Fire by Sebastian Junger Page A

to protect them from being hounded by the national press corps. The Ramada Inn had become a shark pool of competing journalists, and the last thing survivors needed was TV cameras panning their faces for tears and anguish.
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    O n Monday, July 11, a memorial service was held in Glenwood Springs. While Storm King Mountain smoldered in the background, helicopters flew in formation overhead and people wept to the strains of “Amazing Grace.” President Clinton called Governor Roy Romer from Air Force One, and flags on government buildings throughout the country were at half-mast. At dawn the next day, the bodies of the Prineville nine were driven to Walker Field in Grand Junction and then flown home in a Forest Service DC-3. The remains were delivered to four different airfields in Oregon while honor guards played taps and next of kin received the caskets on the tarmac.
    Before the embers were even cold on Storm King Mountain, a ten-member investigation team was convened and given forty-five days to examine the site and deliver its findings. The team was composed of former fire fighters and experts in fire behavior, meteorology, and safety equipment. The question of specific blame, however, was not supposed to arise; it was to be a strictly analytical study of what had happened and when.
    The preferred view among most federal fire personnel and even most South Canyon survivors was that the West was apocalyptically dry and huge fires were bound to happen. On such fires, people sometimes die; indeed, there are a few fatalities every year. “I would go out on a fire line again with any person who was there,” insisted the BLM’s Mike Hayes. “We were doing the best we could with the resources we had. I mean, there were fifty fires in our district at the time.”
    A siege mentality developed in Glenwood Springs. Questions of specific culpability were construed as lack of respect for the fire fighters and even for the dead. On Monday, July 11, the Glenwood Post ran an article titled “Glenwood Incident Commander: Plans for Escape Worked,” a daring stance to adopt concerning a fire in which fourteen people died. Butch Blanco had told the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel the day before that one smoke jumper (Hipke) who’d escaped had started his run behind the ill-fated Prineville crew. That suggested to him that there had been sufficient time to reach a safe area ahead of the fire. “Whether they [the Prineville nine] didn’t take it seriously, I don’t know,” he said.
    The first people to see the dead were the smoke jumpers who had deployed fire shelters below H-1. “I walked straight to the lower group of bodies and called for a helicopter,” said smoke jumper Anthony Petrilli. “They asked if we needed medevac. I told him it was too late for that, and then I walked up the hill and found six more.”
    An hour later twenty-six smoke jumpers helicoptered in to investigate further. It was an early, unnatural dusk on the mountain as they picked their way past the charred bodies. They reported eleven dead and three missing. Within an hour, Governor Romer was on the scene; he told the smoke jumpers he wanted to remove the bodies as quickly as possible. The jumpers objected, saying that this was no different from a crime scene and the bodies should be left until someone examined them. Romer abided by their wishes. The next morning investigators began to measure things, ponder the dynamics of the mountain, and coax secrets from the dead.
    The first question was how fast the fire had moved, and Haugh’s estimate—that the last three hundred feet were covered in about twelve seconds—turned out to be close. In the end, the investigators confirmed that the fire had covered the quarter-mile slope in about two minutes, hitting its top speed of 18 mph in the dried-out Gambel oak.
    The next question was why it had done that. Fire behavior is determined by an