Megafire Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Everybody’s Hometown

  Yarnell Hill

  Fuses and Bombs

  Prescott

  Our Greatest Ally, Our Fiercest Foe

  Heartstrong

  Red Buffalo, Black Dragon

  Crazy Woman

  The Bigger Blowup

  The Crowded Forest

  Mansions in the Slums

  The Blackline

  Slop-Over

  Off to the Races

  Red Zones

  Turning Up the Heat

  Playing with Fire

  Nuclear Frying Pan

  The Vanishing Forest

  The Fire-Industrial Complex

  Photos

  High Park

  Firebugs

  Forest Jihad

  Extended Attack

  Mountain Shadows

  Firestorm

  Seeing Red

  Never Winter

  Black Forest

  Trickle Down

  Backfire

  Frontier Days

  Defusing the Time Bomb

  The Doce

  Where the Desert Breeze Meets the Mountain Air

  The Perfect Firestorm

  Trigger Points

  Nineteen

  Blowback

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Kodas

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-547-79208-8

  “The Hotshot Prayer” written by Patricia Huston, as adapted by Brendan “Donut” McDonough. Copyright © 2002 by Patricia Huston. Adaptation copyright © 2013 by Brendan “Donut” McDonough. Reprinted by kind permission of Patricia Huston and Brendan “Donut” McDonough.

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

  eISBN 978-0-547-79212-5

  v1.0717

  To Melvin, who taught me to respect the men and women who do hard, dangerous work; and to Anita, who taught me to care about them.

  For the 19 fallen Granite Mountain Hotshots and the other 30 wildland firefighters who perished while I reported this book.

  Prologue

  THE FOURMILE CANYON FIRE BROKE OUT on Labor Day 2010, while my wife and I were moving into a cottage in the Colorado Chautauqua, a National Historic Landmark and park overlooking Boulder.

  Our home for the year at the foot of the Flatirons—pinnacles of red rock that define the city’s skyline—carries a rugged, rustic status. The historic dining hall and auditorium 100 yards below our cottage hosted Teddy Roosevelt a century before we moved to the park and bands such as Los Lobos after we arrived. At night we listened to the concerts from the easy chairs on the cottage’s front porch while staring at the lights of the city sprawling below a forest of stars. In the morning we looked out on hot air balloons ascending in the sunrise. On game days we could see the crowds and hear the cheers in the stands of the University of Colorado’s football stadium. The panorama of dark mountain forests descending to the glowing city highlighted what made Boulder County one of the fastest-growing counties in the West.

  The cottage’s interior was as rough-hewn as the Rockies. Ancient knob-and-tube electrical wiring drooped from the ceilings. A cockeyed brass chandelier seemed like it might burst into flame if you looked at it wrong. The windows sat off kilter in their sills. Stinkbugs and box elder beetles didn’t even have to slow down to fly inside through the gaps. Sunlight beamed between the slats into the dim, dusty interior.

  Between the wiring, the wood, and the trees surrounding the cabin, our new life seemed almost designed to burn, but the charm of the location all but blinded us to that. We raved about the delicious apples that fell from the tree overhanging the front gardens, but never discussed the fire hazard posed by the pine needles that piled up in the corners of the roof and the century-old clapboards.

  As we unloaded our boxes, we heard the first planes and choppers buzz over our heads on their way to the wildfire that was already devouring homes. We listened to a police scanner on a laptop and wondered how quickly the ancient wooden cabin would ignite if a firebrand landed on it. I quit unpacking and climbed to the top of the First Flatiron. From there, more than 1,000 feet above our new home, I could see the column of smoke rising five miles away.

  On the shoulder of Flagstaff Mountain, farther west, I joined nearly 100 other Boulder residents looking out on the flames spreading over Sunshine Canyon and Sugarloaf Mountain. The vista was similar to the one I had over the city from my porch, but the scene wasn’t nearly so idyllic. Instead of balloons in the sunrise, we watched air tankers paint red crescents in the sky just above the flaming pines. We could see some of the more palatial homes in the canyons and watched as the fire worked its way among them. The houses didn’t explode, but gradually showed a tiny bit of red around their bases or on their roofs.

  “That one’s going up,” someone would shout as soon as they saw the slightest glow. Sometimes the houses burned fast, but usually it took 30 minutes or more for them to become fully engulfed. Despite covering dozens of wildfires, and fighting them over a summer, this was the first one I saw destroy people’s homes.

  The Fourmile Canyon Fire burned 169 residences and was the first of four fires in four years that would break the “most destructive” fire record in Colorado. While it never threatened Chautauqua or our cottage, it did burn away many of the ideas I had about wildfire. The houses of Fourmile Canyon would be rebuilt long before I filled those voids in my understanding.

  Five years later a fire more than a thousand miles away hit even closer to home. In Lake County, California, my brother Jeff was living in a cabin similar to our onetime home in Chautauqua. During the height of the summer of 2015 the Rocky and Jerusalem Fires burned within a dozen miles of Jeff’s cabin. Then, in September, the Valley Fire burned 76,067 acres through the mountains where he lived.

  “We’d been seeing it all summer,” he told me when I called. “I saw the smoke over here and thought, ‘Oh, shit, here we go again.’ ”

  As the blaze came toward his cabin, Jeff found that his truck wouldn’t start. He was left with a tiny, two-door sports car to carry anything he wanted to save and raced away with his girlfriend’s paintings and silk screens, some jewels and gold, a few tools, and two cats (one would escape his grasp while he searched for a shelter and perish in the flames).

  During the following days he did what he could to help others who were evacuating—gathering pets, turning off electricity, and leading a disabled friend away from the fire. Eventually he found himself alone on a ridgeline, where he watched the panorama of fire.

  “I could see for miles—almost all the way to the East Bay,” Jeff, an unflappable marine veteran who served in Vietnam, said. “It was like that mountain got napalmed and rocketed all at once.”

  By then he was certain that his own home had burned.

  “Going back out the last time was like driving out through the apocalypse,” he said. “Whole neighborhoods have just vanished. They’re gone.”

  By the time my niece and her mother, who live in nearby Cobb, gathered their pets and some valuables, the flames surrounding the town were so thick that t
hey couldn’t drive through them. They parked on a golf course, where treeless greens, water hazards, and sand traps provided a refuge in the orange night. Their home survived, but many of the ones around it, and most of nearby Middletown, burned. They couldn’t return home for weeks.

  The Valley Fire burned more than 1,300 homes and killed four residents,1 one of them an acquaintance of my brother’s. It also climaxed the year in which the most land on record in the United States—10 million acres—burned in wildfires.2

  I covered my first forest fire nearly 30 years before the Valley Fire burned my brother’s home. I fought fires in the Rocky Mountains a decade before the Fourmile Canyon Fire blazed outside Boulder. But the new fires were different from the ones I’d photographed, reported on, and fought years before. Some scientists and firefighters were calling the worst of them “megafires,” but others bristled at the term’s sensationalism and lack of scientific precision.

  During the five years between the fire outside my hometown, which began the series of record-breaking fires in Colorado, and the one that burned down my brother’s cabin and topped off a year in which the most acreage in the nation burned, I tried to learn what was driving fires to be so much larger, faster, hotter, and more destructive. It seemed like that question would be easy to answer, particularly with the world’s first conference studying megafires announced soon after the fire that threatened Boulder.

  But just defining “megafire” proved more difficult than I’d anticipated.

  THE CONFERENCE WASN’T IN A VAST, western forest under a scorching summer sun, but in a hotel auditorium in Tallahassee, Florida, a week before Thanksgiving 2011. The opening speaker was the first person I had contacted about megafires—the man who had coined the term. Jerry Williams was once the national director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service, and thus the top wildland firefighter in the United States. He was the first to warn of an explosion of wildfires that would see the amount of land burning in the United States triple since the 1970s. (During the conference scientists predicted that in some years U.S. fires would burn almost seven times the amount of land burned in an average year in the 1970s.)

  “My first experience with a really unimaginable fire . . . was in Northern California late in August in 1987,” Williams told me when I first called him. That “fire siege” was made up of more than 1,000 blazes that brought every available wildland firefighter in the nation to California and led the governor to declare a state of emergency in 22 counties.

  “I remember saying, ‘Jesus, we will never see anything like that again,’ ” he told me. “And the next year we saw Yellowstone.”

  After he retired from leading the U.S. wildfire fight, Williams led a team of international researchers that studied eight megafires around the world for the United Nations.3

  “We’re seeing . . . a new type of fire . . . in the U.S., Russia, Australia, Greece, South Africa,” he told the assembled scientists in the opening presentation in Florida. “It seems like every year we see a ‘worst one.’ And the next year we see a worse one yet. They’re unbounded.”

  After leaving the Forest Service, Williams became increasingly critical and outspoken about the war on wildfire that he once led. Policies promoted to protect people, homes, forests, soil, and even our air and water often backfired. Many blazes we extinguished simply set the stage for bigger and badder fires in the future.

  “How many of those fires were the result [of], were predisposed by, a land management decision made years earlier?” Williams asked.

  Continuing to fight the fires as we have, he said, was a dead end. Yet we continued to wage an increasingly costly war in which every battle we won seemed to bring a greater loss in the future.

  “We’re trapped by the myths of our own success,” he said. “Sometimes I think this is almost a religious issue, that we can somehow dominate it.”

  The three days following Williams’s presentation were an apocalyptic travelogue as scientists described megafires’ impacts on the atmosphere and soil, insects and flowers, economics and culture. Toward the close of the conference I sat down with 10 researchers from China, France, Portugal, Australia, Canada, and the United States in a discussion led by Dan Binkley, a forestry and ecology professor at Colorado State University. Our charge was simply to come up with a definition of “megafire.” But despite the hundreds of years of cumulative research the group had done on the topic, none of us were clear about what we were actually talking about.

  “The term ‘mega’ must be used to describe the top level of fire intensity,” one researcher insisted.

  “It’s impossible to escape a megafire,” another threw out.

  “They’re impossible to control.”

  “Israel [the Mount Carmel Fire of 2010] wasn’t a megafire.”

  “I don’t see any reason that Australia [Black Saturday in 2009] wouldn’t be a megafire.”

  “Africa burns most,” one researcher noted.

  “You’re looking at the amount of acres burned,” Dan said. “But you can look at the number of lives lost.”

  “In 2003, in Portugal, the fires had political impacts,” Célia Gouveia, of the University of Lisbon, said.

  “The socioeconomic impact would have to be part of the definition.”

  “The ecological impacts should be considered.”

  “The definition should have multiple criteria: property loss, air quality, wildlife, steady-state ecosystem change, species extinction . . .”

  The conference program, and posters around the hotel, showed a lack of agreement even about what the word “megafire” should look like. Some wrote it as one word, others as two, and the conference organizers hyphenated it.

  “Is there a term better than ‘mega’?” Dan asked.

  “High-impact.”

  “Catastrophic.”

  “Uber,” one Canadian scientist said, chuckling.

  “Hellfire,” Dan threw out, to guffaws.

  The group fell into the weeds of fire science, arguing about whether “burn intensity” or “spread velocity” is a better measure of a fire’s mega-ness.

  “There’s an intensity there that’s sort of beyond our experience or comprehension,” Dan said. “Jerry Williams and his colleagues saw fires with behaviors they had never encountered before.”

  Snow was falling in much of the West, but the following day, while we were visiting the Tall Timbers experimental forest near Tallahassee, a fire burned into the suburbs of Reno, Nevada. “My house is threatened by a megafire,” Tim Brown, a scientist from the Desert Research Institute, announced with a shocked smile after calling some of his graduate students to check on his property.

  The phenomenon seemed to be reinventing itself and closing in on us, even as we struggled to define it.

  I returned from Tallahassee to find my home state exploding with its most destructive wildfire season in history—one that was doubly devastating when I took into account that one year burned right into the next, without the usual interruption of winter. Eventually that would drive me to consider another definition of “megafire”—duration. How would a year-round fire season add to the impacts that the researchers I’d sat with had listed?

  Four years after the conference the U.S. Forest Service would define a “megafire” as a wildfire that burns at least 100,000 acres. By then, I had developed more nuanced measures. In charred forests around the world and in the endless season of flame that plagued my own backyard, I found four categories of drivers behind the flames.

  Our use and management of forests left many of them overloaded with far more vegetation than naturally grew in them, as well as invasive, introduced, and exotic species that disrupted the historical cycle of fire.

  Booming development into flammable landscapes provided another fuel load in the form of homes and infrastructure, filled forests with human-produced sparks and heat, and complicated firefighting and forest management.

  The warming and drying climate pr
imed many wildlands to burn and expanded fire seasons by months, often into times when few resources are available to deal with them. And humans had also expanded the fire season with sparks from power lines, vehicles, campfires, and firearms that ignited fires in months in which there was no lightning to start natural wildfires.

  Political and economic decisions intended to deal with wildfires drove the flames as often as they snuffed them.

  I also came to see that despite the size and ferocity of the last decade’s fires, the biggest and baddest of them are still to come. Since the turn of the millennium four different years saw more than 9 million acres burn—record amounts of land that were unthinkable just a few decades ago. Then, in 2015, wildfires spread over more than 10 million acres of U.S. forests. Fire scientists anticipate that within a few years, 12 to 15 million acres a year will burn, and U.S. Forest Service researchers warn that by mid-century that number could reach 20 million—an area nearly the size of Maine.

  As I chased fires across Colorado and around the world, each conflagration illuminated at least one of the drivers of the world’s crisis of fire. But all of them came to play on Yarnell Hill, Arizona, where a small blaze killed the greatest number of professional wildland firefighters in U.S. history. Whereas my first trip to research what was bringing an exponential increase in wildfires to the planet had left me with more questions than answers, my last stop showed what is at stake if we fail to answer them.

  PART I

  Everybody’s Hometown

  1

  Yarnell Hill

  Yarnell, Arizona—July 1, 2013

  EARLY ON THE FIRST MORNING of Prescott, Arizona’s Frontier Days—the oldest rodeo in the world—three white pickup trucks from the city’s fire department drove across a ranch 35 miles southwest of the community filling with cowboys and cantankerous bulls. The trucks drove west on a track bulldozed overnight through what firefighters call a “moonscape”—land burned so black and bare that the path through it seemed to have an amber glow. The fire that had burned the Weaver Mountains the day before had been so hot it cracked the granite boulders strewn about the canyon above them. Where they stopped, only a few black and skeletal sticks remained of what had been an eight-foot-tall bramble of prickly manzanita, catclaw, mesquite, and scrub oak. A single surviving cactus rose from the ash where a dozen firefighters stepped out of the trucks.