Although the crew was in constant radio contact with a command team, Ward said, it remains unclear whether the shelters were correctly deployed and why some crew members weren’t able to make it inside theirs. Several members of the team were found within their fire shelters, a heat-reflecting bag, part of the firefighters’ standard equipment, that they are trained to unroll and climb into as last resort when escape from a fire becomes impossible. Arizona, like much of the Southwest, is in the midst of an ongoing drought, one of the affects of climate change scientists believe is likely to worsen wildfires into the future. Until Sunday, Arizona had lost only 22 firefighters to wildfires since 1955, far fewer than Colorado or California, according to federal data. The incident took the lives of the most firefighters since 9/11, when 341 firefighters were killed, according to the National Fire Protection Association, and the most wildfire fighter deaths since the 1933 Griffith Park fire in California, which killed 86. One member of the crew survived, who had gone to relocate the group’s vehicle when the flames swept in. Ward said at the time of the deaths, the massive fire was speeding through the forest at up to a mile a minute, with flames up to 100 feet high. The group, part of the City of Prescott’s Granite Mountain Hotshot crew, was trying to escape from the worsening blaze to a predesignated safety zone when the fire, driven by high winds, suddenly changed direction and overwhelmed the team, a spokesman for the Prescott Fire Department, Wade Ward, told Mother Jones. “It’s only a matter of time.”ġ9 wildland firefighters were killed in Arizona yesterday fighting the Yarnell Hill Fire near Prescott, a forested town in the mountains north of Phoenix. “Anything wrapped in foil that gets exposed to heat, is going to heat up,” he said.
The human body can withstand temperatures of up to 300 degrees F for a short period of time, but temperatures within wildfires can easily exceed 1,000 degrees. Heat will eventually seep into the bag if left near a fire for more than a few minutes, Petrilli said. It’s unclear at this stage whether all the firefighters who lost their lives were able to make it into their shelters in time, or whether the shelters could have failed. Petrilli declined to comment on the effectiveness of these shelters in yesterday’s deaths, citing the ongoing investigation. “The best instructions we can give is that it’s up to you to find the best deployment site,” he said. The standard-issue emergency fire shelter, from a Forest Service handbook on their use.
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