Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

New West, Old Story

By TIMOTHY EGAN
July 4, 2013, 9:00 pm

Once again, the question hangs over another of the oft-lovely places where fire is at the top of the predator chain: what did they die for? Young men trained to be the best of the best are not supposed to take their last breaths inside the oven of a foil shelter, facedown in hot ground, gasping through the roar of a blowup.

Without question they were heroes, the 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots. Like Smokejumpers in the Forest Service, the Hotshots routinely put themselves on the flank of a fire where no one else will go. If you live in the West, you know them as graduate students or mountain bikers — your neighbors who put on a yellow shirt and 40 pounds of gear to save the place you love.

But as to the question, the why of their deaths: every homeowner in the arid lands owes these fallen men an answer. More than ever, wild land firefighters die for people’s summer homes and year-round retreats. They die protecting property, kitchen views, dreams cast in stucco and timber.

And so it was in Yarnell, Ariz., on Sunday: the Hotshots were sent to the advance guard of a tricky fire in order to protect a former gold-mining community that had become a haven for retirees. After an evacuation order, most of the homes were empty. They were just fuel at that point.

Sunday’s fatal toll from the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona was the greatest loss of firefighter lives in the United States since Sept. 11. But those who died in New York that terrible day were not rushing into a building in order to protect property — they were trying to save lives.

You can’t blame people for living amid the chaparral and piñon pine in the sweep of Arizona where the land rises up from the ceaseless heat of the valley to the cooler air of the plateau. It’s stunning country, even with the menace of monsoon winds in summer. Nor can you blame people in Colorado for living with the sweet fragrance of a forest at 9,000 feet. In the last two decades, by one estimate, almost 40 percent of the new homes built in the West are smack dab in the middle of fire country — a habitat of high risk.

But these homeowners should not expect good people to die protecting those houses. And so in Arizona this week, among the grieving, we heard variations of a theme that always comes up after these tragedies: a structure is replaceable, a life is not.

That sentiment, which is supposed to be the guiding philosophy of fighting wildfires, too often gets tossed aside. In a panic, homeowners rage and scream: do something! They rage and scream at their member of Congress, often an anti-government zealot, who then rages and screams at the federal agencies: do something!

The homeowners know that living in fire country is different from living in the heart of a city. They know the elements — timber, grass, brush, wind, heat, lightning — and the difficult terrain mean that shiny fire trucks cannot arrive at their smoking doorstep on a minute’s notice. They’ve made a pact with combustible nature, a gamble.

And yet, once a galloping afternoon wind transforms a smolder into a sprint of flames, these homeowners expect the best of the best to be on the scene.

“God bless those souls,” Julia Owen, who lives in the area of the Yarnell Hill fire, told The Arizona Republic. “They did it for us. They did it for us.”

After the Big Burn of 1910, which consumed three million acres in a weekend, the Forest Service became the fire service — a protector of woods and cabins rather than a mere steward of the great public land domain. Now almost 40 percent of the Forest Service budget is given over to firefighting. Decisions on which fires to battle often come down to how many homes are in a given area.

Anyone who has fought fire for some time can well recite the awful episodes of recent years: the South Canyon fire of 1994, near Glenwood Springs, Colo., which took the lives of 14 people, or the Thirtymile fire of 2001, in Washington State, with four fatalities. Those fires were exhaustively autopsied; lessons were learned, the authorities said. The words “never again” were spoken at solemn memorials and written into policy manuals.

But here we are again with the question, What did they die for? The author Norman Maclean spent the last 14 years of his life working on a book that became “Young Men and Fire” trying to answer it. His subject was a 1949 fire in Montana that killed a squad of Smokejumpers. It was, he wrote, “a tragedy where nothing much was left of the elite who came from the sky but courage struggling for oxygen.”

*

Related Posts from Opinionator

The Fires This Time
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/the-fires-this-time/

In Fire Country
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/in-fire-country/

*

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/new-west-old-story/ [with comments]


--


Yarnell fire photo of fallen firefighters stirs controversy

The image, which was posted on a Facebook tribute page.
Jul 5, 2013
http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20130704yarnell-fire-photo-fallen-firefighters-controversy.html [with comments] [via http://www.salon.com/2013/07/05/why_do_we_look_at_images_of_death/ (with comments)]


--


(linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=89630495 and following