a spokeswoman for Wickenburg Community Hospital, said officials had told her to expect injured firefighters. Then the grim news arrived.
“It became clear that the firefighters had been deceased,” Glover said. “We were told that we were not getting firefighters.”
But homeowners flooded in, suffering from smoke inhalation as well as shock at losing their homes, she said.
Sunday’s incident appears to be the deadliest in modern wildland firefighting. The previous highest number of deaths in a fire came in Colorado on July 6, 1994. There, at Storm King Mountain near Glenwood Springs, 14 firefighters were trapped when a wind-driven blaze blew up a hill.
Since the 1950s — until Sunday — only three other wildfires had claimed the lives of 10 or more firefighters, and each prompted changes in safety regulations and training.
According to National Interagency Fire Center statistics, Sunday’s deaths were the worst since 1933, when a fire in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park killed at least 25 firefighters.
Officials said some of the Arizona firefighters had been found in fire shelters in the area, where winds occasionally exceeding 40 mph helped fan the flames in 95-degree heat.
Deploying a fire shelter is typically a “last desperate step” for survival, said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “That means they have been trapped.”
A couple dozen firefighters are killed on average each year, he said, but 19 firefighters dying in one fire is a “horrific tragedy.”
When they are fighting fast-moving fires and trying to save lives and property, “firefighters are put into this no-man’s land, having to make these heroic stands … against the unstoppable force of wildfires,” he said.
Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo appeared grim in a late-night news conference.
“Emotionally? We’re devastated,” Fraijo said. “We just lost 19 of some of the finest people you’re ever going to meet. Right now we’re in crisis. … Truly, we’re going through a terrible crisis right now.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.