Fire by Sebastian Junger

“probably in less than thirty seconds. All the body changes—the charring, the muscle contractions, the bone fractures—happened after they were dead.”
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    A bout four-thirty Haugh, Erickson, and Hipke staggered onto Interstate 70. Just an hour before, they had enjoyed a well-earned break on the mountain; now fourteen people were dead. But all they knew at that point was that Blanco, the incident commander, was calling out names on the radio and a lot of people weren’t answering.
    Haugh and Erickson laid Hipke in the shade of a police cruiser and doused him with water to lower his body temperature and prevent him from going into shock. Blanco climbed back up toward the fire to look for more survivors but found none. The eight smoke jumpers who’d deployed their shelters below H-1 emerged, shaken but unhurt. They were saved not by their shelters but by having deployed them on previously burned ground. The fire was still pumping at this point, and Glenwood Springs was now in danger. Flames were racing eastward along the upper ridges, and the BLM command post at nearby Canyon Creek had begun ordering residents to evacuate.
    Haugh’s BLM crew had survived. The other Prineville Hotshots—the upper placements—made it out as well. They had snaked their way down the east side of the ridge through a hellish maze of spot fires and exploding trees. Two of them had tried to deploy their shelters but were dragged onward by friends.
    Word quickly filtered back to BLM officials in Grand Junction that something terrible had happened on Storm King. Mike Mottice, the agency’s area manager, had driven past the blowup and arrived at his Glenwood Springs office around 5:00 P.M . Minutes later crews began arriving from the mountain, and Mottice realized for the first time that there were people unaccounted for. “I hoped that the fire shelters would save them,” he said. “But that evening some smoke jumpers confirmed that there were deaths.”
    The surviving Prineville crew members suspected that some had died, but they didn’t know for sure until later that night. They were shuttled first to the Glenwood Springs office, then to Two Rivers Park at the center of town. An open-air concert was in progress, and they sat in their fire clothes while the mountains burned and local youths took in the music. Finally, around nine, a social worker named Carol Kramer arrived with Prineville crew boss Brian Scholz. Kramer was to take the crew back to the Ramada Inn. A conference room was quickly prepared where she could tell them privately that nine of their friends had died.
    â€œWhen we reached the hotel, they started falling apart,” said Kramer. “At that point, they knew. They were begging us to tell them, to just get it over with. I told them it was bad, that twelve were dead and five were missing.”
    The survivors’ reaction was quick and violent. Some sobbed; others pounded tables. One fire fighter fled the room and threw up. Two crew members quickly left, followed by Scholz, who wanted to keep an eye on them. As a crew boss Scholz considered himself still on duty, and he refused to lose control in front of his men. Gradually a list of survivors was compiled.
    â€œFor a while there was a lot of being out of control,” said Kramer. “Then for a few hours the sobbing was only intermittent; finally, there were a lot of thousand-yard stares. They’d just sit together silently. The next morning they ate a little food. It was a small thing, but that’s what you look for.”
    Some of the most traumatized accepted individual counseling. One thing they needed was to describe the things they had experienced. One man relayed in excruciating detail the sounds of screams and shouts he had heard as he escaped over the hill. Within thirty-six hours, the eleven Prineville survivors were flown home to Oregon—in part to reunite them with their families, in part