Please begin Chapter XIV here.
Chapter I, Chapter II, Chapter II supplement, Chapter III, Chapter IV, Chapter V, Chapter VI, Chapter VII, Chapter VIII , Chapter IX, Chapter X, Chapter XI, Chapter XII and Chapter XIII.
© Copyright 2015 John Dougherty, All rights Reserved. Written For: Investigative MEDIA
Please begin Chapter XV.
Thanks everyone for your contributions.
John
And thank YOU, John ( yet again ) for everything YOU and InvestigativeMEDIA have done and continue to do in support of this ongoing discussion.
Here’s the direct jumplink to the next Chapter ( 15 ) of this discussion…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xv/
The Dailey Courier —-Judge Granted a new Stay till July 6th on the Law suits To allow for more Mediation at the requests of the Lawyers for both sides. Just picked it up on Prescott Dailey Courier site.
Thanks, Bob!
Judge extends stay in Hotshot wrongful death lawsuit
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=146137&TM=23516.5
Personally… I think this is absurd and I don’t know why the Judge keeps going along with all this.
You just have to wonder what the real PROBLEM is here.
Is this really ALL about the elusive Brendan McDonough… and WHEN these lawyers are finally going to pick up the phone and talk to each other and get a deposition done…
…or is it much MORE than that.
I understand that when ‘negotiations’ are taking place… a lot of back and forth has to happen… but if Arizona Forestry really is willing to ‘settle’ theses lawsuits rather than risk going to court ( as they are obviously doing )… then there’s no excuse for the required ‘back and forth’ to arrive at agreements to be taking this long.
They have had plenty of time to discover if they are going to be at an ‘impasse’ on any of the issues on the table… and neither side is willing to compromise.
And all it takes is just one known ‘impasse’ that will prevent a successful settlement and the report back to the Judge should be…
“We are unable to reach a settlement. Proceed with court calendar”.
Followup…
I am the one who has actually been pointing out all along how complicated and how nuanced these kind of ‘legal negotiations’ can get… and how it all becomes a big poker game with ( sometimes ) there being even more than 52 cards in the deck and both sides wanted to keep adding even MORE cards…
…but my point up above is that even all of this kind of legal wrangling can reach the point of being absurd.
On one level, yes, it can get really complex.
But at the BASE level… ‘mediation’ is actually very simple.
Either the parties are going to be able to reach SOME kind of compromise on ALL of the issues laying on the table… or they are not.
And all it takes is one impasse and the mediation should revert back to an active court case. It’s not fair to all involved to NOT do this in a timely way.
And it doesn’t take a YEAR to find out that there are just some parts of the case where neither side is willing to “give in” and reach a compromise.
Example: If Arizona Foresty is trying to settle all of this WITHOUT having to admit any kind of responsibility… but the plaintiffs in the ‘wrongful death’ suits aren’t buying that and are sticking to their guns in their ‘accountability’ demands…
…well… then thats an ‘impasse’.
Time to have a trial and let a Jury decide the issues.
Gamesmanship is fine… and it’s what these lawyers get PAID to do.
But it CAN all get ABSURD and then the adults have to get involved.
Reply to Bob Powers post on June 5, 2015 at 9:21 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Judge Granted a new Stay till July 6th on the Law suits
>> To allow for more Mediation at the requests of the Lawyers for both sides.
I think it’s worth pointing out that this ‘July 6’ date is now the equivalent of the ‘June 4’ date that just went by and it is the date when BOTH sets of attorneys are supposed to supply the Judge with their REPORTS.
That mean the ACTUAL ‘mediation’ session have to take place prior to that date.
That also means an awful lot of ‘stuff’ is not ‘ganging up’ on and around the second anniversary of the tragedy ( June 30 2105 ).
The auction of the land where the deployment site it, the completion of the global mediations, etc. etc.
Combine all that with what happened last year and lots of people being interviewed by the media because of the anniversary itself… and it’s going to be an interesting last couple of weeks of June.
Whoops. Typo. Meant to say…
That also means an awful lot of ‘stuff’ is NOW ‘ganging up’ on and around the second anniversary of the tragedy ( June 30 2105 ).
And we may still see something from McDonough by or before June 30th
A lot may be coming to a head in a short period of time.
Marti, you can bet Maughan did not expect much return on that area as far as cattle or horse grazing are concerned. Manzanita is useless as cattle or horse feed and even deer prefer a different plant to graze on. I think these ranchers lease these lands at such low dollar that it does not matter whether they graze livestock there or not. Peeples Valley is where all the grasses are and where their stock stay and graze. Joy tells me there is a use for manzanita branches in cookie cutter homes with birdcages. Seems the birds like to roost on the branches. I do know the berries are good bear feed on some species.
Manzanita makes AWESOME tea.
What you are saying is what I was thinking all along. Which is why Hays’ interview surprised and interested me. I got the sense from it that, for the MOST part, they WERE grazing cattle in the Peeples Valley VALLEY area and on the Congress side of the Weavers.
But it was also clear, from the interview, that “they” (and remember “they” essentially sold the ranch in 2000) WERE winter-grazing “in the Weavers” (because the valley area water-table rose too much in the winter and that made it less than ideal for cattle), and that that was why he was all jazzed about how he learned from the 1960s fire how much it “cleaned out the area” and made the grasses grow so much better, and that was why he learned how to “prescribe burn” (as it is called now) the bowls, especially after they put all those firelines in to protect Yarnell.
So, obviously, at some point in time, “they” were no longer doing those burns, and then the manzanita etc started re-invading and taking over. I don’t remember if he said anything about when they stopped doing that.
But I can imagine that when Maughan (a Quarterhorse breeder-raiser) bought the ranch, he had absolutely no interest in grazing cattle, and thus no reason in doing what it took to keep the manzanita out and the grass in. So that whole aspect of “range-management” ended and so did the cattle-grazing.
And so Maughan, I suspect, just kept all that ranch-land in the interest of eventually selling to someone who would subdivide it, and, oh, also, it’s a great place to ride horses all over “our controlled land,” and from there, pretty much anywhere. Which I’m sure it has been.
When I was a student at Prescott College, back in the early 1970’s (when it was where Embry-Riddle is now), I could saddle up my Appaloosa Mare and head out to the west to Granite Mountain and ride all around and all over it without a fence anywhere to stop me. It was a wonderful thing!! I doubt that lasted more than ten years after I graduated.
Which brings us back to now. Without managing the manzanita etc with controlled burning, there is no “range-land” and, thus no cattle-grazing, even tho the grazing lease is “paid for.” Cheaply.
So what Maughan has out there is a long-term investment for possible future development or sale-for-development and a great place, in the meantime, to ride horses. Except for where the manzanita and other increasingly yucky brush invasion makes it impossible to even do that. But who cares????
At this point I’m thinking out loud.
He’s sitting on whatever he has out there for future development.
I actually, even give all our fanciful speculations, have a hard time thinking ANYBODY would want to acquire the area around the Deployment Site for “future development.” I mean, come on.
And NOBODY is going to be interested in running cattle out there unless they’re willing to do the kind of range-management that keeps the grass in and the manzanita out. I don’t know the cost-benefit ratio on that.
All things considered, however, that MIGHT be something Yarnell MIGHT possibly benefit from thinking about, all things considered. Because, apparently, just sitting back and letting all the Manzanita grow back doesn’t bode well for the future of Yarnell, as we have seen.
So back to Rex Maughan. I don’t think he really has anything to gain from trying to stand in the way of this Memorial Site going forward. In the general scheme of things. It’s NOT going to simply GO AWAY. (And this message is also to you, YARNELL!!!)
I’m thinking that, if I were Rex Maughan right now (and granted I might have a bit of a different perspective on this than he might have), and I wanted to hang on to my investment in that area in the interest of future development, I would simply put up a fence (or somehow make AZ Parks pay to do that with the money they have left over after “buying” the land for less than $500k) on my side of the roads going through my land out there, with BIG DO NOT TRESPASS signs on it, and, thus, by doing so, rid myself of my concerns about liability, with some well-placed locked gates so me and my friends can get through them easily (NOT a NEW THING), and kick back and enjoy the ride, and teach my grandkids how to successfully manage a lemonade stand.
And the FIGHT would be OVER.
And I might add. Host a Memorial BBQ every June 30.
What’s to lose in that?
OK Rex Maughan, you can pay me $10k for that brilliant analysis and advisement, which could potentially save you a whole lot of money if you’re contemplating out-bidding the Memorial Committee in order to try to maintain some kind of control over all of this, which most likely is not, in the long run, possible.
Yarnell needs to understand the seriousness of the wildland fire community’s interest in this site.
No matter what you do or don’t do……….
It. Is. Not. Going. To. Go. Away.
Deal with it.
If anything the ranchers in the area would be glad to see the manzanita burned off. Yes a prescribed burn would do well for the area now and again and I had thought that was what they wanted when they did not bother to put the fire out early. There are plenty of areas around Yarnell that still have the manzanita overgrown. I think though that the powers that be have decided that we already have too much methane production from cattle and considering it all, the fewer cattle, the better according to their way of thinking. Seven billion people produce a bunch of methane as well.
Probably your Maughan assessment is correct. However, considering the vast acres of Arizona that the Maughan ranches control, a measly 240 acres of non productive land must register low on his priority list. He was one of the few that might have actually benefited from the fire.
“considering the vast acres of Arizona that the Maughan ranches control, a measly 240 acres of non productive land must register low on his priority list. He was one of the few that might have actually benefited from the fire.”
i agree and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve worked out some kind of a deal by now.
Unfortunately, since the Memorial Committee is in violation of State Open Meeting laws by not posting the minutes to their meetings since January, it’s REALLY hard to know what’s happening.
I would bet that the Parks Department would be WAY more interested in paying for that fence if it made it less necessary to put in that three-mile climb to the site.
Marti, you can bet Maughan did not expect much return on that area as far as cattle or horse grazing are concerned. Manzanita is useless as cattle or horse feed and even deer prefer a different plant to graze on. I think these ranchers lease these lands at such low dollar that it does not matter whether they graze livestock there or not. Peeples Valley is where all the grasses are and where their stock stay and graze. Joy tells me there is a use for manzanita branches in cookie cutter homes with birdcages. Seems the birds like to roost on the branches. I do know the berries are good bear feed on some species.
**
** DEPLOYMENT SITE LAND AUCTION HAS BEEN ANNOUNCED
Well, it’s official.
They are going ahead with the PUBLIC AUCTION of the land where the deployment site is located and it WILL be at 11:00 AM on the morning of the second anniversary of the tragedy.
The Prescott Daily Courier
PUBLIC NOTICES
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=7&SubSectionID=257&BrowseClass=1&Category=50
From this just-published announcement…
———————————————————————-
PUBLIC NOTICES
ARIZONA STATE LAND DEPARTMENT 1616 WEST ADAMS STREET PHOENIX, ARIZONA 85007 PUBLIC AUCTION SALE NO. 53-117361 Pursuant to A.R.S. Title 37, notice is hereby given that the state of Arizona through its Arizona State Land Department (herein called ASLD), will sell at Public Auction to the highest and best bidder at 11:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 30, 2015, at the Cortez Street entrance of the Yavapai County Courthouse, Prescott, Arizona, trust lands situated in Yavapai County to wit: TOWNSHIP 10 NORTH, RANGE 5 WEST, G&SRM, YAVAPAI COUNTY, ARIZONA PARCEL: S2, SECTION 9, CONTAINING 320.00 ACRES, MORE OR LESS LOCATION: WEST OF SR89 AND YARNELL, ARIZONA BENEFICIARY: PERMANENT COMMON SCHOOLS
———————————————————————-
I hope they ( The PUBLIC Arizona State Yarnell Hill Fire Memorial Board ) are ready for other ‘bidders’ to show up… and have at least a little more than $500,000 at their disposal.
Things are going to get REALLY WEIRD if someone other than the State of Arizona gets ahold of that piece of property.
from reading this link:
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=7&SubSectionID=257&BrowseClass=1&Category=50
If ground-disturbing activities will or may impact one or more Register Eligible Site or Sites, purchaser shall consult with the State Historic Preservation Office and otherwise take such actions as are necessary to avoid, preserve, protect, or mitigate impacts on the Register Eligible Site or Sites. In the event that avoidance, preservation and protection of the Register Eligible Site or Sites cannot be accomplished, purchaser shall ensure a Data Recovery Plan is developed in consultation with and acceptable to, the Arizona State Museum and the State Historic Preservation Office, or their successor agencies, and the Data Recovery is implemented and completed prior to the Register Eligible Site or Sites being affected. The artifacts and records recovered from the property shall be curated according to the Arizona State Museum (ASM) Conservation and Curation Standards as established in rules implementing the Arizona Antiquities Act.
reply: good to know. I will let some interested elderly folks know—
GENERAL INFORMATION: The ASLD may cancel this auction in whole or in part at any time prior to the acceptance of a final bid. A protest to this sale must be filed within 30 days after the first day of publication of this announcement and in accordance with
????????????????
Max D. Masel State Land Real Estate Director
this man is in the link…this man is also the one the day after my hearing I was issued his map which he did not agree with the imminent domain factor of Maughan/Baluco/S&P/Whitehead areas and that State supersedes County maps/assessments. He is a direct kind man even though we did not agree he did everything to make the desert walker understand the importance of not being on the Weavers in that restriction map of what he mailed and I have abided by it 100% since receiving such map. I am crystal clear of all boundaries set before me and will not cross any of them yet in it I still find the whole thing unjust. How come a man on a horse with many dogs can travel the same area as I once did on the Weavers or some people who knew the men were not allowed but some were…this pick and choose method is why I also continue to unravel the missing threads to this here Yarnell Fire and like one psychic reached out and stated—“you do not have to be on any hill to reach the truth…sometimes just taking a step back and looking at the puzzle even with missing pieces you see the whole puzzle in completion”…yet in a world where documents and sources are so important I am always available to new or old information pertaining to the YHF. One person said they had the sign photo and one said they would hike the area to get a new picture…I do not think either method is needed but if you have the photo still; any tiny detail is fine and post a link on investigative media for the world to properly assess. I do have to wonder besides the current map restrictions which is obvious not everyone has to abide by it nor is there the proper no trespassing signs…we know WWTKTT had an interest in the sign and we emailed Bob, Marti to email WWTKTT and information I could gather before or after the fire and in that Elizabeth Nowicki sent a private email vs public request for the forward of those emails. I could not forward due to their emails were in it and last time I did that a loved one of the GMHS was not pleased and I am not going to get caught up in any silliness. I did send my whole file to Elizabeth but I have no interest in corresponding private with her. I like her. I like her piece with Morgan Loew. I just do not have the capacity to comprehend the delivery of simple questions that I answered but not to her approval and said re-ask in 2016. I will not have anyone set me up or redirect or do any silly thing to get me caught up in horseshit. I have good character yet my impression from corresponding with Elizabeth that she may favor to agree or disagree on that topic. Yet if Joy A. Collura can get thousands of petition signatures of having good character in less than a week’s time I think it’s pretty simple and obvious that very little amount of people stated “I don’t want to get involved”…when it came down to it I had more support asap than not. Why is that I have asked a few and they reply “you gave me hope when I lost my child” and “you gave me hope when I lost everything” and “you gave me hope that maybe they will change the way they fight these fires” or “you gave me hope I can fight the fight with the diseases I face because you too have your plate full”…SO for LOVE, HOPE and FAITH I continue on trying to be there for any and every area to this fire no matter how tiny a detail. I have no gain in this at all. Sonny’s son spent this week with him and he said “Dad, I just do not see how you and Joy hike for fun like you two do or do all you have for these people until I spent this week with you. You do it for Ted. My brother. I get it.”…Until you lose a person to a tragedy you cannot fathom the depth you will go to and Sonny never got closure and it breaks him into the deepest pit of painful tears and for that Sonny does this for everyone in HOPES the loved ones of the GMHS have closure. (1 Corinthians 13:7)
****Here is the facts. I believe with all my heart that the hundreds and hundreds of firefighters as well as homeowners who crossed our paths will one day come forward with more details. ****
Did you just catch that. I said here is the facts…and I believe…
I felt I was reading the SAIR for a second or Dickman’s book…sounded good but where is the sources…the names and say you have in book our names as one interviewed and you referred to the SAIR…all it makes me want to do is write Karel and Dudley a FOIA for our interview transcripts because page 194 and 195 is not how it unfolded Kyle. You picked words and pieced your narrative just like the SAIR.
Now for my statement above..most from the firefighting community we met Spring 2015 by mere chance when Sonny was out to get a welder and they were in our space…we were there first…also since that event it just keeps happening how the firefighting community keeps naturally being placed in our space not going out seeking any of it—
Even in 2015 I cannot remember and I am very very sorry but I may of journaled it on here and there is record but we met by chance one of the men’s father in Prescott and he looked us in the eye and thanked us for our efforts yet all the efforts in the world will never bring his son back but maybe this will never happen again with such efforts of others. I am sorry to all the loved ones but its not easy when I have hiked some of you because it’s not. That simple. Phillip “Mando” Maldonado was at the Ranch House memorial and we had NO CLUE who he was—sonny thought maybe Al-Qaeda but Sonny did not want him on hike—how that played out was Shaun Efran and his crew were contracted out by Weather Channel to take short hike with the eyewitness hikers to do this piece https://vimeo.com/82920041 and as the crew and us awaited Shaun (BOSS) to get up to the highway Ranch House memorial we ran into this young man and he looked very bereaved in his body language. He did not speak much. When he heard we were going up to the mountain top to do a piece for Weather Channel I said he was welcome to join. He remained quiet but spoke here and there. I never asked any information of who he was but Shaun and the crew got to know him and learned he use to be a GMHS and I said “shew, I will have to let Sonny know he is not Al-Qaeda.” You see that hike Sonny walked ahead and mainly solo ahead ticked off I let a man on the hike. He just did not want to hike with a person he was not expecting but as time of the day unfolded and he knew who he was, he knew this was right. I think God orchestrated a lot of this aftermath but not the missing elements that led to the death of nineteen men. Mando never gave any private brotherhood chats on the GMHS to the hikers but you all can contact Shaun Efran…maybe to him he did. Yet we all knew it was RIGHT him being there. He had life happenings and was not able to get to Yarnell sooner so it was all by chance just like a lot of this aftermath of the fire. MAN, if I can gather every account that would make a story in itself but you see I am not looking for a story or a book or a movie but the plain simple missing elements not yet shown. If the SAIR can answer my questions than I will cease this all. I will let this all rest.
I do not see the interest in the sign and I can only assume Elizabeth asked for what I sent in private because we use to post everything raw as we got it and than all of a sudden we are sending it via email or in person…number one, you can thank the hearsays & impurities of what I saw in my hearing for that and number two, what was your interest in the photos Elizabeth? Was it just to kinda keep in the online flow of WWTKTT? Just curious. I reread what I wrote above and it popped up in my head…because usually Marti and WWTKTT have the photo dissect interest. Each person has been shared a link in confidentiality with no written,verbal, online permission to distribute what we send in person or in email. We normally say “public” but if we say this is not to be posted public it is not because we give a shit but because we now see people are trying to dissect the hikers and shit for me to be followed two years later with same rhythm of folks…it don’t add up…just a house wife…desert walker…not even working currently…after my next health assessment I may though…
Good catches Joy.
That “Register Eligible Site or Sites” thing is pretty standard, and is the basis for lots of archaeological survey. It doesn’t guarantee the preservation of a site, just the documentation of it.
When I was an archaeology major at the first incarnation of Prescott College, I spent eleven weeks excavating and mapping a small site complete with a kiva on Black Mesa. It took a bulldozer half an hour to destroy it.
Of course it was even remotely close to being as nationally well-known as the Deployment Site.
Although, CURRENTLY, all the stuff the Peabody Coal Company-financed Prescott College/Southern Illinois University Black Mesa Field School artifacts are a HUGE BIG FIRE-FIGHT in the realm of Native American recovery of their ancestral properties.
So there’s that. Considering the circumstances.
And, yes, I had highlighted that paragraph, also.
And, yes, this also:
“GENERAL INFORMATION: The ASLD may cancel this auction in whole or in part at any time prior to the acceptance of a final bid. A protest to this sale must be filed within 30 days after the first day of publication of this announcement and in accordance with”
……….
Which means that if Maughan et al really don’t want the Memorial Site to happen, they can just protest the sale.
Popcorn!!!
————-
I can’t tell what the “date” of this “publication” is. Was it in April? Or today? Or yesterday?
Joy~
Got behind on my email. Just found yours.
Just replied.
Deal’s on.
Hope it’s not too late.
Namaste!
(sometimes people have to hit me over the head to check my email)
Joy~
Got behind on my email. Just found yours.
Just replied.
Deal’s on.
THANK YOU DEARLY. PERFECT TIMING TOO. SAVES ALOT OF STRESS THERE.
Hope it’s not too late.
NO. I HAVE BEEN TIED TO THE FIRE THIS WEEK AND SONNY SO I CEASED THE CRAIGSLIST LISTINGS BUT YOU BETCHA AND ITS A VOW IT WILL BE RETURNED- THANK YOU FOR THIS OPPORTUNITY—
Namaste!
WHENEVER I HEAR OR SEE THIS WORD; NAMASTE—IT REMINDS ME OF THE MANY PILATES AND YOGA SESSIONS WITH MY MOTHER WHO IS VERY MUCH INTO FITNESS…VERY DISCIPLINED STRUCTURED WOMAN…NOT ME…DESERT TRAILING FOR ME…YET I HAD MY YOGA/PILATES/AEROBICS DAYS…I THINK OF MY MOTHER PLACING SO GENTLE HER HANDS TOGETHER TO HER CHEST/HEART LIKE A PRAYER WAY OF HANDS AND SAYING NAMASTE AT THE END OF OUR EXERCISES…I WOULD THINK “I BOW TO YOU???” HUH…IT REMINDED ME OF THE FOLKS FROM INDIA I HAVE MET…MY MOM SAYS THE INNER PART OF HER HONORS THE INNER PARTS OF ME IS HOW IT WAS SHARED…
(sometimes people have to hit me over the head to check my email)
HEE HEE…I KNEW YOUR EMAIL RYTHYM SO I NEVER THOUGHT ANYTHING OF IT..FIGURED WHEN YOU SAW IT, YOU SAW IT KINDA THING AND AGAIN THANK YOU…YOU WILL BE PLEASED THAT I AM A FOLLOW THROUGH GAL…
Sweet.
*chuckles*
The “god” in me greets the “god” in you. Even though you know I don’t believe in a “god” but in the communicative intelligence of the Universe.
I used to be a long-distance swimmer. Totally disciplined. But now I’m just putting one foot in front of the other. And YOU have helped me keep doing just that.
that is some nice reading.
Thanks for posting this, WTKTT!!
So………………………. No delay.
A further thought.
I read somewhere yesterday, and I can’t remember exactly what it was — minutes of some meeting or another — that Maughan was concerned about liability, having people cross his land.
He was told liability wouldn’t be a problem because people would be notified they had to stay on the road or get permission to cross onto his land. I’m guessing that didn’t allay his concerns.
Makes me wonder if a fence saying “No Trespassing” (something Joy has complained doesn’t exist and should) could be used for negotiating??
Makes me wonder if a fence saying “No Trespassing” (something Joy has complained doesn’t exist and should) could be used for negotiating??
reply: not so much a complaint as it is to reinforce that you cannot ARREST people on the Weavers if one state land restricted or private without proper signage and fencing…it is a YCSO matter on topic of Trespass in Arizona: First, Second and Third Degree..A.R.S. 13-1501/02/03/04….how does one trailing out there KNOW where they travel unless they are ODD like ME and look into it and get written permission from private land owners and have a state land permit. SHIT. almost EVERY person we met DID NOT KNOW even about having to have this permit…if anything the state should thank my ass for their increased revenue on recreational permits because I required it on hikes with me long before this fire…ask locals I began to be such a stickler that I would not hike with you IF you did not show me you had it when hiking in Congress. I am an Arizona gal and born here but the very state I love has me disappointed in the way some are running the show here—
Another thought.
To be honest, I don’t know if highest = best in this auction. And I’ve wondered, all things considered.
Highest is just a number.
Best is a judgement call.
Could it be possible that the caller of that judgement could decide that the highest bid might not qualify?
Reply to Marti Reed post on June 5, 2015 at 11:58 am
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Best is a judgement call.
Yes.
Interesting phrasing popping up there in the actual public land sale notice.
>> Could it be possible that the caller of that judgement could decide
>> that the highest bid might not qualify?
Yes.. but the other interpretation for ‘highest and best’ means that if even if someone is the ‘highest’ bidder… if the CHECK BOUNCES… then the land is now awarded to the next highest bidder whose check will NOT BOUNCE.
In other words… “Highest and Best” could mean… “Highest offer that is actually backed up with real money”.
Mmmmmmmm. Gotcha, thanks.
So “best” simply could mean “having dollars in the account this check is written off of.” Makes sense.
Still, wondering, all things considered, if “best” could mean one or a number of other things beyond that.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AAD72skvle6Io8jtO_DmLQn7a/Photos%20and%20Video/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball?dl=0&preview=IMG_1896.JPG
need appx time on this photo
The EXIF data embedded in this IMG_1896 says it was taken at 5:48 PM on June 30, 2013.
It was taken with a network-connected Apple iPhone 4S so that time and date should be considered to be exactly correct.
Here is some of the actual EXIF metadata embedded in the photograph…
File Name: IMG_1896.JPG
Directory: SAIT/Dropbox/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball
File Size: 1891 kB
File Type: JPEG
MIME Type: image/jpeg
Camea Make: Apple
Camera Model Name: iPhone 4S
Date/Time Original: 2013:06:30 17:48:00 ( 5:48 PM )
thank you. Another complimented time stamp to homeowners accounts/videos/photos. Thank you for the time stamp.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AAD72skvle6Io8jtO_DmLQn7a/Photos%20and%20Video/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball?dl=0&preview=IMG_1891.JPG
need appx time of this photo please
The EXIF data embedded in this IMG_1891 says it was taken at
4:48 PM ( plus 54 seconds ) on June 30, 2013.
It was taken with a network-connected Apple iPhone 4S so that time and date should be considered to be exactly correct.
The time of the actual deployment site burnover has been estimated to be 4:43 PM, so this photograph was taken by Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball just 5 minutes and 54 seconds after that.
Here is some of the EXIF metadata embedded in the photograph…
File Name: IMG_1891.JPG
Directory: SAIT/Dropbox/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball
File Size: 2.6 MB
File Type: JPEG
MIME Type: image/jpeg
Camera Make: Apple
Camera Model Name: iPhone 4S
Date/Time Original: 2013:06:30 16:48:54 ( 4:48:54 PM )
Followup…
IMG_1891 was taken by Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball looking WEST from the intersection of Lakewood Drive and Manazanita in the Glen Ilah subdivision.
He was exactly here when he took his IMG_1891 photo with his iPhone 4S…
34.218613, -112.760252
The image that precedes this one in the same folder ( IMG_1890 ) was taken just about 2 minutes before ( at 4:47:02 PM ) a few yards south of where he took IMG_1891 and his IMG_1890 actually captured the roadsign there at that intersection of Lakewood Drive and Manzanita.
The reason both photographs are so DARK and they look like nighttime is because the smoke column was directly over Glen Ilah and blocking out all sunlight at that point.
Joy, there’s a narrative associated with these photos.
Cory Ball borrowed a UTV from Yarnell Fire Department and drove up into Glen Illah under a request from Gary Cordes to connect with the dozer operator (we think — the whereabouts of the dozer and its operator after Ball’s photo of it at 3:30 pm have been a point of contention and confusion, and are STILL unknown) to check on the possibility of putting a dozer line out from the top of Manzanita (we had LONG discussions about this back in November/December-ish).
He only got a short ways into Glen Illah before the fire forced him to scramble back to the Ranch House Restaurant Parking Lot. Where he waited until he made a second trip in at around 5:43 and took a lot more photos.
So that’s what’s going on in these photos. We are REALLY indebted to Cory Ball and the Blue Ridge Hotshots for all their photos, without which we wouldn’t know half of what we know. They have been essential.
I agree.
PS. I’m still looking at those photos showing the/those firefighters up there in the boulders near the fire. Great catches!! I find them VERY interesting.
Do you have ANY IDEA when you took them?
I haven’t had the time to compare them to the photos I downloaded from JD’s dropbox, so I don’t know if some version of them is in those photos.
Are these photos part of the photos in JD’s dropbox???
Thanks in advance.
Before I reply to various comments below, I am wondering if anybody can provide me with a link to the actual (document) wrongful death lawsuit(s).
I’ve been hunting and hunting today, and can’t seem to find anything but stories about it/them but no actual its/thems.
I started searching for it/them after I read the actual property lawsuit (which was easy to find). It was an interesting read. I hadn’t actually read it before. Some interesting details I hadn’t seen before. I don’t know if they’re a result of actual interviews or just speculation. Also kind of a problematic timeline.
Thanx in advance!!
http://archive.azcentral.com/ic/pdf/0627yarnell-fire-maricopa-lawsuit.pdf
Direct download of PDF file from AZCENTRAL archives.
This is the one with individuals like Todd Abel and Roy Hall named as defendants in the wrongful death allegations. Their WIVES are also listed as defendants but this is SOP for cases like this. WIVES of defendants in civil Cases are usually also included in order to prevent defendants from simply transferring all their assets to their wives… which is always EASILY done.
NOTE that actual full names of wives not even needed. Jane Doe Abel and Jane Doe Hall is all that’s needed.
Thanks, WTKTT!!
Hmmmm. The property owners’ lawsuit is definitely a better read.
Reply to Marti Reed post on June 4, 2015 at 5:43 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Hmmmm. The property owners’ lawsuit is definitely a better read.
As far as the amount of ‘detail’ regarding what the lawyers were claiming actually happened that entire weekend… YES… these ‘wrongful death’ claims were not nearly as comprehensive or detailed.
The ESSENCE of these relatively SHORT “Wrongful Death” claims are items 58 and 59 under the first count of negligence claimed…
——————————————————————
COUNT ONE – NEGLIGENCE
58. At all relevant times, the Forester Defendants assumed control of the
fire suppression efforts and had a duty to Plaintiffs and their decedents to
use due care and comply with the standard of care for wildland fire
suppression efforts.
59. The Forester Defendants BREACHED these duties.
( Followed by list of specific breaches being claimed ).
——————————————————————–
So that’s really the essence of the case and the lawyers are claiming that the actions ( and lack of actions ) on the part of Arizona Forestry Management that day ( which included AZF contractors Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed ) were NEGLIGENT… and people DIED because of this NEGLIGENCE.
That’s the case that has to be proved.
If this first count of negligence can’t be proved to a jury then it is doubtful all the other COUNTS of negligence which are also in the document will stand up.
** THERE WAS MORE DETAIL IN ORIGINAL ‘NOTICE OF CLAIMS’.
However… the ORIGINAL “Notice of Claim” for “Wrongful Death” documents that preceded the actual claim filings also had “more detail” than appeared when the full suits were all filed in June of 2014.
The followng is a link to the original “Notice of Claim” for the “wrongful death” of Andrew Ashcraft.
This document was made publicy available by InvestigativeMEDIA at the following google DOCS folder.
This copy of the original is a Microsoft Word document.
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CC4QFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.investigativemedia.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F12%2FAshcraft-Claim-Letter-Final-12-19.doc&ei=mEdxVfyLIMeXsAWXhIL4Dg&usg=AFQjCNEx-nxLFk3Rlo6qh9asrz7F7mHjUQ&bvm=bv.95039771,d.b2w
ALL of the other original “Notice of Claims” that were filed are basically identical to this one as far as the content and claims go. The only major difference in the individual original claims filed was that each document for each Hotshot contained different photos and information in the section marked “The Decedent”.
These documents were all telling us exactly who these men were. The information about them, who they were, who they loved, and who loved them far surpassed anything that appeared in any MSM article prior to the filing of these “Notice of Claims”.
The information in the “Synopsis” and the “Description of Incident” was also more detailed than what would end up appearing in the ACTUAL “Wrongful Death” claims themselves that would then be filed in June of 2014… just before the 1 year deadline for filing the actual suits ( June 30, 2014 ).
In other words… the CLAIMS themselves got ‘refined’ into tighter ‘legalese’ somewhere between the filing of the original “Notice of Claims” in 2013 and the ACTUAL claims/lawsuits filed in June of 2014.
Copy.
Thanks!
Every one should check out the film on unacceptable Risk over on Wild Fire Today
Excellent information on Climate Change and its affect on Fire.
Yes, it IS good. Thx for posting!
wow, guess who is in front of me
in the Yarnell library.
I met him 2 weeks before the fire.
Ferrell Truman (retired chief of Yarnell fire after Pete Andersen/PAINTER nowadays …he was glad by Dickman’s book and being in it with a full set of grey hair. Pleasant speaking man. He is next to Ninabill/Dorman/McCrary/Holly Becker and his home was saved by the fire. yes his wood home.
He thought it burned as he drove away in the rv and said South Carolina fishing here I come…but Yarnell inspires him to paint. His art has been up since May and will be up again this month in June, Meet and greet is June 18 a Thursday so come bring your books and get them autographed and see his paintings. I like this man. He looked at photo of Dickman and did not recognize the fella so I said “do you think he even interviewed you?” and he replied it was someone from Outside magazine so maybe but does not look too familiar the photo. He described how when he left at 445pm Dorman’s home was on fire and that compliments others accounts too.
Thank you for being at the library versus on some hot hike today…always a learning adventure.
I will stay a little longer but I am thinking a miscommunication and they went to Congress library so let me go see and call down there and ask…
if so send the information tomorrow from another town because we are heading out to the mysterious turquoise mines…always a wildlife adventure…
Task complete.
AMAZING work, Sonny.
THANK YOU!
I have all 47 photos. Truly GOOD WORK.
I am geo-stamping them now… but that’s going to take a little time.
You are right. The SIGN itself is damaged and is hard to read.
Looks like a lot of the black paint used for the inset lettering just got burned away.
The TOP half of the sign ( the WARNING part ) is still easily read, but the SMALL lettering underneath it is hard to make out.
Here is my best guess at what the entire sign actually says…
————————————————————-
WARNING
DANGEROUS CONDITIONS
DO NOT ENTER
Any person ( destroying ) or ( defacing ) this
sign ( will be ) in violation of Arizona legislative
statues section 27 -363 ( and will be )
guilty of ( ??? ) otherwise provided by
( ??? ) statutes 27 – 302.
————————————————————–
It does not appear to specifically say anything about EXPLOSIVES, so I’m wondering now how the sign ever got referred to that way in the original investigation reports…
…but it is pretty much right where it is supposed to be… and right where you and Joy have already verrfied it being.
This is just more verification that this part of the ‘story’ that seems to be now firmly established.
The dozer (apparently) DID complete its work that morning ‘improving’ that ‘Jeep Trail’ all the way to near where this sign was, and right up near the edge of the COLD BLACK… and this work WAS completed by 11:30 AM that day.
So even by 11:30 AM that fateful day… the PLAN from early that Sunday morning had been basically COMPLETED already… and there WAS now a ‘dozer push’ all the way from the COLD BLACK out west back EAST to the Sesame Clearing area that *could* have been ‘burned off’ later that day, if conditions permitted.
Yes–That is a good 10 mile plus rough hike the way you have to go to get in legally. Where they started cutting to where they ended by that big rock and boulders around the bend to the north. Walking down that decline is treacherous to say the least–I fell once and banged that new camera but it survived so the photos came out good enough. What the hell were they doing down here in these steep boulders. I am sure they thought the same thing and that short steep fire line they were doing was ended pretty quickly due to the situation. Considering their exhausted looks when we passed them and that 106 degree day they did more than was necessary and as far as I could tell really was an exercise in futility to start with. Morrison and Wooten would have said the same, but I will have to check with Ted Putnam or Wayne Neil to see what they thought since they were the ones that actually walked and marked the line from start to ending. See it would have helped slow the south east progression at the time they were working but at that time the north progression was already a wild firel with the winds driving it toward Peeples Valley–That we were watching and now that I think as to why we saw the crew in limbo was they had likely decided that there wasn’t a lot they could do anyhow.
The burn out at the Shrine area where you see men lighting up things with a Zip torch had to be early when the winds were headed north but that does not make sense to me even now since from the Shrine if the fire goes north from where they were it would possible spread to the NE which would take it to U-Stow it area, before that houses including Chuck Tidy residence behind U-Stow It. Maybe ok if the thing continued N to Peeples Valley. But if it reversed then it went directly up to that bowl where they died. Actually it would pass through the Sesame Street portion that is dirt track below the Helms and all that brush was dense starting from the Shrine back south and really dense from Sesame street to helms and bowl area. It would seem to me that from what we were watching that it was more likely the burn out they were doing that reversed and caught the men. You could determine that by timing the video taken at the Shrine–It may have been that some boss must have not figured that the fire would ever change direction as it did. Down in the valley you could not see the thunder storms that we could see atop the mountains. It seems Donut and the Blue Ridge guy saving him were likely avoiding the reversal of that Shrine area burnout. The other thing if you look at the dozer trail in one of Shaun Efran’s hikes where there is snow and we are being interviewed you will clearly see the bulldozer trail as it was made between sesame and the helms, it also turns directly toward the Helms in an east westwardly direction. If they were doing a back burn along that bulldozer trail then that would have trapped the men with a reversal as well. However the only video evidence I have seen that is significant is those fellows running up the Shrine road above where the pavement ends using their zip torches. Is it standard procedure to burn along a bulldozer clearout if you are not afraid of a reversal of winds? Well what they did at the Shrine was OK as long as wind direction was right, but whew they could not have known that the GMHS were not too far South of them and at a higher elevation in a box canyon trying to bushwhack through the thickest manzanita Imaginable. Surely firefighters are aware that Arizona winds can reverse in a heartbeat–though that does not happen often.
I was told that one Fema man Dennis Faulk did operate one of the dozers for a time. If I see him again I will ask him if it is true. He did a lot of work toward trying to get federal aid and was hard at his job spending extra hours helping people when he could have been doing his own pleasures. He was one who did deserve an award for his efforts in helping others. He is one hell of an organizer and leader too bad he wasn’t in charge of that fire itself from the get go. You can bet it would have been out on Friday night had he been involved.
two corrections–drip torch not Zip torch but it was a zip fire. and Dennis Foulk is the correct spelling. Denny was super on the Fema project trying to restore the Yarnell area back to normal after the fire.
Sonny, you wrote:
“The burn out at the Shrine area where you see men lighting up things with a Zip torch had to be early when the winds were headed north but that does not make sense to me even now since from the Shrine if the fire goes north from where they were it would possible spread to the NE which would take it to U-Stow it area, before that houses including Chuck Tidy residence behind U-Stow It.”
I’m not aware of this burnout. Or any visuals of it. Am I missing something?
It was on u tube a long time ago and it just disappeared. Joy and I both saw it and when I saw the rock fence to the left we immediately knew where it was filmed. Joy might be able to fetch it again somewhere. Definitely they had their drip torches going as they were coming back toward the shrine and lighting up along the road. Joy also maybe can remember the firefighter who posted it. It was tied to a guy named Red something u tube uploads and Joy found it off his comment wall. That same u tube showed the other side of 89 activity as well. Plus the firefighters just hanging out at the Presbyterian church.
Ferrell graduated in late 60’s from Tempe Fire Academy…neat man
So, I’m going to re-post up here at the top some of the stuff I posted down below, because, given the possibility that the auction of the State Trust Land to the group having been given, by the Arizona State Legislature, the power and the money to create the Memorial for the Granite Mountain Hotshots at the locations of their deaths, by buying that land on behalf of the Arizona State Parks Department for the Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial Site, could get seriously derailed on June 30,
I think it’s important to understand the context of this whole thing.
—————————————
Way down below, I responded to a comment by Bob Powers, by describing the fact that the ONLY way this land transfer could happen, given the set-up of the Arizona State Trust Lands. I said this JUNE 2, 2015 AT 5:19 PM:
“Just spent the day researching the whole Arizona State Trust Land and the Arizona State Parks realities.
Interesting stuff.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to “just transfer” land from Arizona State Trust Land to anything or anybody, including Arizona State Parks.
Arizona State Trust Land does not belong to the State of Arizona. It belongs to the Trust, and the State only manages it.
It MUST be either SOLD or LEASED, and the beneficiaries MUST BE COMPENSATED for the sale or use of the land at the highest market value.
And not only does changing any of this require amending the Constitution of the State of Arizona, but it also requires an Act of Congress to amend the originating 1910 Enabling Act.
A NUMBER of attempts have been made over the past 10 years or so to “reform” the Arizona State Trust Land management system (because EVERYBODY finds is highly problematic in one way or another), and they’ve ALL gone down in flames.
So, yes, handing half a million dollars to the Memorial Board to purchase it and, in turn, hand it off to Arizona State Parks (an entity which has never been seriously supported or funded, except during Bruce Babbitt’s eight years as Governor) and has all but been starved out of functional existence since 2006) is about the ONLY way to transfer that land out of State Trust use and ownership and into some other kind of use.
This whole day’s worth of research leaves me wondering, however, if, since the land was, apparently, most likely used for grazing leasing (they HAD to have been doing something “lucrative” with it or I’m sure they would have unloaded it a long time ago), who had those grazing leases? And what might THAT possibly have to do with anything?”
Bob Powers then responded JUNE 3, 2015 AT 6:55 AM:
“From the looks of Yarnell brush fields I doubt the allotments could hold many Cattle based on actual feed per Acer so probably not any where near LUCRATIVE . The Value set by the State some times is to much for Range Land and people just do not buy or bid on the land.
Some local Ranchers Bid and are the only bidder on the Range Allotments so the bids are low for Leases.
some Section allotments 640 Ac. can go for $100 a Year with only 1 local Rancher bidding. The income goes to the School Fund.”
———————————-
At which point I responded JUNE 3, 2015 AT 10:24 AM:
“Not one to leave any stone unturned when I’m really curious about something, I did discover this morning that there WAS a grazing lease on this piece of Arizona State Trust Land.
It’s noted in the Minutes of the Arizona State Parks Board of Directors Meeting on April 16, 2014, where they’re discussing the Memorial.
http://azstateparks.com/board/downloads/minutes/2014/ASPB_MINUTES_04-16-14.pdf
From Page 5:
“4. Yarnell Hill Memorial – staff briefing on the components of the bill and its affects
on Arizona State Parks
Please see the presentation posted online at azparks.com/board Presentation 04/16/14.
Mr. Ream presented a map of the proposed area for the Yarnell Hill Memorial site. State
Land Trust has identified 240 acres valued at about $1,000 per acre and the Yarnell Hill
Memorial Site Board will need to make the recommendation to purchase the land. At that
time the State Land Commissioner will need to make that land available for auction. Mr.
Ream advised that an adjacent landowner does not want a memorial put on the land as
the only access point to the site passes directly through his land. Currently there is a
grazing lease on the land and the committee may be met with some difficulty throughout
the process. The other access points are north of Yarnell and a good bit out of the way.
Director Martyn advised the Committee that this bill does have the potential of being
designated as an Arizona State Park officially and they will then have to play an active
role in the management of the natural resources.”
I’m guessing, at this point, the logical holder of that grazing lease would be Maughan. But I’m not sure.
Maughan is really opposed to this Memorial. So……….I wouldn’t be surprised if WTKTT’s speculation might actually come true and Maughan showed up at that little auction on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse on June 30.”
More to come, to keep the rule of one link per post.
“:
And then I wrote JUNE 3, 2015 AT 10:41 AM:
———————————-
PS. Another REALLY interesting and relevant thing I found on this Google hunt is a 2005 “Oral history interview with Senator John Hays” by the Northern Arizona University Ecological Oral Histories Course.
I just read the transcript, but there is a video attached, and I just downloaded that and will watch it. It may help make more sense of the locations Hays is describing.
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm/ref/collection/cpa/id/63397
He even describes the 1960’s wildfire that occurred, leading to the building of the fire-breaks we have been discussing.
He talks a lot about their ranching history and the kind of ranching, grazing, land management, prescription burning, etc that was going on in the Yarnell/Peeples Valley/Weaver Mountains area.
The Hays family was the original owner of the ranch that the Maughan family bought a chunk of.
“Description CONTENT: In this oral history Senator Hays talks about the environmental history of the Peeples Valley region and his family’s relationship to the land. Topics also covered include cattle ranching and sheep herding, grasslands, fire control, invasive plants, water and weather. BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY: The Ecological Oral Histories Course recorded the ecological impact and change from those who have lived and worked for years on the Colorado Plateau. The project was funded by an Environmental Research, Development, and Education for the New Economy (ERDENE) grant and administered by the Ecological Monitoring & Assessment Program and Foundation at Northern Arizona University.”
—————————-
It’s kind of confusing in the interview to know EXACTLY which parts of the Hays Ranch were sold to Maughan and when, and I couldn’t find anything EXACTY about that today.
But it seems to me, from various readings, that in 2000 John Hays and his family sold pretty much MOST of the Hays Ranch to Rex Maughen, although John Hays still lives at the original headquarters house in Peeples Valley (and I’m still not sure exactly where that is), and was there during the Yarnell Fire, and was cited in one of the major stories about it.
John Hays was both a State Representative and a State Representative and has held NUMEROUS positions all over the place regarding range management and all kinds of related things.
The sense I get from all of this is that, yes, cattle have been grazed all over the place around Yarnell, including in the Weaver Mountains (especially in the winter), for a long long time. Which would possibly explain why Rex Maughan would possibly still own a grazing lease on the land parcel we are talking about, even though, mostly, Rex Maughan raises Quarterhorses.
A couple of things—-
Any grazing lease on that peace of property would be able to be researched for the cost. Each bid for those sections and the term of lease is open for review by public.
Not sure how to get to the states records but they are required to release that info on each parcel under lease and who holds the lease, term, and bid some are on a 10 year term.
The other problem is access if the land owner will not grant access then he controls the State trust land as the Memorial Board is finding out.
As far as grazing I am sure it is better now after the fire has cleaned out the brush.
and for a few years to come dependent on rain fall to produce foliage.
The State dose have the authority to shut down the allotment to grazing for a period of time so their closure could keep the lessee out of the allotment.
Thanks Bob!
I’m kinda sorta thinking some combination of Sonny and/or Joy might even know more about this via boots on the ground. I’m thinking they would know if they’d seen cattle/sheep/horses on that rangeland.
Apparently there weren’t any there on June 30, 2013.
There might be some there now, though. All things considered, including probably some good grass.
Although, as Hays describes it, they didn’t graze cattle there in the summer. Just in the winter.
I’m kinda sorta thinking some combination of Sonny and/or Joy might even know more about this via boots on the ground. I’m thinking they would know if they’d seen cattle/sheep/horses on that rangeland.
reply: cattle/sheep/horses you see more on the Congress/Aguila side and even Aguila has goats and mountain ram like you see near Hoover dam.
Use to be long ago cattle but I would have to ask Culp or ranchers or OX ranch or Grantham for confirmation on that. Rex has horses but you see them mainly on highway 89 not way out there. Way out there again is plenty of skunks and rattlers relocated…javelinas/coyotes/cats/lions, deer and rarely a bear…you see coons…and plenty of squirrels and pack rats as if you were living in NJ…so many jam packed in one little area.
Joy,
What you’re saying is pretty much what I was thinking. I didn’t/don’t think Maughan is actually interested in cattle-ranching.
And thanks for wandering through these comments and replying.
I really appreciate it.
Interesting stuff, huh?
yes, I am happy too because so many times since two years have gone by I wanted to just sit back and read and just zone out on here but my life has not been that way.so this has been a nice peaceful day coming to Yarnell.
The Hays family was the original owner of the ranch that the Maughan family bought a chunk of.
————————-
reply: another tidbit piece of important notes…he also has cancer and at Christmas time he was rumored to be dead but Maria Luissa who owns the Shrine gave me the facts and as well as the ranch hand guy too and Ranch House owner Vicki V….he is doing okay considering…not dead. Let’s see how many people get wiped out here in the community…we will continue to research that retardant ingredients because maybe some of the elements is doing the old school ways and attack the fire fierce early on versus what they are doing…
Sad news. But I was wondering………..I notice he was born seven years after my mom. So he’s getting up there.
He seems like a really really nice and interesting guy.
Apparently he’s also an artist.
although John Hays still lives at the original headquarters house in Peeples Valley (and I’m still not sure exactly where that is), and was there during the Yarnell Fire, and was cited in one of the major stories about it.
reply:
http://eweb.co.yavapai.az.us/recorder/eagleweb/docSearch.jsp
is one resource to further find out your answer on that-
also my medical massager’s mom-in-law…elderly woman lives next to Hayes and I can run it by her next massage. I do not travel too much near his area because I was always near 800-20-047s&u area which the Helms own next to that parcel out by Peeples Valley. Hays owns 200-12-001d…that Monica Mine Rd. has a lot of private ownership.
I do know by locals about a decade ago Hays was rumored to have financial sticklers and liens so maybe that is when Rex Maughan obtained it…???
Thanks for that link. I have no idea what, mostly to do with that site.
But I did find some activity between John Hays and Rex Maughan in 2000. So I think that has to do with the sale of the land.
You wrote:
“I do know by locals about a decade ago Hays was rumored to have financial sticklers and liens so maybe that is when Rex Maughan obtained it…???”
He says in the interview that they all decided to sell it because they were getting older and couldn’t keep up the work. But financial concerns could have also been, understandably, involved.
So, next I wrote, given all the above, on JUNE 3, 2015 AT 11:02 AM:
————————————————————
And finally, I want to post (for the record) the April 1, 2014 State Land Department “Order Authorizing Additional Access With Regard to Closing Order No. 006-2013/2014,” the order that closed the area.
It states that:
“It has been determined to be in the best interest of the Trust to grant additional access for litigation purposes to the State’s attorneys, witnesses, experts and claimants, and potential claimants and their attorneys, witnesses and experts.
IT IS ORDERED effective at 8:00 o’clock a.m. on the date of this Order, that access is now granted to the State’s attorneys, witnesses, experts and claimants, and their attorneys, witnesses and experts with the advance permission of the State Attorney General’s Office.”
The original July 12, 2013 order, a copy of which is attached to this file and addressed to Rex and Ruth Maughan, says:
“IT IS ORDERED that effective at 8:00 o’clock a.m. on the date of this Order, the subject land is closed to any and all access and use, except to the families of the fallen, those public safety officials charged with inverstigating the fire and protecting the public and rights of entry to be issued for official purposes. No applications will be accepted for surface and subsurface leases, permits, sales, minerals, oil and gas exploration and right-of-way applications, until further Order of the State Land Commissioner.”
So I don’t know where that closure left the holder of the grazing lease (which, given this order copy addressed to the Maughans, could indicate they might have held that lease). It doesn’t say anything about that.
But if it DID exclude the holder of that lease from entering that land, I wouldn’t be surprised if that entity might have been a bit more than ticked off about it.
http://azstateparks.com/committees/downloads/Yarnell_Land_Closing_Orders.pdf
>> Marti wrote…
>>
>> But if it DID exclude the holder of that lease from entering that land,
>> I wouldn’t be surprised if that entity might have been a bit more
>> than ticked off about it.
Agree.
And yes… ‘that entity’ ( and all kinds of other ‘entities’ that might have their own interests in that land ) are going to be free to try and ‘remedy the situation’ on their own behalf and for their own untethered interests…
…at 11:00 AM on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse…. June 30, 2015.
If the Memorial Board gets ‘nervous’ about this… their only option is to simply postpone the auction… and start seeing what their options are.
I could be wrong… but their MIGHT be a way to change the process to sort of a ‘sealed bid’ thing… whereby you get the chance to ‘flush out’ potential bidders without actually PERFORMING the auction.
That’s a little funky… but it might be LEGAL.
In other words… switch to SEALED BIDS… and ‘rig’ the process so that if you actually see someone wants to outbid you… then you actually CANCEL the whole process so they can’t get what they want.
And now you know WHO they are… and what kind of additional funding you are going to need to go up against them.
This actually happens all the time in the ART world… especially when ‘private collections’ are involved.
Here is the other crazy scenario ( and would seem to more aligned with what the widows actually want ).
Another BIDDER might have every intention of allowing a memorial to be built… but they simply want to be the ones to DEED RESTRICT the land ( as they, perhaps, even donate it back to Arizona ) and retain the power to say who gets to visit the site.
Man, I’ll tell you, all of this is WAY WAY WAY WAY WAY above my “pay-scale.”
It’s a good thing macaroni and cheese goes better with New Mexico Red Chile, at this point.
Between this, and the ADOSH vs AZDF embroglio, and the Lawsuits, and all the pain and agony, and McDonough’s PTSD, and the books and movies, and the Prescott wildland fire=fighter staffing issues, and God only knows what else, (including all the possible illnesses leading to deaths in Yarnell)………
………..whenever I look at photos of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, I just say, under my breath, “Just stay there in the black, just stay there in the black, just stay there in the black, just stay there in the black………………………………..”
More Shakespeare.
IT IS ORDERED effective at 8:00 o’clock a.m. on the date of this Order, that access is now granted to the State’s attorneys, witnesses, experts and claimants, and their attorneys, witnesses and experts with the advance permission of the State Attorney General’s Office.”
reply:
WITNESSES
does that mean US the hikers are legally allowed on his area?????
That was exactly one of the FIRST questions that popped into my mind when I read that, Joy.
at 2:32pm a person from this site privately emailed me
Email Title: No.
Content: The answer to your question is “no.”
To clarify my comment today above on WITNESS and US hikers- I was in a huddle local library in many talks like Southwest airlines great deals, May artist of the month became an extension to June Truman Ferrell who if you are interested in his art work after seeing it at the library contact hi [email protected] or –602-301-4062 and his meet and greet is June 18th 2pm-3pm and other topics like local romances and etc. and Chris found a churchkey so when someone saw what page I was on as they past by humor flew in the area on topic so someone asked
“WITNESSES
does that mean US the hikers are legally allowed on his area?????”
so I postedwhat they said but for the record it was not meant for a joke- this person asked seriously but I, Joy, for the record know the fine print WITH WRITTEN PERMISSION…so hope this clears it for the world that I am clear I am not allowed on certain sections and for the RECORD…I no longer even travel the Weavers. The very state I love did me wrong as the desert walker and with no help from game and fish we buried wildlife so homeowners did not have to face that unpleasant death smell hearing the comments we can still smell where the men died and it was not that—it was big ass burned to death deer and as well javelina and coons and etc we buried tomake sure these homeowners could focus just on their losses their at home not the awful smell of death. Only one from game and fish thanked me for that hard work day in and night we did. It was not easy in that heat.
Copy.
Thanks Joy.
After which, I finally wrote this JUNE 3, 2015 AT 11:18 AM:
———————————–
Oh, and another PS.
I case anybody thinks that land might not be worth the $501K that it would take to outbid the state, I’ve seen 20-acre parcels around Yarnell for sale for as much as $200k.
So that little piece of territory itself might not (at the going current market value) be worth $501K, but it could EASILY be worth it for someone like Maughan, in the long scheme of things, all things considered.
As I said below… not to quibble… but it’s not $501,000 dollars that’s needed.
It’s only $500,000 plus one single Lincoln penny.
I actually don’t think the ‘donations’ that have been raised so far by this Yarnell Hill Memorial Board can be LEGALLY ADDED to the $500,000 they have to purchase the land with. Those ‘donations’ are supposed to be for ‘other things’.
Regardless… I believe the Yarnell Hill Memorial Board has actually only raised just a few thousand dollars so far.
You said:
“I believe the Yarnell Hill Memorial Board has actually only raised just a few thousand dollars so far.”
Yes, I think that’s true, also, and I agree with you that those particular funds are designated for the Memorial, not the purchase of the land.
And, also, yes, it’s one penny not one dollar.
Although I don’t know, all things considered, that some kind of donation for the land COULDN’T be added to the pot. I haven’t seen anything that says that couldn’t be allowed.
And I have no idea whether someone or other on the Board is or isn’t aware of all of this stuff. I have a hard time imagining that, given some of the “connections” that are, apparently involved, everybody is totally oblivious to all of this.
But who knows????? It could be a VERY interesting second anniversary of the Fatal Deployment of the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
SO.
That’s where things may be at, and how they may have gotten there, heading into the June 30 auction of the parcel of Arizona State Trust Land by the Arizona Department of Lands, which has been engineered to be bought, via $500,000 given to the Memorial Site Board, by the Arizona Legislature, in order to purchase the location of the Deployment Site of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, and, thence pass it on to the otherwise woefully underfunded Arizona State Parks Department — a move that a number of Yarnell citizens and landowners, and at least one really really wealthy and powerful lease-holder (who owns the land that he is denying access to that is needed to create a reasonable access to the site), are seriously seriously seriously seriously opposed to, for a whole VARIETY of reasons.
WHEW. Time to go to bed.
Context. It has a history.
Marti… thank you for ALL of that ‘homework’ and ‘context’.
I think if anyone from the Yarnell Memorial Board read that ‘context’… and realizes you are right about what COULD happen…
…their only option right now is to just call off the June 30, 2015 auction.
At least the site then remains ( indefinitely? ) on actual State Trust Land… and completely under THEIR control with regards to ACCESS.
That beats the heck out of some PROXY BIDDER from some anonymous LLC possibly getting ahold of it and building the “Granite Mountain Water Park”.
Dare I say it?… “Six Flags Over Yarnell”?
500K was never a realistic amount to allocate if they wanted to be ABSOLUTELY SURE it ends up a State of Arizona controlled ‘park’.
You wrote:
“Marti… thank you for ALL of that ‘homework’ and ‘context’.”
You’re welcome. I found it absolutely fascinating.
“…their only option right now is to just call off the June 30, 2015 auction.
At least the site then remains ( indefinitely? ) on actual State Trust Land… and completely under THEIR control with regards to ACCESS.”
That could very well be the case. A whole bunch more NEGOTIATION probably needs to happen. And that might not be impossible. This really doesn’t need to be a total fustercluck.
I don’t see Maughan as the kind of guy who would be interested in a waterpark. But I’m guessing he probably didn’t appreciate that memo. I have no clue what he valued that access to that tiny piece of the Weavers for before all of this ruckus. I haven’t looked to see if he’s on the list of people on the Loss of Property Lawsuit. He didn’t lose any buildings.
And it was really interesting how John Hays talked about that 1960’s wildfire essentially cleaning everything out and making it all better, and how he learned prescribed fire-burning as a result of it. And then used it.
I don’t think Maughan lost anything but his friggin grazing lease, which he may not have actually been even using.
But to have been, for all intents and purposes “emailed”, in no uncertain terms, that he was BANNED from the land adjacent to his ranch, and his lease being, for who knows how long, most likely VOIDED, by a state agency that he may have agreed with others had been related to the “mismanagement” of that fire…………
……………….and then be expected to be all nice about opening up his lands to WHATEVER in terms of WHOMEVER passing through them…………………………
…………………………and knowing he has all the friggin dollars he would need to just outbid that Board and end that game forever…………………………given that he owns about fifteen ranches all over Arizona………………….
I’m just trying to wander into his possible brain.
I should seriously go to bed instead.
Goodnight.
Still sitting here cogitating.
I have NO CLUE what Rex Maughan was using his land or his (most likely) lease in that big middle bowl and little bowl for.
Rex Maughan’s big interest is not cattle. It’s Quarter Horses.
Which is different from when the Hays Family owned the Hays Ranch, most of which they sold to Rex Maughan around about the year 2000.
The Hays Ranch was ALL about cattle, and they used the Weaver Mountain area for WINTER grazing of their cattle.
I’m not sure Rex Maughan even owns any cattle on that land, at least to any great extent.
So I’m actually thinking he might have been sitting on that land (and that lease) more with the idea of eventually sub-dividing and “developing” it. Or something along those lines.
I was actually stunned to see a piece of land way up north of the area we’ve been talking about (approximately in line with Model Creek Road but way over to the west of it), with NO access, up for sale for about $100k for about 20 acres. That doesn’t mean the owners think they’re gonna get that any time soon, but……………they can probably afford to sit on it until………..whenever.
So, given that Maughan isn’t all that much into cattle, much less grazing cattle. I’m thinking his interest in this land has been more along the lines of the eventual “development” of it.
Given that nobody’s now going to want to “buy,” much less “develop” that little parcel of land that’s being auctioned off on June 30…………….
………..I’m still stumped in my thinking about all of this.
Again he also controls access with his private property almost surrounding the State Trust Land. It is worthless to a developer if they cant get access from the Hayes Ranch Road (BSR) Road.
That is what happens with these kinds of Sections and why the Private land owner controls the State Grazing Rights.
Dose Maughan have sheep? What is his Lease per year or dose he even have one? Maughan controls the access and there fore the land with out a lease agreement. Gets very complicated here.
You wrote:
“Again he also controls access with his private property almost surrounding the State Trust Land.”
Yep. And that just may be all he’s really interested in. He doesn’t want people just “wandering around” on that land. Before the fire, he probably didn’t really care all that much.
I still think, more and more, that ULTIMATELY he’s “sitting on” that land for eventual development. Which he intends to control, and profit from.
Once upon a time, awhile back, we talked/speculated/imagined about how the Helmses could (and, in our minds, SHOULD, along with the whole town of Yarnell) leverage this whole thing. Apparently they weren’t interested in doing that.
Apparently, folks out there continue to think this whole thing is just going to eventually “go away.”
That’s just not going to happen.
I have met people who have told me they get hunting permission to go out there in that area so maybe for those folks …??? but nah I have only seen cattle on the other side of 89 over out 202-10-014 areas
Thanks for adding hunting to the list of possibilities.
I’m just trying to learn all I can about what is “on the table” regarding this.
On the other hand, Rex Maughan could just sit back and continue to deny the use of his land for access and watch Arizona Parks go through all kinds of difficulty putting in that difficult route to the site and not, frankly, even give a damn.
This whole thing might not even matter one iota to him, all things considered. Or, at least matter $500,000.01 to him.
Who knows??????????????
Your Right——-
That beats the heck out of some PROXY BIDDER from some anonymous LLC possibly getting ahold of it and building the “Granite Mountain Water Park”.
Dare I say it?… “Six Flags Over Yarnell”?
reply: my mother use to live directly behind Jackson NJ Six Flags (parkway exit 98; if you know Jersey you don’t say TOWN you say EXIT)- the fence had the safari zoo bordered her property…I saw baboons and all kinds of cool animals daily there. She had no fence the fence was the safari adventure. My mom had baboons and other animals break out into her yard—even hit big news one year—but yeah my luck Six Flags will be in my backyard here…you could be right but hope not…those baboons are not friendly…They would not have to bring in animals though—enough safari on the Weavers already
This made me LOL!!
A wildlife park.
We have an awesome wildlife park over in Edgewood, east of Albuquerque. It does great animal rescue and equally great educational stuff.
Plus yummy chuckwagon barbecues.
Come to think of it, adding this to the mix.
One thing Rex Maughan is well-known for (and beloved, also) is the late September BBQ/Quarterhorse Sale/party/art festival/general get-together that is also a benefit for the Arizona Cattleman’s Association.
I think he inherited that extremely successful and popular tradition from John Hays.
Just brain-storming here.
well here we go again but who does the hikers bump into and in all places- Yarnell but the people in charge of Veteran Disability and a man with no legs and another with one leg and they were eating and ready to head to the 89 memorial. They asked how come there is no way to the area for handicapped folks and we said no folks at this time- restricted off and eventually they plan to make a rugged way in kind of thing and let me tell you “steam” filled the room so do not be shocked if a campaign on that starts because they learned they will not have handicap accessible way into there. I explained most likely emergency quad entrance but this man seemed to be like a marine who fought and is a hero kind of guy and for the rights of people with disabilities do not be shocked a campaign does not come from just this simple brief hello how are you meeting…you see us people with disabilities do not like to be viewed as a liability—we all are liabilities in some way—if you want to go to see the area and its not restricted- do it…I guarantee you they will want to avoid hiking highly populated rattlesnake areas though…I promise you that Weavers has its share of them because of snakeman relocating so many for over forty years and I even sent photos and such to game and fish on the pythons Snakeman let loose that we caught one on the night vision perimeter cameras so it is not just rattlers out there. Plus any locals that are blessed to see the African size mountain lion and we have seen up close than things like that I would say you want to hike it—hike and beware kind of thing—enter at your own risk signs kinda thing—good news I am at the library in Yarnell waiting for a local to come with the explosive sign photos so you will get them today WWTKTT—They are driving up here to meet me here because it is cooler than Congress so you will have solid confirmation where you can dissect the photo for gps and have fun—my hiking ad flyer has not brought me calls to take a hike in 100+ heat but it has people offering photos so there you have it—today depending when they arrive or tomorrow you will have photos. YAHOO!!!! I told them to be discreet when arriving at the library so if I am being watched no one will even know who they are and why they came up here. No name at this point will be publicly given but a camera or video camera name or cell name—okay but we will knock that task out for you once and for all and sorry for the delay but I just cannot hike it up there—the ranchers and locals support me and my venture to seek clarity and that is where we will piece the puzzle together as a community of online and offline folks wanting puzzle complete but in the end I still think some pieces will remain in the dirt bag of the vacuum cleaner that was sucked up so it will take ripping into that bag to get those pieces,,,
Perfect. This thing is live. All it needs is to go viral.
Are you reading this, Memorial Committee?
You should be.
good news I am at the library in Yarnell waiting for a local to come with the explosive sign photos so you will get them today WWTKTT
reply: you have been sent all information requested by outside source. I hope it gives clarity.
Maughan is really opposed to this Memorial. So……….I wouldn’t be surprised if WTKTT’s speculation might actually come true and Maughan showed up at that little auction on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse on June 30.”
is there any public display of Rex being opposed?
first I heard of this…
Wow, he would be the one to have an interest to land lock that area and make such a purchase.
interesting.
It was in the minutes of the April 2014 Minutes of the Arizona Parks Board meeting that I posted upstream, but will re-post the link of here. They were discussing the Memorial, and it says:
“Mr. Ream advised that an adjacent landowner does not want a memorial put on the land as the only access point to the site passes directly through his land. Currently there is a grazing lease on the land and the committee may be met with some difficulty throughout the process.”
“Mr. Ream” is Jay Ream, “Deputy Director, Parks and Development.”
WTKTT may be aware of some other documentation of Maughan’s opposition.
Oops, forgot the link.
MINUTES OF THE MEETING
ARIZONA STATE PARKS BOARD
April 16, 2014
http://azstateparks.com/board/downloads/minutes/2014/ASPB_MINUTES_04-16-14.pdf
Unfortunately, the Memorial Committee hasn’t posted any of their Minutes since January (which is a violation of Arizona’s Open Meeting Law), so we have, essentially no clue as to the content of their discussions about all of this.
Sonny says
June 5, 2015 at 1:32 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Marti, you can bet Maughan did not expect much return on that area as far as cattle or horse grazing are concerned. Manzanita is useless as cattle or horse feed and even deer prefer a different plant to graze on. I think these ranchers lease these lands at such low dollar that it does not matter whether they graze livestock there or not. Peeples Valley is where all the grasses are and where their stock stay and graze. Joy tells me there is a use for manzanita branches in cookie cutter homes with birdcages. Seems the birds like to roost on the branches. I do know the berries are good bear feed on some species.
The brush in that area is growing back after two years and if we continue to have another couple years of decent rains then it will be close to what it was before the fire. If you hike the area now be sure to wear jeans and boots. Shorts and shower shoes as I have seen before won’t protect you.
Right now cattle could do well with the dispersion of grass and other plants. Eventually manzanita will take it over though.
Reply to Marti Reed post on June 3, 2015 at 11:18 am
NOTE: This was brought up from down below in a thread that was running out of room.
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I case anybody thinks that land might not be worth the $501K that it would
>> take to outbid the state, I’ve seen 20-acre parcels around Yarnell for sale
>> for as much as $200k.
>>
>> So that little piece of territory itself might not (at the going current market
>> value) be worth $501K, but it could EASILY be worth it for someone like
>> Maughan, in the long scheme of things, all things considered.
And ( all things considered )… a lot of people OTHER than Ranchers like Maughan.
Couple of other points…
That area just to the east of the boundary of this Section 9 ( in Township 10 North, Range 05 West ) where the DPS Ranger 58 Helicopter actually finally ‘sat down’ and dropped off DPS Officer/Medic Eric Tarr was also known as “the cattle pond” area.
I think it’s a given that there were no cattle anywhere out in that area at anytime that entire weekend ( or for long time prior to that? )… but that doesn’t mean the area wasn’t considered by rancers ( like Maughan ) to be viable ( and valuable ) cattle grazing land. If it wasn’t… then what was the “cattle pond” doing right there?
Also… it’s not $501 K that will get anyone but the Memorial Committee that land.
It’s actually just an even $500 K plus one single extra penny… unless the members of the committee themselves start adding to the $500 K that morning with what’s in their own wallets.
So I think we are left with FOUR potential ‘categories’ of people that might actually show up on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse at 11:00 AM on the morning of June 30, 2015, and be ‘bidding’ for that land.
1) The Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board. They only have ( max ) $500 K to bid.
2) RANCHERS. Some of them ( like Maughan ) have even already stated they do NOT want any kind of PUBLIC MEMORIAL on that land so close to theirs… and regardless of any other property value they see… that alone could bring them to the auction with checkbooks larger than the Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board.
3) A small group of widows of the deceased Hotshots. State Representative Karen Fann, who was instrumental in even creating this Yarnell Hill Site Memorial Board and in seeing the legislation that created it pass the Arizona House and Senate, has ALWAYS said that she sides with the widows and was the one who originally tried to put the option into the legislation that assured that the widows would have a chance at obtaining the land and controlling it themselves.
4) Others? – Given the publicity surrounding ALL of this… there is really NO TELLING who might come crawling out of the woodwork on the morning of June 30, 2015 and start bidding on that land. I used the example already of Ross Perot… who donated his own airplane just get that WFF statue flown into Prescott. He has $500K plus under just one of his couch cushions… but can anyone really be sure someone else LIKE Ross Perot might not show up that morning.
Matter of fact… I’m pretty sure an auction like this allows for PROXY BIDDING.
In other words… some ‘agent’ could show up and just start out-bidding EVERYONE… and no one will ever really know exactly WHO that ‘agent’ represents or WHO is actually acquiring the property.
It won’t even be clear on the DEED, when the smoke clears.
The ‘owner’ could be just some obscure LLC or organization with no names mentioned.
LOL, WTKTT!!
After I just took issue with your description of Cory Ball’s photos downstream, I was about to repost my “hidden in the weeds” posts to the top because I think they are important, for the sake of context. I think I probably still will.
While we are (at least I am) constantly looking for SOMETHING regarding this whole fustercluck regarding what’s happening with the “Global Mediation,” given last week’s cancellation of Brendan McDonough’s THIRD deposition……
The NEXT potential fustercluck could really EASILY happen at the end of this month, June 30, the second ANNIVERSARY of the deaths of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, on the steps f the Yavapai County Courthouse.
That’s why I’m going to post to the top, the stuff I posted down below. CONTEXT. (While I, WAY past my bedtime, am making macaroni and cheese because I’m hungry for it).
Given what happened on the FIRST anniversary… and “all of a sudden” people who were THERE feeling free to speak to the media… there really is NO TELLING what might happen this time around… as that date approaches.
With regards to just the ‘fusterclucking’ that’s gone down in just the past few weeks… I still think it’s fascinating that there are still NO COMMENTS on the MSM articles about this THIRD cancellation of Brendan McDonough’s deposition.
Actually… I take that back.
Still ZERO ZIP NADA on the Daily Courier article… but there are now just TWO simple one-line comments on the AZCENTRAL article that had the REAL information in it about David Shapiro now pissing all over the proceedings and trying to limit his client to one-single-never-gonna-happen-again-take-it-or-leave-it deposition.
Those ONLY two comments are…
Mary Melcher – Jun 1, 2015 7:12pm
He wants us to wait and buy the book
Hal Francis – Wickenburg, Arizona – Jun 1, 2015 9:51pm
We need to hear what he has to say.
>> Marti said…
>>
>> While we are (at least I am) constantly looking for SOMETHING
>> regarding this whole fustercluck regarding what’s happening with
>> the “Global Mediation,” given last week’s cancellation of Brendan
>> McDonough’s THIRD deposition……
Rest assured. All of that is just simply ‘backdrafting’ at the moment.
Open a door… add a little oxygen to the heat… and WHOOSH.
It’s inconceivable ( to me, anyway ), that one or more of the Judges in any one of these pending litigations isn’t going to break out their wooden paddles, start paddling these attorneys, and start issuing SUBPOENAS for the elusive Mr. Brendan McDonough.
I don’t think the PTSD claim can be sustained, either.
Not for someone who just listed themselves on Facebook as a PUBLIC FIGURE and proudly printed their own CELLPHONE NUMBER on that same PUBLIC page.
Now that I think of it… regarding this “elusive Mr. McDonough” thing…
I HOPE the following has occurred to any/all of the attorneys that will finally get to ask him some non-softball questions.
It has to do with the YARNELL-GAMBLE video/audio.
That video was shot by ( supposedly ) Blue Ridge Hotshot Ronald Gamble at exactly 4:27 PM from the driver’s seat of one of the Blue Ridge Hotshot Crew Carriers.
At that moment… the Blue Ridge Hotshots were actively ‘mounting up’ and just trying to get the FLOCK OUTTA THERE.
At that same moment… Brendan McDonough was just a few yards away sitting in the Driver’s seat of the Granite Mountain Superintendent vehicle and ready to ‘convoy’ and follow the Blue Ridge Crew Carriers out of there.
So that means that Brendan McDonough must have ALSO heard ( in FULL ) the same radio exchange that Ronald Gamble accidentally captured while he was shooting his iPhone video and trying to capture that ‘cool’ fire coming over the ridge up there.
Brendan’s priority channel was the GM intra-crew… but since we hear Eric Marsh himself speaking ( at exactly 4:27 PM ) over the TAC channel in that YARNELL-GAMBLE video… that means for sure and certain that Eric Marsh himself was NOT talking to Jesse Steed at that moment over the GM intra-crew channel.
So if there was no traffic at that moment on the GM intra-crew… then Brendan’s radio WOULD ( most likely ) have also LOCKED ON to this same TAC channel exchange as the radio in the Blue Ridge Crew Carrier did.
So it is HIGHLY LIKELY that Brendan McDonough himself heard this entire radio exchange… and *might* be able to recall CALL SIGNS… and WHO seemed to be urging Eric Marsh to “Hurry Up” and get Granite Mountain to Yarnell.
Personally… I still think it’s just as important to know WHO THAT WAS as it is to know exactly what Marsh ( in turn ) might have then been saying or doing to try and get Jesse Steed to ‘obey his orders’ and/or ‘Hurry up’ himself.
If Brendan didn’t hear that exchange… or any others like it… so be it.
But I sure hope someone realizes that just as it has always been HIGHLY LIKELY that Brendan heard all this additional GM intra-crew radio traffic following his evacuation from the lookout mound… it is JUST AS HIGHLY LIKELY Brendan heard all this OTHER radio traffic as well.
And I hope someone remembers to ask him about ALL OF IT.
wwtktt-
i am sending you the information as i catch pics i think might be of interest to you-
i like some of the pics from the osha hike.
toss if not.
still after all this time no sign yet-
I could of hiked to the area already the amount of time I spent looking if there was no bs order i got but i do not trust any sheninanigans because the paper i was served mentioned hiking than the judge said state had to say it to me than to have state serve me next morning with map- nah, not interested in getting caught up in horseshit—
i will keep looking
well, it is not easy for me to go through an unorganized format of photos but I did spend some time today looking but now we are having company unexpectedly popping in and I am not even over there so time for me to say good night…it is hard for me to go back through photos because I faced alot of losses in too many ways but my loved ones and seeing the journey of them die just makes me feel stronger to remain here alive. Shit. Tears rolling down my face. Why so many with disease? I told my husband today hanging out with Sonny takes the DIS out of mine…at puts me at EASE. Many I know who know our journey are laughing on that one saying WHAT…I knew it…back on the trails to the mysterious turquoise mines Sonny use to work in…so adios for now.
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on June 2, 2015 at 1:52 pm
>> Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> wwtktt- i am sending you the information as i catch pics i think
>> might be of interest to you – i like some of the pics from the osha hike.
>> toss if not.
Thank you, Joy. Yes…. I have received all of these pictures you have been sending.
Fascinating photos… including all the ones of what might have appeared to be just insignificant shots of DOZER TRACKS at various places out there.
You joked about how you were kidding Sonny about taking pictures of just simple DOZER TRACKS there on the ground… but once GPS location is applied to those photos they are telling an important part of the ‘story’ about the actual WORK that was taking place the morning and the afternoon of the tragedy.
So again… that matches the ongoing theme here that EVERY PHOTO IS IMPORTANT.
Even the ones that appear to be insignificant can ( and often DO ) contain small ‘clues’ that add up to more details about what was really happening out there that day.
In other words… SMALL pictures are what always make up the LARGER picture.
I am currently working with ALL of these photos and will report more on them later.
Example: I am almost done with one of those “through the looking glass” crossfades from your photos of the mysterious ( unidentified ) firefighters clearly seen standing out there in the area where Granite Mountain was working BEFORE the full Crew arrived out there.
It “crossfades” from your photo(s) into a LARGER “Google Earth” map showing exactly where all these men were standing out there as you captured them in your photos.
Another example: Now that you have verified the APPROXIMATE location of the EXPLOSIVES sign… it turns out that TWO of the photos taken by Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball ( His images IMG_1880 and IMG_1881 ) were NOT taken where it was previously thought they were taken.
It was previously believed those two BR Hotshot Cory Ball images were taken of the dozer ‘pushing line’ back EAST on the ‘Cutover Trail’ that the Blue Ridge Hotshots were going to work on much later in the afternoon. That’s the first ‘work’ that anyone ever gave the Blue Ridge Crew that day and they didn’t even get to perform that task. As soon as the Blue Ridge Crew got ‘lined out’ on that Cutover Trail that connected to the Shrine Road Youth Camp… they were ordered to RTO ( Reverse Tool Order ) and haul ass and EVACUATE back to the Youth Camp.
As it turns out… Cory Ball’s images IMG_1880 and IMG1881 were taken WAY out to the WEST and right there near this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign.
Cory Ball was the Blue Ridge Hotshot who had to ‘ride with the dozer’ that Yavapai County loaned Arizona Forestry because it only showed up with a Yavapa County Public Works empoyee as ‘dozer operator’ and he didn’t have the right WFF ‘qualifications’ to be working an Arizona Forestry workplace ( He was not ‘red-carded’ as either an HEQB or a DOZB ).
At exactly 11:27 AM on Sunday morning… Cory Ball got OUT of the dozer as it was approaching that EXPLOSIVES sign and THAT is when he took his two photos with filenames IMG_1880 and IMG_1881.
Those two photos are now VISUAL PROOF that this Yavapai County Dozer with this mysterious ( unidentified ) Yavapai County Public Works employee driving it actually DID improve that ‘Jeep Trail’ that lead to the northwest away from the old-grader all the way out to that EXPLOSIVES sign…
…and THAT work was COMPLETED as early as 11:30 AM that Sunday morning… 25 minutes BEFORE BR Supt. Brian Frisby and BR Captain Trueheart Brown actually went up to meet Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed for their 30 minute face-to-face meeting at exactly 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM.
Matter of fact… this also now proves that the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data is showing Frisby and Brown actually travelling NORTHWEST from the old-grader to go and MEET UP with Cory Ball and the mysterious dozer operator at exactly the same time Cory Ball had exited the dozer to take those two photos of his ( IMG_1880 and IMG_1881 ).
Cory Ball took those two photos within 45 seconds of each other at exactly 11:27 AM.
The Blue Ridge GPS tracking data shows Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown arriving at that exact location ( where Ball just took these two photos ) no more than 1 minute later.
If there is ever more access granted to the Blue Ridge Hotshots… or if they are ever allowed to talk freely about their participation in the Yarnell Hill Fire… I believe we will learn that Frisby and Brown did NOT get ‘lost’ while they were trying to get up there to meet with Marsh and Steed. I believe we will discover they actually DECIDED to head up that Jeep Trail that lead northwest away from the old-grader because they wanted to meet-up with Corry Ball and SEE how far the dozer had gotten BEFORE they then turned around, went back to the old-grader… and then took the southern two-track away from the old-grader and on up to their face-to-face with Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed.
>> Joy A. Collura also said…
>>
>> still after all this time no sign yet-
Copy that.. but PLEASE don’t trouble yourself too much over this “photo of the EXPLOSIVES sign” thing. You and Sonny have both already verified down below that the ‘red teardrop marker’ on that Google Earth image is, in fact, the approximate location of that sign.
The ONLY reason this EXPLOSIVES sign is important in any way is because it is actually mentioned in a number of pieces of public testimony as the place where the DOZER that was being supervised by Blue Ridge Hothshot Cory Ball ( acting as red-carded DOZB ) and that still mysterious ( unidentified ) Yavapai County Dozer operator actually STOPPED ‘improving’ that Jeep Trail and TURNED AROUND and headed back to the old-grader that morning.
It is NOT necessary to actually SEE the sign itself.
Google post-fire satellite imagery shows pretty much exactly where that ‘dozer push’ ended out there… and you and Sonny have now simply verified the testimony that exists about the dozer STOPPING its work right around where that EXPLOSIVES sign was located.
That’s important enough all by itself… so THANK YOU ( and Sonny, too ) for taking the time to do that.
It is ALSO enough that you have already now supplied that fascinating photo of the gas can and the corrugated metal sheets lying out there on the ground on that Jeep Trail. You also already verified that is ALSO the same location as the EXPLOSIVES sign because if you stand where that ‘gas can’ photo was taken and simply TURN AROUND… that is where the sign is. That ‘gas can’ photo is pretty much just more proof that the sign is right about there where the Google satellite imagery shows the dozer push ending.
>> Joy A. Collura also said…
>>
>> I could of hiked to the area already the amount of time I spent looking if
>> there was no bs order i got but i do not trust any sheninanigans because
>> the paper i was served mentioned hiking than the judge said state had
>> to say it to me than to have state serve me next morning with map- nah,
>> not interested in getting caught up in horseshit—
>> i will keep looking
As stated already… it would be NICE if there was an actual photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign that shows enough terrain so it can be fully GPS stamped… but
it is NOT NECESSARY. Just verifying the approximate location is/was enough for now.
Thank you for all that you do… and HAVE done… but there is NO NEED to even get
anywhere close to any more ‘horseshit’ over this ‘hiking’ stuff just over something like this.
Followup…
Here is a JUMPLINK to that exact PUBLIC online folder containing Blue Ridge Hothshot Cory Ball’s photos from Sunday, June 30, 2013… in Yarnell.
This folder contians the two images named IMG_1880 and IMG_1881 mentioned above. They are in the second row of photos… 3rd and 4th photos from the left..
.https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AAD72skvle6Io8jtO_DmLQn7a/Photos%20and%20Video/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball?dl=0
And here is a DIRECT link to Cory Ball’s IMG_1880
Cory Ball has EXITED the DOZER out near the EXPLOSIVES sign and he is taking this photo while standing on an already-improved part of the Jeep Trail and he is looking BACK to the SOUTHEAST towards Yarnell ( in the distance ).
The REASON he apparently took this photo when he did ( 11:27 AM ) is because he was trying to take a picture of that SEAT plane which clearly appears in the sky in the upper left center of the photo… flying back towards Yarnell.
This MAY have actually been a photo of Air Attack Rory Collins… but the plane looks took small for something an Air Attack would normally fly.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AAD72skvle6Io8jtO_DmLQn7a/Photos%20and%20Video/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball?dl=0&preview=IMG_1880.JPG
And here is a DIRECT link to Cory Ball’s IMG_1881.
He took this one just about 45 seconds after his previous IMG_1880 photo and he is standing in the exact same place on the improved part of the Jeep Trail where he took photo IMG_1880.
All he did after taking his IMG_1880 of the ‘plane flying over’ was TURN AROUND and now take a photo of the mysterious Yavapai County Public Works employee operating the dozer a littler farther to the west… and possibly almost about to reach the infamous EXPLOSIVES sign.
IMPORANT NOTE: Look in the upper left of this photo and you will clearly see a portion of the COLD BLACK that was, indeed, right there near where the dozer was going to STOP improving the Jeep Trail.
That is COLD BLACK from the day/night before.
No smokes. Not anywhere on the interior OR on the edge of the black.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AAD72skvle6Io8jtO_DmLQn7a/Photos%20and%20Video/BlueRidgeHotshotsPhotosVideos/Ball?dl=0&preview=IMG_1881.JPG
Thanks for all of this, WTKTT!
I never had ANY IDEA where these two photos were taken and I do not remember any “It was previously believed those two BR Hotshot Cory Ball images were taken of the dozer ‘pushing line’ back EAST on the ‘Cutover Trail’ that the Blue Ridge Hotshots were going to work on much later in the afternoon.”
As I remember it, we DID discuss where the photos that he took later of the dozer and the crew that afternoon were taken. Which was, in fact, “of the dozer ‘pushing line’ back EAST on the ‘Cutover Trail’”
My question is HOW DO YOU KNOW where these two photos were taken? They are not geotagged. I am perfectly willing to accept that you have, via Google Earth/Map become way more familiar with that landscape than I am. But I really don’t know how you can be so certain that these photos were taken where you are saying they were taken.
A problem I am having with your description above is this:
“All he did after taking his IMG_1880 of the ‘plane flying over’ was TURN AROUND and now take a photo of the mysterious Yavapai County Public Works employee operating the dozer a littler farther to the west… and possibly almost about to reach the infamous EXPLOSIVES sign.”
Thinking that 1881 is looking to the west doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
1880 shows, clearly, Yarnell proper in the background. That would have, generally speaking, meant that Ball was shooting THIS photo facing, relatively speaking, toward the WEST.
I agree that then he turned around. But that would mean that:
1881 is taken in the OPPOSITE direction, i.e toward the EAST, with the hill coming down from the left, meaning he was taking this photo looking toward the EAST.
So I have a question and a disagreement.
Question: How do you KNOW Ball was taking these photos where you say he was taking them.
Disagreement: I would lay humongous bets that he was taking these photos facing in the opposite direction you are saying he was taking them.
Marti… it’s late here so this has to be short.
I have ‘Google Earth’ “through the looking glass” crossfades for BOTH of these Cory Ball photos that ‘geo-places’ them to within ( I believe ) 100 feet of actual location.
I just haven’t posted these “crossfades” yet… but I will.
Hint: For 1880… Look closely at that MOUND in the right side of the photo. The ROCKS can be easily matched to Google Earth imagery.
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Thinking that 1881 is looking to the west doesn’t
>> make any sense to me at all.
Look in the upper left corner of 1881.
That is COLD BLACK from the previous day/night that was up on THE RIDGE.
That means Ball was facing WEST while standing on the Jeep Trail up there near that EXPLOSIVES sign.
Another quick followup…
>> Marti said…
>>
>> 1880 shows, clearly, Yarnell proper in the background.
>> That would have, generally speaking, meant that Ball
>> was shooting THIS photo facing, relatively speaking,
>> toward the WEST.
I think you are a little mixed up as to EAST and WEST on this one.
What I actually said was that for 1880… Ball was standing on the Jeep Trail and shooting to the SOUTHEAST.
Until I can upload the Google Earth ‘through the looking glass’ crossfades… just call up Google Maps with satellite view of the area and locate the old-grader itself.
The ‘view’ back towards Yarnell from even just the old-grader would be “looking to the SOUTHEAST”… not the WEST.
The ‘Jeep Trail’ in question is the one that led directly to the NORTHWEST away from the old-grader… so even at ANY point along that ‘Jeep Trail’… a photo taken showing Yarnell like Ball’s 1880 does would be (generally) a view to the SOUTHEAST.
Thanks, gotcha.
Makes more sense now.
And I’m not surprised that’s how you figured it out. Which is why you asked.
Oops. Typo. Haven’t woken up enough yet.
I meant to say:
Which is why I asked you.
Followup…
And HERE is the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data from the 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM timeframe as mentioned in the post above.
It shows Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown heading UP the Jeep Trail to the northwest to where Cory Ball and the Dozer were ( near that EXPLOSIVES sign ) and then arriving right there in that location just about 1 minute after Cory Ball took his photos IMG_1880 and IMG_1881.
It then shows Frisby and Brown TURNING AROUND, heading BACK to the old-grader, and then heading up the other two-track that lead SOUTH away from the old-grader and on up to their 30 minute face-to-face with Eric Marsh and Brian Frisby.
Apparently Captain Brown left the GPS unit in the Polaris Ranger for the duration of this 30 minute meeting since the tracking data shows it to be absolutely stationary ( parked ) for that entire time.
It then shows Frisby and Brown LEAVING that meeting ( with Brendan McDonough now onboard the Polaris Ranger ), heading back towards the old-grader, and then stopping for a moment ( at exactly 12:39 PM ) to let Brendan out so he could hike up to his lookout position on that mound where he would remain for the rest of the afternoon until he got into trouble.
NOTE: The sequence showing Frisby and Brown purposely traveling to the NORTHWEST and up that Jeep Trail to meet with Cory Ball and the mysterious dozer operator actually comes at the very beginning of this Blue Ridge GPS tracking day.
That’s because Blue Ridge Captain Brown didn’t even turn his GPS tracking unit ON until exactly 11:00 PM when he arrived out there near the old-grader, and the unit didn’t start recording valid GPS data ( still right there at the old-grader ) until 11:10 AM, just before they decided to head up that Jeep Trail to the northwest and meet with Cory Ball and the mysterious dozer operator.
They actually ‘took off’ in that direction ( from the old-grader ) to meet with Ball at 11:23 PM… and they arrived at his location near the EXPLOSIVES sign at 11:28 AM… just 60 seconds after Ball had taken his two images IMG_1880 and IMG_1881.
They then ‘scouted west’ just a little bit more and up into that drainage ( past the EXPLOSIVES sign )…and then they turned around and went ‘ricky-tick’ back to the old-grader and on up to their face-to-face meeting with Marsh and Steed.
Blue Ridge GPS Tracking Data – Unit in possession of BR Captain Brown
———————————————————————————
COLUMNS:
Time – Latitude, Longitude – Distance traveled (feet) – Rate (mph) – Description
1100 – VIDEO STARTS
1101 – 1109 – VIDEO is running but tracking pointer doesn’t appear until 1110
1110 – 34.231428, -112.782608 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Pointer appears near old-grader
1111 – 34.231428, -112.782608 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1112 – 34.231464, -112.782528 – 0023.050 – 00.26 – Slight movement east on two-track
1113 – 34.231464, -112.782528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1114 – 34.231311, -112.783531 – 0343.066 – 03.90 – Back west to old-grader itself
1115 – 34.231362, -112.783678 – 0054.318 – 00.62 – Slight movement to west of old-grader
1116 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0018.698 – 00.21 – Slight movement south in grader clearing
1117 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1118 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1119 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1120 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1121 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1122 – 34.231309, -112.783705 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1123 – 34.231367, -112.783689 – 0024.364 – 00.28 – Slight movement back north
1124 – 34.231648, -112.784110 – 0163.805 – 01.85 – Headed northwest on jeep trail away from grader
1125 – 34.231955, -112.784979 – 0339.999 – 03.85 – Continuing northwest on jeep trail
1126 – 34.232284, -112.785290 – 0143.944 – 01.64 – Still headed northwest on jeep trail
1127 – 34.232603, -112.785602 – 0161.395 – 01.83 – Still headed northwest on jeep trail
1128 – 34.232603, -112.785602 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1129 – 34.233197, -112.786809 – 0434.956 – 04.94 – Still headed northwest on jeep trail
1130 – 34.233255, -112.787624 – 0249.851 – 02.84 – Still on jeep trail, now headed more westerly
1131 – 34.233091, -112.788166 – 0176.292 – 02.00 – Still on jeep trail, now headed west
1132 – 34.233091, -112.788166 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1133 – 34.233202, -112.787822 – 0115.505 – 01.31 – Now headed back east on jeep trail
1134 – 34.233277, -112.787340 – 0145.492 – 01.65 – Back east on jeep trail
1135 – 34.233140, -112.786701 – 0227.090 – 02.58 – Now headed southeast on jeep trail
1136 – 34.232476, -112.785451 – 0439.727 – 05.00 – Still headed southeast back towards old-grader
1137 – 34.231348, -112.783676 – 0737.133 – 08.38 – Arrival back at western edge of old-grader clearing
1138 – 34.230780, -112.782903 – 0414.637 – 04.70 – Went past grader, back to main two-track, then south
1139 – 34.229727, -112.782962 – 0413.506 – 04.69 – Still headed south on two-track
1140 – 34.228671, -112.782876 – 0395.696 – 04.49 – Still headed south on two-track
1141 – 34.227811, -112.782962 – 0305.242 – 03.47 – Still headed south on two-track
1142 – 34.226398, -112.783456 – 0584.841 – 06.64 – Still headed south on two-track ( towards anchor pt.)
1143 – 34.225795, -112.783450 – 0236.614 – 02.68 – Still headed south on two-track
1144 – 34.225107, -112.784395 – 0345.736 – 03.92 – Still headed to anchor point, now climbing to west
1145 – 34.225152, -112.785468 – 0373.750 – 04.24 – Still climbing west up to anchor point
1146 – 34.224704, -112.786186 – 0318.112 – 03.61 – At two-track junction now. ( Mystery panel location )
1147 – 34.225072, -112.786514 – 0178.261 – 02.03 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1148 – 34.225715, -112.787088 – 0331.968 – 03.76 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1149 – 34.225258, -112.787452 – 0195.187 – 02.22 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1150 – 34.224872, -112.787951 – 0240.243 – 02.73 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1151 – 34.225387, -112.788166 – 0210.341 – 02.41 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1152 – 34.226309, -112.788616 – 0395.360 – 04.50 – Heading north on two-track toward anchor point
1153 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0401.875 – 04,57 – Arrival at anchor point for face-to-face with Marsh/Steed
1154 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1155 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1156 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1157 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1158 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1159 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1200 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1201 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1202 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1203 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1204 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1205 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1206 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1207 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1208 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1209 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1210 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1211 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1212 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1213 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1214 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1215 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1216 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1217 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1218 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1219 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1220 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1221 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1222 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1223 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1224 – 34.226977, -112.789528 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1225 – 34.227216, -112.790698 – 0448.106 – 05.09 – Slight move north on two-track
1226 – 34.226932, -112.790086 – 0214.886 – 02.44 – Slight move south on two-track
1227 – 34.226507, -112.788713 – 0567.084 – 06.44 – Heading south back down two-track quickly now
1228 – 34.225460, -112.788144 – 0435.904 – 04.95 – South on two-track
1229 – 34.224830, -112.787833 – 0298.186 – 03.39 – South on two-track
1230 – 34.225717, -112.787104 – 0406.622 – 04.62 – South on two-track
1231 – 34.225185, -112.786546 – 0330.076 – 03.76 – South on two-track
1232 – 34.224704, -112.786186 – 0208.207 – 02.37 – At two-track junction again. ( Mystery panel location )
1233 – 34.225025, -112.785001 – 0477.361 – 05.42 – East on two-track back down towards old-grader
1234 – 34.225877, -112.783424 – 0585.917 – 06.66 – North on two-track back towards old-grader
1235 – 34.227881, -112.782887 – 0788.222 – 08.96 – North on two-track back towards old-grader
1236 – 34.229185, -112.782823 – 0493.748 – 05.61 – North on two-track back towards old-grader
1237 – 34.230037, -112.783016 – 0315.424 – 03.58 – North on two-track back towards old-grader
1238 – 34.231093, -112.782823 – 0396.879 – 04.51 – North on two-track back towards old-grader
1239 – 34.231255, -112.782807 – 0058.155 – 00.66 – Dropping Brendan off at road junction(s) near grader
—————————————————————————
Followup…
Every time I post one of these ‘cuts’ from the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data I feel the need to point out the following…
1) Brendan McDonough testified to ADOSH that Granite Mountain NORMALLY carried at least FOUR of these kinds of handheld GPS tracking units into the field with them whenever they worked a fire.
2) Thanks to Calvin’s sharp eyes… we have ALWAYS known for SURE that they had at least ONE of these GPS units out there on that ridge with them in Yarnell… and it was right there attached to the left pack-strap of Robert Caldwell ( as seen in the MacKenzie photo of Caldwell facing Christopher’s camera with his lighted drip torch in his hand ).
3) Robert Caldwell’s GPS unit ( which we KNOW he had that day ) has NEVER SHOWN UP in the evidence record. Not ever.
Wouldn’t it be nice to at least see the same kind of CLEAR movement and location data represented by the Blue Ridge GPS data for at least even just Robert Caldwell that day.
Better yet… what if Eric Marsh actually had one of the FOUR that Granite Mountain was supposed to always be carrying… and Marsh had it on like Captain Brown did.
Maybe he ( Marsh ) did… and maybe that’s part of the reason that NO GPS UNIT has ever shown up in evidence record.
More potential specific questions for Brendan, really.
Does he know MORE than he has ever said about just WHO actually had a GPS unit with them out there that day?
It’s pretty much a given that Brendan himself did not… but could he still possibly NAME the ( potentially ) FOUR other people who DID?
This may or may not be relevant to the questions that Brendan could be asked about who, exactly, was in possession of GPS units that day… but it’s certainly ironic.
The CRIME that Brendan McDonough actually did JAIL TIME for was for stealing a GPS unit.
From Kyle Dickman’s original article about Yarnell…
http://www.outsideonline.com/1926426/19-true-story-yarnell-hill-fire
———————————————————-
Donut can trace his interest in firefighting to a fire-science class he took as a 14-year-old kid. He came to Granite Mountain during hard times. In December 2010, he’d spent a couple of nights in jail for possession of a stolen GPS.
———————————————————-
Two more quick points about Granite Mountain and GPS units…
1) NO INVESTIGATION ever bothered to even obtain an EQUIPMENT INVENTORY list for this organization known as “Granite Mountain”.
Some BUDGET documents were requested ( and supplied ) by the City of Prescott… but NOWHERE in those documents is their any detail about equipment expenditures or acquisitions or whether the hand tools, power tools, radios, GPS units ( if any ) or any other support items were being paid for with City of Prescott dollars or out of these constant GRANT monies that were showing up.
2) Eric Marsh was a GPS expert.
In his OWN RESUME’… in his OWN PERSONNEL file… Eric Marsh took the time to point out that he was “Skilled in GPS”.
From the document named “Eric Marsh Personnel File.pdf” that is
part of the ADOSH public evidence release.
On page 68 ( of 132 pages )… Eric S. Marsh’s RESUME’
Eric Marsh himself listing his ‘additional skills’…
—————————————————–
I am skilled in the use of chainsaws, fireline tools, portable pumps and hoses, CAFS, various hand and power tools, basic computer skills, GPS, compass and maps.
—————————————————–
Eric Marsh himself said…
“I am skilled in GPS”.
So you tell me…
If an Interagency Hotshot Crew always had at LEAST FOUR handheld GPS Units with them in the field ( as one of the crewmembers has already testified )… then what are the ODDS that the Superintendent, who was always off by himself ‘scouting’, and whose favorite personal hobby was off-road boondock bike riding ( by himself ) and who has stated in his own RESUME’ that he was “skilled in GPS”…
…would NOT have had either his own personal or a ‘company’ GPS unit with him in the field on June 30, 2013?
Marcia Weary says
July 24, 2013 at 3:57 pm
Are the rock piles pictured in the videos scree from mining? Was the bowl created from mining debris?
reply:
No. these are natural.
LZ says
August 2, 2013 at 7:20 pm
As I listened to this interview I couldn’t help but get angrier as it went on. As a wildland firefighter for many years now retired I can only tell you I would never trust this man’s judgement on an incident. I couldn’t believe his ill placed rationale for firefighters taking risks to save structures. It’s lives (including thier own) property, natural resources, in that order. I also couldn’t help counting the number of 10 Standards and 13 situations violated. I understand this is a sensitive situation and my heart grieves for those families, but we’ve got to get beyond protecting reputations and tell the truth.
reply:
Exactly on this one. I would think if I had anything at all to do with overseeing that fire I would be headed to Guatamala or at least keep my head down. Whew to take awards and present yourself as a great firefighter? I have met quite a few since the fire and the majority scratch their heads on this one. Well we even have one of those bosses running for Mayor–I hope he bosses Prescott better than he did Yarnell. Well perhaps he did all right on his end but when you lose 19 young souls no one even associated with the Yarnell Fire Need present themselves as a hero yet whatever the dead ones did they want the world, especially other firefighters the absolute truth as to why they died.
Amen…with a capital AMEN!
Another Hotshot says
August 7, 2013 at 8:51 am
http://www.investigativemedia.com/granite-mountain-hotshot-crew-founder-darrell-willis-describes-last-moments-of-crew-at-deployment-site/
I felt considering he just had such a heavy loss that I will never assess that John Dougherty video of him but since day one when I heard “God had another plan…”
It just stuck to me to stay simple and share that weekend and let the EXPERTS who SEEK purity PROPERLY assess that weekend not me…but until more PEOPLE and VEHICLES and ETC surface NOONE can say their BOOK or MOVIE or anything is the DEFINITE account not even if we did a book or movie—but you bet we would show more information than the SAIR offered.
**
** WHAT HAPPENS NOW WITH MCDONOUGH?
It’s hard to say.
What we KNOW now ( according to AZCENTRAL ) is that this third cancellation of his deposition has to do with the fact that his attorney, David Shapiro, tried to play HARDBALL with Arizona Forestry and say that Brendan now only allow just ONE SINGLE deposition to take place, regardless of how many court cases Arizona Forestry is involved with and how many lawyers involved with however many court cases actually want a piece of McDonough.
What we do NOT know is where this ‘requirement’ is coming from.
In other words… WHO is now actually setting this REQUIREMENT that there only be ONE SINGLE deposition… with no chance at a ‘followup’ interview?
Is it Mr. Shapiro?, Brendan McDonough?, Brendan’s therapist? Even OTHER people?
ALL of the above?
The SECOND attempt to depose Brendan on February 26, 2015 is the one that was cancelled at the last moment with Brendan’s criminal defense attorney David Shapiro submitting a letter to Arizona Forestry from the therapist that has (supposedly) been treating Brendan for PTSD. ( Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ).
That therapist was simply ‘running the show’ and saying that under no circumstances did he/she think having Brendan do this “get it off his chest thing” was going to be good for him.
Obviously some negotiations took place and then this THIRD May 28, 2015 deposition date was set… apparently also with the ongoing assumption ( as agreed to before even the FIRST scheduled deposition ) that if a ‘followup’ deposition was deemed necessary that McDonough would be OK with that.
Sometime before May 28, it looks like that ‘assumption’ about additional depositions ( if necessary ) got taken off the table by Mr. David Shapiro.
But was this simply because Brendan’s THERAPIST doesn’t really want him to do this at all… much less more than once… so it is the THERAPIST who is still “running the show” and trying to control multiple valid court case calendars like he/she did back in February?
Does Brendan really HAVE PTSD to the point where it should be allowed to be affecting all these court calendars for all these court cases like this?
I suppose we will find out.
As far as we know… the Arizona Forestry lawyers had to ( once again ) walk into global mediation today and sit directly across the table from the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits… and they ( the AZF lawyers ) STILL don’t know everything that Brendan knows.
But the ‘wrongful death’ case court calendars are still ‘frozen’ until around the end of June… so Arizona Forestry has until then to still try and get Brendan in the room and finish ‘mediation’ with the ‘wrongful death’ plaintiffs.
Something that came out this morning actually *might* be just a little more proof that Brendan’s PTSD really is affecting his decisions and/or his ability to fulfill some of his obligations.
The Arizona State appointed Yarnell Hill Fire Memorial Site Board had its FIFTH official meeting just yesterday, and the Prescott Daily Courier published a synopsis of what went on at the meeting.
Joanna Dodder Nellans ( the reporter ) notes that Brendan McDonough has been ABSENT from the ‘last several’ meetings of this board even though he was appointed to be on it by Arizona Speaker of the House and Brendan voluntarily accepted that appointment.
Apparently.. .no REASON has been given ( publicly ) for his absence from these meetings and his inability to fulfill even THIS job that he volunteered to do.
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Subcommittee will lead design of hotshots memorials
Published: Monday, 6/1/2015 6:00:00 AM by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1086&ArticleID=145965
From the article…
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PRESCOTT – It’s likely that the site where 19 of Prescott’s Granite Mountain Hotshots perished will remain simple, with only white crosses marking the spots where they died in the Yarnell Hill Wildfire in 2013, alongside a memorial sign and a low wall to define the area and offer simple seating for visitors.
The crosses are important to the hotshots’ families, said Amanda Marsh, widow of Granite Mountain Hotshots Superintendent Eric Marsh and a member of the Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board.
The board agreed unanimously to the design concepts at its Friday meeting in Prescott after hearing a presentation from design subcommittee co-chair Mike King, a retired Prescott National Forest supervisor. The lone hotshot survivor who was acting as a lookout at another location, Brendan McDonough, is on the board but has not attended the last several meetings.
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There have only been FIVE meetings of this Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board… so depending on whether “has not attended the last several meetings” means the last TWO or the last THREE meetings… it still means Brendan has only attended about HALF of the meeting of this Memorial Board to which he was appointed by the Arizona Speaker of the House.
The most important VOTES that this Committee has had so far have been at the last two meetings… so apparently Brendan has missed all of these important VOTES regarding whether to purchase the land, how to get access to it, and what the Memorial will actually look like.
** STILL A CHANCE SOMEONE ELSE COULD ACQUIRE THE LAND
The article has a SIDEBAR which appears to contain the answers to some additional questions about the upcoming action on the steps of the Yavapai Courthouse at 11:00 AM on June 30, 2015… the very morning of the second anniversary of the tragedy.
This topic also appears to have come up at the meeting itself and was being openly discussed Jay Ream, deputy director of the Parks Division of the Arizona State Parks was (apparently) at this latest Board Meeting and was answering questions.
There is still no mention of this small group of GM Hotshot Widows who originally said they intended on buying the land themselves and then limiting who could have access to the deployment site.
But board member Lenora Bennett Nelson herself openly raised the question of what happens if someone else shows up the morning of June 30 and starts bidding for the land.
The minimum ( appraised ) value of the land is $304,000, but it was once again openly ( and publicly ) acknowledged that this Yarnell Memorial Board could not possibly put in a bid any higher than the $500,000 that was appropriated by the Arizona State Legistlature to buy the land.
If a competing bid is entered for just 1 dollar about $500,000… then the Yarnell Hill Memorial Board will NOT become the owners of the deployment site. Someone ELSE will.
From the sidebar accompanying the article…
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Auction is last step for state park
The Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board also heard Friday about progress on buying 320 acres surrounding and including the site where the Granite Mountain Hotshots died.
The land is state trust land that the Arizona Constitution requires to be auctioned. State officials will conduct the auction on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott at 11 a.m. on June 30, the second anniversary of the hotshots’ deaths.
All the sale preparations are complete, said Jay Ream, deputy director of the Parks Division of the Arizona State Parks. The site will become a state park. “All we have left is the actual auction,” he said.
“I can’t imagine why, but what happens if someone else wants it too?” board member Lenora Bennett Nelson said.
“We are prepared to bid…and we anticipate being the successful bidder,” Ream responded.
The minimum bid is $304,000, the appraised value of the land. The Arizona Legislature set aside $500,000. The money will go to schools since they are the beneficiaries of the sale of that state trust land.
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** STILL NO ACCESS RIGHTS FROM LANDOWNERS…
The other bit of news in the article published today is that according to the minutes of the last meeting, a significant effort was supposed to have been made to try to get Rex Maughan ( the rancher ) and other landowners to agree to the minimal pass-through rights for there to be access to the deployment site from the end of Shrine Road and southwest to the deployment site.
This alternate access route would be FAR simpler than the other 3+ mile cross-country steep hike across State land. It would also just take people past the existing in-town memorial at the intersection of Highway 89 and Shrine Road. People could then just go down to the end of Shrine Road ( to where the Youth Camp was ) and then have a relatively short hike over relatively FLAT ground to reach the deployment site.
Anyway… the NEWS from yesterday’s meeting is that apparently NO PROGRESS has been made on getting ANYONE ( Rex Maughan and others ) to even consider giving the Arizona State Parks Department the minimal access rights needed to allow this simper way to get to the deployment site.
Correction for above.
The FIFTH official meeting of the Arizona State appointed Yarnell Hill Fire Memorial Site Board actually took place last Friday ( May 29, 2015 ) and not yesterday.
This Arizona PUBLIC Board remains in violation of the Arizona Open Meetings laws by not publishing the minutes of their meetings in a timely fashion.
The AGENDAS and the MINUTES for these meetings of this Arizona PUBLIC Board are supposed to appear at the following PUBLIC site…
http://azstateparks.com/committees/Yarnell.html
The minutes for any meeting of any Arizona PUBLIC Board are supposed to be posted within 72 hours following any official meeting of the Board… and that includes DRAFT minutes that won’t be approved until the NEXT meeting of the Board.
The minutes from even their April 10, 2015 meeting have yet to be posted.
That is approaching almost TWO MONTHS late, according to Arizona law.
Additional Correction for above.
The actual MINUTES for this PUBLIC Yarnell Hill Fire Memorial Site Board’s April 10 meeting have STILL not been published online, as required by Arizona Law.
The only way we actually know what took place during that April 10, 2015 meeting of this PUBLIC Board is because PDC reported Joanna Dodder Nellans has been making a point of attending these meetings and then reporting about what went on there.
She posted the following report on the April 10 meeting just four days after it was held.
It is in THIS article where we learned that the Board was still trying to work out access rights with Rancher Rex Maughan ( and other landowners ) for that SIMPLER way for the public to reach the deployment site…
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Public will get to submit designs for Hotshots memorial
Published: 4/14/2015 6:02:00 AM by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=198&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=144158
From the article…
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Second Possible Route
A second possible route would involve only about a 1.5-mile hike with a minor elevation change, Palm said. It would start at the west end of Shrine Road in Yarnell.
That route would need an easement through two areas of land owned by Rex Maughn, a millionaire with ranches covering hundreds of thousands of acres in Arizona. While Arizona Sen. Steve Pierce has been talking with Maughn about possible access to the site, they haven’t discussed this particular route, Palm said later. Pierce is a Prescott rancher who also serves on the board.
It would be great to have both access routes, said Chuck Tidey, a board member and chair of the Yarnell Hill Recovery Group that has been leading the effort to restore unincorporated Yarnell after the wildfire torched 127 homes there.
The route from Highway 89 along Shrine Road also would pass by the memorial that the community of Yarnell is building at the corner of 89 and Shrine, Tidey noted. And it would pass by the Shrine of St. Joseph, as well as “Carraro’s Grotto,” a whimsical path through boulders that the late Alessio Carraro labeled as animals and other shapes.
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That was almost TWO MONTHS ago on April 10, 2015.
There is no indication ( as of this morning, June 1, 2015 ) that Arizona Senator Steve Pierce has made any progress convincing Rancher Rex Maughn ( or any other Yarnell landowner ) to grant any access rights for this simpler, ‘alternate’ way for the public to visit the deployment site.
Thanks for all the update on the Memorial.
I was at the Rattle Snake Memorial on our trip to Northern California on the 20th of May. It was rewarding and peaceful to me as all Memorials should be it is a place of remembrance that all should have and Fire Fighters should visit to discuss and understand why the Fire Fighters Died to help with there store of knowledge about Safety and Fire.
Its FS land on the Mendocino NF They dedicated it to the memorial and built the memorial to the men who died fighting the fire on Federal land.
Why cant the state do the same? It is on State land where they died.
I had not been to the site for almost 6 years but it was very peaceful and rewarding for me and I walked out to the crosses on a hiking trail and tied flowers to the Cross of my Father for memorial Day. My Father is Buried in the place of his birth in Tryon Oklahoma a long way from Idaho and I do not get there very often.
The Memorial sits out in the middle of a canyon on the old original road that is mostly dirt now
it can be accessed from the top or bottom off the new main road into the Forest.
one of the First to have crosses after the South Canyon Fire. The FS for years fought the installation of Crosses on National Forest Land.
The State of Arizona needs to take a long hard look at there Regulations and dedicate this land with out a auction it is there responsibility to treat it as such.
If interested go to the Mendocino NF Rattle Snake Fire Fighter Memorial on Google
Some Pictures and information, it is also listed on the Forest Map.
reply to:
The State of Arizona needs to take a long hard look at there Regulations and dedicate this land with out a auction it is there responsibility to treat it as such.
From the hikers: AMEN BOB POWERS!
exactly. another money market bs thing.
Reply to Bob Powers post on June 1, 2015 at 4:02 pm
>> Bob Powers wrote…
>>
>> Its FS land on the Mendocino NF They dedicated it to the
>> memorial and built the memorial to the men who died fighting
>> the fire on Federal land.
>> Why cant the state do the same?
>> It is on State land where they died.
Well… technically… that bottom half of Section 9 of Township 10 North Range 05 West is Arizona State TRUST Land.
There’s a subtle difference between it being just flat-out ‘State Land’ and ‘State TRUST Land’.
It means that the State of Arizona is really just holding the land “in TRUST’ for someone else… and in THIS case that ‘someone else’ happens to be the Arizona Public School System. Whoever BUYS this ‘Trust’ land… the proceeds for the sale go to the Arizona Public School System.
What this Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board is about to do is…
1. Take some ( or all ) the $500,000 the Arizona State Legislature gave it and purchase all 320 acres of that south half of Section 9, Township 10 North, Range 05 West.
2. Minimum bid is $304,000. If there is NO ONE bidding against them on the morning of June 30, 2015… then that’s probably the ‘bid’ that will get the land purchased.
3. Arizona Public School System will get the $304,000.
4. The Yarnell Memorial Site Board will immediately hand the land over to the Arizona State Parks System, who have agreed to develop and maintain the memorial site.
So the ‘money’ we are talking about here is truly ‘funny money’. It was granted by one Arizona entity ( The AZ Legislature ) to another ( The Arizona Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board ) to be used to pay for a piece of Arizona State Trust Land. The money goes right into the Arizona State Public School System and then land goes right into the Arizona State Parks System.
So when all was said and done… the Arizona State Legislature could have just transferred $304,000 from the AZ General Fund to the School System fund and then deeded the land to Arizona Parks.
However… that would have violated the Arizona Constitution and would have denied the School System the opportunity to make as much as they possibly could from the sale of the land ( to highest bidder ) instead of just getting the $304,000 ‘fair-value’ appraisal amount.
It would have taken a very special piece of legislation coming from the Arizona Legislature to short-circuit this process and just GIVE the land to Arizona State Parks, since this is all based on Constitutional requirements… but it could still be done.
Matter of fact… I think if someone ( anyone ) shows up on the steps of the Yavapai Courthouse at 11:00 AM on the morning of June 30, 2015 and yells out a bid of $500,001 dollars ( and outbids the Memorial Board )… I think we WILL then see some pretty special piece of legislation appear along the lines of eminent domain which would negate the land sale and just foce the land to become part of the Arizona Parks and Recreation Division.
Ross Perot already donated his own airplane to fly that bronze statue of the Wildland Firefighter down to Phoenix and then to Prescott for the memorial service back in 2013. Ross Perot has always had a ‘side interest’ in this event.
What if Ross Perot himself feels like that group of widows really SHOULD be able to control access to the place where their husbands died?
Ross Perot could just check under one of his couch cushions and hand them a check for $500,001, and the land is theirs.
The Memorial Board ONLY has $500,000. This is publicly known.
Anyone who has just 1 dollar more than that can own the land themselves at 11:00 AM on the morning of June 30, 2013.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I had not been to the site for almost 6 years but it was very
>> peaceful and rewarding for me and I walked out to the crosses
>> on a hiking trail and tied flowers to the Cross of my Father
>> for memorial Day.
I believe the Prescott Daily Courier article linked to above also points out that all of the OTHER fatality sites must be ‘hiked to’… so what is being planned for the Yarnell memorial site falls into alignment with that.
The ‘hike’ to the Yarnell site might be longer, steeper tougher than the others… but tradition seems to already have been established. Some kind of ‘hike’ SHOULD be involved to reach such a place.
I have no idea how ‘handicap access’ fits into the equation here… for either the Federally owned/maintained memorial sites or the State Park ones.
I know that one of the primary reasons that they are almost REQUIRED to keep this new Granite Mountain ‘State Park’ very, very simple is that there is a point where they WOULD have to make sure it is complete accessible for the handicapped… and they are trying to stay BELOW that threshold because they haven’t been given the money to cover THOSE expenses.
Crapola. DATE typo up above. Meant to say 2015 and not 2013.
Paragraph above should have been…
The Memorial Board ONLY has $500,000. This is publicly known.
Anyone who has just 1 dollar more than that can own the land themselves at 11:00 AM on the morning of June 30, 2015.
.
Two things on access.
Hand Crews normally do not die on Roads they are out in the brush on a mountain. Handicap access to trails is considered Wilderness travel and access is based on your ability to travel in the wild.
The main spot where the memorial is for the Rattle snake fire is handy cap accessible and next to a Road. from that point you can see the crosses across the canyon and you can drive to the top to access a trail the parking spot also has a restroom.
The same with South Canyon there is a memorial site at the bottom of the mountain accessible by road you have to climb the mountain to see the crosses scattered along a trail.
There is no regulation to make wild areas accessible to Handicapped.
people. You are at your own risk in a wild land, forest, park, etc. The Trails are not built for wheel chairs however a ATV can be used in many areas and the Handicap use them.
Obviously whatever kind of ‘trail’ they come up with needs to be ATV accessible for emergencies… but whether any part of the memorial needs to be ADA ( Americans with Disabilities Act ) compliant remains to be seen.
Here is where Arizona State Representative Karn Fann said it’s going to come down to a matter of SCOPE…
From the minutes of the Memorial Board’s meeting on
February 27, 2015.
Arizona State Representative Karen Fann expresses concern about the DESIGN o fthe memorial and that if it gets too elaborate they may start running into ADA ( Americans with Disabilities Act ) issues and requirements…
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Ms. Black asked if we’ve had ideas of our own yet on design and she understands the chairman of that committee is not present but does anyone have some ideas of what they’d like to see happen in the near future. We understand the access would be part of it, but has there been any ideas on how we might like to solicit those design ideas and make a determination on where we’ll go.
Representative Fann stated everyone is still trying to figure out what they want to see but the vast majority states they want to leave it simple and raw.
We need to be careful on SCOPE because if we get too far off the beaten track we could come up with something that could require ADA and restrooms, etc. and these are issues that will need to be considered.
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The ‘restroom’ issue was actually also raised ( twice ) during the previous Board meeting on January 6, 2015…
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4. Maintenance and preservation of the Yarnell Hill Memorial Site – Discussion of agency or group responsible for the maintenance and preservation of the site, funding if any needed for the perpetual upkeep, equipment, staffing and whether to form a sub-committee.
Chairman Martyn stated that Yavapai County has graciously agreed to help with the maintenance of whatever direction the committee decides to go. Supervisor Simmons will be a big help with this. Other things that may need to be addressed is the possibility of having a restroom on the site. He asked for volunteers to sit on this committee and Mr. Fraijo volunteered. Mr. Martyn asked if Supervisor Simmons would chair this committee and he agreed.
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Later in the same meeting is when Mrs. Pfingston ( the mother of Andrew Ashcraft ) asked if she would serve on the design subcommittee. She said she would…and to this day she is the ONLY Granite Mountain family member on the committee that is actually deciding what the memorial should look like.
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Mr. Martyn asked if Mrs. Pfingston would like to be on sub-committee for the memorial and she stated she would love to participate.
Mrs. Pfingston stated she would like it to be a hiking trail; she does not want to see cars back there if at all possible. Obviously it would have to be accessible by ATVs for emergencies. She has spoken to other hot shot crews that want to go out to help maintain the area. There’s a wildfire academy that could use the area for training. She would like to see a restroom at the site and there’s a great example of a biodegradable, clean, self-sufficient restroom at Highland Center in Prescott that would be great. Chairman Martyn reminded everyone that the committee would decide on all matters relating to the memorial site.
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Reply to Bob Powers post on June 1, 2015 at 4:02 pm
>> Bob Powers wrote…
>>
>> The ( Rattle Snake ) Memorial sits out in the middle of a canyon
>> on the old original road that is mostly dirt now
>> It can be accessed from the top or bottom off the new main
>> road into the Forest.
>> One of the First to have crosses after the South Canyon Fire.
>> The FS for years fought the installation of Crosses on
>> National Forest Land.
I imagine so, yes. The CROSS is a religious symbol associated with some pretty specific belief systems ( most of them Christian based ) and the Federal Government obviously has to be careful with stuff like that.
Even the Arlington National Cemetery has 63 official religious symbols that can be ‘chosen’ by family members, including the official symbols for the WICCAN religion and even the official symbols for registered ATHEISTS.
http://www.cem.va.gov/cem/docs/emblems.pdf
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AVAILABLE EMBLEMS OF BELIEF FOR PLACEMENT
ON GOVERNMENT HEADSTONES AND MARKERS
From the 61 ( SIXTY ONE ) available headstone markers…
(10) AARONIC
(15) BAHAI
(16) ATHEIST
(18) HINDU
(21) SUFISM ( REORIENTED )
(22) TENRIKYO
(23) SEICHO-NO-IE
(28) ECKANKAR
(35) SOKA GAKKAI
(36) SIKH ( KHANDA )
(37) WICCA
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According to the article… the Granite Mountain Memorial Design Subcommittee is now reporting they basically want to just ‘go with’ the ‘simple white crosses’ idea.
I certainly hope that means they have actually already checked with ALL of the family members of the deceased before making this PUBLIC announcement of a design choice.
There’s never been a complete breakout on the religious orientation or beliefs of ALL of the Granite Mountain Hotshots… and even for the ones that might not have had any particular preference I don’t think the families would make a big deal about a simple white cross marking the place where their loved one died…
…but if this Memorial Subcommittee didn’t take the time to VERIFY that… well… then I don’t know what to say. That would be a screw-up.
And speaking of ‘marking the place’… this announcement coming out of the design subcommittee verifies that they actually will, in the end, need to be ACCURATE with this and make sure even the simple white crosses are in the exact right place(s).
I’m sure they will have to use the original YCSO Police detectives PHARO-3D images taken at the deployment site at first light on July 1, 2013.
That hand-drawn ‘chart’ at the back of the SAIR report showing the fire shelters is probably accurate with regards to relative postioning of each of the shelters and were each body was found… but it’s pretty obvious that drawinig is NOT to SCALE.
Based on the photos that have been released… the shelters were not nearly as close together or as ‘tightly grouped’ as that drawing in the SAIT would have people believe.
The installation of the white crosses will have to show where all of the bodies REALLY were.
>> Bob Powers also wrote…
>>
>> The State of Arizona needs to take a long hard look at there
>> Regulations and dedicate this land with out a auction it is
>> there responsibility to treat it as such.
Actually… ‘Regulation’ isn’t quite the right word.
It’s a little more than that.
This whole ‘Arizona State Trust Land’ thing is actually codified in the Arizona CONSTITUTION… which makes ‘turning the knobs’ on some legislation to get around it that much harder.
It can be done… be it will take a pretty serious piece of ’eminent domain’ legislation coming out of the Arizona Legislature and Senate and then off the Governor’s desk in order to just MOVE a piece of official ‘State Trust Land’ over to the State Parks Department.
Again… it can be done… but not easily.
While I know you are a stickler for specifics I will add my 2 cents here
First State Trust lands have in the past been set-aside as Parks, Recreation areas and even logged for the timber. They can be sold or retained for other uses like grazing allotments where the State charges for there use.
So Yes the State can set-aside the section the Crew died on if they so chose.
Also Crosses are not a religious statement but a simple marker.
The cemetery is the place for Religious symbolism.
Also pin point accuracy is not the absolute necessity for the markers as close as possible will surface I doubt that the investigation was GPS accurate but who knows? They may have pinpointed each location.
My point is it dose not mater it is the symbolism that counts with the Families. Close as possible will work for the site.
Reply to Bob Powers post on June 1, 2015 at 9:20 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> While I know you are a stickler for specifics I will
>> add my 2 cents here
>>
>> First State Trust lands have in the past been set-aside
>> as Parks, Recreation areas and even logged for the
>> timber. They can be sold or retained for other uses
>> like grazing allotments where the State charges for
>> there use.
>> So Yes the State can set-aside the section the Crew
>> died on if they so chose.
I believe you.
I haven’t fully researched the process by which a piece of Arizona State Trust Land can pass out of the ‘Trust’ part without the designated beneficiary getting justly compensated… but yes… we are talking about the government here. They can do what they want.
If it was EASY to do, however, I would then wonder why they didn’t just go ahead and do that and why there is even going to be this stupid auction on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthose at 11:00 AM on the morning of the second anniversary of the tragedy ( June 30, 2015 ).
I’m actually of the opinion that if there really is ANY way they can avoid having to have this public action… they should do that ( as Gary Olson would say ) “most ricki tick”.
If there is ANY chance someone else might actually outbid the State or Arizona and become the owner of that deployment site… they should make SURE it doesn’t happen BEFORE it happens.
That will just be a total joke and/or a nightmare if someone OTHER than the State of Arizona actually gets control of that piece of land.. for whatever reason(s).
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Also Crosses are not a religious statement but a
>> simple marker.
>> The cemetery is the place for Religious symbolism.
What you say is true…and sometimes even for cemeteries.
Example: At the military graves near Normandy Beach… ALL of the graves have white ( marble ) CROSSES… but if the soldier was JEWISH then there is also a “Star of David” on the Cross itself.
However… I certainly think that if any Granite Mountain family member has any OBJECTION to there being what could be construed as a “Christian Cross” marking their loved one’s place of death… it would be arrogant and rude for the planners of the memorial to not take their concerns into consideration and “do something else”.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Also pin point accuracy is not the absolute necessity
>> for the markers as close as possible will surface
In this case… the PHARO-3D images that are KNOWN to exist makes the “as close as possible” goal not only completely attainable but literally “exactly correct”.
>> I doubt that the investigation was GPS accurate but
>> who knows? They may have pinpointed each location
I guess you’ve never seen any PHARO 3D images.
If they want to put the crosses EXACTLY where every single one of those bodies was at dawn on Jule 1, 2013… it will be easily done.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> My point is it dose not mater it is the symbolism that
>> counts with the Families. Close as possible will work
>> for the site.
I think it DOES matter… and not just because ( in this case ) there is no excuse for it not to be 100 percent accurate.
The only reason I can think of for it to not be 100 percent accurate is if someone actually takes a look at what the REALITY might turn out to be and decides that with all the hype about how “they all died together”… they then decide to EDIT the actual cross locations to more closely match what THEY think the families ( and the public ) would like to see.
What I mean is… unless they dedicate themselves to accuracy ( which the PHARO 3D images can easily provide ).. they may decide that if one group of shelters ends up looking to be a little “off by itself”… they will willy-nilly MOVE that grouping close to the others so it “looks better” and doesn’t ‘upset the families’.
Again I will say pin point accuracy is Great how ever it is not a necessity to be at the Head –Feet or center of body with in reasonable proximity is OK. I guess I differ with you on a Cross
They have been used for centuries as a Marker and I have never considered them to be a CHRISTEN MARKER only a noted place where someone died or is Buried. The persons denomination, beliefs or non beliefs do not really matter or if they are atheists they should not have a marker at all. The whole concept here is to designate location of each individual not there differences or beliefs. All are Equal and all died together at what ever location with in close proximity.
The fence enclosure already identifies the area which is oh ya on State Land.
When states were formed they were given sections of land in each township and range in the west I have worked with these sections on the National Forest for my entire carrier.
Normally Sections 16 and 36 although some adjusting and trading has occurred or the state has inherited the land thru Taxes etc.
The parcels are managed for the School funding. could show you many, many sections which have never been sold sense Statehood many of those out in the middle of no where like the Section of State lands in Yarnell. These lands are managed by the States for many different uses and if sold the funds go to the State school system.
State Trust Lands exist in all the western States. State Parks Are Built On Them. Cattle Graze on them. The FS and BLM suppress fires on them under Co-op agreements. with in there boundaries.
In the Sawtooth National Recreation area I can show you a piece of State Trust land that a entire Fish Hatchery and Residences and Office was built for The State Fish and Game.
As you have said the State is just trading dollars Give and get I it back from one pocket to the other.
They could just as well designate the Memorial area and assign it to the State Parks and Recreation for upkeep.
Just spent the day researching the whole Arizona State Trust Land and the Arizona State Parks realities.
Interesting stuff.
It is NOT POSSIBLE to “just transfer” land from Arizona State Trust Land to anything or anybody, including Arizona State Parks.
Arizona State Trust Land does not belong to the State of Arizona. It belongs to the Trust, and the State only manages it.
It MUST be either SOLD or LEASED, and the beneficiaries MUST BE COMPENSATED for the sale or use of the land at the highest market value.
And not only does changing any of this require amending the Constitution of the State of Arizona, but it also requires an Act of Congress to amend the originating 1910 Enabling Act.
A NUMBER of attempts have been made over the past 10 years or so to “reform” the Arizona State Trust Land management system (because EVERYBODY finds is highly problematic in one way or another), and they’ve ALL gone down in flames.
So, yes, handing half a million dollars to the Memorial Board to purchase it and, in turn, hand it off to Arizona State Parks (an entity which has never been seriously supported or funded, except during Bruce Babbitt’s eight years as Governor) and has all but been starved out of functional existence since 2006) is about the ONLY way to transfer that land out of State Trust use and ownership and into some other kind of use.
This whole day’s worth of research leaves me wondering, however, if, since the land was, apparently, most likely used for grazing leasing (they HAD to have been doing something “lucrative” with it or I’m sure they would have unloaded it a long time ago), who had those grazing leases? And what might THAT possibly have to do with anything?
You did a lot of research there I seem to have missed the legality of State Trust Lands.
You are right most are leased as range land for Grazing allotments but most are not big money makers unless bidders are vying for great grass allotments and even then the bids are not large amounts of money.
From the looks of Yarnell brush fields I doubt the allotments could hold many Cattle based on actual feed per Acer so probably not any where near LUCRATIVE . The Value set by the State some times is to much for Range Land and people just do not buy or bid on the land.
Some local Ranchers Bid and are the only bidder on the Range Allotments so the bids are low for Leases.
some Section allotments 640 Ac. can go for $100 a Year with only 1 local Rancher bidding. The income goes to the School Fund.
Thanks, Bob. Makes sense.
Not one to leave any stone unturned when I’m really curious about something, I did discover this morning that there WAS a grazing lease on this piece of Arizona State Trust Land.
It’s noted in the Minutes of the Arizona State Parks Board of Directors Meeting on April 16, 2014, where they’re discussing the Memorial.
http://azstateparks.com/board/downloads/minutes/2014/ASPB_MINUTES_04-16-14.pdf
From Page 5:
“4. Yarnell Hill Memorial – staff briefing on the components of the bill and its affects
on Arizona State Parks
Please see the presentation posted online at azparks.com/board Presentation 04/16/14.
Mr. Ream presented a map of the proposed area for the Yarnell Hill Memorial site. State
Land Trust has identified 240 acres valued at about $1,000 per acre and the Yarnell Hill
Memorial Site Board will need to make the recommendation to purchase the land. At that
time the State Land Commissioner will need to make that land available for auction. Mr.
Ream advised that an adjacent landowner does not want a memorial put on the land as
the only access point to the site passes directly through his land. Currently there is a
grazing lease on the land and the committee may be met with some difficulty throughout
the process. The other access points are north of Yarnell and a good bit out of the way.
Director Martyn advised the Committee that this bill does have the potential of being
designated as an Arizona State Park officially and they will then have to play an active
role in the management of the natural resources.”
I’m guessing, at this point, the logical holder of that grazing lease would be Maughan. But I’m not sure.
Maughan is really opposed to this Memorial. So……….I wouldn’t be surprised if WTKTT’s speculation might actually come true and Maughan showed up at that little auction on the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse on June 30.
PS. Another REALLY interesting and relevant thing I found on this Google hunt is a 2005 “Oral history interview with Senator John Hays” by the Northern Arizona University Ecological Oral Histories Course.
I just read the transcript, but there is a video attached, and I just downloaded that and will watch it. It may help make more sense of the locations Hays is describing.
http://archive.library.nau.edu/cdm/ref/collection/cpa/id/63397
He even describes the 1960’s wildfire that occurred, leading to the building of the fire-breaks we have been discussing.
He talks a lot about their ranching history and the kind of ranching, grazing, land management, prescription burning, etc that was going on in the Yarnell/Peeples Valley/Weaver Mountains area.
The Hays family was the original owner of the ranch that the Maughan family bought a chunk of.
“Description CONTENT: In this oral history Senator Hays talks about the environmental history of the Peeples Valley region and his family’s relationship to the land. Topics also covered include cattle ranching and sheep herding, grasslands, fire control, invasive plants, water and weather. BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORY: The Ecological Oral Histories Course recorded the ecological impact and change from those who have lived and worked for years on the Colorado Plateau. The project was funded by an Environmental Research, Development, and Education for the New Economy (ERDENE) grant and administered by the Ecological Monitoring & Assessment Program and Foundation at Northern Arizona University.”
And finally, I want to post (for the record) the April 1, 2014 State Land Department “Order Authorizing Additional Access With Regard to Closing Order No. 006-2013/2014,” the order that closed the area.
It states that:
“It has been determined to be in the best interest of the Trust to grant additional access for litigation purposes to the State’s attorneys, witnesses, experts and claimants, and potential claimants and their attorneys, witnesses and experts.
IT IS ORDERED effective at 8:00 o’clock a.m. on the date of this Order, that access is now granted to the State’s attorneys, witnesses, experts and claimants, and their attorneys, witnesses and experts with the advance permission of the State Attorney General’s Office.”
The original July 12, 2013 order, a copy of which is attached to this file and addressed to Rex and Ruth Maughan, says:
“IT IS ORDERED that effective at 8:00 o’clock a.m. on the date of this Order, the subject land is closed to any and all access and use, except to the families of the fallen, those public safety officials charged with inverstigating the fire and protecting the public and rights of entry to be issued for official purposes. No applications will be accepted for surface and subsurface leases, permits, sales, minerals, oil and gas exploration and right-of-way applications, until further Order of the State Land Commissioner.”
So I don’t know where that closure left the holder of the grazing lease (which, given this order copy addressed to the Maughans, could indicate they might have held that lease). It doesn’t say anything about that.
But if it DID exclude the holder of that lease from entering that land, I wouldn’t be surprised if that entity might have been a bit more than ticked off about it.
http://azstateparks.com/committees/downloads/Yarnell_Land_Closing_Orders.pdf
And thanks, JD, for apparently FIXING the PROBLEM I was having!!!
Oh, and another PS.
I case anybody thinks that land might not be worth the $501K that it would take to outbid the state, I’ve seen 20-acre parcels around Yarnell for sale for as much as $200k.
So that little piece of territory itself might not (at the going current market value) be worth $501K, but it could EASILY be worth it for someone like Maughan, in the long scheme of things, all things considered.
Oops. I guess I spoke to soon about JD fixing THE PROBLEM.
1. If someone else purchases the land they will have no access to it., UNLESS it is an adjoining landowner. But, THAT scenario, would piss off a gazillion people so I don’t think they’d ever do it.
2. The reason Brendan may not have been attending the last few meetings, perhaps, is that due to the current controversy about the ‘rumored argument’, he and Amanda Marsh may not want to be in the same room together.
3. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did Shapiro’s ‘one deposition’ stand come as a response to the other ‘global mediation’ attorneys wanting to get in on this one, and then ADF balking, or did he make the stand previous to any of that, and THEN the ‘global mediation’ attorneys wanted to crash this party thinking they might not get another chance?
reply to:
1. If someone else purchases the land they will have no access to it., UNLESS it is an adjoining landowner. But, THAT scenario, would piss off a gazillion people so I don’t think they’d ever do it.
my reply: how interesting it would be if the tragedies of yesteryears that laid upon the Weavers long before this tragedy and the Apaches or Navajo tribal leaders took serious to the gps coordinates they had received by the desert walker the importance to that terrain to them as well as gathering those important relics that lay up there that belongs to them and the Mormons and they purchase the land that once was already theirs. Many people will never know the truth to that tragedy either just like this one more than likely. Yet you may find an early 1900’s Mormon bible in certain areas or certain relics but nothing to piece together correctly that tragedy because the names flowing public were not the names to be looking at…just like this fire…we discuss Donut a lot or some of us label like myself Tarr/Frisby heroes but the reality the names not spoken (yet) are the ones who hold the key to the answers and deeper clarity to this fire, I mean how come we discuss Blue Ridge when homeowners have more said to seen others including Central Yavapai in that area and yet we do not hear too much on them or even the incident commandment folks. It is too hot WWTKTT yet we are looking into a pilot to fly over area and someone else offered to go up but I am not. I am not getting pulled into any horseshit. I tell them the current need on IM and they can decide to meet it or not. We are trying to get out of the heat. So piercing that sun today. Later I will attend the livestock and poultry/pea fowls…too hot. Sonny is ill. I am going to skim comments and we will go to that link and check map for you FINALLY.
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on June 1, 2015 at 4:13 pm
>> Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> Sonny is ill. I am going to skim comments and we will go
>> to that link and check map for you FINALLY.
Super. Thank you, Joy.
To repeat… it is NOT nearly as important to see a photograph of that infamous ‘WARNING: EXPLOSIVES’ sign as it is to just simply have someone verify exactly where it IS out there on that Jeep Trail.
All you have to do is simply click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that should appear on the resulting Google satellite image is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
UPDATE: Joy… scratch my comment just above. I didn’t scroll down far enough a few moments ago to realize that you have ALREADY clicked that link and provided answers in the following message down below…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xiv/#comment-298014
So Thank you! ( To you AND Sonny ).
So that ‘red tear drop’ marker on that satellite map is, in fact, pretty close to where this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign is.
I think this can be considered verification that the dozer ( with Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball onboard ) really did make it all the way to the edge of the cold black there at around 11:30 AM on the morning of June 30, 2013.
There is testimony that the ‘turnaround point’ was the EXPLOSIVES sign… and it wasn’t because anyone thought they might get blown up. It was simply because that is the point where that Yavapai County dozer with the 12 foot fixed blad couldn’t make it any farther up the slope, and turned around and went back to old-grader.
But according to both Arizona Forestry and ADOSH fire progression maps… that means the dozer WAS able to clear a path all the way to the edge of the ‘black’ there near the toe of that slope.
And this work was completed circa 11:30 AM, just 5 minutes before Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby and BR Captain Trueheart Brown would even begin their 30 minute long face-to-face meeting with Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed.
So the only mystery now is… if they actually did have a complete ‘dozer line’ cut all the way from the black on the western ridge to the Sesame Clearing area to the east ( where all the vehicles were parked ) by 11:30 AM…
…then what ELSE was Granite Mountain doing for the rest of the afternoon… and WHY was it not completed 4 hours later, circa 3:30 PM?
As far as we know… the PLAN in the morning was to have some ‘dozer line’ stretching across that valley that COULD be ‘burned off’ later on Sunday afternoon when the winds died down.
In the morning… apparently no one in fire command at Yarnell believed the fire would be threatening Yarnell or Glen Illah THAT DAY.
Their PLAN was to try and get a burnout in later that evening in order to provide protection for Yarnell the following day ( July 1, 2013 ).
Well… it looks very much now like they had already gotten what they wanted by 11:30 AM. That’s the moment the dozer ‘connectec up’ the pushed dozer line to the cold black to the west right around that EXPLOSIVES sign.
Of course… just an hour later Bravo 3 ( Warbis and Lenmark ) showed up to relieve Rory Collins as Air Attack and they could see right away that the fire was going to go into Yarnell THAT day… during THAT burn cycle… but why THAT knowledge was not fully communicated to ALL the people that needed to know it is still another story altogether of the ‘missed opportunities to successfully communicate’ that fateful day.
Correction… left the digit ‘2’ out up above.
Meant to type ’25 minutes’ instead of ‘5 minutes’.
According to the Blue Ridge GPS Tracking data.. the actual face-to-face between Frisby/Brown and Marsh/Steed took place from 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM.
So the paragraph above should have read like this…
“And this work was completed circa 11:30 AM, just 25 minutes before Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby and BR Captain Trueheart Brown would even begin their 30 minute long face-to-face meeting with Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed.”
Again you are missing the Point.
What was GM doing after the Tractor line was in.
They were assigned to connect Hand Line to the Tractor line along the Black edge of the Fire with and from a anchor point.
The Fire changed the burn out plan or the fire was expected to back into the tractor line and it would stop it. They did not have a bad plan the weather just changed every thing.
Bob Powers says
Reply to Bob Powers post
on June 2, 2015 at 7:00 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Again you are missing the Point.
No. I think it’s the other way around. Read on.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> What was GM doing after the Tractor line was in.
>>
>> They were assigned to connect Hand Line
>> to the Tractor line along the Black edge of
>> the Fire with and from a anchor point.
Exactly. Where I think YOU are ‘missing the point’ is that according to existing evidence and testimony… then that ‘plan’ was ALREADY accomplished right around 11:30 AM and the minute that dozer arrived at the EXPLOSIVES sign and now had fully improved dozer line connected all the was from the BLACK in the WEST to the Sesame Clearing in the EAST.
No one seemed to think this ‘dozer line’, in and unto itself, represented any real protection for the town of Yarnell. It was only being done with the idea that later that evening ( Sunday evening ) they *might* be able to ‘burn it off’ and create a better firebreak.
As for what Granite Mountain was really doing, then, from 11:30 AM onwards is, I think, where the real mystery lies.
I’m not sure it could be called ‘line construction’, for all intents and purposes. More like just what the DOC crew was doing in that area the day before and trying to just “cold mop” ( or California Cold Trace ) on that area around the anchor point.
What I’m still not seeing myself is that if there was now full dozer line connected all the way from the Sesame Clearing out to the BLACK by 11:30 AM… then what purpose would any similar ADDITIONAL line have been accomplishing south of that and more towards the two-track the GM walked up on?
Whatever THAT reasoning may have been has never been made clear in the evidence record.
Even Brendan was never actually ASKED about this.
Even though he told ADOSH several times that for the 3 hours in which he was on his lookout mound ( from approx 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM ) and that he could clearly see them… he was never asked, nor did he ever explain, exactly WHAT they were trying to accomplish… or WHY it needed more than another HOUR circa 3:30 PM after having had upwards of SIX hours ( 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM ) to accomplish this mysterious task.
I’m perfectly willing to believe they THOUGHT it was important to “tie something into something else” up there… but we still don’t know for sure EXACTLY which two POINTS we are talking about…
– or why GM couldn’t accomplish the task in time.
– or why Marsh refused to let Blue Ridge even help with the task and just let them stand around doing nothing.
I guess this is where I am confused…
If we KNOW now that the DOZER had actually completed a fully improved dozer push all the way from the Sesame Clearing area out west to the BLACK itself…
…then was Granite Mountain trying to work their way NORTH around the edge of the existing black to “tie in” to that existing point where the DOZER had ‘met the black’ circa 11:30 AM…
…or was Granite Mountain building line more DUE EAST from the anchor point and trying to just cover that estimated 1900 feet and “tie in” to that OTHER two-track which heads SOUTH away from the old-grader.
That OTHER two-track leading SOUTH away from the old-grader ( the one GM actually used to walk up on that morning ) had been ‘improved’ by the DOZER as well… but only to about the toe of the western ridge slope.
If it’s the latter… then what were they planning on doing with that huge patch of unburned fuel that was going to be left between that southerly “tie in” point and the improved Jeep Trail that leads northwest away from the old-grader?
Were they just going to “light that up” as part of the burnoff… if/when the plan ever made it to that point?
I still think the exact details on all of this ‘work’ matters since whatever they were doing ( and refusing Blue Ridge’s help to complete ) is what actually kept them stuck up there for longer than they should have been that day… and is what eventually led to the TIME CRUNCH and the resulting poor decision making that got them all killed.
The Hand line to tie into the dozer line is in fire terms SOP. To insure no hot spots rekindle at the black edge that is standard especially after the escape on Saturday.
The burn out was the plan you do not leave that much unburned fuel to run at a tractor line or any line. The burn out had to be at the right time and weather conditions I do not believe the IC and others thought the fire would change directions and that was their plan.
The crew was and I have said this over and over perfectly safe to stay next to the Black and retreat to the black they could have stayed there all day and night that had nothing to do with them being killed what caused that was moving out of the Black or away from it.
There was no time crunch as long as they worked and stayed close to the Black.
Poor decision making was pure and simple not following the 10 and 18.
Simple Fire Fighting 101— with or with out details that is simply how it is done—Connect point A to point B— BUILD LINE—Control Fire. The main goal of every wild fire.
Reply to Bob Powers post on
June 2, 2015 at 9:01 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> The Hand line to tie into the dozer
>> line is in fire terms SOP.
Yes. I know… but you’re still not answering my question.
WHICH DOZER LINE?
Was Granite Mountain spending all that energy and spending all that time trying to “tie in” to that dozer line that we now know ended at the EXPLOSIVES sign and right there at the edge of the existing black…
…or were they trying to head more EAST down that drainage and “tie in” to that also-improved two-track that heads SOUTH from the old-grader? That’s the point that was only 1900 feet from the edge of the existing black.
In all honesty… these are just RHETORICAL questions. I do not EXPECT you to have the answers since the answers don’t even seem to be in the evidence record.
I’m just trying to make sure you understand what I’m wondering about.
WHICH DOZER LINE were they trying to “tie in” to, WHERE, and WHY was it taking so long and WHY were they refusing available help ( Blue Ridge ).
>> Bob Powers wrote…
>>
>> The burn out had to be at the right
>> time and weather conditions I do
>> not believe the IC and others thought
>> the fire would change directions and
>> that was their plan.
Copy that.. and that poor assumption on their part might be exactly what Eric Marsh was talking about when he told Jesse Steed “I could just feel this comin’, ya know”.
It simply remains a mystery why Marsh and Steed and Granite Mountain were ‘sticking with this plan’ when it really wasn’t going to work.
Even Air Attack Bravo 3 looked down at 12:30 PM and knew that ‘plan’ wasn’t making any difference… and wasn’t going to that day.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Simple Fire Fighting 101— with or
>> with out details that is simply how
>> it is done—Connect point A to
>> point B— BUILD LINE—Control Fire.
>> The main goal of every wild fire.
I understand.
But in this particular case… I am simply still wondering EXACTLY what the “points” were… what was taking so long, and why they refused help in getting the work done.
None of THOSE questions have ever really been properly addressed.
OK again from the anchor point on the south end of the fire hand line to the North until they hit the Tractor line that tied into the black at the explosive sign.
Why they did not take help from BR hell I don’t know they thought they could get the assignment done them self’s. Pride, didn’t think they needed help. We may never know why they made that decision.
My opinion 2 Crews on that piece of line would have been running over each other. The Division in my opinion was really only Sector size there are 2 to 3 Sectors in a Division or roughly 3 miles and that is just ruff estimates.
To the point that Steed said they had about an hour to finish their assignment. that says they did quite a bit of line in roughly 5 hours.
Reply to Bob Powers post on
June 2, 2015 at 11:37 am
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> OK again from the anchor point on
>> the south end of the fire hand line
>> to the North until they hit the
>> Tractor line that tied into the black
>> at the explosive sign.
Copy that. Thank you. While there still doesn’t seem to be a definitive piece of evidence which confirms that is what GM was actually trying to do… I tend to agree that this seems more likely. They were probably working their way AROUND the edge of the existing black, with direct attack, and just doing the California Cold Trail thing towards the north in the hopes of meeting that dozer line at that EXPLOSIVES sign.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Why they did not take help from BR
>> hell I don’t know they thought they
>> could get the assignment done
>> them self’s. Pride, didn’t think they
>> needed help. We may never know
>> why they made that decision.
Maybe Brendan knows.
He was still ‘engaged’ at the time when Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby supposedly made the offer to come up there and help but Eric Marsh said NO and refused their help.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> My opinion 2 Crews on that piece of
>> line would have been running over
>> each other.
Maybe so… but we now know that the dozer reached the EXPLOSIVES sign around 11:30 AM, and then turned around and went back towards the old-grader.
At that point.. the two-track was improved all the way from the Sesame Clearing out to the EXPLOSIVES sign.
From a pure “Let’s get this DONE” standpoint… Blue Rdige ( Crew ) could have started line work from where the dozer stopped working SOUTH towards the anchor point… and if Granite Mountain had continued coming NORTH from the anchor point… the 2 Hotshot teams would have met in the middle and the whole PLAN would have been completed with plenty of time for BOTH sets of Hotshots to just hike back EAST to the Sesame Clearing area and back to their vehicles.
It’s not like something else would NOT have gotten done that day if they had just done this. During the time BR would have been just helping GM with this… they actually did nothing but stand around by their Crew Carriers in the Sesame Clearing area for hours doing nothing at all.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> To the point that Steed said they
>> had about an hour to finish their
>> assignment. that says they did
>> quite a bit of line in roughly 5 hours.
If we are going to assume their goal really was to complete handline around the black edge all the way NORTH to that EXPLOSIVES sign and the spot where the dozer had improved that Jeep Trail right up to the black…
…then yes… that was a little farther than trying to build line due east towards the other improved two-track.
How much farther?
Not much.. but some.
As a point of reference… let’s actually use that infamus NOTCHED ROCK that is actually seen in just about all of Christopher MacKenzie’s photos from the GM work area… and is also seen in MANY of the Joy Collura and ADOSH photos of that same area where GM was working.
From the ‘Notched Rock’ due NORTHEAST to the EXPLOSIVES sign…
1,917 feet / 639 yards / 0.36 Miles.
From the ‘Notched Rock due EAST to the other improved two-track….
1,787 feet / 596 yards / 0.34 Miles.
So regardless of which direction GM was actually heading with their line building… there really was only a difference of just 130 feet ( 43 yards ) between the two options.
Those measurements are not ‘guesses’ now that we have a confirmation where the EXPLOSIVES sign was and where the dozer actually ‘turned around’ that day on the NORTH Jeep Trail.
So call BOTH of the distances about the SAME. We now have a way to tell how much GM was ( or wasn’t ) getting done up there that afternoon.
I had Sonny drop me off at the house today but I do not keep my archives at home so got those elsewhere than loaded some stuff up but I will not take my archives out to the caves/desert so any chance I am home I will get the archives elsewhere and examine for photo. So whatever comes first; the photo, the local, Sonny’s offer to take it as well as another—but have no clue which will come first.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE )
post on June 1, 2015 at 3:26 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> 1. If someone else purchases the land they will have no access to it.,
>> UNLESS it is an adjoining landowner. But, THAT scenario, would
>> piss off a gazillion people so I don’t think they’d ever do it.
From what I can tell… there are already landowners with property adjacent to the that bottom half of Section 9 who couldn’t give a hootn’ crap whether what they do ( or don’t do ) pisses someone off, or not, so long as they are getting what they want.
It WOULD behoove some of those landowners with property touching that south half of section 9 to OWN that land… and it really would NOT surprise me if they show up on the Yavapai County Courthose steps at 11:00 AM on June 30, 2015 and start trying to outbid the State for that land.
>> TTWARE also wrote…
>>
>> 2. The reason Brendan may not have been attending the last few
>> meetings, perhaps, is that due to the current controversy about the
>> ‘rumored argument’, he and Amanda Marsh may not want to be in
>> the same room together.
Good point… but if you take as truth what Kyle Dickman himself is now saying ( in his book ) Amanda Marsh said to him… it’s hard to believe she would be either surprised or bothered by anything Brendan has to say.
It was in Kyle Dickman’s PROLOGUE ( Page XV ) when he talked about first meeting Amanda Marsh and even then she told him that with regards to Eric… she knew THEY ( whoever she thinks THEY are ) were going to “Build him up… then tear him down”.
In the PROLOGUE ( Page XV ) of Kyle Dickman’s book…
——————————————————————————–
Much of Granite Mountain’s unique personality and culture stemmed from
the crew’s leader, Eric Marsh. When I first met his widow, Amanda, at their
horse ranch outside Prescott, she told me, “People are going to build him
up — make him a hero — and then tear him down”. Her husband’s personal
history was colored, but, more significantly, his fire-line record was varied.
One hotshot superintendent who’d worked with Marsh called him a
“bad-decisions, good-outcome guy”, while others considered him among
the most skilled firefighters they knew. Marsh emerged as a highly intelligent
and deeply complicated figure. He was key to understanding this tragedy.
————————————————————————–
So it’s hard to believe Amanda Marsh would be ‘surprised’ in any way that some/all of the blame is going to be put on Eric Marsh… but maybe ( just maybe ) she really is pissed off at Brendan for how he has handled all this.
As in… how BADLY he has handled all this.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>>
>> 3. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did Shapiro’s ‘one
>> deposition’ stand come as a response to the other ‘global mediation’
>> attorneys wanting to get in on this one, and then ADF balking, or did
>> he make the stand previous to any of that, and THEN the ‘global
>> mediation’ attorneys wanted to crash this party thinking they might
>> not get another chance?
Good question.
What ARE we really looking at, here?
Kudos to AZCENTRAL for finding out what really happened and not doing the same kind of obtuse reporting that the ‘Prescott Daily Courier’ is famous for… but even AZCENTRAL didn’t really get the cows into the barn.
We still don’t know EXACTLY what went down here… or what the possiblities are now.
It’s almost like Brendan, and his lawyer, and his therapist are DARING Judge Mosesso to issue an order that someone PROVE their client ( Brendan ) really does have PTSD bad enough to keep jerking everyone around like this.
Back before the FIRST scheduled deposition ( which Brendan cancelled when he dumped Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini in favor of Criminal Attorney David Shapiro ) this issue about whether there would be MORE THAN ONE DEPOSITION had already been addressed.
That’s when ADOSH just wanted to postpone the first deposition from November 25 to December 14 just in case the ‘document dump’ scheduled for December 13 actually provided more evidence and more questions that only McDonough might know the answers to.
But Judge Mosesso denied that ‘stay’; because Brednan’s own lawyer(s) and Arizona Forestry said they had NO PROBLEM with there being some FOLLOWUP depositions ( also under-oath ) if there needed to be.
Now… two deposition cancellations later.. that has completely changed.
Brendan’s lawyer is now all about just allowing ONE SINGLE DEPOSITION.
Granted… anyone who wants to know what Brendan really knows has now had plenty of time to assemble the right list of QUESTIONS… but still… this guy is the key witness in a very complicated case involving THREE separate classes of legal proceedings ( ADOSH citation Hearing track, ‘Wringful Death’ Civil Cases(s), and ‘Property Damage’ Civil Case(s) ).
That’s just the way it is… and the cards the guy has been dealt.
It is unrealistic for him or his lawyers or advisers to think he can always be ‘calling the shots’ and setting the ‘agenda’.
At any moment.. one Judge or the other is going to subpoena his ass.
You wrote:
“It WOULD behoove some of those landowners with property touching that south half of section 9 to OWN that land… and it really would NOT surprise me if they show up on the Yavapai County Courthose steps at 11:00 AM on June 30, 2015 and start trying to outbid the State for that land.”
See what I wrote upstream about Maughan and the parcel. I TOTALLY agree with you.
Just thinking here….
Wonder if suddenly Brandon will spill his guts on June 30th? The anniversary of the event, for maximum benefit, since he now declares himself “a public figure”?
Right up there with the Kardashian ‘ s 🙁
Dunno. Absolutely NOTHING would surprise me at this point.
My whole thing with Brendan McDonough declaring his occupation to be “Public Figure” on his own Facebook page ( and the reason I was pointing it out )… is that if this guy is still going to be playing the PTSD card over in the court proceedings… it’s gonna be a little hard.
I mean, c’mon… some guy is saying he has PTSD so bad he can’t sit through a private deposition and talk about things he’s already blabbed about to the media and church groups ( and who-knows-who-else ) over and over already…
…but the same guy is now saying his OCCUPATION is ‘PUBLIC FIGURE’… and the guy publishes his own frickin’ CELLPHONE NUMBER in the ABOUT box on his own frickin’ PUBLIC Facebook page?
Sorry. It just doesn’t ‘add up’.
With it coming close to the anniversary of the fire, I wonder if Brandon is going to “spill his guts” on the 30th of JUne??? After all, he is now a “public figure”, meaning publicity…
He thinks hes right up there with Kim and Chloe 🙂
As I said up above… the ‘juggling act’ Brendan seems to have going on here is that over in the LEGAL arena… he seems to want to claim he should receive ‘special handling’ and ‘special treatment’ because he still has PTSD so bad even the act of having to recall what happened that day is ‘traumatic’ for him…
…but at the same time he has now changed his DESCRIPTION / OCCUPATION field on his PUBLIC Facebook page to say “Public Figure”… and he has actually PUBLISHED his own CELLPHONE number there in the ABOUT box on that same PUBLIC Facebook page.
What… does he expect anyone who has any questions to just CALL him?
Something is just not right here, and Brendan can’t have it both way.
He can’t say he is a “Public Figure” and say he is dedicating his life to making sure everyone “Remembers his brothers” ( and all fallen WFF )… but continue to tell Judges and Lawyers he should receive special treatment with regards to just telling them what he knows about what really happened on June 30, 2013.
It’s a VERY unusual situation… and I have no idea how it’s going to play out.
I just hope that if Brendan is really still having that much trouble even just talking about what happened almost 2 years ago… that he is getting ( and will continue to get ) the REAL HELP that he seems to need.
**
** AZCENTRAL REPORTS ON LATEST DEPOSITION CANCELLATION
Just as Marti predicted… AZCENTRAL has posted their article about the latest McDonough deposition cancellation… but the delay was just so they could find out a few more details.
Sure enough… It looks like this David Shapiro guy is the culprit.
All of a sudden he comes out with his own little poker-hand and nasty-grams and tried to say that his client ( McDonough ) will ONLY give ONE deposition.. no matter what ( unlike previously where Shapiro had agreed to followup depositions if necessary ).
Shapiro is the one who was now trying to turn this one deposition into a BIG PARTY with all kinds of lawyers from all the different proceedings present at this one-and-only-take-it-or-leave-it deposition of McDonough.
As I had guessed the other day.. it was Shapiro’s turn to piss all over the proceedings.
It appears that AZF attorney David Selden wasn’t buying any of it and told Shapiro “not a chance”… we will depose for “Arizona Forestry versus ADOSH” but you and your client can negotiate separately with all the others who might want a piece of your evasive client.
AZF attorney David Selden called Shapiro’s bluff.
So Shapiro is now the one that ‘jumped the shark’ and he’s the one that has to ‘fix it’.
Here’s the article appeared this evening…
AZCENTRAL
Article Title: Yarnell hotshot deposition delayed over legal dispute
Published: 7:17 p.m. MST May 30, 2015 by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez
http://www.azcentral.com/story/politicalinsider/2015/05/30/yarnell-fire-hotshot-brendan-mcdonough-deposition-postponed/28243273/
From the article…
——————————————————————————–
Deposition postponed … The sworn deposition of Brendan McDonough, the lone surviving member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, did not take place last week as scheduled.
Plans to depose him Thursday about the events surrounding the Yarnell Hill Fire, where 19 members of the crew perished, were derailed over a dispute about who could attend.
McDonough has previously been interviewed by fire investigators and the media, but he has never answered questions about the accident under oath. Two prior scheduled depositions have been canceled.
His testimony is of interest in litigation stemming from the catastrophe, particularly in light of recent claims that McDonough overheard a crucial radio transmission between hotshot crew bosses about the positioning of the firefighting team. The attorney representing state forestry has been trying to depose McDonough for several months tied to a workplace safety case, following revelations of McDonough’s alleged knowledge of those radio transmissions.
Documents obtained by The Arizona Republic last week shed light on the dispute.
McDonough’s attorney, David Shapiro, wrote to attorneys representing the state that McDonough would participate in one deposition, which could be attended by attorneys in both the workplace and civil litigation cases: “Unless, of course, your goal never was to foster transparency, encourage truth-finding, and minimize stress and trauma on the impacted parties,” Shapiro wrote in one e-mail.
Dave Selden, attorney for state forestry, wrote he could not agree to the conditions, saying that he is only involved in the workplace-safety case and that Shapiro would have to make arrangements for future depositions with other attorneys.
“My interest is to obtain the full, complete and truthful testimony of Mr. McDonough,” Selden wrote Shapiro. “I believe it will be less stressful for him and that the purpose of the deposition in obtaining his full, complete and truthful testimony will be enhanced if the deposition is not a spectacle attended by a large number of other persons.”
McDonough is expected to shed light on what he heard during a radio conversation between Granite Mountain Hotshots supervisor Eric Marsh and his deputy, Jesse Steed, shortly before the crew was overcome by the fire. According to one unofficial account, Marsh was purported to have ordered Steed to abandon a safe zone and join him with the crew at another location near where the crew died a short time later.
——————————————————————————–
ERRATTA: Photo number FOUR in the slideshow at the bottom of the page is incorrectly identified as a post-fire picture of the Boulder Springs Ranch. It is not. It’s another place southeast of the BSR that also had some defensive work already done and it survived the burn-over/around.
Shall we start laying bets on what’s going to happen tomorrow?
What a mess.
With that story in mind, I was just checking out WildlandFire dot com and found myself reading through a 2010 thread. regarding the Esperanza Fire Investigation. that was bumped up into 2015 by a posting at the end of it regarding the movie being made from John Maclean’s book.
All things considered, I think it’s worth reading, while await the next twist in the Yarnell Hill Wildfire saga.
—————————————————–
Thread: Esperanza Factual Report Analysis, 2007
abercrombie Administrator
Esperanza Factual Report Analysis, 2007
I added these links – that clarify and correct the Esperanza Investigation Report- to the list (under Esperanza) on the Documents Worth Reading page of the Archives.
For comparison, the Esperanza Investigation Report (in manageable, down-loadable pieces) is located on the CAL FIRE website. Ab.
Oops. Forgot to paste the link:
http://hotlist.wildlandfire.com/threads/13082-Esperanza-Factual-Report-Analysis-2007
**
** KYLE DICKMAN SOUNDS OFF ON CNN
**
** HE TELLS HOMEOWNERS TO STOP EXPECTING FIREFIGHTERS TO DO ANYTHING
The following appeared in the thread below that was discussing Kyle Dickman’s willy-nilly ( and unverified ) statement that it was Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby who ORDERED Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to ABANDON their crewmates.
It was about the CNN article that Kyle Dickman wrote just the other day ( My 27 ), on the day before Brendan’s most recent blown deposition ( May 28 ).
It’s Kyle Dickman himself “going off” on homeowners ( in general ) and telling them to STOP even expecting firefighters to ever try and protect their homes OR their property.
CNN
Article Title: Stop expecting firefighters to save your homes
By Kyle Dickman
Posted/Updated 8:03 AM ET, Wed May 27, 2015
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/opinions/dickman-wildfire-threat/index.html
You wrote:
“It’s Kyle Dickman himself “going off” on homeowners ( in general ) and telling them to STOP even expecting firefighters to ever try and protect their homes OR their property.”
KD wrote:
“Homeowners should be proactively preparing for fires–as they do in Australia–by thinning brush around their homes and installing fire resistant roofs and siding. If they do, they shouldn’t have to risk their lives to save their homes. Nor should firefighters.
With that edge alone, firefighters have a real and safe chance at protecting houses from even the worst of fires. In Yarnell, one ranch with adequate defensible space survived even after flames as high as 60 feet consumed the walls of brush that surrounded the buildings.
Millions more American are moving into wildfire-prone areas every decade. With climate change expected to lengthen and intensify western droughts and fires expected to keep pace, homes will keep burning in record numbers. Unless, that is, homeowners act on the most American of ideas and start protecting their own property.”
There’s a difference.
I’m starting to really like Mr. Kyle Dickman!
In fact, with a position like that, I am going to have to reverse myself and read Mr. Dickman’s book. Of course I don’t own a Kindle, so I think that means I will have to order a hard cover copy. (On a side note Kyle, please email me your mailing address so I can send you my copy for your autograph, [email protected]
And I will say this about Mr. Dickman’s book without even reading it yet…at least he was willing to put himself out there under his real name and give it a shot. This is a probably the most complicated fire in history to try and write about and besides you know what they say, “It’s probably close enough for government work!”
I have mixed feelings about him.
Like I said his narrative claiming Brian Frisby was the one who ordered the Peeples Vally FF to abandon the six in Harper Canyon was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.
AND I’m increasingly in the camp of “OK people, if you’re not going to mitigate your own wildfire danger, I don’t believe fire-fighters facing an out-of-control wildfire should be doing it for you.”
Screw it.
Well…I already liked you Marti, I especially like the “screw it” part. You know that is a drum I have been beating since day 1.
As far as the Brian Frisby part, yes, that is too bad, Brian Frisby is one of my hero’s from the Yarnell Hill Fire. Eric Tarr is another one.
But like I said, it was a complex fire and Kyle put himself out there and gave everyone a good starting place. I found throughout my career that the person who goes first often losses the most but that same person sometimes wins the most.
At least the rest of us now have something to criticize. And I doubt that Mr. Dickman said his book is the definitive book on the fire, that sounds like something his publisher said to sell books.
Hope this isn’t just clutter, but for things like that book if you were to want to read it on kindle and have an Android phone, you normally should be able to read it on you phone after downloading kindle to the phone. iPhones I am not sure about.
Thank you if that was for me, but being a pretty low tech guy I had probably better stick with the hard copy.
**
** HOLLYWOOD MOVIE PRODUCER SAYS HIS YARNELL MOVIE
** WILL BE LIKE THE KYLE DICKMAN BOOK.
**
** MORE ABOUT JUST WHO THE MEN WERE THAN ABOUT THE FIRE THAT
** KILLED THEM OR THE DECISIONS THEY MADE.
The following PDC article appeard in just the last few days and I brought the link to it back up here so it doesn’t get lost down below… because THIS report about the movie now actually tells us what the movie itself is going to be like.
This is an update on the movie project that was actually announced almost a year ago, on June 24, 2014.
The Producer ( Lorenzo di Bonaventura ) is the same and so is the author of the screenplay ( Ken Nolan, who wrote ‘Blackhawk Down’ ), but the original director ( Scott Cooper, ‘Crazy Heart’ ) has backed out. No new director named yet.
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Hotshots movie in development
Published: 5/27/2015 6:03:00 AM by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1086&ArticleID=145778&TM=48728.38
From the article…
—————————————————————-
A movie about Prescott’s fallen hotshot firefighters is still in the works, although some of the players have changed.
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura of “Transformers” fame is in the development stage for the movie, planning the elements of the film, his publicist Arnold Robinson of Rogers and Cowan said.
Ken Nolan, screenwriter of “Black Hawk Down,” currently is writing the script, Robinson added.
“There are no actors attached to the project at this time, but discussions with talent are taking place,” Robinson said. Director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart” and “Out of the Furnace”) is no longer planning to work on the hotshot film, his spokesperson said.
———————————————————————-
Later in the article… there is the following interesting quote from producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
He didn’t have much to say last June 24 when this movie project was first announced and he was first named as producer… but now we hear him describing what ‘perspective’ he wants the movie to take…
—————————————————————-
“The nation came together to mourn the great loss of life by these heroes, but their bonds with each other makes their story so much more extraordinary and compelling,” di Bonaventura said. “The story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, and the tragedy that befell them, is not as much about the fire as it is about a group of blue-collar guys and their families and the brotherhood that they form with one another.”
—————————————————————-
So the last sentence tells us what this movie is pretty much going to look like…
“…not as much about the fire as it is about a group of blue-collar guys and their families and the brotherhood that they form with one another.”
In other words.. pretty much just like the Kyle Dickman book.
It’s going to be a “human interest” approach and just another “isn’t it great to be in the brotherhood” movie…and the actual ‘Yarnell Hill Fire’ is probably not going to be examined in any great detail.
I hope this movie producer is paying attention to the reviews of the Dickman book.
Yes… some people appreciate Dickman’s book for what it is ( just a chance to know a little more about the men who burned to death ) but MOST of the reviews are also proving that people DO want to KNOW more about WHAT HAPPENED that day… and Dickman’s book just leaves them hanging, disappointed, and wanting to know MORE.
And once again ( just like in the comments on the article about the Granite Mountain Hotshots memorial ) the comment section for this ‘movie’ announcement has at least one local resident saying that they hope the movie uses the actual Yarnell Hill Fire area and the Prescott area for the location shoots… because that will be great for bringing more TOURISM dollars to Prescott.
Speaking of comments on Daily Courier article, I find it interesting that, even as late as today, there are NO comments on the DC article about McDonough’s deposition being cancelled YET AGAIN.
Copy that. Same for the AZCENTRAL article.
Not even any comments from ‘the regulars’ at these sites. It qualifies as unusual.
Maybe everyone is too busy picking their jaws up off the floor to comment yet. It realty has now crossed over into the ABSURD..
Now that we know more about what just went down it’s hard to say if there really is a fix here short of an actual subpoena.
If Brendan’s therapist is still running the show and is the one insisting there only be one single deposition for any / all lawyers who want a piece of Brendan… then this could amount to an impasse and Judge Mosesso really will have to step in.
**
** LOCATION OF EXPLOSIVES SIGN
I’m bringing this back up to the top after a busy day of postings because I really think I’m making a very simple request that keeps getting ignored.
Here is that same message from below that I’ve posted about FIVE times now…
————————————————————————————
Thank you, Joy.
I now have copies of those other 53 photos and I’m still looking at them.
With regards to that one photo showing the old gas can on the ground right in front of those overlapping sheets of what looks like corrugated metal panels…
…is that where the EXPLOSIVES sign was there out on that Jeep Trail?
Are those the original ‘signs’ themselves there just lying on the ground by the gas can?
Where exactly was that photo taken?
It’s going to be hard to geo-tag it just from the photo itself since it’s just a photo of the ground and there isn’t much ‘terrain’ to go on.
Also… as I said down below… if you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
Thanks in advance!
A photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign would be nice… but it is still far more important to just determine, once and for all, exactly WHERE that sign was out there than to actually have a photo of it.
—————————————————————————————–
If that clickable link above is NOT actually working… and you do NOT get taken to a Google Maps Satellite view of the old-grader area with a RED Balloon where the dozer scrape appears to stop and, I believe, that old EXPLOSIVES sign was located…
…then please let me know.
There are other links/pages that can be used to accomplish the same thing here.
The link IS working.
However, it didn’t come up with the red balloon visible. I had to click on the magnifying glass next to the location fill in (where you have the longitude/latitude) and then the red balloon appeared.
Too bad we can’t get close enough to see the gas tank.
Come on Google!
And this stupid WordPress is STILL automatically tagging my posts with an http//deleted tag and turning my name red.
It’s getting really tiring.
Please JD could you fix this?
hi. popping in quick at the Wickenburg library. WWTKTT- the temps are high where we are now. Sunday I logged on laptop to get virus and desktop it took over 14 hours to fix the two Sunday and so I have been out running since 4:50am so I have not been able to do the photos but I did look 12-2am but had to crash because alarm was set for 4;33am—I am not forgetting you nor Dr. Ted Putnam just have a lot on my plate and it SHOULD solo be health but its not—
To confirm Dr,. Ted Putnam; yes that couple was the same couple in Chino Valley. Is it coincidence? Or are we the hikers continuing to being followed??? And why follow us even going on two years? I am just typing real quick…no time to read…
Joy A Collura and Sonny Gilligan present here at Aguila library.
replies:
pretty damn close Sonny says and Joy says it is pretty close if not on it.
we will further get information for you to have reliable source.
reply in caps below:
LOCATION OF EXPLOSIVES SIGN
WHAT HAS BEEN HARD IS I HAVE FOUND PRIOR TO FIRE HIKES BUT NONE WITH SIGN YET. MAINLY PHOTOS & VIDEOS OF SNAKEMAN, FRANKIE AND ME RELOCATING RATTLESSNAKES BY THE DOZENS IN THAT AREA. FOR A LONG TIME AND I MEAN LONG TIME SNAKEMAN HAD BEEN RELOCATING SNAKES TO THIS AREA; OVER FORTY YEARS. MY BIBLE STUDY’S PAL’S HUSBAND WAS A MINER FRIEND OF SNAKEMAN. SHE CAN CONFIRM MY DIALECT. WHEN HE WAS DYING HE EVEN ON MY PERIMETER CAMERAS STATED NOT TOO LONG BEFORE HE DIED TO RELOCATING SOME TO MY BACKYARD BECAUSE I CEASED HIKES WITH HIM SUMMER 2009 BUT I COULD NOT COMPREHEND HIS QUIRKY WAYS- HE REMINDED ME OF THE MAN EDD BYRNES OF 77 SUNSET STRIP—I NICKNAMED SNAKEMAN “KOOKIE” BECAUSE HE PLAIN OUT WAS…PLUS HE DID WHAT THE FONZ AND KOOKIE DID ALWAYS WITH THAT DARN COMB. MOST YOUNG SOULS WON’T EVEN KNOW WHO EDD BYRNES IS BUT I AM A GAL WHO WATCHED THAT SHOW AND ALOT OF GOLDEN ONES FROM THE DAY…I LOVED THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP WITH HUGH O BRIAN…
I’m bringing this back up to the top after a busy day of postings because I really think I’m making a very simple request that keeps getting ignored.NOT IGNORED. I HAVE NOT EVEN DONE MY HEALTH STUFF. I KEEP PUTTING OTHERS BEFORE ME AND SOON I AM GOING TO BE FIRM AND JUST MAKE THE DARN APPOINTMENTS BUT STUBBORN ME HOLDS OFF HOPING TIME WILL JUST HEAL…SO DREAD THE DOCS-
SONNY:
WWTKTT
Sorry for my tortoise way there. So you know we have to come into town some ten miles of dirt and rough roads, and It is sometimes hard to get a computer here at the library. So no intent to evade the question –Joy showed me that map of the burned out area and we saw the old grader area on the map of the burned out Weaver terrain.
That red tear drop is just about right on as to the location of the explosives sign. You can see where the dozer cleared out an area then above that a ways is the sign. The road after the sign makes a jag to the North for maybe a few hundred yards if that much, It then veers back along the north side of the wash and canyon, very steep to first mine then crosses the wash back to the south and switches back toward the higher mine diggings. All that from memory, and Joy is still looking — she did take a photo of that sign but a lot of time has passed and she up to now has not found it. She will post or send to you if she discovers it.
Do know that that dozer guy had some real rough going in that boulderous area from the grader to where he turned around.
Here is that same message from below that I’ve posted about FIVE times now…
AGAIN WE ARE SORRY—BUT THERE IS MORE THAN JUST THE HIKERS—I MEAN THERE IS CHIEF BEN PALM WHO DETERMINES WHO GOES AND WHO DOES NOT OUT THERE SO MAYBE CONTACT HIM AND ASK HIM…HEE HEE
————————————————————————————
Thank you, Joy.
NO PROBLEM.
I now have copies of those other 53 photos and I’m still looking at them.
GOOD
With regards to that one photo showing the old gas can on the ground right in front of those overlapping sheets of what looks like corrugated metal panels…
…is that where the EXPLOSIVES sign was there out on that Jeep Trail?
YES IF YOU TURNED AROUND ROM TAKING THAT PHOTO- RIGHT THERE
Are those the original ‘signs’ themselves there just lying on the ground by the gas can?
WOULD HAVE TO SEE PHOTO AGAIN TO ANSWER- I DO NOT THINK SO BY MEMORY- OLD GAS TANKS AND 55 GALON BARREL DRUMS
Where exactly was that photo taken?
TRYING TO REACH A FIRM CONFIRMATION NOT YET
BUT QUESTION TO YOU
A LOCAL READ MY FLYER IN CONGRESS AND THINKS THEY HAVE THE PHOTO TOO
THEY WILL NOT SHARE IT BUT HOW DO THEY LOOK AT THE GPS ON THE PROPERTIES—
I CAN TELL THEM ON MY NEXT TIME TO LAUNDRY MAT BULLETING BOARD AREA
It’s going to be hard to geo-tag it just from the photo itself since it’s just a photo of the ground and there isn’t much ‘terrain’ to go on.RIGHT
Also… as I said down below… if you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
Thanks in advance!
A photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign would be nice… but it is still far more important to just determine, once and for all, exactly WHERE that sign was out there than to actually have a photo of it.
pretty damn close Sonny says and Joy says it is pretty close if not on it.
we will further get information for you to have reliable source.
reply in caps below:
LOCATION OF EXPLOSIVES SIGN
WHAT HAS BEEN HARD IS I HAVE FOUND PRIOR TO FIRE HIKES BUT NONE WITH SIGN YET. MAINLY PHOTOS & VIDEOS OF SNAKEMAN, FRANKIE AND ME RELOCATING RATTLESSNAKES BY THE DOZENS IN THAT AREA. FOR A LONG TIME AND I MEAN LONG TIME SNAKEMAN HAD BEEN RELOCATING SNAKES TO THIS AREA; OVER FORTY YEARS. MY BIBLE STUDY’S PAL’S HUSBAND WAS A MINER FRIEND OF SNAKEMAN. SHE CAN CONFIRM MY DIALECT. WHEN HE WAS DYING HE EVEN ON MY PERIMETER CAMERAS STATED NOT TOO LONG BEFORE HE DIED TO RELOCATING SOME TO MY BACKYARD BECAUSE I CEASED HIKES WITH HIM SUMMER 2009 BUT I COULD NOT COMPREHEND HIS QUIRKY WAYS- HE REMINDED ME OF THE MAN EDD BYRNES OF 77 SUNSET STRIP—I NICKNAMED SNAKEMAN “KOOKIE” BECAUSE HE PLAIN OUT WAS…PLUS HE DID WHAT THE FONZ AND KOOKIE DID ALWAYS WITH THAT DARN COMB. MOST YOUNG SOULS WON’T EVEN KNOW WHO EDD BYRNES IS BUT I AM A GAL WHO WATCHED THAT SHOW AND ALOT OF GOLDEN ONES FROM THE DAY…I LOVED THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF WYATT EARP WITH HUGH O BRIAN…
I’m bringing this back up to the top after a busy day of postings because I really think I’m making a very simple request that keeps getting ignored.NOT IGNORED. I HAVE NOT EVEN DONE MY HEALTH STUFF. I KEEP PUTTING OTHERS BEFORE ME AND SOON I AM GOING TO BE FIRM AND JUST MAKE THE DARN APPOINTMENTS BUT STUBBORN ME HOLDS OFF HOPING TIME WILL JUST HEAL…SO DREAD THE DOCS-
SONNY:
WWTKTT
Sorry for my tortoise way there. So you know we have to come into town some ten miles of dirt and rough roads, and It is sometimes hard to get a computer here at the library. So no intent to evade the question –Joy showed me that map of the burned out area and we saw the old grader area on the map of the burned out Weaver terrain.
That red tear drop is just about right on as to the location of the explosives sign. You can see where the dozer cleared out an area then above that a ways is the sign. The road after the sign makes a jag to the North for maybe a few hundred yards if that much, It then veers back along the north side of the wash and canyon, very steep to first mine then crosses the wash back to the south and switches back toward the higher mine diggings. All that from memory, and Joy is still looking — she did take a photo of that sign but a lot of time has passed and she up to now has not found it. She will post or send to you if she discovers it.
Do know that that dozer guy had some real rough going in that boulderous area from the grader to where he turned around.
Here is that same message from below that I’ve posted about FIVE times now…
AGAIN WE ARE SORRY—BUT THERE IS MORE THAN JUST THE HIKERS—I MEAN THERE IS CHIEF BEN PALM WHO DETERMINES WHO GOES AND WHO DOES NOT OUT THERE SO MAYBE CONTACT HIM AND ASK HIM…HEE HEE
————————————————————————————
Thank you, Joy.
NO PROBLEM.
I now have copies of those other 53 photos and I’m still looking at them.
GOOD
With regards to that one photo showing the old gas can on the ground right in front of those overlapping sheets of what looks like corrugated metal panels…
…is that where the EXPLOSIVES sign was there out on that Jeep Trail?
YES IF YOU TURNED AROUND ROM TAKING THAT PHOTO- RIGHT THERE
Are those the original ‘signs’ themselves there just lying on the ground by the gas can?
WOULD HAVE TO SEE PHOTO AGAIN TO ANSWER- I DO NOT THINK SO BY MEMORY- OLD GAS TANKS AND 55 GALON BARREL DRUMS
Where exactly was that photo taken?
TRYING TO REACH A FIRM CONFIRMATION NOT YET
BUT QUESTION TO YOU
A LOCAL READ MY FLYER IN CONGRESS AND THINKS THEY HAVE THE PHOTO TOO
THEY WILL NOT SHARE IT BUT HOW DO THEY LOOK AT THE GPS ON THE PROPERTIES—
I CAN TELL THEM ON MY NEXT TIME TO LAUNDRY MAT BULLETING BOARD AREA
It’s going to be hard to geo-tag it just from the photo itself since it’s just a photo of the ground and there isn’t much ‘terrain’ to go on.RIGHT
Also… as I said down below… if you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
Thanks in advance!
A photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign would be nice… but it is still far more important to just determine, once and for all, exactly WHERE that sign was out there than to actually have a photo of it.
thank you Ered Matthews-
I just ran into old material of yours-
you and Morgan Loew captured the hikers as real and raw as possible.
thank you.
I am still trying to find photo.
**
** THE MYSTERY SUPERVISOR AT THE YOUTH CAMP – REDUX
As we were once again discussing the Kyle Dickman book and its ERRATTA… and how he just willy-nilly states as a FACT that it was Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby who was ORDERING Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to abandon their crewmates…
…a number of interesting questions got asked.
First and foremost… it is still NOT KNOWN exactly who it was that told Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to abandon their own men in Harper Canyon. We have come close to identifying this person and the most likely candidate is Task Force Leader Trainee Tyson Esquibel.
It is actually HIGHLY UNLIKELY it was Brian Frisby, as Kyle Dickman now states as fact.
I’m going to respond to the questions that popped up on this thread below as best I can… and it will have to be one post at a time since it’s probably going to take a lot of Hyperlinks to get this done.
So here goes. Responding to something TTWARE said first…
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive (TTWARE) post on May 29, 2015 at 8:37 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> Since we’re discussing nuances of the reports involving the Harper
>> Canyon thing, my recollection is that he stated that “the ‘incident
>> commander’ for our area came and ordered me to move the vehicle”.
You have a GREAT memory. That is EXACTLY correct.
The HE you are referring to is Peeples Valley FF Bob Brandon, and the place he said this was NOT in the various media articles that appeared. It was in his OWN story… in his OWN words… as posted on the Yarnell Hill Recovery Group Website.
Website: Yarnell Hill Recovery Group – Stories page
Story by: Bob Brandon
Title: Gets Caught in the Firestorm, Helps Rebuild
http://www.yarnellhillrecoverygroup.org/our_stories/os_bob_brandon.html
From Bob Brandon’s STORY… in his OWN words…
NOTE: Bob Brandon makes it VERY clear here in his own story that he knew perfectly well who the Blue Ridge Hotshots were and when he was seeing him in that Youth Camp area. This is the account where Brandon identifies the person who would order them to leave as “the Incident Commander for our area”, just as you are remembering.
I just wanted to point out that as mistaken as Brandon was about this person being an ‘Incident Commander’… he was also just as sure this person was NOT a ‘Blue Ridge Hotshot’.
Also NOTE that even though Brandon seems to mis-identify this person as an IC… the way Brandon tells the story ( in his own words ) is that he is also definitely SURE this same IC person was there waiting for them in the St. Joseph Shrine Parking lot after he and Keehner slowly drove the vehicles out.
This actually MATCHES some research that Marti did on Tyson Esquibel’s whereabouts in this timeframe and the stillframes Marti extracted from one of the Aaaron Hulburd M2Uxxxx videos which shows ( apparently ) the same YELLOW-HELMET FF with the chest harness seen out in the Youth Camp area standing back there by the Shrine just a little later.
That actually MATCHES Brandon’s account here… in HIS own words… of this same ‘IC’ person who was ordering them around in the Youth Camp also meeting them again back there at the St. Joseph Shrine. More about this later.
Here is Bob Brandon… in his OWN words and not filtered through a reporter…
—————————————————————————————-
About that time, the Blue Ridge Hot Shots arrived on our scene and they started to march in. It was actually a two-pronged attack on this road we were supposed to be cutting. We were to the north and they were to the south of us along the bulldozed road.
Then the sky started really looking funny. To that point we never had any smoke or fire to speak of that was threatening us. The fire was quite a ways away, about a mile. My lookout came down off the mountain and said that there was a problem because he just got the weather report and they talked about the changing winds, but he didn’t understand what it meant.
We looked up behind Boulder Mountain and we noticed that the fire was standing straight up, right behind Boulder Mountain about 100 feet high. And we’re thinking, That’s not right. Because the fire was way north of us, clear up to Peeples Valley.
As the sky started to darken, we were getting really nervous about what was going on. Well the Hot Shots from Blue Ridge came running out of the woods, and I mean just as fast as they could go, and this was heavy forest. They just came running out of the woods, jumped in their trucks and left. And I’m thinking, Wait a minute. They’re professionals. We do this on a volunteer basis, so what aren’t we seeing?
I had an alarm that we had set up. I was going to turn the siren on and start pressing the siren so they could hear us, and that meant to abandon and come back and we’ll get out. Well, when I started the alarm, the Incident Commander for our area came pulling up, and he said, “I want you to get these trucks out of here.”
I says, “I can’t do that.”
He said, “You have to do it now.”
And I said, “No. There’s six men still like a mile out into the forest and they need to come back to this safe zone, because this is where they know it is.”
And he said, “No. I’m telling you to leave now.”
I told my lookout, I said, “Go to their trucks and put the keys in the ignition and start the trucks so when they come running out of the woods and they get to their truck they don’t have to look for their keys.”
He said, “We’re not going to leave,” and I said, “Yeah, we’re going to leave but we’re going to drive very slow.”
Well he didn’t want to and I told him, “We have to. This is what we have to do.”
The next instant, the fire dropped right over the top of us like a gigantic hand and everything around us was on fire. It was pitch black. Matt could not even see the hood of the truck. You could see nothing. And there were fires and fireballs and flames in every direction.
And I said, “Start driving very slow.”
I turned on all my lights and started driving very slowly down this little path back to the Shrine. That was approximately 2 ½ miles. So we were just picking our way, really slow hoping that somebody would get to us or see the truck and get in.
Well we drove all the way to the Shrine and about that time the Shrine was on fire. The hills were on fire around us and we met the IC and we told him that we’re not going any further.
We said, “We need to get our six men that are back there.” We didn’t have any radio contact with them because it was so loud. It was like being in the back of a jet aircraft on a runway.
So we were shouting at each other. About that time two Peeples Valley firefighters popped out through the black. And we got them over to the trucks and I said, “There’s still four more.”
So he jumped back up to his truck and went back up the road. And he was met with the ones coming out with their trucks. So we all did meet at the Shrine.
—————————————————————————————-
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> The reason I remember that statement specifically is that it showed
>> a complete lack of understanding (and training) regarding the incident
>> command structure. There is only one IC on any given fire, period.
That’s correct. It could not possibly have been Roy Hall.
But see my other comment at the top.
At the same time Bob Brandon seemed to be mistaken about the title of the person who would be ordering them to abandon their crewmates… Brandon was also definitelly SURE what the Blue Ridge Hotshots looked like and WHEN he was seeing them in the same area.
He definitely does NOT think whoever was telling him to abandon his crewmates was a “Blue Ridge Hotshot”.
** BRANDON SPEAKS TO THIS MYSTERIOUS ‘IC’ AGAIN DOWN AT RHR…
So we can say it’s a GIVEN that Bob Brandon was mis-identifying this one individual as an ‘Incident Commander’… but what is interesting in his own story, in his own words, is that he is CONSISTENT with this mis-identification and reports seeing/talking to this person no less than THREE times that afternoon.
1) When this person ordered them to abandon their crewmates.
2) At the St. Joseph Shrine after he and Keehner drove the vehicles out slowly.
3) Once again down at the Ranch House Restaurant.
More from Bob Brandon… in his OWN words…
Here is the part where he says he spoke to this same ‘IC’ person again down at
the Ranch House Restaurant…
———————————————————————
I was fortunate enough that I had a camera in my jumper. So I was taking pictures all the time, any time I had a spare moment. And I took a picture of the slurry bomber that was actually driving right for what we later found out were the fallen firefighters.
The four of us from Peeples Valley joined back up at the Ranch House and we decided we were going to go back to the Model Creek grade school. So we slowly made our way back.
It was 4-ish, 4:30, in the afternoon and it was pitch black. You’d think it’s nighttime. You think, well you’re going to go back and have supper or get out of this because there’s nothing for you to do there. Because at that time Glen Ilah was virtually on fire and propane tanks were blowing up all around us and we just said, “You know there’s nothing we can do. You can’t go into that. It would be like going into a war zone.”
So we told the IC we were going to go back down that way and that we would return in the morning or in the evening if they needed us, because we were basically on 24-hour duty. And we went back to Peeples Valley and waited out the evening and got ready for the next day.
———————————————————————
So after seeing/talking to this mysterious IC person at least THREE times… there’s no doubt that Bob Brandon would be able to IDENTIFY this person if anyone asked him to.
Kyle Dickman didn’t even do that.
Dickman just decided for himself this ‘mystery person’ was Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby and he published that as a FACT in his book without even trying to verify it.
And just for the sake of completeness… this online page is also where we find Bob Brandon describing being ‘inteviewed’ by investigators just 48 hours after the tragedy…
———————————————————————
The next day they took us in and debriefed us. This was two days after the incident with the 19. They went through and looked at my pictures and took a flash card of them. And I don’t know what they did with them, but it was pretty good because my pictures had timelines on them, so they could see what happened at what time.
Then they took information off our cellphones because that’s how we talked to, texted, each other. And those all had timelines on them, too. What time we were there. What time we were aware that the fire was about to overtake us. What time we got out. And some of the texts about whether we were safe.
———————————————————————
To this day… all of this crucial ‘debriefing’ testimony and ‘evidence’ and ‘information’ that was gathered from Bob Brandon and the other Peeples Valley Firefighters has never seen the light of day… not even after many valid FOIA and Arizona Open Records requests.
Okay… moving along to some of the other ( related ) questions that got asked…
**
** HOW DO WE KNOW THAT’S TYSON ESQUIBEL IN THE
** BALL CAP AND CHEST HARNESS?
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 8:03 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> And as long as I’m writing down here in the weeds about the
>> details regarding something that you and I are VERY interested in…
>>
>> I’m not looking at the images from the Ranch House Restaurant
>> right now. But I have in my head-memory the image of the fire-fighter
>> there that I think is the one you think is Tyson Esquibel and corresponds
>> to the guy standing on the right of the UTV in the clearing at the Youth Camp.
>>
>> The question I have had, but have never asked is — What led you to
>> believe that firefighter in the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot
>> photo is Tyson Esquibel?
>>
>> I’m guessing, now, all things considered, you are correct. But I’m just
>> curious how you determined that, given that at the time you were
>> saying that, we hadn’t seen these videos which proved that it wasn’t
>> Tony Sciacca, and we were much more sketchy about what was going on.
>>
>> I guess my question then, and thus now, was/is did you see something
>> going on in those photos that tied that fire-fighter with that chest-holster
>> and that yellow helmet to something definitive regarding “Tyson Esquibel”?
>>
>> I’m just curious.
Tyson Esquibel’s PUBLIC Facebook page…
https://www.facebook.com/tyson.esquibel
There are plenty of 100 percent PUBLIC photos of Tyson Esquibel just sitting there on his Facebook page… and any number of them seem to confirm that is him in the Tom Story photos standing there in the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot with that ‘chest harness’ on and ( at that time, anyway ) that black baseball cap.
We talked about all this back in Chapter 10 and the consensus was that it is perfectly possible Esquibel had a YELLOW HELMET on ( along with that same chest harness ) while he was out in the Youth Camp area… but as he drove that orange and white Glendale Fire Department extended cab pickup out of the Youth Camp and down to the RHR… he simply took off the YELLOW HELMET and replaced it with that Black Ball cap we then see him wearing in the Tom Story photos from the RHR parking lot.
But he still had that same chest harness on even after switching from the YELLOW helmet to the black ball cap.
You are actually the one who discovered more images that appear to be Tyson Esquibel in the last round of Aaron Hulburd videos.
That requires more Hyperlinks… so will continue that next message…
Back in Chapter 10 of this ongoing discussion…
There was the following exchange regarding Tyson Esquibel…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-x/#comment-187441
————————————————————————
** WantsToKnowTheTruth says
** November 24, 2014 at 10:02 am
Marti… on an airplane using a smartphone at the moment so it’s hard to cut/paste but here are some replies to multiple comments above.
RE: Engine CEY P59
You are right about the logo on the door. That isn’t Sun City FD logo. It is still definitely the same Engine CEY P59 seen in both video and Tom Story photos, though. Resource order E-5 with resource suborders E-5.1 thru E-5.4 showing crew members.
RE: Yellow Helmet on FF with Chest Harness ( Tyson Esquibel? )
Again… you are right. Meant to post about this the other day. Did another round of intense ‘color balancing’ myself on a blowup of that photo and there’s really no way that is a WHITE Helmet on that FF with the black chest harness standing out there near the BR Polaris Ranger in the Youth Camp. Has to be YELLOW. I think that puts it back to being Tyson Esquibel as the one who Bob Brandon was mistaking to be an ‘Incident Commander’ and the one who was ordering Brandon to move the vehicles and basically abandon his men out west in Harper Canyon. Esquibel was definitely wearing similar chest harness as seen in the photo.
** Marti Reed says
** November 24, 2014 at 10:36 am
I did some screensnaps from some of the videos.
On M2U00264, at +1:20 there’s a guy with a yellow helmet and a “bib harness” standing next to Brush Truck 103. Looks as close as I’ve seen in the videos
to the guy with the yellow helmet in the Youth Camp photo. But I have no idea who this firefighter is. Just because he’s standing in the middle of the Youth Camp photo with the Blue Ridge UTV, doesn’t mean he is “the Commander” mentioned by Bob Brandon. And, yeah, I still think the “Commander” would have been, for these guys, Tyson Esquibel. And speaking of “safety issues.” A BUNCH of those guys walking out don’t even have helmets on, just baseball caps.
** WantsToKnowTheTruth says
** November 24, 2014 at 1:22 pm
If you recall the past conversations about this ‘mystery IC’ who Bob Brandon says TOLD him to move the vehicles… what we still do NOT know is if Tyson Esquibel was simply wearing that ‘black ball cap’ all day ( as seen in the Tom Story photos )… or whether he, himself, had a YELLOW Helmet on when he was out in the Youth Camp area. He could have easily taken his Helmet off on the evacuation drive and put the ‘black ball cap’ on before reaching the RHR.
I think in order to really solve the ‘Mystery IC’ problem… we need a little more detail from Bob Brandon himself.
Gee… I wonder where we might find that.
Oh… I don’t know… maybe in the FULL DEPOSITIONS he and the other Peeples Valley FFs say they gave to ‘investigators’ just 48 hours after they incident… but now seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth?
** Marti Reed says
** November 24, 2014 at 6:50 pm
Yeppers!!!
—————————————————————————-
** PHOTOS MATCH BOB BRANDON’S ACCOUNT?
So back in Chapter 10 ( link above ) you said this…
——————————————————————-
On M2U00264, at +1:20 there’s a guy with a yellow helmet and a “bib harness” standing next to Brush Truck 103. Looks as close as I’ve seen in the videos
to the guy with the yellow helmet in the Youth Camp photo.
——————————————————————–
That actually MATCHES the testimony from Bob Brandon that they actually spoke to this mysterious ‘IC’ guy TWICE out there that afternoon.
ONCE when he ordered them to abandon their own crewmates because they (quote) “can’t run that fast”… than then AGAIN just a short while later when they reached the St. Joseph Shrine parking lot ( where you are seeing that same FF with the harness ).
Here is that testimony from Bob Brandon about the SECOND time they ran into this same (mysterious) IC guy up there at the Shrine of St. Joseph…
——————————————————————–
Well we drove all the way to the Shrine and about that time the Shrine was on fire. The hills were on fire around us and we met the IC and we told him that we’re not going any further.
——————————————————————–
A LOT of this ‘matches’ the other evidence. The most recently released Aarron Hulburd videos DO show the Peeples Valley Fire Department vehicle(s) stopping there at the parking lot of the St. Joseph Shrine… exactly the way Brandon says they did.
So this photo of the FF you say is “as close as I’ve seen in the videos to the guy with the yellow helmet in the Youth Camp photo” also matches Bob Brandon’s story and this photo COULD be of the same ‘IC’ guy that Brandon says he met again there in that parking lot.
You know… this would have all been a lot easier if Kyle Dickman himself had even lifted one finger to try and VERIFY some of this before just willy-nilly deciding for himself this mysterious person was Brian Frisby.
It was just a ‘lazy choice’ Dickman made.
There is other testimony of both Frisby and Brown yelling across the Youth Camp at people to ‘get out’… so Dickman just assumed that meant any reports coming from anyone ( like Bob Brandon ) of being told to “get out” of that area had to be people remembering being told that by Brian Frisby.
Just lazy reporting and lazy authorship.
Another opportunity missed to find out what really happened that day.
So given that I said this:
“On M2U00264, at +1:20 there’s a guy with a yellow helmet and a “bib harness” standing next to Brush Truck 103. Looks as close as I’ve seen in the videos
to the guy with the yellow helmet in the Youth Camp photo”
…..back in November, now I don’t think that’s true, since…
…..we can see the vehicle Tyson Esquibel was driving (as resourced in the Resource Order) driving out from the Youth Camp into the Shrine area right before the UTV driven/riddent by Frisby and Trew.
And as that vehicle is driving by in Aaron’s video, we can hear Tyson communicating with Gary Cordes.
OK now it’s REALLY time for me to hit the sack.
On the other hand, maybe it’s possible that the guy in the video is the guy in the the photo and neither of them is Tyson Esquibel.
Who friggin knows??????
-/-
That thing that I typed at the end was supposed to be a gesture that can be typed in Twitter that shows someone throwing their hands up into the air in mystification, but it didn’t work here.
But I think the whole first point of this whole conversation is that whoever ordered that Peeples Valley fire-fighter to, apparently, abandon that crew working up in Harper Canyon wasn’t even remotely Brian Frisby.
And the second point is that, given the seriousness of this incident, it really needs to be INVESTIGATED.
All things considered.
There are “near misses” that actually get “written up” on the Lessons Learned website.
Reply to Marti Reed post on
May 29, 2015 at 11:51 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> But I think the whole first point of this whole
>> conversation is that whoever ordered that
>> Peeples Valley fire-fighter to, apparently,
>> abandon that crew working up in Harper
>> Canyon wasn’t even remotely Brian Frisby.
I’m actually going to disagree with your choice of words there and say that I still consider it just HIGHLY UNLIKELY that it was Brian Frisby telling Bob Brandon to abandon his crewmates.
The truth is that there just hasn’t been a good enough investigation ( by ANYONE ) of this part of the ‘story’ to be sure.
Even Frisby’s own Unit Log says that he and Captain Brown were, in fact, YELLING at firefighters in the Youth Camp area to “get the hell out”.
There is also no question that what Blue Ridge Captain Brown says to KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell as they drive up to them in the Shrine parking lot, in response to KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell’s query of “How ya doin’, guy?” is…
“Tryin’ to keep fuckin’ idiots from burnin’ themselves up. God DAAAMN”.
So I don’t think the “not even remotely possible” phrase is 100 percent accurate.
It still MIGHT have been Frisby telling Brandon to get those vehicles out of there.
I just don’t know.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And the second point is that, given the
>> seriousness of this incident, it really needs
>> to be INVESTIGATED.
>>
>> All things considered.
And I think you just accurately described the other TAG LINE for this sub-thread.
It still goes back ( down below ) to a discussion of the Kyle Dickman book and his willy-nilly declaring that Brian Frisby was DEFINITELY the one ordering Brandon to abandon his crewmates.
How many ‘opportunities’ to actually discover the real truth for even moments like this are going to continue to be ‘missed’?
What do you even call what Kyle Dickman just demonstrated?
That he would actually make a move to publish a BOOK and actually dare to call it the “definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… when all we are discovering is that the guy was too lazy to even just TALK with people like Joy Collura, Sonny Gilligan, Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner?
What do you really call that?
Laziness?… or Incompetence?… or BOTH?
I’d still say it’s 99.99999999999999999999999999999
percent likely that the guy ORDERING them to leave six crewmen at risk of losing their lives was NOT Brian Frisby.
If they HAD gotten killed because of this order (which could EASILY have been the case), his career would have been forever finished and he would be the target of a Wrongful Death Lawsuit.
And I’m sure he knows that. Unless I’m missing something.
Hmmmmmmmm sound familiar?
But they didn’t get killed so Esquibel isn’t facing that Lawsuit EITHER.
On the other hand, maybe this is exactly why AZDF was extremely comfortable with nobody investigating it. Or seeing pictures of it and reading conversations over cellphones and such about it.
And EXTREMELY uncomfortable with it being a part of the ADOSH citations.
Because that means it might just get investigated, after all.
I still think Brian should sue.
Like I wrote downstream, THIS was THE MAJOR reason I put down KD’s book and decided I didn’t really care about what he had to say about this thing.
I found it completely appalling.
This is NOT a game.
It was not Brian Frisby and here’s why:
ANYONE with a solid wildfire background would know that if 6 or ANY AMOUNT of firefighters were being overtaken by a wildfire, an ALL-STOP would need to be called immediately, and the number one priority on the fire would become the attempt to save the lives of THOSE people (sort of like what actually happened when GM deployed).
That fact that this did not occur is solid evidence to me the person involved did not have the experience or common sense to perform this act at the same moment he was ordering their ride to leave without them.
Hence, NOT Brian Frisby.
I agree with 99.99999999999999999 percent and I also agree with TTWARE.
I really, really doubt it was Brian Frisby telling Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to abandon their crewmates.
I really, really think the most likely candidate is still Task Force Leader Trainee Tyson Esquibel.
It’s just that this whole Harper Canyon / Youth Camp thing has always had ( and STILL has ) so many ‘loose ends’ it’s hard to go the full 100 percent on any of the current ‘assumptions’.
Captain Darby Starr was offered ( and he accepted ) a national level firefighter-of-the-year award for ( supposedly ) ‘saving’ himself and those other 5 FFs that were cutting line out there in Harper Canyon…
…but I’m still not sure even the story HE is telling is what really happened.
At some point… we REALLY do need to see/read those interview transcripts ( and the photographs ) from the Peeples Valley firefighters that WERE collected by Arizona Forestry but have never seen the light of day.
Having Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown one day free to talk and not feel like they are members of the mafia, or something, would also be nice.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 11:42 pm
>> Marti wrote…
>>
>> On the other hand, maybe it’s possible that the guy
>> in the video is the guy in the the photo and neither
>> of them is Tyson Esquibel.
Exactly.
There were also OTHER FFs wearing a similar chest harness that day who also appear in Tom Story photos at the RHR.
In Tom Story photo 201303_Yarnell_Hill_1677, we see THREE FFs wearing the same ‘chest harness’.
The one on the right with the black ball cap appears to be Tyson Esquibel ( because we can see his face pretty clearly and it matches photos of Tyson Esquibel ).
But to his LEFT in the photo are TWO MORE FFs that seem to be wearing the same ‘chest harness’… and the first one to the left IS, in fact, also wearing a YELLOW Helmet. That’s the one who is also seen with the neck protector unfolded and up around his neck.
To the left of HIM ( and in the foreground ) is the other FF with the bald head and talking on his cellphone. He has no head covering at all but his back is to the camera and we’ve never been able to see his face and/or identify him… but he, too, is wearing that ‘chest harness’ deal.
Direct link to the Tom Story photo I’m talking about…
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/02ue6bnjp6nazkm/AACUc_jX8WNPOrznsNSlYV-ea/Photos%20and%20Video/Tom%20Story%20Photos/201303_Yarnell_Hill_02?lst=&preview=201303_Yarnell_Hill_1677.jpg
NOTE: There is also an FF with a RED HELMET in this photo seen sticking pretty close to the person who seems to be Tyson Esquibel. This FF has also never been identified. Maybe HE is the one with the RED HELMET seen in the photo(s) taken out at the Youth Camp.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Who friggin knows??????
A lot of people. Especially the ones who are IN the photographs or were standing nearby.
I still can’t believe that throughout all of the SAIT and ADOSH interviews… they weren’t taking a moment as they had all these people ‘in the room’ to help them do their own identifications on who is in some of these critical photos.
Again.. that’s like “Investigations 101”.
Identify people in photographs.
Exactly. And thanks for hanging in there on this.
I think it’s REALLY important, all things considered.
And it ain’t over, either.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 11:37 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> And as that vehicle is driving by in Aaron’s video, we can
>> hear Tyson communicating with Gary Cordes.
Yes. I think it’s been established that the AUDIO track for that video does, in fact, capture Aaron Hulburd’s radio broadcasting what Tyson Esquibel is saying to Gary Cordes AS he is actually driving by Aaron Hulburd’s camera.
Thanks for writing this up, WTKTT!
It’s getting way past my bedtime, and so I’m a little bit brain-dead, but.
It really is harrowing to read this. I’ve read it before, but thanks for posting it.
I’m still not finding what you were “quoting” when you wrote down below the thing about the “white helmet.” Be that as it may.
You wrote:
“This actually MATCHES some research that Marti did on Tyson Esquibel’s whereabouts in this timeframe and the stillframes Marti extracted from one of the Aaaron Hulburd M2Uxxxx videos which shows ( apparently ) the same YELLOW-HELMET FF with the chest harness seen out in the Youth Camp area standing back there by the Shrine just a little later.”
That’s not quite correct. Actually it’s pretty jumbled. What I was describing, regarding the yellow-helmeted guy with the chest harness standing on the right side of the Blue Ridge UTV in the clearing at the Youth Camp, about five minutes before we see everybody coming out into the Shrine area, is Papich’s photo IMG_3955.jpg.
That’s the guy that, once upon a time, long ago, you had said you thought was Tyson Esquibel, via seeing him in one of Tom Story’s photos of the various and sundry fire-fighters in the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot. Which is probably true.
And so I had asked you how you had identified that person as being Tyson Esquibel, because I hadn’t been able to FOR CERTAIN make that identification, even though, all things considered, it’s probably true.
Regarding Tyson Esquibel “standing back there by the Shrine just a little later.” No.
What I said was that, in Aaron’s video you can see Tyson Esquibel being the one coming out just in front of Brian and Trew and just behind the crew [that had been in danger in Harper Canyon} walking out.
By “being the one coming out” I mean the vehicle that he was driving that day (the big Glendale truck) is seen right in front of Trew and Frisby on their UTV.
NOT that he was “standing back there by the Shrine just a little later.”
And, given what I am seeing in Aaron’s videos, I am not seeing a correlation between what Brandon is saying and what I am seeing in those videos. But that’s something that I am, at the moment, too tired and too past my bedtime and too brain-dead to go into at this time. But I probably will tomorrow.
I had just, about 20 minutes before I started writing this, replied to TTWARE’s comment down below about the “Incident Commander” thing. I had said that I didn’t remember that having seriously entered into the conversation. I guess that’s because I, knowing that the Incident Commander was nowhere near this Youth Camp area, didn’t take that seriously. I guess I don’t remember that having been much of an issue on here. But maybe for some it was.
This whole thing is such a serious mess. I really hope that sometime somehow someway (especially since Mosesso has denied AZDF’s attempt to get it “erased,” it gets truly INVESTIGATED.
I truly believe there are a number of Lessons Learned that really need to be learned from this. On a whole bunch of sides and levels and whatevers.
But the various and sundry narratives of it are so conflicted, at this point, and the visual record is so not in sync with those narratives, that I just see this as, at this point, a whole big jumble.
It’s really frustrating, and it’s seriously time for me to go to bed.
**
** SO WHERE DID THE ‘WHITE HELMET’ REFERENCE COME FROM?
I was typing this last response in the series while you were typing.
I probably should have posted this first since the whole “white helmet” thing is what you were most concerned about down below.
Last but not least… here is that other question that was asked on this same side-thread about that mysterious Youth Camp person…
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 7:49 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> WTKTT, you said:
>>
>> “…someone who they have identified as their own ‘group supervisor’
>> with a ‘white helmet’ appeared and started ordering them to get their
>> two vehicles out of there immediately.”
>>
>> I know this is a picky little detail down here in the weeds, but since I
>> care a lot about this, your “white helmet” in quotes caught my attention.
Yes… and as it turns out… that was a ‘brain fart’ on my part.
Bob Brandon himself does not actually use the words ‘white helmet’.
We don’t have him using that exact description in any of his accounts about this person who was ordering him to abandon his crewmates.
What we DO have ( from Bob Brandon ) are the following two descriptions…
1) “Incident Commander” – From his own story at the Yarnell Recovery Site
2) “Our Group Supervisor” – From the Daily Courier article.
The ‘white helmet’ reference first popped in relation to this Bob Brandon account for the following two reasons…
1) It might explain Brandon mistakenly describing the person he is talking about as an “Incident Commander”. We knew that Tony Sciacca was there in that area but it still wasn’t clear if Sciacca had ever made it all the way back to the Youth Camp to even BE someone telling Brandon to do anything.
2) For a while… it looked like that ‘mystery person’ standing near the Polaris Ranger back in the Youth Camp had on a WHITE HELMET. Consensus now is that it is definitely a YELLOW helmet on that person.
So good catch… and file that one away under ‘brain fart’.
Bob Brandon described this mystery person with terms like “Incident Commander” and “Our Group Supervisor”… but he never actually said he was wearing any particular kind of head gear or helmet color.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Also, when I read “white helmet.” I went scurrying back to look at
>> the photos of Frisby and Trew and the UTV at, and fleeing from,
>> the Youth Camp.
>>
>> In the image of them riding through the embers, Frisby has his
>> typical black baseball cap on and Trew has a blue helmet on (which
>> he had on, apparently, all day).
>>
>> Neither probably even OWNS a white helmet, I would bet.
Correct… and it’s worth noting down here again that in Bob Brandon’s own account in his own words… he definitely could identify the ‘Blue Ridge Hotshots’ versus other people out there and there’s no reason to believe he could have accidentally been identifying any Blue Ridge Hotshot as either an “Incident Commander” or “Our Group Supervisor”.
>> Marti also wrote…
>>
>> Also, I went back and looked at that image of the UTV in the middle
>> of the clearing at the Youth Camp. After all of this convo, it was
>> interesting to look at it again.
>>
>> I had white-balanced the image awhile back when I was trying to figure
>> out who was in it.
>>
>> The guy standing to the right of the UTV (who, I think you once said
>> you thought was, based on photos from the Ranch House Restaurant
>> Parking Lot, Tyson Esquibel) has a YELLOW helmet on, not a white one.
I agree. I thought ( myself ) it might have been WHITE but having done a lot of color balancing I think its pretty safe to say it’s a YELLOW Helmet on that FF.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> They guy standing to the left of the UTV has a RED helmet on.
>> And I have NO CLUE who that is.
That actually COULD be either Bob Brandon or Matt Keehner.
What is absolutely astounding is that these photos were never showed to the people who were known to have been out in that Youth Camp area at that time… in order to identify exactly WHO these FFs are in these photos.
That could still be done.
Whoever was out there having these conversations near the Polaris Ranger
should be able to recall those moments and who else was standing there.
Maybe not by full first or last names.. but definitely WHO ‘in general’ was there.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> This photo was taken about, I think, five minutes before we see all
>> these trucks and crews coming out of the area on the Aaron Hulburd videos.
Yes.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> That YELLOW helmet was, I think, another of the reasons I didn’t
>> think it was Tony Sciacca, way back when when we were discussing
>> whether or not it was him. (Of course, at that time I had NO IDEA
>> what Tony looked like but I didn’t think he would have been wearing
>> a yellow helmet).
Gotcha. A lot of this is coming back to me now.
The reasons I thought it COULD have been Tony Sciacca back there giving
those orders to Bob Brandon were at least twofold…
1) We KNOW from Sciacca’s own testimony he was in the general area. We
just didn’t know at that time how far back he’d ever gotten on Shrine Road.
2) We KNOW Sciacca was wearing a WHITE HELMET and so could have
easily been either mis-identified as an IC or a ‘Group Supervisor’… OR he
might have even been identifying himself to others that way.
The second round of Aarron Hulburd videos that were released pretty much
proves that Tony Sciacca never really did get any farther west on Shrine
Road than the parking lot of the St. Joseph Shrine.
So WHITE helmet or not… Sciacca really could NOT have been the person
back there at the Youth Camp ordering Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to
abandon their crewmates.
I believe that’s the current consensus as far as Sciacca goes on this part of the story.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> But I knew at the time that it’s still hard to tell. But I now TRULY
>> don’t believe anybody with a “White Helmet” (i.e. the official color
>> of major OVERHEAD — for a REASON) was anywhere near the
>> Youth Camp at that time.
Well.. we can now see with our own eyes ( in the additional Aaron Hulburd videos ) that Tony Sciacca ( with HIS WHITE HELMET ) was very much ‘near the Youth Camp at that time’.
The parking lot of the St. Joseph Shrine was just several hundred feet to the east of the entranceway to the Youth Camp.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> So that’s why I’m interested in where you got the “white helmet.”
>> Was it from another article or something?
No. It was from the tangled recesses of my brain and the many conversations we’ve had trying to figure out why Brandon might have mis-identified this ‘mystery person’ as an “Incident Commander”.
Talking to a person with a WHITE Helmet might explain such a mis-identification… but now we are actually pretty short on people known to be wearing WHITE Helmets who can be placed all the way back at the Youth Camp at ANY time that day.
So scratch the original thinking.
Whatever was causing Bob Brandon to be mis-identifying this person who was ordering him to abandon his crewmates as an “Incident Commander” probably had nothing to do with the color of his helmet.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> BTW I think the paragraph from the article above pretty much
>> kills any idea that it was Frisby. It essentially says Group Supervisor
>> twice. That Group Supervisor would never have been Brian Frisby.
I agree… and in Bob Brandon’s own account on the Yarnell Recovery Website he also makes it pretty darn clear that he knew exactly what the Blue Ridge Hotshots looked like and when he was seeing or talking to any of them.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And since it wasn’t Gary Cordes (because he wasn’t there), it
>> had to have been Tyson Esquibel, who, by the way, is seen in
>> the Hulburd videos driving out JUST AHEAD of Brian and Trew
>> and just AFTER the crew on foot walking out.
Correct… and that puts us back were we left it before.
All things considered… the MOST LIKELY candidate for this mysterious IC and/or “Group Supervisor” who was telling Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to abandon their crewmates is Taks Force Leader Trainee Tyson Esquibel.
The LEAST LIKELY candidate would be either Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby or Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown.
But instead of even lifting a finger to try and VERIFY anything… Kyle Dickman just went with the LEAST LIKELY candidate and says in his PUBLISHED work that it is a FACT that it was Brian Frisby.
I would really, really, really, really like to know what Mr. Brian Frisby himself has to say about that.
Thanks for hanging in there on this, WTKTT!
I think we’re pretty much on the same page now.
To be perfectly honest, it was this whole thing that, essentially, made me mostly lose interest in the book. I just found it appalling.
And now I’m thinking the only way it makes sense is that the guy in the video standing near the engine is NOT Esquibel, because it IS Esquibel driving “his” truck out AFTER that other guy was captured in the video. And, yeah, I remember there were a number of guys rigged like that in the Ranch House Restaurant Parking Lot. And I, at the time, had no clue who any of them were.
Another thing that is astounding with regards to the Kyle Dickman book is that there is no evidence whatsoever that this former Hotshot who is now saying he was trying to write the “Definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire” every lifted a finger to even TRY and talk to ANY of the Blue Ridge Hotshots.
So here’s a Hotshot writing a book about Hotshots for other Hotshots and he never even lifted a finger to talk to the OTHER Hotshots who not only saved Brendan’s life but were the first FFs to be on the ground next to the bodies at the deployment site?
Really?
It would not have surprised me to read in his ‘sources’ section the same thing you can read in the ADOSH report… that every attempt was made to interview Blue Ridge Hotshots but U.S. Forestry did everything possible to prevent it.
What DOES surprise me is that this Dickman guy apparently didn’t even TRY… and is perfectly comfortable just making his own assumptions about what Brian Frisby did or didn’t do that day… and that he was definitely the one telling other FFs to abandon their crewmates becase (quote) “They can’t run that fast”.
** KYLE DICKMAN SOUNDS OFF ON CNN
By the way… have you seen this CNN article published just a few days ago.. on the day before Brendan’s last blown depostion ( May 27 )?
It’s Kyle Dickman himself “going off” on homeowners ( in general ) and telling them to STOP even expecting firefighters to ever try and protect their homes OR their property.
CNN
Article Title: Stop expecting firefighters to save your homes
By Kyle Dickman
Posted/Updated 8:03 AM ET, Wed May 27, 2015
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/27/opinions/dickman-wildfire-threat/index.html
>> Marti wrote…
>>
>> And, given what I am seeing in Aaron’s videos, I am not seeing a
>> correlation between what Brandon is saying and what I am seeing
>> in those videos.
I hear ya.
SOME of what we can now see happening in the most recent Aaron Hulburd video releases matches Bob Brandon’s description(s) of what went down that afternoon… but SOME of it does NOT.
We CAN see a group of FFs on foot sort of ‘catching up’ to the trucks there in the St. Joseph Shrine parking lot. This DOES match part of Brandon’s description… and especially the part where one of the FFs on foot seems to do a “What the FUCK!” gesture out ahead to the FFs standing by the vehicle.
That would match Brandon’s recollection that the FFs who had to run for their lives out of Harper Canyon were pretty PISSED when they discovered that they HAD been ‘left behind’; and the vehicles were not where they were expecting them to be.
But as far as them running into this “Incident Commander” person there in the St. Joseph Shrine parking lot… I’m not really seeing that moment captured in the videos… if it even happened.
I think the bottom line on this sub-thread is that we determined quite some time ago that it IS still possible to cut through the confusion and the conflicting reports and find out exactly what happened out there in the Youth Camp / Shrine Road area… but it’s going to take more interviews with the people involved.
The SAIT and ADOSH investigators simply never got down to brass tacks on what was really happening there in that area. ADOSH heard enough to justify a workplace safety citation… and that’s all they are required to do.
But the REAL truth ( and the maximum Lessons Learned ) relies on someone conducting more interviews with the participants.
That’s what’s really sad to me.
That Kyle Dickman would not only not even feel the need to lift a finger to try and figure this out even for a tome he was going to call a “definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… but that he went for the “easy way out’ and just put it all onto Brian Frisby… who apparently still can’t even open his mouth to defend himself without risking the loss of his job.
It’s gonna get really, really intesting soon with regards to Frisby and Brown and Ball and the rest of the Blue Ridge Hotshots.
Are we really going to see them testifying in any of the upcoming proceedings.. or not? Cant the FEDS really keep them bottled up for much longer?
And, PS.
I can’t remember amid all the jumble.
Is the June 1 date for the “global mediation” session still on, or has that been postponed, again, also?
AFAWK… it is still ON.
But there is no time to get the McDonough deposition stuff resolved unless they just put pedal to the metal and “get ‘er dun”.
So just like the deposition situation in February whereby they were waiting until February 26 to depose Brendan and they had ‘global mediation’ just days later on March 2…
it’s now “Deja Vu all over again”.
They have blown their chance to depose Brendan and find out what he knows just days ( hours? ) before they have to sit across the table from the ‘wrongful death’ plaintiffs again.
And once again… they will be staring across the table at the ‘wrongful death’ plaintiffs WITHOUT knowing what Brendan McDonough actually knows.
If the fact that everyone has had to wait another 3 months just to be back in the EXACT same set of circumstances they were in on February 26 through March 2 wasn’t so SAD… it would be LAUGHABLE.
The freeze in the court calendar for the ‘wrongful death’ suits extends to the end of June, I believe… so it’s possible what could happen here is that Arizona Forestry will now CANCEL the June 1 mediation session and try to use all of June to get Brendan deposed again.
I would imagine this really has to be IT for them ( Arizona Forestry ).
I can’t imagine the Judges involved here granting yet ANOTHER stay in the court calendars just because these attorneys can’t get their shit together.
>> WTKTT…
>>
>> attorneys can’t get their shit together.
What I actually meant by that is that until we find out more about what really happened yesterday… we are now supposed to believe that the same set of attorneys that have been trying to get the same witness into a room since October of 2014… and who were ‘ready to go’ with the actual depostion upwards of TWO times prior to yesterday…
…are only NOW (suddenly) arguing about WHO gets to be ‘in the room’ and what questions can/should be asked?
They have had TWO prior attempts to do the same exact thing they were supposed to do yesterday… and only NOW they are still trying to work out VERY basic details like who gets to ask what questions?
Give.Me.A.Freakin’.Break.
There HAS to be much more to this story than we know yet.
It really CAN’T be that these attorney are THIS incompetent.
Thank you!
And yes: “Give.Me.A.Freakin’.Break.”
And yes: “There HAS to be much more to this story than we know yet.”
“There HAS to be much more to this story than we know yet.”
I’m thinking there might be a really interesting article in the Arizona Republic/AZCentral on Sunday.
But I could be wrong.
Still, something to potentially look forward to.
That’s exactly why I asked TWICE today:
“Marti Reed says
MAY 29, 2015 AT 11:51 AM
Also,
Marti Reed says MAY 29, 2015 AT 11:12 AM
What I’m wondering now is (because I don’t understand this stuff) what are Mosesso’s options/obligations in all of this?
Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on this day at this time and determine who can be there and who can ask questions and who has to or doesn’t have to supply their questions to whom in advance?
Just to get the darn thing DONE????”
I put the above comment in the wrong place. Sorry.
Today’s threading has been beyond complex.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 10:10 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> What I’m wondering now is (because I don’t understand this
>> stuff) what are Mosesso’s options/obligations in all of this?
>>
>> Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on this day
>> at this time and determine who can be there and who can
>> ask questions and who has to or doesn’t have to supply
>> their questions to whom in advance?
No. Not really.
He can supply the RULINGS that establish those parameters as he is requested to supply them… but he cannot DICTATE to counsel how they should go about practicing their own profession(s).
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Just to get the darn thing DONE????”
It doesn’t really matter to him whether the ‘damn thing gets done’, or not.
His job is really pretty simply.
ADOSH issued some citations and some fines already.
The Employer in question is totally disagreeing with everything that ADOSH has come with and they don’t want to pay a DIME.
The Judge has to eventually just decide whether the citations and the fines should remain ‘as is’… or get ‘adjusted’ in some way.
The Judge has NO obligation to help one side or the other.
It’s complicated.
He CAN order someone to testify ( issue a subpoena )… but only if he is ASKED to. He can’t initiate anything like that on his own.
Great, thanks!
**
** ARIZONA FORESTRY REQUEST FOR DISMISSAL OF
** TWO OF THE ADOSH CITATIONS HAS BEEN DENIED.
>> On May 28, 2015 at 5:15 pm, WTKTT said…
>>
>> I think it’s worth mentioning that what is still being tossed back and forth here ( and
>> what Judge Michael Mosesso has apparently still not issued a ruling on ) is whether
>> Arizona Forestry is going to get its way and have some of the sub-items of ADOSH
>> Citation 1 dismissed before things ever get to the ‘evidentiary’ part of this
>> appeal process.
I was wrong.
I posted that yesterday before reading all the way through one of the new ALJ Hearing File documents that showed up online yesterday afternoon.
In the document named “2015_05 Updated 05.26.15.pdf” posted just yesterday… there IS a copy of a RULING on this from Judge Mosesso.
That document is sitting at the bottom of the public ALJ Hearing File at…
https://sites.google.com/site/yarnellhillinformation/home/yarnellhillaljhearingfile
Judge Mosesso has flat-out DENIED the request from Arizona Forestry to ‘dimisss’ ADOSH Citations 1(b) and 1(c).
On page 46 ( of 143 pages )…
———————————————————————–
ORDER
IT IS ORDERED Respondent’s ( Arizona Forestry’s ) Motions to delete ( ADOSH ) Citation Item 1(b) and Item 1(c) are DENIED.
By: MICHAEL A. MOSESSO
Administrative Law Judge
———————————————————————–
Arizona Forestry’s ‘Motion to Delete/Dismiss’ ADOSH Citation Item 1(b) is the one where the Arizona Forestry lawyers were selling the snake oil that because Brendan McDonough himself never (technically) told ADOSH he thought he was in any danger on the afternoon of Sunday, June 30, 2013… that ADOSH had no right to conclude that he might have been ( in danger ).
Arizona Forestry’s ‘Motion to Delete/Dismiss’ ADOSH Citation Item 1(c) is the one where the Arizona Forestry lawyers were selling the snake oil that because no resources were ever actually ‘officially’ assigned to Division Z… that the citation for FFs being in danger in Harper Canyon should be dismissed because those guys were not ‘officially’ part of Division ‘Z’.
Judge Mosesso himself described this piece of creative mental gymnastics and legal cliff-diving as the “Phantom Resources” issue.
Judge Moseso’s ruling says that both of these claims are complete horseshit, and the original ADOSH Citations Item 1(b) and Item 1(c) will NOT be ‘dismissed’.
Arizona Forestry can still try some other arguments at the Hearing itself to get these Citations mitigated or dismissed… but this ‘snake oil’ they just tried to sell has been recognized as such by Judge Moseso.
The Kyle Dickman book is not mentioned, but as if there weren’t plenty of other reasons to dismiss the Item 1(b) Citation already… Kyle Dickman’s interviews with Brendan and his recounting of the events of Sunday afternoon directly contradict the claim that Arizona Forestry was making about Brendan not being in any danger.
Brendan was in DEEP SHIT that afternoon… and ( even according to Kyle Dickman’s new book ) he KNEW IT. So it is unlikely Arizona Forestry will even TRY this argument again based on the testimony from Brendan that has now been published in Kyle Dickman’s book.
The ADOSH citation for just that ‘needlessly unsafe workplace’ violation and just that one potential entrapment situation is going to stand ‘as is’… at least until this all gets to an official HEARING.
Good catch, thanks!
I hadn’t had time to read all the way through, either backwards or forwards, the whole file.
And, actually, I’m not terribly surprised. Mosesso has, apparently, been “around the block” a few times with these lawyers.
I think it’s worth noting that even if Judge Mosesso hadn’t ruled on this yet… the fact that Kyle Dickman’s book is now published and it is PRIMARILY based on extensive in-person interviews with McDonough would be enough of a reason to keep the ADOSH Item 1(b) Citation firmly in place.
Kyle Dickman doesn’t just back up everything ADOSH had to say about Brendan being in real danger that day.
Kyle Dickman’s ‘imagineering’ even extends to saying that Brendan was basically TERRIFIED as he came literally RUNNING off of his Lookout Mound and HAULING ASS down towards that ‘T’ intersection where he was going to accidentally run into Brian Frisby.
If that isn’t true… then it’s now Brendan himself who has to take issue with Kyle Dickman’s ‘imagineering’.
Followup…
The day before Dickman’s book was actually published some parts of his ‘Foreword’ were published.
That’s where Dickman describes McDonough’s evacuation as a MAD DASH and that Brendan was so freaked out at that point that Dickman uses words like RUNNING and STUMBLING and SWATTING aside the brush as he tore down the mound toward the old-grader.
From a comment down below in this chapter I made on May 11, 2015…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xiv/#comment-295270
—————————————————————–
Kyle Dickman is (apparently) characterizing Brendan’s evacuation as some actual MAD DASH down from the mound with Brendan actually SPRINTING ( Dickman’s word ) down towards the old-grader location and just frantically ‘swatting’ the vegetation out of his way because he was already sort of ‘freaking out’… or something… and that by the time he arrived where Frisby was about to pick him up… he ( Brendan ) KNEW his chances of either out-running the fire OR surviving a deployment by that old-grader were (quote) “NOT POSSIBLE” and “GRIM”.
From what was published this morning…
—————————————————————-
Donut dropped off the back side of the granite knoll and started sprinting through brush so dry it cracked as he swatted it aside. Embers and ash drifted over his head. He plowed through the bushes toward a small clearing around the metal skeleton of a long-abandoned road grader.
As he stumbled into the clearing, Donut suddenly realized it wasn’t possible to outrun the blaze—a nightmare scenario for every wildland firefighter, made worse by the fact that the clearing, his only chance for survival, was barely the size of a tennis court. He couldn’t outrun the fire. Flames had halved the distance between the drainage and the clearing in minutes. The wind thrashed the walls of scrub oaks and manzanita bushes surrounding the grader. Even if Donut deployed his fire shelter, an aluminum shield designed to deflect heat, his chances of surviving a burnover were grim. Marsh knew as much, too.
——————————————————————
That totally contradicts everything Arizona Forestry was recently trying to establish in their ‘motion to dismiss’ that McDonough-related ADOSH citation.
Arizona Forestry’s total ‘grounds’ for asking for dismissal was to tell Judge Mosesso that since there is no testimony from Brendan in either of his ADOSH interviews that HE was ever concerned about HIS situation at all that day… that that means there were no grounds for ADOSH to issue a citation relating to his possible entrapment that day.
Looks like the Arizona Forestry lawyers forgot to actually check with Brendan before they submitted that bullshit to Judge Mosesso.
—————————————————————————
So given that actual recounting of Brendan’s situation by Kyle Dickman himself… I wouldn’t want to be any Arizona Forestry lawyer still trying to argue that just because Brendan never actually told any ADOSH investigator he was ‘afraid’ that afternoon… that he was in “no danger”.
Mosesso may be a lot of things, all things considered.
But, clearly, one of thing he is NOT is….
stupid.
Agreed… but in all honesty… he doesn’t get a whole lot of points for timely reactions, either. He really is either so busy he can’t issue rulings in less than a week… or he’s just plain LAZY.
Whoops. TYPO above. Left the word NOT out of a sentence and changed its meaning.
Paragraph above should have read like this…
The Kyle Dickman book is not mentioned, but as if there weren’t plenty of other reasons to NOT dismiss the Item 1(b) Citation already… Kyle Dickman’s interviews with Brendan and his recounting of the events of Sunday afternoon directly contradict the claim that Arizona Forestry was making about Brendan not being in any danger.
On May 28, 2015 at 5:02 PM, WTKTT wrote:
“The only BIG difference between now and then is that Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini has spilled his guts about what Darrell Willis told him and the fact that McDonough now wants to “get stuff off his chest”.
I’m not 100 percent sure how that Paladini moment could have changed things to the point where suddenly Arizona Forestry doesn’t even WANT the ADOSH lawyers to ask any/all questions of McDonough…”
This is so convoluted. Tell me if I have something wrong here.
Way back in October, AZDF (I think I’m gonna stick with that acronym going forward) was notified, if I recall correctly, that Brendan had this story he wanted to tell, and so THEN AZDF decided they wanted him to be deposed so they could be aware of what was in that story before they had to go forward and prepare for the trials and the ADOSH vs AZDF tribunal.
So then Brendan got himself a new lawyer who had a problem with that date, and the deposition was postponed, much to AZDF’s consternation.
They wanted that deposition so SO BADLY that they pushed for a subpoena of Brendan. Mosesso wouldn’t issue a subpoena.
Then the February deposition got cancelled, apparently, because Brendan’s “therapist” “said” it would amplify Brendan’s PTSD.
Then it got rescheduled for May about the time the news was saying Brendan would testify if he legally had to.
So, I’m not seeing anything here that seems to be related to Paladini’s “spilling of his guts.” Nothing in that would have been NEWS to AZDF, unless I’m missing something. It was only NEWS to the public.
Is it possible that the thing that has changed is that, up until “now” (or until that somewhat mysterious-t0-me statement from Shapiro that Brendan would testify if legally required) AZDF was assuming that only THEIR lawyers would be involved in the deposition?
I’ve never been clear on this whole thing. I’ve never been clear on WHO was supposed to/allowed to be asking the questions in the deposition.
And, at some point in the past couple of months the understanding was that there was an argument going on because AZDF was insisting that only THEY would be questioning Brendan (or even PRESENT at the deposition), and then, at least as I recall, that somehow changed. But I don’t recall where/how “we” knew about that.
I think they’ve NEVER wanted anybody else to question Brendan, and maybe they were assuming that that was going to be the way the deposition would be managed, and then something changed about THAT, and that’s what this is all about.
Am I somehow not getting this right?
Also, on May 28, 2015 at 11:22 PM WTKTT wrote:
“What’s really bizarre about what happened TODAY is to wonder WHY, all of a sudden, it was even an issue WHO would be allowed to be at the deposition and be asking questions.
It certainly wasn’t an issue back in February of 2015 and up to just 48 hours before the previously scheduled deposition.
All the ‘lawyers’ were ‘good to go’ for THAT under-oath depostion with no one having a cow about who might be going to ask what questions.”
That relates, also, to what I wrote above.
Just pulling this conversation together into one place.
Additional Point
Both Willis and Paladini went to the City Council and To the State Attorney with Brendan’s revelations. So they have all of that info before the News release by Paladini.
Exactly.
Bob~
See below where WTKTT explains to me that even though Willis and Paladini told AZDF, et al, about Brendan having a story to tell, they didn’t tell them WHAT the story was.
So now I’m agreeing that Paladini’s public bombshell about what the story WAS may have had something to do with AZDF all of a sudden getting freaked out about who would be involved in Brendan’s May deposition.
Keep in mind that even at the time these ‘revelations’ appeared in the ALJ Hearing File ( that Paladini and Willis had informed Arizona Forestry Brendan had something he wanted to “get off his chest” )… it was impossible to tell how MUCH Paladini and Willis had told Arizona Forestry… particularly AZF attorney David Selden.
AZF Attorney Dave Selden was the one who was ‘authoring’ those memos to Judge Mosesso and the one who was making all the arguments to Mosesso about how important it was to have Brendan subpoenaed
But even I am the one who said it appeared that AZF Attorney Daid Selden “knew more than he was willing to say”.
Bottom line here is that we still do NOT KNOW how much Selden really knew ‘back then’… when he was asking Mosesso to subpoena Brendan.
But it DOES APPEAR as if Selden knew ONLY that Brendan has some very important ‘additional information’ that he overheard on the crew intra-net… but neither Paladini nor Willis had mentioned the infamous ARGUMENT or the ORDER from Marsh.
THAT was the WTF moment even for Arizona Forestry when Paladini suddenly ( and still inexplicably? ) decided to spill his guts to the media.
I am still just GUESSING that this WTF moment is what has ‘changed things’ with regards to Brendan’s deposition… but I can’t think of anything else that WOULD have suddenly made it very important to Arizona Forestry that they now CONTROL this deposition in ways they didn’t seem concerned about back on February 26, 2015.
Maybe before Paladini spilled his guts to the media… the Arizona Forestry lawyers were not even taking seriously what SAIT Co-Lead Mike Dudley said almost a year ago about people saying they “heard an argument at the saddle”.
Maybe the Arizona Forestry lawyers were answering their own “what’s the worse that could happen” question regarding Brendan’s untold knowledge with something along the lines of… “So Brendan tells us that Marsh was out in front of Steed. So what”.
But the moment Paladini is now saying that there is a good possibility Brendan McDonough will testify ( under oath ) that Arizona Forestry Management ( DIVSA Eric Marsh ) actually ORDERED those men to come down into that death trap…
…everything changed.
That’s a total game changer for any set of lawyers trying to sit across the table from some angry families suing your agency for ‘wrongful death’.
You wrote:
“But it DOES APPEAR as if Selden knew ONLY that Brendan has some very important ‘additional information’ that he overheard on the crew intra-net… but neither Paladini nor Willis had mentioned the infamous ARGUMENT or the ORDER from Marsh.
THAT was the WTF moment even for Arizona Forestry when Paladini suddenly ( and still inexplicably? ) decided to spill his guts to the media.”
Given that the SAIT leader, Mike Dudley, essentially “bombshelled” that Utah gathering of wildland firefighters way back in June 2014 with the “news” that there were “unconfirmed” “rumors” (based on a video that, apparently was circulating and still hasn’t been made public) of an “argument” between Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed, and that that “bombshell” was kind of “rocketing” back and forth over the Internet, I find it hard to believe that “no-one” at AZDF was paying any attention to that.
As a matter of fact, I think I have it reliably in my memory banks that there is documentation that AZDF was trying to acquire that video and possibly some information regarding it.
I think I read that somewhere in the ADOSH site documentation.
So I find it hard to believe that there were no conversations going on between AZDF and their lawyers about the “high possibility” that that argument may have occurred between Marsh and Steed. From about June into about October when this whole thing was emerging.
S0 starting there, and narrowing it down, it appears to me, right now, that the point of OMFG has to do with “THE ORDER from Marsh to Steed” part of what Palladino said was part of “the story” that Brendan wanted to “get off his chest.”
Which DOES boomerang back to AZDF, since Eric, having been designated as Division Supervisor, was, at that point of designation, not only an employee of AZDF, but also then a part of the Incident Management Team.
Major deal. For AZDF.
If it is true that a member of the Incident Management Team ORDERED the Supervisor of an Interagency Hotshot Crew to do something that clearly put their lives in danger, that a WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLGAME, I would think, potentially legally.
Of course that all leads back into the whole realm of “You have the right and the responsibility to turn down unsafe orders” yada yada yada yada yada.
But even given that, I’m at this moment in time thinking that possible ORDER is the thing AZDF is choking up on and freaking out about.
So, yes, I am agreeing with you.
It’s the ORDER.
That’s the game-changer.
So, now, I’m sitting here thinking about that.
And Brendan.
Still a bit befuddled and thinking “out loud.”
So, apparently, via all of this (but we still don’t have a deposition so we still DON’T KNOW) Brendan heard Eric Marsh order Jesse Steed to bring the crew “down” towards the Boulder Springs Ranch.
We still don’t know whether that happened while they were still “up in the black” or “down at the saddle.”
We’ve been “hunching” that, all things considered, the “argument” happened at the saddle.
So what Brendan apparently “knows” is that this ORDER happened, and when it happened.
So he’s been carrying this apparently heard “ORDER” around inside his head all this time, while espousing to the public (possibly understandably) that he though his leaders were doing/deciding the right thing; while not divulging to the ADOSH investigation (also possibly understandably at that time, but definitely not the RIGHT THING TO DO) (and all of this, apparently, while retaining LAWYERS who were. apparently, ADVISING him) that he knew this ORDER had taken place……..
WHEW.
Apparently, he really really really really really really really didn’t want anybody to know about that ORDER (even possibly himself, which, having been thru my share of PTSD and survivor guilt I understand the psychology), but something inside himself (and possibly a bunch of external pressure, as in, COME ON BRENDAN QUIT SITTING ON THE TRUTH WHICH WE THE FAMILIES REALLY REALLY REALLY WANT TO KNOW) just couldn’t keep living with that cognitive dissonance.
And so FINALLY he has prepared himself to stand up in front of those various lawyers and those in-house microphones and talk about that and answer WHOMEVER’S questions. And talk as honestly (given the questions that would probably be lobbed at him) about that day.
However much it may be inferred that he’s been gaming the system and the writers and the lawyers and the agencies in order to protect his own framework of “His Leaders Could Do No Wrong” and enjoying the benefits of all of that (the HERO mythology around Fire-fighters)…..
…….that experience has come at an increasing cost to him.
I really really really really hope Judge Mosesso choses to END ALL THE GAME PLAYING and order this deposition to occur as soon as possible. And let the chips fall where they may.
That really needs to happen. ASAP.
And I’m really really really sick of this software automatically and mindlessly attaching this deleted Website thingy to my posts and therefore painting my name in red.
JD???????????
I’ve been here posting for a year and a half and I’ve never had this happen.
JD can you stop this? It’s really a PITA.
Thanks in advance
Both sides are allowed to be at depositions and ask questions. Otherwise, it is something that could not be referred to in court.
The earlier depositions were scheduled before the “global mediation” efforts began. My speculation is that it’s highly likely that the rest of the global mediation lawyers (other than ADF and ADOSH) wanted to get in on the current deposition and THAT is what is causing the current dust-up.
Thank you, and yes that makes sense.
The “party” has increasingly gotten out of AZDF’s “control.”
According the article in the Prescott Daily Courier that REPORTED the new deposition that was supposed to happen yesterday… PDC reporter Joanna Dodder Nellans says flat-out that the ‘global mediation’ is, in fact, a pretty BIG PARTY.
Joanna Dodder Nellans says the ‘global mediation’ not only involves lawyers and plaintiffs for ALL of the following…
1) “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” ( Citation challenges. HEARING only. )
2) Wrongful Death Lawsuits against Arizona Forestry ( Civil Court case )
3) Property Damage lawsuits against Arizona Forestry ( Civil Court case ).
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Hotshot survivor agrees to May deposition
Published: 5/14/2015 11:25:00 PM by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1086&articleID=145284
From the article…
———————————————————————-
Selden told the administrative law judge that he wants the deposition to take place before a June 1 mediation session. The global mediation will involve the ADOSH appeal as well as related lawsuits filed by more than 160 Yarnell property owners and 12 of the families of the fallen hotshots against State Forestry.
———————————————————————-
So TTWARE might be right.
This same “List of contestants” for the ‘global mediation’ might have also suddenly decided they all wanted to be “in the room” for Brendan’s deposition as well.
Ya know… at this point… I don’t know why Judge Mosesso ( in the AZF versus ADOSH case ) doesn’t just say to everyone…
We are GOING to have a HEARING ( no early citation dismissals ).
We are GOING to call all kinds of witnesses ( like EVERYONE ).
I am GOING to allow the PUBLIC to attend ALL Hearing sessions.
I am GOING to allow Network Television cameras in the courtroom.
I am GOING to allow all witness sessions to be televised.
So everyone can just ‘get over it’.
We are going LIVE with this.
Make sure you all have your High-Definition TV makeup kits by then.
SIDENOTE: How much you want to bet that if Judge Moseso did do anything even remotely resembling what I just suggested up above… that Arizona Forestry wouldn’t just pull the ripcord.
By that I mean… exercise the option they have ALWAYS and STILL have.
Just stop contesting the ADOSH Citations and just pay the fines.
They ( Arizona Forestry ) could do that at ANY moment… and all this LJ Hearing and Judge Moseso stuff immediately just ‘goes away’.
That doesn’t do much for them over in the other courtroom where the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits are progressing… but it really would immediately make all this ALJ and Moseso stuff ‘go away’.
ADOSH was DONE with all this when they issued their findings.
They ‘pegged the meter’ on the citations and the amounts they were even legally able to charge the employer ( Arizona Forestry ).
It was only ‘Arizona Forestry’ who couldn’t bring themselves to just “let it go” and pay the fines.
THEY are the ones who decided to contest ALL of the ADOSH citations.
Well… then THEY are also the ones who, at any moment, can also decide to just throw in the towel.
Here is where I intended to write this:
That’s exactly why I asked TWICE today:
“Marti Reed says
MAY 29, 2015 AT 11:51 AM
Also,
Marti Reed says MAY 29, 2015 AT 11:12 AM
What I’m wondering now is (because I don’t understand this stuff) what are Mosesso’s options/obligations in all of this?
Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on this day at this time and determine who can be there and who can ask questions and who has to or doesn’t have to supply their questions to whom in advance?
Just to get the darn thing DONE????”
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on
>> this day at this time and determine who can be there
>> and who can ask questions and who has to or doesn’t
>> have to supply their questions to whom in advance?
>>
>> Just to get the darn thing DONE????”
The SHORT answer: Not really.
He’s NEUTRAL in this.
He cannot step in and start doing their work FOR them.
He can only issue procedural rulings that help things move along to a logical conclusion.
His job is simple.
ADOSH has already found an Employer was running an overly dangerous workplace and they have already ‘pegged the meter’ on the citations and the fines they are allowed, by law, to impose.
At some point…. there just needs to be a HEARING ( not a trial ) about whther those citations and fines should be mitigated or adjusted.
That’s it.
If he actually does get too heavy handed and shows what could be construed as a BIAS for one side or the other… then the whole damn process could have to ‘rinse and repeat’ as one side ( or both sides ) file APPEALS.
His biggest controlling element is the court calendar itself.
A DATE has been set for the HEARING itself ( In October ).
That quickly becomes the ‘motivator’ for both sides and he can make sure it remains the “Ready or not… here I come” day.
The HEARING itself becomes the BOOM moment.
Once the HEARING goes down… he is allowed to render his decision and all that’s left is to read it and weep.
That’s the motivation for the lawyers to get off their asses and do what they are supposed to do.
They can keep ASKING for extensions… but the Judge can say NO.
So, also, as related to the above, and to bring this convo together into one place,
On May 15, 2015 at 7:56 AM WTKTT wrote, regarding “Prescott Daily Courier Hotshot survivor agrees to May deposition Published: Friday, May 15, 2015 by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1086&articleID=145284”:
“…..2) The article now seems to go out of its way to say that only ONE attorney will be ‘questioning’ Brendan at the deposition… and it’s an attorney for Arizona Forestry. There is no mention that any attorney for ADOSH will be present at the deposition.
That doesn’t even match what I understand to be a valid deposition in cases like this.
This means that ONLY ‘Arizona Forestry’ will be asking Brendan the questions and so ONLY Arizona Forestry will be able to ‘steer’ the deposition in the direction THEY want it to go.
Usually… in a case like this ( and the way it was going to be both time previous to this )… BOTH sides of the case would agree to accept a deposition from a key witness like this… and it can become a substitute for being “called to the stand”… but only if both sides AGREE to this… and only if BOTH sides to get to ask questions just like they would if the witness was actually called to the stand in a courtroom.”
That link didn’t copy/paste correctly. The correct link for the Prescott Courier story is:
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1086&articleID=145284
One has to understand the way the the Courier routinely prints stories.
Generally, one can count on the information printed to be either late, dis-jointed, leaving out some critical details, or all of the above!
Using my Courier decoder ring, I have determined that lawyers for all pertinent parties will be able to question and depose Brendan.
Gotcha. Thanks!
Still haven’t seen anything coming out yet from AZCentral/Arizona Republic about yesterday’s cancelled deposition. Although I haven’t had time today to do a search. They may be waiting for a few more things to unfold.
Also,
Marti Reed says MAY 29, 2015 AT 11:12 AM
What I’m wondering now is (because I don’t understand this stuff) what are Mosesso’s options/obligations in all of this?
Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on this day at this time and determine who can be there and who can ask questions and who has to or doesn’t have to supply their questions to whom in advance?
Just to get the darn thing DONE????
This comment was in response to this:
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xiv/#comment-297614
in which WTKTT is describing the back and forth going on between AZDF, ADOSH, and Judge Mosesso regarding what questions are required/permitted/not required etc to be submitted in advance to the “other parties” in the deposition of retired State Forester Scott Hunt,
…….and speculating that those same kind of issues may also be involved in this conflict regarding Brendan’s deposition.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 10:46 am
>> Marti said…
>>
>> So, I’m not seeing anything here that seems to be related to Paladini’s
>> “spilling of his guts.” Nothing in that would have been NEWS to AZDF,
>> unless I’m missing something. It was only NEWS to the public.
One of the things you are a little ‘off’ on with your timeline above is the fact that according to the ALJ Documents that were appearing showing that Arizona Forestry had been ‘informed’ that Brendan had ‘additional testimony’… Arizona Forestry was not totally SURE what that testimony WAS.
They were still describing it to Judge Mosesso using vague terms like “information previously not revealed to any investigator” in a vague timeframe of “decisions made AFTER the MacKenzie videos and just prior to deployment”.
At the same time they were originally asking for the Judge’s OK to issue ‘deposition notification’ to McDonough ( which Judge Mosesso granted ) and also asking the Judge to subpoena Brendan to force him to show up ( which Judge Mosesso refused to do )… Arizona Forestry was NOT SURE exactly what it was that Brendan was going to testify to.
Lawyers for Arizona Forestry explained that they had simply been INFORMED that Brendan had this “additional information” by Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini and ( at that time ) Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis.
The BOMBSHELL for everyone involved was when City Attorney Jon Paladini seemed to suddenly decide it was OK to spill his guts about all this to the press.
THAT is when even the attorneys for Arizona Forestry apparently found out EXACTLY what it was that Brendan wanted to “get off his chest”.
It was the part about the infamous ARGUMENT… and the supposed scenario whereby Eric Marsh stopped NEGOTIATING with Steed and just flat-out ORDERED him to bring those men down off that ridge through that explosive fuel-filled box canyon.
There really is no indication that the Arizona Forestry lawyers themselves had even heard that little tidbit of information from Paladini prior to his “chat with the media”.
So as far as Arizona Forestry suddenly having a different take on WHO should be allowed to be at Brendan’s deposition(s), and WHAT questions can/should be asked… all I was saying is that this ‘Paladini moment’ *might* have had something to do with what is happening now.
The Arizona Forestry lawyers seemed to be “good to go” with everything even just hours before the February 26 scheduled deposition. Then the letter showed up from Brendan’s PTSD therapist ( via David Shapiro ) and that deposition was called off.
Now, all of sudden, it matters to AZF who is there and what questions can be asked?
It doesn’t make any sense.
Only thing I can think of is that the information provided to the media by Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini really changed AZF’s entire perspective on the Brendan McDonough depositions.
They ( AZF ) still desperately WANT and NEED to know what Brendan knows… but they also now need to control the way the information is revealed so as to not let TOO MUCH information end up ‘going public’. Where they are drawing the line on that and what they consider to be TOO MUCH INFORMATION… I do not know.
That just seems to be the way they are suddenly behaving.
They want a level of CONTROL over Brendan’s deposition that they didn’t even seem to care about as recently as February 26, 2015… and before Paladini’s “here’s what Willis told me” dump to the media.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Is it possible that the thing that has changed is that, up until “now” (or
>> until that somewhat mysterious-t0-me statement from Shapiro that
>> Brendan would testify if legally required) AZDF was assuming that
>> only THEIR lawyers would be involved in the deposition?
I don’t think so. All the evidence is there that AZDF was perfectly aware that
ADOSH would be fully present at either of the two scheduled depositions
and would be fully armed with their own sets of questions.
AZDF even acknowledged this to be their understanding when they were complaining to the Judge about ADOSH telling him how busy they were preparing for the McDonough depositions back in February of 2015.
AZDF wasn’t making the case to Mosesso that ADOSH didn’t have the right to be doing all this ‘prep-work’ for the upcoming McDonough deposition. To the contrary. AZDF was telling Mosesso that they UNDERSTOOD how busy ADOSH was getting ready for the February 26 McDonough deposition because that’s exactly what THEY were doing as well for the entire first part of February.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I’ve never been clear on this whole thing. I’ve never been clear on WHO
>> was supposed to/allowed to be asking the questions in the deposition.
If you read the existing ALJ documents… it seems perfectly clear that at least up until a few days ago… BOTH sides of the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” proceedings were fully aware ( and fully OK with the fact ) that they would BOTH have attorneys present at the deposition and that BOTH sides would get to ask whatever questions they wanted to.
A deposition IS, in fact, like being “called to the stand”.
Both sides AGREE to accept ‘sworn testimony’ from a witness… but usually ONLY if both sides get to “examine / cross-examine” AS IF the witness WAS ‘on the stand’.
How Arizona Forestry could now believe they are entitled to be having some kind of PRIVATE under-oath deposition with McDonough… and why they would only now think that to be the case for this THIRD ATTEMPT to depose him… is still an absolute head-scratcher.
Obviously there is ‘more to this story’ regarding what happened yesterday.
Ahhhhhh, OK, now I understand better. I was missing that piece of the puzzle about how, even though AZDF knew Brendan had a story to tell, they didn’t know what that story was actually about.
I had assumed that when Willis and Paldini had gone down to Phoenix they had told Scott Hunt (and whomever) what the story WAS.
So, yeah, what you are saying is making more and more sense.
And thanks for the clarification about the deposition expectations. Also thanks to everybody else who has chimed in and helped me understand this better.
I think we’ve talked about this before… but it really is ‘not credible’ to think that someone wasn’t either RECORDING or TRANSCRIBING that MEETING between Prescott City Attorney Palladini and Darrell Willis and all of those attorneys for Arizona Forestry and the Arizona Attorney General’s office.
This was a BIG DEAL.
I’ll bet you couldn’t swing a cat in that room in Phoenix that day without giving an attorney a black eye.
I would find it VERY hard to believe that such an important meeting has no ‘record’ of what was being said… and how much Palladini and Willis really DID tell David Selden and the other attorneys form the Arizona Attorney General’s office.
If anything Palladini has said to the media is to be believed… then we also now have to believe that both he and Willis sat in that room with gaggles of well-dressed ( and well-paid ) State level attorneys… and they somehow chose to NOT tell them everything THEY knew?
Then we are to believe that even though Paladini and Willis chose NOT to share everything they knew with the AZF attorneys that day… that suddenly Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini would decide it was OK to tell it all to the media, instead?
There are still an awful lot of ‘side stories’ here that need to be told.
**
** BRENDAN MCDONOUGH
**
** OCCUPATION: PUBLIC FIGURE
Given the continued shenanigans that went down today with regards to Brendan McDonough, the lawyers, and this ongoing deposition debacle…
…I popped over to Brendan’s online ‘social pages’ to see if he actually might have had anything to say himself about today’s events.
It occurred to me that Brendan might, himself, have had just about enough of all these lawyers and all this bullshit and he might be about THIS close ( fingers pinched close together ) to just saying “Fuck it… I’m telling my story MY way… on MY terms… and like RIGHT NOW”.
No such luck. ( Well… not today, anyway ).
But there were some interesting ‘developments’ over on Brendan’s ‘social presence’ public pages ( Twitter / Facebook ).
On March 9 of this year ( 2015 ), Brendan McDonough suddenly appeared on Twitter at the following link…
https://twitter.com/bmcdonough20
His TweetPage graphics consisted of a background image of a wildfire at night ( not the Yarnell fire ) and a photo of him with his back to the camera standing in front of the 911 memorial at the site where the World Trade Centers stood in New York City.
His first (test) Tweet was…
—————————————————————
Brendan McDonough @ BMcDonough20 – Mar 9
Hello Twitter! #myfirstTweet
—————————————————————
That remained the ONLY Tweet on his page… until just a few days ago.
8 days ago… on May 20, Brendan suddenly posted another Tweet…
————————————————————
Brendan McDonough @ BMcDonough20 – May 20
During my time with Carry the Load I have found something that was lost inside me that I haven’t seen in a long… h t t p: / / fb.me/7hDTP1yIM
————————————————————
** Carry The Load
The “Carry The Load” organization was started by two former Navy SEALS
( Clint Bruce and Stephen Holley ).
“Carry The Load” is a registered Not-for-profit IRS 501(c)3 corporation with Tax ID #27-4568835
The stated purpose of this not-for-profit company is pretty simple.
They want to (quote) “Restore the True Meaning of Memorial Day”.
They want to make sure people remember that ‘Memorial Day’ isn’t just an excuse to go out to the lake and drink beer and eat hamburgers.
Their programs include marches and rallys and have actually expanded to include not only the whole month of May ( they refer to it as ‘Memorial May’ )… but they now also include firefighters, police and other first responders along with military personnel.
This year ( 2015 ) Brendan McDonough took a very active part in a number of “Carry the Load” public events… which is what led to only his second Tweet ever just 8 days ago on his Twitter page.
That ‘Tweet’ is actually just a ‘share’ link for something that Brendan also posted over on his own PUBLIC Facebook page.
The LINK in his Tweet actually just jumps to that PUBLIC post on his Facebook page, which is actually a photo of Brendan walking in a “Carry the Load” event in Chattanooga, TN on May 20.
The ‘copy’ ( text and comment ) for that public photo is as follows…
——————————————————————————–
Brendan Mcdonough
During my time with Carry the Load I have found something that was lost inside me that I haven’t seen in a long time. Something my brothers loved me for, I feel like a lot has been building up to that moment I had. I feel a little more at peace as the days go on and thankful for what God has given me. Thank you everyone for the love and support have a great week. The question I’ll leave you with is “who are you carrying?” — in Chatanooga, Tn. – May 20, 2015
Comment from Ryan Gabriel – May 20 at 4:53pm
Hooah! You got a lot of love brother from a lot of places worldwide!
Nothing will stop you with God and our brotherhood!
——————————————————————————–
What is interesting about Brendan’s PUBLIC Facebook page is how he is now listing his ‘occupation’ ( his ‘who am I’ descriptor ) on his own Facebook page BANNER.
His Facebook HOME PAGE BANNER now says this…
Brendan McDonough
Public Figure
His public ABOUT page now says this…
About Brendan McDonough ( Public Figure )
Page Info
Phone:(928) 925-7856
So PTSD or not… Brendan is now listing HIMSELF as a “Public Figure”, and seems resigned to that role for at least a while to come.
He makes NO MENTION of still being ’employed’ by the “Wildland Firefighter Foundation” or doing his own PTSD counseling.
I still think he ‘moved on’ from that job right around the time that Vicki Minor and her son Burke and that WFF organization had its feet in the fire over how they were spending the millions of dollars raised following the whole Yarnell thing… but there’s still been no actual confirmation that Brendan does NOT actually work for Vicki and Burke Minor anymore.
Direct link to Brendan McDonough’s PUBLIC Facebook page…
https://www.facebook.com/brendan.j.mcdonough
The second photo down on his Facebook Timeline is also related to his recent participation in the Memorial Day “Carry The Load” event(s).
This one appears to show him standing in front of the “Tour Bus” used by that organization to “spread the word” during the month of May.
It appears from the various other photos that Brendan might have actually been on the “Tour Bus” with them this year.
Actually… it looks like Brendan WAS on the “Carry the Load” tour bus this year as it started its “Memorial May” tour in New York City.
There’s another photo of him actually marching in a “Carry the Load” event in New York City on May 3, 2015… and then the photo of him standing by the “Carry The Load” tour bus has him in Murfreesboro, TN, 12 days later on May 15, 2015.
WWTKTT-
awful sad.
awful sad.
well, I want to post an email I got about Dickman’s book and the lawyer’s reply on the hiker’s published account and I replied back “where in those 2 places did I say that exactly or even THEY said that. I never personally nor Sonny on that tragic day even used words to Marsh like bear wallowing or bushwacking and etc…”
here is the email today so if anyone else saw mistakes this is the lawyer handling it so please start sending your corrections WWTKTT and Holley:
From: “Zalcman, Amelia”
Date: May 28, 2015 6:42 AM
Subject: On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman
Dear Mr. Gilligan and Ms. Collura
I am an attorney for The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, publishers of On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman (the “Work”). I was forwarded your email of May 15, 2015 regarding Work and the reference to your interview regarding the Yarnell Hill fire. Your email indicated that you were concerned that Mr. Dickman did not specify the source of your interview. In the notes documenting his sources, Mr. Dickman does in fact refer to the Serious Accident Investigation Report as well as the work done by John Dougherty and notes that several interviews (including yours) come from those transcripts. I’ve cut and pasted those paragraphs here for your convenience. In the book they appear in the notes on pages 275-276.
“Russ Shumate’s story came from comprehensive interview transcripts and hand- written notes from both the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health Investigative Report and the Serious Accident Investigation Report. These notes, obtained through FOIA requests from the excellent independent journalist John Dougherty, among many others, also provided the foundation for all the Yarnell Hill chapters that follow.
Details of Granite Mountain and other firefighters’ ex- perience on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30 came from conversations with Todd Abel, Conrad Jackson, Steve Emery, the Ferrells, and McDonough, as well as interview transcripts and notes from [the SAIR], among others, Abel, Russ Shumate, Byron Kimball, Gary Cordes, Paul Musser, Darrell Willis, Rance Marquez, Rory Collins, Brian Frisby, Rogers Trueheart Brown, three other Blue Ridge Hotshots, and the hikers Joy Collura and Tex Gilligan.
I hope this clears up any confusion.
Thank you
Amelia Zalcman
Amelia Zalcman
Vice President
Associate General Counsel
Penguin Random House LLC
(617) 244-1666 (ph)
(212) 782-5004 (fax)
[email protected]
There is a basic assumption being made by this ‘lawyer’ which is the same mistake a lot of other people ( other lawyers included ) have been making all along.
That ‘assumption’ is that things that have been printed/published in the SAIR report or things that appear in the SAIT interview notes actually represent the truth or actually represent things people actually said.
There are a LOT of things in the original SAIR report that make it sound like they are coming from things people actually said, or thought, or did… when that is NOT the case.
Next thing you know… this lawyer will be saying that it’s ok to report the was a 30 minute blackout where no one was communicating with Granite Mountain just because that’s what was published in the SAIR.
Or that Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby actually did think that Eric Marsh meant he was retreating to a ‘ranch up north’. You still have to love that one. The SAIT makes it sound like that was exactly what Frisby told them he thought… when Frisby’s own published Unit Logs indicate no such thing.
There was a lot of “imagineering” going on in that original SAIR report.
And for an author / publisher to come along and start saying they are now selling “The definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… that REQUIRED them to at least do a minimum amount of VERIFYING these things they just decided to REPRINT from ‘other sources’.
The lawyer is trying to make it sound like just because Dickman found other reports of people saying or doing things.. then it was OK to reprint all that as the truth without even lifting a finger to verify any of it.
Maybe that helps bring a book to market faster… but it doesn’t give you the right to start selling as “a definitive account”.
The Dickman book is what it is.
It’s a ‘human interest’ work with some background on the men who died that came out of interviews that only Dickman was granted because he was a ‘former Hotshot’.
That’s it.
It is ( by no means ) the “definitive account of the Yarnell Fire”.
Not even close.
I think what Joy is asking is for us to send our opinions/facts/corrections to the lawyer.
I will probably do something like that tomorrow. I hope you will, too.
I doubt the lawyer is reading what you just wrote, accurately, above.
And, all things considered, at this point, I don’t think there’s much of anything that can be done about it.
The book is published. It has a life of its own.
But stil……….
Reply to Marti Reed post on
May 28, 2015 at 11:53 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I think what Joy is asking is for us to send our
>> opinions/facts/corrections to the lawyer.
>>
>> I will probably do something like that tomorrow.
>> I hope you will, too.
Yes, I will… if I get the time to finish my own ERRATTA list for that book… but commenter “GoingDirect” ( Holly Neill ) herself pretty much ‘got it right’.
She caught most of the MAJOR screw-ups and they have printed her comment publicly.
The “buyer beware” moment has already happened up there.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I doubt the lawyer is reading what you just
>> wrote, accurately, above.
Even if she was… she would still come back with… “Mr. Dickman states in his book that his narrative is based on various PUBLIC / PUBLISHED sources and not just his own personal interviews”.
That’s the “line in the sand” she was drawing in her email to Joy Collura. That’s their “Whadda you want from us” moment.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And, all things considered, at this point, I don’t think
>> there’s much of anything that can be done about it.
No. There isn’t.
There certainly isn’t going to be any kind of “We’re so sorry we got all that wrong” or any kind of huge RETRACTION issued for a book they are selling under the false claim of it being “The definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”.
Not gonna happen… and that was the “shot across the bow” in this publisher / lawyer letter back to Joy.
The lawyer does not CARE that Mr. Dickman took all kinds of words that had been put into Joy’s mouth and then published by other people… and then Mr. Dickman regurgitated the same mis-statements via his own ‘imagineering’.
She ( the lawyer ) will ALWAYS be taking the stance here that regardless of whether Mr. Dickman felt the need to actually TALK to people ( who are still alive ) that he would be portraying and quoting in his book… that it’s still OK for him to just munge together a whole lot of things that OTHER people have SAID they SAID into his own ‘story’… and go with that.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> The book is published. It has a life of its own.
One of Mark Twain’s constant ‘targets’ for his quotations was his own publishing industry.
It was Mark Twain himself who was combating this very sort of “He said she said he said she said it so it’s ok for me to say it, too” stuff when he first wrote…
“A falsehood can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> But stil……….
As far as “But still..” goes… I think there is already plenty of commentary out there showing this book up for what it really is.
If you want to read some intesting stories about what it’s like to be a Hothshot ( in general ) or what some of those men who burned to death were really like…
…then by all means… buy / read Dickman’s book.
If you want to read “the definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… then that is most certainly NOT what this book is.
From the reviews and the commentary I’ve seen out there already… I think this is now pretty much a ‘given’.
The author and/or publisher are NEVER going to be issuing any retractions or apologies for anything… no matter how many SMEs ( Subject Matter Experts ) chime in about how wrong Dickman was.
I’m sure there are some other Hotshots out there as well who would mightily disagree with even just some of Dickman’s own narrative about ‘Hotshotty” sort of things.
But they ( Dickman and/or Publisher ) won’t be apologizing for any of that, either.
Followup…
Wanted to make it clear that YES… I DO believe that BOTH the publisher and the author should issue a public apology for claiming this book is the “definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire” when it is NO SUCH THING…
…but I don’t believe that they are ever going to do that no matter how many people they hear from who know the ‘facts’ far better than they do.
That being said… let’s return to something YOU ( Marti ) pointed out down below.
It would NOT surprise me if the author and the publisher DO hear from a lawyer representing Mr. Brian Frisby.
In his book… Mr. Dickman is stating unequivocally that Mr. Brian Frisby was the one who was ordering fireman to move vehicles and abandon their crewmates.
Dickman is saying it was DEFINITELY Brian Frisby who said “They can’t run that fast” and was, essentially, telling Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner that their crewmates were probably already burning to death so they might as well go ahead and move the vehicles.
I could imagine Mr. Brian Frisby taking umbrage at being willy-nilly ( publicly ) accused of being the one to have said/done that.
It’s not flattering. Especially not for someone who is trying to be a respected fireman and Hotshot Superintendent.
So yea… maybe some of this Dickman ERRATTA really does rise to the level of SLANDER…
…but you can’t file a SLANDER lawsuit on someone else’s behalf. That’s called not having the proper ‘standing’ to file such a suit.
It has to come from the person who is being (supposedly) being ‘slandered’.
Maybe Frisby is the the one who said those things.
Maybe Dickman did talk to him.
But maybe NOT.
.
I am lost here—-When the vehicles were being moved the crew was not in trouble and Frizby thought they were in the Black.
Why would he say that then.
I also doubt that Frizby would say something that negative in front of any one. Just dose not match his personality. .
I think you just have the ‘wrong crew’ in mind.
What Peeples Valley firefighters Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner have already testified to is that while they were standing by the vehicles parked in the Youth Camp area and watching for any sign of the other 6 firefighters who had been working out west in Harper Canyon to ‘appear’…
…someone who they have identified as their own ‘group supervisor’ with a ‘white helmet’ appeared and started ordering them to get their two vehicles out of there immediately.
They refused… saying their were waiting for their own men and that is where those men expected the vehicles to be.
This ‘group supervisor’ apparently didn’t understand or didn’t care what they were saying. He supposedly told them “They can’t run that fast” ( implying that if they weren’t visible yet… it was too late ) and he again ORDERED them to get those vehicles out of there.
This time Brandon and Keehner complied… but only kinda-sorta… they fired up the vehicles and just started ‘creeping’ to the east and out of the Youth Camp.
Sure enough… Sun City Captain Darby Starr and the other 5 FFs ( including other Peeples Valley FFs ) emerged hauling ass from the west and were able to catch up to the vehicles.
They were apparently really PISSED that Brandon and Keehner had moved the vehicles and they weren’t where the men had expected them to be… but Brandon and Keehner explained what happened. That some guy had come along and told them to stop waiting for them to appear and to foreget about those other men and move the vehicles, anyway.
This is ALSO the ‘engines got PINCHED’ story that was then being mis-reported in SPGS1 Gary Cordes’ own SAIT Interview notes when he said…
——————————————–
3 engines working on the shrine area got pinched. The crews that had hiked in couldn’t find their buggies when they came out because a water tender guy had moved their vehicles.
——————————————-
Cordes was referring to this same incident back there at the Youth Camp where Brandon and Keehner had been ORDERED to move the Peeples Valley Water Tender and the other command vehicle by this mysterious “group supervisor” with a “white helmet”.
The fact that Cordes himself is mis-reporting the incident the way he is has always been taken to mean that even though he, himself, was SPGS1… that he could not have been the actual white-helmeted group supervisor that Brandon and Keehner were referring to.
That leaves a very short list of people that it could have been giving that ORDER to Brandon and Keehner… but the actual identity of that person has never been established.
Brandon and Keehner themselves allude to the fact that they went over all this with Arizona Forestry investigators in face-to-face interviews and testimony given just 48 hours after the tragedy… but those ‘transcripts’ ( and the photos and videos they also gave to the investigators ) have never seen the light of day.
WTKTT, you said:
“…someone who they have identified as their own ‘group supervisor’ with a ‘white helmet’ appeared and started ordering them to get their two vehicles out of there immediately.”
I know this is a picky little detail down here in the weeds, but since I care a lot about this, your “white helmet” in quotes caught my attention.
So I went and read the DC article. The paragraph in the article, which you quoted downstream, says:
“Their group supervisor pulled up and told Brandon and Keehner they had to move their trucks out. Brandon refused, telling the commander that his crew was still in there. The supervisor repeated his order, saying the other guys couldn’t run that fast..”
This does not say anything about a “white helmet.”
Also, when I read “white helmet.” I went scurrying back to look at the photos of Frisby and Trew and the UTV at, and fleeing from, the Youth Camp.
In the image of them riding through the embers, Frisby has his typical black baseball cap on and Trew has a blue helmet on (which he had on, apparently, all day).
Neither probably even OWNS a white helmet, I would bet.
So, I’m not getting where you are getting the “white helmet” thing.
Also, I went back and looked at that image of the UTV in the middle of the clearing at the Youth Camp. After all of this convo, it was interesting to look at it again.
I had white-balanced the image awhile back when I was trying to figure out who was in it.
The guy standing to the right of the UTV (who, I think you once said you thought was, based on photos from the Ranch House Restaurant Parking Lot, Tyson Esquibel) has a YELLOW helmet on, not a white one.
They guy standing to the left of the UTV has a RED helmet on. And I have NO CLUE who that is.
This photo was taken about, I think, five minutes before we see all these trucks and crews coming out of the area on the Aaron Hulburd videos.
That YELLOW helmet was, I think, another of the reasons I didn’t think it was Tony Sciacca, way back when when we were discussing whether or not it was him. (Of course, at that time I had NO IDEA what Tony looked like but I didn’t think he would have been wearing a yellow helmet).
But I knew at the time that it’s still hard to tell. But I now TRULY don’t believe anybody with a “White Helmet” (i.e. the official color of major OVERHEAD — for a REASON) was anywhere near the Youth Camp at that time.
So that’s why I’m interested in where you got the “white helmet.” Was it from another article or something?
BTW I think the paragraph from the article above pretty much kills any idea that it was Frisby. It essentially says Group Supervisor twice. That Group Supervisor would never have been Brian Frisby.
And since it wasn’t Gary Cordes (because he wasn’t there), it had to have been Tyson Esquibel, who, by the way, is seen in the Hulburd videos driving out JUST AHEAD of Brian and Trew and just AFTER the crew on foot walking out.
Details down in the weeds. But details I think you might be interested in.
And as long as I’m writing down here in the weeds about the details regarding something that you and I are VERY interested in………
I’m not looking at the images from the Ranch House Restaurant right now. But I have in my head-memory the image of the fire-fighter there that I think is the one you think is Tyson Esquibel and corresponds to the guy standing on the right of the UTV in the clearing at the Youth Camp.
The question I have had, but have never asked is — What led you to believe that firefighter in the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot photo is Tyson Esquibel?
I’m guessing, now, all things considered, you are correct. But I’m just curious how you determined that, given that at the time you were saying that, we hadn’t seen these videos which proved that it wasn’t Tony Sciacca, and we were much more sketchy about what was going on.
I guess my question then, and thus now, was/is did you see something going on in those photos that tied that fire-fighter with that chest-holster and that yellow helmet to something definitive regarding “Tyson Esquibel”?
I’m just curious.
Since we’re discussing nuances of the reports involving the Harper Canyon thing, my recollection is that he stated that “the ‘incident commander’ for our area came and ordered me to move the vehicle”.
The reason I remember that statement specifically is that it showed a complete lack of understanding (and training) regarding the incident command structure. There is only one IC on any given fire, period.
In response to TTWARE above:
I don’t remember the term “Incident Commander” coming into the discussion.
The quote from the article is:
““Their group supervisor pulled up and told Brandon and Keehner they had to move their trucks out. Brandon refused, telling the commander that his crew was still in there. The supervisor repeated his order, saying the other guys couldn’t run that fast..”
It’s clear from that the Brandon was confused as to which appropriate term he should have been using. But “Incident Commander” was never inside my head in any of those conversations.
It is important to keep mind, and I doubt that the public in general really gives a shit about this seemingly minor detail, but many of the positive reviews that have already appeared on Amazon were from people who had been given “free” copies of the book prior to their reviews.
Reply to
The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive
( TTWARE ) post on
May 29, 2015 at 11:43 am
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> It is important to keep mind, and I doubt
>> that the public in general really gives
>> a shit about this seemingly minor
>> detail, but many of the positive reviews
>> that have already appeared on Amazon
>> were from people who had been given
>> “free” copies of the book prior to their
>> reviews.
No matter how much ERRATTA is published regarding this Kyle Dickman book ( and it would almost take a whole ‘nother book about the book to get it all codified )… I think the opinions are still going to just fall into two distinct categories.
The old saying that comes to mind to describe those two distinct categories would be…
“To those who understand… no explanation is required. To those who do not… no explanation is possible”.
There will ALWAYS be people who will be accepting every word in this book as fact simply because it is a Hotshot writing ABOUT other Hotshots… and FOR other Hotshots.
Fine. Whatever.
It IS a good tome to help get to know just SOME of the men who burned to death a little better. There’s no doubt about THAT part.
But notice that with ALL of the pre-release copies that were handed out so that they could have some ‘reviews’ in the can by release day… not ONE of them appears to have gone to anyone who actually knows a thing or two about what really happened that day.
Example: Kyle Dickman himself ( in his book ) praises independent journalist John Dougherty for his own dedication to discovering and reporting the ‘whole truth’ about that weekend in Yarnell…
…but AFAIK Kyle Dickman didn’t give one of these advance copies to Mr. Dougherty.
Not even for a quick ‘fact check’.
Ditto for Mr. John MacLean and Ms. Holly Neill.
It’s perfectly obvious that both MacLean and Neill are ALSO very interested in ‘getting this right’… and they know a LOT about what happened that day…
…but there appears to have been no attempt whatsoever to give either of THEM an advanced copy of the book even just for simple proof-reading purposes ( which the book also could have used ).
Dickman had plenty of options to try and ‘get this right’ and make it a better book.
He decided to NOT exercise those options.
It would be even better to cc Kyle Dickman while doing so. But I don’t have his email address.
There is some new stuff in the ALJ mostly on State Forester Deposition.
Yes. Checking those ‘updates’ out now… but evne though the documents are being
posted today they are DATED 2 days ago ( May 26, 2015 )… so doubtful they contain
any details about what actually happened TODAY ( May 28 ) and with regards to Brendan’s depostion being cancelled for the THIRD TIME.
New files are appearing at the bottom of this public page…
https://sites.google.com/site/yarnellhillinformation/home/yarnellhillaljhearingfile
I think it’s worth mentioning that what is still being tossed back and forth here ( and what Judge Michael Mosesso has apparently still not issued a ruling on ) is whether Arizona Forestry is going to get its way and have some of the sub-items of ADOSH Citation 1 dismissed before things ever get to the ‘evidentiary’ part of this appeal process.
That includes Citation 1 Item (b) where Arizona Forestry is now trying to claim that just because Brendan never told ADOSH he was in any ‘trouble’ that day… that the entire citation ADOSH issued for Brendan’s potential entrapment situation should be immediately DISMISSED.
That claim was always essentially bullshit… but the Arizona Foresty lawyers still thought it was worth a shot… and they ‘worked it up’ and shot it over to Judge Mosesso’s desk.
What has CHANGED since Arizona Forestry originally filed that motion for dismissal of Citation 1 Item (b)… is that Kyle Dickman’s book is now out.
Kyle Dickman himself says that the information in his book about what was happening out there with Brendan came straight from Brendan McDonough himself. No question.
Kyle Dickman’s re-telling of events fully supports everthing ADOSH concluded and issued fines for.
So even the first book that has been published now with (supposedly) direct testimony from Brendan himself establishes that ADOSH was CORRECT about what was going down out there and was justified in issues those particular workplace safety violation citations.
It would be pretty insane if Arizona Forestry still tries to push for dismissal of this one item now that Kyle Dickman’s book is out… with Brendan’s own testimony in it.
wwtktt-
I had planned to work on photos but Sonny stop by and wanted me to list his Harley Sportster which I took the photos but never yet listed because we spent most of the afternoon until now with a lady who was going from Colorado to Venice Beach and he allowed her to stay at his cabin so we spent some time discussing some interesting things about life and health—2 topics I appreciate. Sonny one one hand “done” with hikes with me to than let’s hit the turquoise mines I use to mine…NUMBER ONE focus for me is no hikes but get some funds and get my blood labs and body scans; I am not doing too hot. He always in the past takes a glimpse at me and feels”she is good enough- let’s go” and I do but not this time- the swelling on top of my head I know anyone else would already be attending as I try to weigh and wait it out because I dread the doctors…I am disappointed but not shocked about all you wrote today on Brendan…I was hoping he would speak up even without a lawyer at this point just as you mentioned. My computer says it has a dynamo combo virus and so I have to reset it to an earlier time…I am so tired to mess with it now but always something with these darn technology stuff. good night.
Thank you, Joy.
I now have copies of those other 53 photos and I’m still looking at them.
With regards to that one photo showing the old gas can on the ground right in front of those overlapping sheets of what looks like corrugated metal panels…
…is that where the EXPLOSIVES sign was there out on that Jeep Trail?
Are those the original ‘signs’ themselves there just lying on the ground by the gas can?
Where exactly was that photo taken?
It’s going to be hard to geo-tag it just from the photo itself since it’s just a photo of the ground and there isn’t much ‘terrain’ to go on.
Also… as I said down below… if you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
Thanks in advance!
A photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign would be nice… but it is still far more important to just determine, once and for all, exactly WHERE that sign was out there than to actually have a photo of it.
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on May 28, 2015 at 10:52 pm
>> Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> I am disappointed but not shocked about all you wrote today
>> on Brendan…I was hoping he would speak up even without
>> a lawyer at this point just as you mentioned.
It would not SURPRISE me if Brendan really does say “The hell with all these lawyers” at this point and decides to tell HIS story, in HIS way…
…but I ( me, personally ) still don’t think that’s the best thing for him to do at this point.
It’s all about CREDIBILITY now and Brendan has dug himself a deep enough hole here that he’s going to have to get a little ‘dirty’ just to crawl back out of it. There are people who are not going to believe anything he has to say now no matter how many ‘books’ he puts his hand on and swears to tell the truth.
I still think his BEST chance at crawling out of this hole he has dug for himself with the least amount of dirt in his shoes ( and to have the BEST chance of what he says be accepted as ‘the truth’. ) would still be to go the under-oath deposition route… and not walk in with any kind of AGENDA of his own as he did during his original interviews.
He does appear READY to finally do that… so I hope they work out whatever bullshit is going on now that caused today’s third deposition attempt to be cancelled.
What’s really bizarre about what happened TODAY is to wonder WHY, all of a sudden, it was even an issue WHO would be allowed to be at the deposition and be asking questions.
It certainly wasn’t an issue back in February of 2015 and up to just 48 hours before the previously scheduled deposition.
All the ‘lawyers’ were ‘good to go’ for THAT under-oath depostion with no one having a cow about who might be going to ask what questions.
BOTH side were disappointed last time when it was cancelled right befor eit happened due to this (supposed) letter from Brendan’s therapist saying it wouldn’t have been good for Brendan to testify.
So fast forward to today… and all of a sudden it looks like Arizona Forestry lawyers want to totally CONTROL who gets to even attend the deposition and who gets to ask any questions?
That just adds ANOTHER layer of mystery to this whole screwed-up process of just trying to get a Hotshot to do what he should have done in the first place… and just tell the ‘whole TRUTH’ to investigators.
Regarding the Deposition of Scott Hunt, which was ordered to take place on May 22, although it didn’t (possibly, given the documents, because neither he nor the requisite lawyers were going to be available at that time)………
The documents are quite interesting, although WAY above my pay-scale to actually EVALUATE.
There’s a pretty BIG FIGHT going on over this, on an equal par with the one going on over the deposition of Brendan McDonough.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 29, 2015 at 12:17 am
>> Marti said…
>>.
>> There’s a pretty BIG FIGHT going on over this, on an equal par
>> with the one going on over the deposition of Brendan McDonough.
Yes… and while we still don’t really know what went down yesterday with regards to the THIRD attempt to depose Brendan being cancelled… some parts of documents filed over the deposition of Hunt might shed a little more light on what happened yesterday with McDonough.
As part of ADOSH’s response to Arizona Forestry’s objections
to retired State Forestry Scott Hunt being ‘deposed… ADOSH is seen telling ALJ Judge Mosesso that while they COULD supply more information about what they intend to ASK Scott Hunt during the deposition… they also make it clear to the Judge there is no REQUIREMENT for them to do so…
From ALJ Hearing document “2015_05 Updated 05.26.15.pdf” sitting at…
https://sites.google.com/site/yarnellhillinformation/home/yarnellhillaljhearingfile
—————————————————————————-
4. If the Administrative Law Judge ( Michael Mosesso ) would find
it helpful for ADOSH to file supporting materials regarding
the examples of areas of inquiry ADOSH listed in its request to
depose Mr. Hunt, ADOSH has them available and will promptly
do so at the ALJ’s request. ADOSH does however note that
there is NO REQUIREMENT under the ADOSH rules to file
supporting materials to support taking a deposition, or to let
the opposing party know ahead of time some of the expected
areas of questioning prior to a deposition.
———————————————————————–
So the ‘consternation’ for YESTERDAY could be ADOSH actually asserting this ‘rule’ over the McDonugh deposition. The Arizona Forestry lawyers might only want to agree to allow ADOSH to ask Brendan questions if Arizona Forestry has a complete LIST of those questions beforehand ( which can presumably be passed on to Brendan’s lawyer David Shapiro so he can help prepare Brendan how to answer the questions )…
…but ADOSH might be telling Arizona Forestry lawyers what they are telling Judge Mosesso up above.
They are NOT REQUIRED to provide any kind of LIST of questions they intend to ask prior to any deposition.
And how could this be any other way, really?
When Brendan is under no obligation to actually GIVE this ‘under-oath’ deposition ( there is still no subpoena )… then finding out beforehand what ALL of the questions are going to be could just give him another reason to not show up at all. If he doesn’t like any of the questions that he now knows he’s going to be asked… he doesn’t have to show up.
Same for the Arizona Forestry lawyers themselves.
They only actually care about Brendan but so much here.
They are NOT being paid to defend someone named ‘Brendan McDonough”.
They are being paid to defend an agency called “Arizona Forestry”.
So ditto for Arizona Forestry.
They might not want to even let this deposition take place if there is even ONE question they know is going to be asked that THEY don’t want Brendan giving an answer to.
I don’t know what that question might be… but it could be any number of things.
They ( the Arizona Forestry laywers ) have an obligation to make this all come out well for THEIR client ( Arizona Forestry ) and they could really give a crap about someone named Brendan McDonough.
Won’t it be a hoot if ADOSH turns around now and wants to schedule its OWN deposition of McDonough and be totally in-control of THAT deposition and ask any/all questions that Arizona Forestry doesn’t seem to want Brendan to answer.
In other words… unless they just forget all this ‘behind close doors’ depositon stuff and agree to just put Brendan on a witness stand and accessible ( at that time ) by BOTH sets of lawyers…
…then we really could end up with TWO separate depositions here.
One is being run by Arizona Forestry.
The other is being run by ADOSH
and neither side is ‘invited’ to attend the other side’s deposition of McDonough.
More crazy-town… but perfectly possible, I supposed.
Thanks for describing this.
What I’m wondering now is (because I don’t understand this stuff) what are Mosesso’s options/obligations in all of this?
Can he just order BOOM this is going to happen on this day at this time and determine who can be there and who can ask questions and who has to or doesn’t have to supply their questions to whom in advance?
Just to get the darn thing DONE????
And I have no idea why my name keeps get posted in red and on the form under Website it keeps saying http://deleted even after I keep deleting that.
So that’s what’s happening and I wish I knew how to permanently make it STOP.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 28, 2015 at 2:54 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> There is some new stuff in the ALJ mostly on State Forester Deposition.
Yes. At the top of the following ‘updated’ document we now see the ORDER issued by Judge Mosseso which says that ADOSH’s request to do an under-oath deposition of former Arizona Forester Scott Hunt is GRANTED… and that the parties should go ahead and agree on a time and “get ‘er dun”…
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6N47Z5CNR-CVkwxWlpyWEkybDQ/edit?pli=1
ADOSH has not also asked Judge Mosesso to subpoena Scott Hunt… but if Hunt ( and his lawyer ) start to blow off the scheduled depositions like McDonough ( and his lawyer ) they very well may ask for one.
LOL. YOu wrote that while I was picking my way through the filings, after which I wrote what I wrote up above:
Marti Reed says
MAY 29, 2015 AT 12:17 AM
Regarding the Deposition of Scott Hunt, which was ordered to take place on May 22, although it didn’t (possibly, given the documents, because neither he nor the requisite lawyers were going to be available at that time)………
The documents are quite interesting, although WAY above my pay-scale to actually EVALUATE.
There’s a pretty BIG FIGHT going on over this, on an equal par with the one going on over the deposition of Brendan McDonough.
So…… Mosesso’s order was signed May 20. The deposition, which was disputed MIGHTILY by the Lawyers representing Arizona Department of Forestry, was scheduled for May 22.
One of the MANY issues raised by the ADOF lawyers was that the timing of the deposition was not “meetable” (for lack of, on my part, a better word) by either Scott Hunt or ADOF lawyers.
The Mosesso order, dated May 20 says:
“IT IS ORDERED that Complainant may notice the deposition of former State Forester Scott Hunt at a time and place that is mutually agreeable to the parties.”
So what this is looking like, by me, is that Mosesso has overridden a whole host of objections by ADOF lawyers and has ordered the deposition anyway, but that the reason it hasn’t, apparently, happened yet is a matter of scheduling, which, as has been stated periodically downstream, is a completely normal thing to happen.
On the other hand, the deposition may actually have happened by now but nothing has been added to this docket as a result of it. That may even be the case.
It’s really too bad it is impossible to copy/paste the contents of these correspondences. I think they’re really important. I’m just too lazy/whatever to type them. I think this is a really important thing that is going on.
To be honest, the biggest issue I have with the higher echelons of the Arizona State Department of Forestry is the decision to place a short Type 2 Incident Management Team in charge of the fire for June 30.
Especially given the fact that a full Type 2 Incident Management Team was available close by IN PRESCOTT at that time.
And especially given the fact that the short team was totally under-resourced and the IC spent most of Sunday filling in the holes in his team, instead of actually fighting the fire, including calling in resources from the full team.
Basically Shumate called for a Type 2 team late Saturday night, but he was too brain-dead by then to fill out a REQUIRED Escaped Fire Analysis, and SOMEBODY at Arizona Department of Forestry, apparently unimpressed by the potential DANGER of that ESCAPED fire, let that “little” detail go by and ordered that Short Team, and Shumate said “OK, WHATEVER….”
During the ADOSH interviews, under the time-pressure they were under, unfortunately, they never managed to comprehend the significance of this enough to ask the important questions about it. They just didn’t quite get there, although they almost did.
I’m thinking, thus, that this is one of the areas they want to ask Hunt about, given the written reasons (which I am too lazy/whatever to type out) that they included in the request for this deposition.
It is relevant that some of the reasons ADOF (sorry but I never have been able to figure out exactly what is the exactly appropriate acronym for the Arizona Department of Forestry) is contending the deposition of Hunt is that ADOSH already conducted their interviews and that if they didn’t gather enough information to actually support their charges, that is THEIR problem.
Also, (and I am writing this off the top of my head and it’s late but I think it’s important) another thing ADOSH wants a deposition of Hunt has to do with what seem to be some National Weather Service (or maybe some other agency) meetings/briefings during the week before the Yarnell Hill Fire was ignited, having to do with EXTREME POTENTIAL FIRE WEATHER BEHAVIOR CONDITIONS in the area, and whether or not ADOF was paying any attention to them.
I’ve seen some things noting that that was, indeed, happening, but I can’t, at the moment, refer to them.
So I just want to note that these are the things that are, I think, involved in this whole back and forth that is going on regarding the deposition of Scott Hunt.
I wrote up above:
“and the IC spent most of Sunday filling in the holes in his team, instead of actually fighting the fire…”
Which may be the reason why any kind of over-all STRATEGY for seriously mapping/planning out and paying serious attention to what was happening in Division A, as it related to the overall fire, even before the 2:00 PM, much less the 3:30 Pm, NWS, was totally failing to happen.
**
** THE DOZER HAD A 12 FOOT ( FIXED ) BLADE
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 27, 2015 at 11:46 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> ALL BLACK IS NOT EQUAL—You are correct how ever in fire terms cold or hot has
>> to have a control LINE on it fully tied in. you cannot contain or control the fire
>> without that line totally in.
>>
>> When we were discussing Cold trailing on Saturday on Initial Attack that is totally
>> different once you stop the fire spread you go back and build line in those
>> cold trail areas.
>>
>> Once the fire made the next day it required line on every inch of the fire direct or
>> indirect. That is how it is done and that is what’s required.
>>
>> You do not cut corners.
>> You build complete and tied in line. COLD BLACK OR NOT.
>>
>> The indirect cat line was a serious problem.
>> Most tractor blades are 8 foot wide
>> Was this a 12 foot blade?
>> In all those rocks a 8 foot blade would be more functional
Yes. It was a 12 foot ( fixed ) blade… and both SPGS1 Gary Cordes and
Blue Ridge ( Frisby, Brown, Ball, etc. ) were disappointed about that.
From PDF page 22 of the original SAIT Interview Notes…
This is from the SAIT’s interview with SPGS1 Gary Cordes…
———————————————————————————-
0800-0900
– Dozer arrived. Took dozer I to put it to work.
I didn’t like that it had a 12 ft. blade.
0930
– Blue Ridge showed up.
– Dozer boss (Ball) took over the dozer.’’
– It was ¾ of the way to the old dozer.
– Eric said he didn’t want the dozer.
———————————————————————————-
Key phrase(s)…
Gary Cordes: “I didn’t like that it had a 12 ft. blade”.
“Eric said he didn’t want the dozer”.
NOTE: So here we have confirmation from SPGS1 Gary Cordes that not only did DIVSA Eric Marsh say he didn’t need the Blue Ridge Crew to be helping out with any linebuilding alongside Granite Mountain that day… Marsh ALSO said he didn’t need the bulldozer, either.
In addition to the bulldozer having a disappointing 12 foot blade… there is also testimony that Blue Ridge was disappointed about it NOT being an ‘angled’ blade…
From PDF page 60 of the original SAIT Interview Notes.
This is from the SAIT’s Blue Ridge Interview notes…
———————————————————————————-
There ( Blue Ridge’s ) original assignment was to relieve Gary Cordes, with the Structure Group. Brian and Trew came across the Dozer, he wasn’t carded Trew grabbed an extra radio/cloned it and gave it the Dozer operator, DOZP. The fire had been picking up all day, 6ft fl. Trew had Ball work with DOZP who didn’t know who he was working for, he had no supervisor, no division. DOZP said he was trying to be flexible with no plan. Trew made an announcement over radio Ball was working for Trew and had them go to Tac 3 because Trew had been scanning it all day and heard nothing going on figured it wasn’t really being used. They were to punch the road and open it up, the area near the grater and go towards GM. B and T went to the explosive sign and realized they couldn’t go any further.
They were not at the 0900 briefing when the incoming team came in. @ 1100 they did notice buildup from the NE they were trying to bring the dozer line towards GM with the T1 dozer but were having a real tough time. It was steep, the DOZP didn’t have an angled blade, it was too hard.
———————————————————————————-
Key phrase(s)…
“…the DOZP didn’t have an angled blade, it was too hard”.
“B and T went to the explosive sign and realized they couldn’t go any further”.
NOTE: There yet another reference to this infamous ‘explosives sign’. This suggests that the ‘explosives’ sign really was right there at the END of that ‘Jeep Trail’ that led away from the old-grader to the northwest. That’s the route that Brian Frisby ( B ) and Trueheart Brown ( T ) took when first trying to get up to the high-ridge to meet with Marsh and Steed. When ‘B and T’ found out that ‘Jeep Trail’ leading northwest from the old grader was a ‘dead end’ ( at the explosives sign ), they turned around, went back past the old-grader, and then took that OTHER two-track leading away from the old-grader is a southerly direction That’s the one that Steed and the GM crew hiked out to the ridge on earlier that morning.
Yes a full 12 ft. blade would have been a problem especially with out the ability to angle it.
Made it a serious problem for line construction.
This dozer that arrived with the 12 foot ( fixed ) blade still appears to have been on loan from Yavapai County.
It is BR Hotshot Cory Ball himself who says the dozer operator ( whose name is still unknown ) was a COUNTY EMPLOYEE.
From Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball’s typed Unit Log…
——————————————————————————–
Blueridge One requested me plus one to travel to fires edge.
I was assigned ( to be DOZB because the ) county employee
not IA qualified and did not have a radio.
Gave radio from BRIHC to operator (xxxxxxx).
——————————————————————————–
SIDENOTE: ‘Blueridge One’ is a reference to Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby. It was OPS1 Todd Abel that called Frisby at 10:00 AM and requested they get someone HEQB / DOZB qualified out there to relieve Gary Cordes on the dozer.
That was the ONLY assignment that OPS1 Todd Abel gave Frisby at 10:00 AM.
It was Frisby who then decided that rather then just run Cory Ball out there from the Yarnell Hill Fire Station… he would now have the entire Blue Ridge Crew ‘mount up’ and relocate out to the Sesame Clearing area where GM had parked their own Crew Carriers.
That is where the Blue Ridge Crew would then sit for the next 4-5 HOURS doing NOTHING… until Gary Cordes decided to try that desperation move and clear out that Cutover Trail from the Sesame Clearing over to the Shrine Youth Camp and Harper Canyon areas.
Testimony now shows that DIVSA Eric Marsh actually REFUSED to let Blue Ridge help Granite Mountain with their line work that day.
So Granite Mountain busted their butts from 10:00 AM to 3:30 PM that day… while the entire Blue Ridge Crew sat around just about 3/4 of a mile away ( to the east ) down that two-track doing absolutely nothing at all for most of the day.
That still doesn’t make ANY sense… especially since Gary Cordes ended up calling around later that afternoon wondering why Granite Mountain hadn’t FINISHED their assignment yet.
If Eric Marsh had simply ALLOWED the Blue Ridge Crew to help with that line work up there on that ridge… maybe that entire project up there would have been ‘a wrap’ by as early as 2 PM that day… and none of us would even be here having this conversation.
“Blue Ridge One” is Brown not Frisby
So the Deposition got canceled again this time the Lawyers could not agree on who got to ask questions. Are you freeking kidding me? In the Prescott Dailey Courier This morning.
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Hotshot deposition cancelled today
Published: 5/28/2015 6:01:00 AM
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1086&ArticleID=145802
From the article…
————————————————————-
A deposition by former Granite Mountain Hotshot Brendan McDonough scheduled to occur today, May 28, has been cancelled, his attorney David Shapiro said Wednesday.
McDonough was prepared to give a statement about what he experienced on June 30, 2013, when all the other 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots died in the Yarnell Hill wildfire, Shapiro said. He was acting as a lookout in a location away from his fellow hotshots.
But attorneys representing the state and other civil litigants couldn’t agree on which attorneys should be able to be present and question McDonough, Shapiro said. McDonough was prepared to allow ALL the attorneys to question him, Shapiro said.
————————————————————-
Key statement…
“McDonough was prepared to allow ALL the attorneys to question him, Shapiro said”.
So now it’s lawyer David Shapiro’s turn to piss all over the process and feel like HE is getting HIS way, or something?
Fer cryin’ out loud.
You just can’t make this kind of shit up.
I wonder who is going to play David Shapiro in Scott Cooper’s MOVIE?
SIDENOTE: Scott Cooper’s latest movie… “Black Mass” ( with Johnny Depp playing gangster Whitey Bulger ) ran into some post-production issues but those have all been resolved and now there are trailers out for “Black Mass”. Release date this summer.
So rumor has it that Director Scott Cooper ( Crazy Heart, Black Mass, etc. ) is now going to turn his full attention to the Granite Mountain movie project that was announced last June.
From the article, which I had found yesterday:
“Director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart” and “Out of the Furnace”) is no longer planning to work on the hotshot film, his spokesperson said..
Link to article about the movie:
5/27/2015 6:03:00 AM
Hotshots movie in development
Courtesy photo
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, right, works with Director Michael Bay on the set of “Transformers.”
Joanna Dodder Nellans
The Daily Courier
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1086&ArticleID=145778
Thank you. I didn’t see that article appearing just yesterday.
That’s the same producer that was announced back in June of 2014.
Did you also see this from yesterday’s article?
Same producer that will be doing the ‘Granite Mountain’ movie is CURRENTLY working with actor Mark Wahlberg on a movie about the “Deppwater Horizon” incident.
From the Joanna Dodder Nellans PDC article…
————————————————————————-
Di Bonaventura has worked with actors ranging from “The Rock” Dwayne Johnson on one of di Bonaventura’s G.I. Joe movies to Mark Wahlberg on his latest “Transformers” movie. Di Bonaventura currently is working on “Deepwater Horizon” with Wahlberg, reports the IMDb website.
————————————————————————–
Yes, I did see that.
And, all things considered, took note of it.
So, what do you think “other civil litigants” in “But attorneys representing the state and other civil litigants couldn’t agree on which attorneys should be able to be present and question McDonough” means?
Speaking for myself… I believe ‘other civil litigants’ in that article is simply a reference to the plantiffs in the wrongful death lawsuits.
So I believe the ‘shorthand’ being used in the article is…
“Attorneys representing the state” = Any attorney from the Arizona State Attorney general’s office that has been ‘assigned’ to represent Arizona Forestry in EITHER the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” ALJ Hearing process *OR* in the “wrongful death” lawsuits *OR* in the other “Property damage” lawsuits.
“Other civil litigants” = Anyone who isn’t a lawyer representing either Arizona Forestry or ADOSH. That leaves the plaintiffs in the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits AND the remaining 150+ plaintiffs in whatever still-active ‘property damage’ suits haven’t been dismissed yet.
It’s really, really bizarre how this McDonough deposition thing is going down.
It would APPEAR to be happening in the ‘context’ of the “Arizona Forestry versus ADOSH” ALJ Hearing track… since that is where we have been seeing all the documents appearing asking ALJ Judge Michael Mosesso to not only authorize this McDonough deposition…but to subpoena him to be there.
But even though all that correspondence has been showing up in the public part of the ALJ Hearing file… the actual despostion seems to be of great concern to the lawyers in the OTHER no-shit Civil Court cases like the wrongful-death lawsuits and the remaining ‘property-damage’ lawsuits.
So it’s hard to say who all the “playas” are in this McDonough DEPOSITION game… or what the TRUE ‘context’ of it is.
Example: Regardless of the documents we’ve seen flying about this McDonough deposition in the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” ALJ Hearing File… there is no true guarantee that whatever recorded TRANSCRIPT there might be resulting from this deposition could be considered PART of the “Arizona Foresty vs. ADOSH” proceeding.
After the deposition… we might ‘discover’ that Arizona Forestry wants the actual ‘written TRANSCRIPT’ to suddenly appear to be part of the ‘evidence’ for either the ‘wonrful death’ or the ‘property damage’ lawsuits.
There’ no telling, really. It’s all very incestuous at this point on the Arizona legal defense side of things.
Same lawyers are ‘helping out’ with ALL THREE cases… ‘behind the scenes’.
Correction for above. It’s really not clear WHICH attorneys are now currently having the disagreements that have led to this THIRD cancellation.
Mr. Shapiro is the ‘messenger’ in the PDC article but it’s actually not clear if there are are also objections on HIS part contributing to this cancellation.
It’s hard to say how this gets resolved.
Theoretically… we should now see some documents appearing in the ALJ Hearing file pretty quickly detailing what the real issues are now. Judge Moses so will probably have to chime in on this.
I’m also not sure the consternation at this point has all that much to do with WHICH lawyers are ‘allowed’ to be there at the deposition.
I think the real issue now is more along the lines of lawyers representing Arizona Forestry getting VERY worried about which QUESTIONS will be asked.
THEY ( the Arizona Forestry lawyers ) know which questions THEY plan to ask… but they probably have NO IDEA what questions attorneys representing ADOSH are planning on asking.
And we also haven’t seen anybody even REQUESTING that they ‘pre-submit’ any kind of list of questions.
It’s just a deposition. I don’t think there is actually a LEGAL requirement for either side to pre-submit that kind of ‘list of questions’.
Brendan ALWAYS has the right ( either during a deposition or when actually on a witness stand ) to assert his own 5th ammendment rights… but ONLY if he feels the answer to a question he is being asked might result in slef-incrimination.
Brendan still can’t invoke the 5th ammendment just because he doesn’t want to answer a question or because the actual ( TRUE ) answer might reflect badly on “his brothers”… or something.
The 5th ammendment is only there for PERSONAL protection. You can’t invoke it just to protect someone ELSE or to just avoid answering a question you don’t like.
But all that being said… since Brendan’s lawyer seems to be saying that Brendan was prepared to answer questions from ANY / ALL lawyers… that Mr. Shapiro has already advised Brendan of the realities just mentioned… and Brendan is OK with all that.
This now seems to have something to do with what has happened since the last cancelled depostion.
Just before February 26, 2015… the Arizona Forestry lawyers seemed perfectly OK with the ADOSH lawyers being at the deposition and basically asking whatever questions they wanted.
Now… all of a sudden… that’s some kind of ‘show stopping’ issue.
The only BIG difference between now and then is that Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini has spilled his guts about what Darrell Willis told him and the fact that McDonough now wants to “get stuff off his chest”.
I’m not 100 percent sure how that Paladini moment could have changed things to the point where suddenly Arizona Forestry doesn’t even WANT the ADOSH lawyers to ask any/all questions of McDonough…
…but it does seem like it has had something to do with what happened today.
I fully expect ALJ Hearing Judge Michael Mosesso to show up with his big wooden spanking paddle here at any moment.
He’s been more than patient with these lawyers.
Thank you so much, WTKTT, for wrestling with this, It is SO confusing. And I could easily walk away from trying to understanding it because of its MIND-NUMBINGNESS.
One thing I find standing out in the confusion of ALL OF THIS (after reading everything posted upstream) is Brendan’s apparent open-ness (desire?) to be questioned by WHATEVER lawyers, while the agency lawyers battle all around him.
I find that significant, all things considered.
Although I could be wrong.
He doesn’t seem to be the one “protecting Brendan.” Could that possibly mean he was never all that interested in “being protected”??????
Which would mean somebody else was much more interested in “being protected”?????
I know you have, and possibly correctly, more of a personal narrative of Brendan essentially “gaming everybody.” And that is, indeed, what it often looks like.
But this current situation doesn’t look like that to me. It looks, to me, more like Brendan being perfectly willing to be deposed (that thing that everybody says is so so so so so difficult to go through) and questioned by whatever lawyers from whichever sides, and the Arizona Department of Forestry being the ones throwing the monkey wrenches into the whole thing……
……….which is ironic, given their initial desire to have him deposed.
Which says to me ADOF ONLY wants him to be deposed by THEIR lawyers, and nobody else.
That’s what it looks like to me right now.
Awhile back I wrote that it Brendan really had a story he wanted to get off his chest, he should really just head over to Joanna Dodder’s office and get it off his chest.
There were all kinds of reasons pointed out to me why that most likely wouldn’t have been the case.
I could be way way way off the mark here, but wouldn’t it be ironic if that’s exactly what he did, out of total frustration with all the lawyers, including his own, right now?
He could just go to her and say, “I don’t even know if I’m even remembering all this stuff correctly, because it’s easy to get stuff like this all jumbled up, but I’m totally sick and tired of all the games that are being played right now, and I just want to tell my story as I best remember it right now and let the chips fall where they may.”
I mean, really, if he’s willing to be deposed and questioned by WHATEVER lawyers,
I can’t believe he would be, by now after all of this insanity, afraid of being seriously interviewed by Joanna Dodder.
Or even more interestingly, and probably hard-nosedly, by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez at Arizona Central. What a scoop THAT would be.
I’m starting to sound like a broken record on this one… but I really do believe that it would be a mistake if Brendan just waltzed into a TV studio… or even just wrote some kind of ‘OP ED’ piece or posted something on his Facebook page with the signoff “…and that’s the TRUTH”.
It’s about CREDIBILITY now. ( Brendan’s ).
He really does owe it to himself and the families of these so-called ‘brothers’ of his to finally do what he should have done in the first place and make it as BELIEVABLE as he can.
No matter what he does now… there will still be people who think he is still just pursuing how own ‘agenda’.
But an under-oath deposition ( with actual possible perjury implications and penalties ) would be the BEST way to have whatever Brendan has to say now be accepted by the greatest number of people as “the TRUTH”.
Regardless of what anyone has been ‘advising’ him to do or not do… Brendan is an ADULT who has dug this hole for himself and allowed himself to be in the position he finds himself.
He is the one who has to ‘find the way out now’… and in a manner that doesn’t make it look like he’s STILL pursuing his own agenda and still jerking everyone around.
And yes.. even if the problem yesterday had nothing to do with Brendan and it’s now all about just the way the Arizona Forestry lawyers want it to ‘go down’… I think Mr. Shapiro needs to do HIS job and work this all out with his fellow lawyers on behalf of his client.
It really would be in Brendan’s BEST INTERESTS at this point for this official, sworn, under-oath deposition to take place… and Mr. Shapiro should do all he can to work through this setback and make it happen.
No, you don’t sound like a broken record.
It’s just the way these conversations happen “here.”
And, yes, I’m realizing what you are saying is correct.
And I appreciate you saying that Brendan’s lawyer has some obligation to try to help untangle this thing, on behalf of his client.
Something really funky must have gone down in order for this THIRD scheduled deposition to be cancelled.
Arizona Forestry lawyers needed this one to happen just as badly as they needed the Feb 26 one to happen because in just a few hours from now they have to ( again ) walk into a room and sit across the table from the ‘wrongful death’ plaintiffs.
Arizona Forestry still needs to know what Brendan really knows just as badly today as the did the night of March 1, 2015… the day before the ‘global mediation’ session.
We have not heard if the pre-scheduled June 1, 2015 mediation has been cancelled.
So it’s Deja-Vu all over again.
Arizona Forestry has to walk into a meeting and try to ‘settle’ these ‘wrongful death’ suits without knowing what Brendan McDonough really knows.
It’s going to be interesting to find out what could have been so objectionable yesterday that Arizona Forestry would have allowed it to be the reason they still don’t get to know what Brendan knows.
So……looking at Joy’s photos from her email. They still don’t “sync” numerically with what she wrote below in her descriptions of the photos that we couldn’t figure out what she was referring to.
The file numbers start with CAM00473.jpg and run through CAM00526.jpg and look to be screensnaps of looking at a site or something that doesn’t look like what their Google site looks to me like. So I don’t know what these photos are of.
They also say, in the metadata, “Make: LG Electronics, Model LG-L38C.” I don’t know what that refers to. They also have the date of 5/24/15, which, I assume, is when she captured those screensnaps.
But some of what she is describing in her string of comments below corresponds to some of what I am seeing.
And some of these photos I have never seen before, neither on the two Google Albums nor on the collection of “Hiker Photos and Videos” on JD’s Dropbox collection from the FOIA release. So I don’t know who took them, although a number of them DO correspond to her files either/both on Google or Dropbox.
A thought at this preliminary moment. One of Joy’s concerns has ALWAYS been the photo of the two fire-fighters up high on the ridge (which is, in its original format in the Dropbox collection).
I have to say here that when I zoomed way way in on that photo and tried to enhance it’s “viewability.” (which is not all that powerful, to be honest–people have a tendency to think one can work miracles on these–they can’t) the most important thing I saw was that both had black helmets on and neither had a RED helmet on. That is very very clear. Which means, I don’t think Eric is in that photo.
Which is why I always thought that the two firefighters in that photo must have had to do with either the crew (part of the moki helitack crew plus part of the doc crew) that was being removed from the fire on Sunday morning via helicopter.
Joy DOES HAVE photos in her Google album that I haven’t seen in the Dropbox collection of another fire-fighter in the rocks down below. I also think that firefighter has a black helmet on, but it’s hard to be sure.
I downloaded A BUNCH of her Google Album photos, but, unfortunately, I discovered that when you download them, they are in a tiny format and stripped of all their metadata, so that when looking at them in lightroom, they’re really small and I can’t tell when they are time-stamped.
Joy has some VERY interesting photos in the bunch she emailed to me and Bob Powers, and I forwarded tonight to WTKTT. A number of which I haven’t seen before. But I still don’t know how to exactly correlate them with the notes she wrote downstream.
If it’s any help, if Joy could re-described those photos using the filenames attached to them in her email, that would really help us correlate those descriptions with the photos I think she is talking about.
And a question to Joy: Did you take all of these photos?
And an unrelated related side-note, since I’m a Human.
The weather systems (El Nino (that is making life wonderful and lovely in New Mexico – because it’s pretty much dousing our wildfire season) are also causing all the havoc in Texas. So I’m experiencing some feelings about that. And I was aware of that while looking at the Fire Danger maps that show Oregon and Washington totally “in the red.”
Let us all keep in mind that wildfire danger transcends our thinking about the Yarnell Hill Fire. I know we all are aware of that. I just wanted to say that.
So Joy wrote downstream May 27, 2015 at 11:14 AM:
“what I so far came across but the old gas tank is directly next to sign so if we can gps that photo that may help.”
The image she sent in her email that looks to me like an “old gas tank” is CAM00513.jpg. I’m not positive this is what she’s talking about and I’m not sure this is going to be easy to geotag. But, apparently, I think this may be where she is trying to head us.
PS. This is a post-fire image, so it might be possible to see it in Google Earth.
And it is approaching my bedtime, so I’m not going to try that tonight.
very quick- Today on my travels of Congress…I started at the library until 4pm than dropped off laptop and visited retired sheriff home to ask if any new news on fire and hello from lois to him and off i went and i hiked all over town and spoke to people and one person says they may have that photo of explosive sign from hike I took them so we will see…I put flyers up…
Outdoor Adventure Awaits…Adaptive Hiking
I may have disabilities but I also have ABILITIES!
It begins with one foot in front of the other.
We all have our challenges—-I simply acknowledge mine and accept my new-normal and that’s okay!
…..etc….well… long flyer…anyways in it I got one reply already and at end of flyer I said “until the day I pass on- always there for all affected by the YHF.” and the person was not reaching me for hiking information but wants to meet and show their account so working on that…
I explained to the person the funny thing is at the library today the patrons suggested me make a flyer on hiking but put that at end about the fire and I will probably see people identify…oh the desert walker…we know her…let’s talk about the fire…hope more surface.
You never know.
I am beat. I was going to zone out either on photos or craigslist and I thought nah, sleepie time for me. I really appreciate the TOGETHERNESS here on this site and off the site—thank you. I too believe in what you believe Marti…enjoyed the email…I read it a few times…was just on cell and was tired to reply and I cannot log on to my email except for cell because I forgot the password. good night. I was asked by many they are shocked how many days in a row I hiked solo without Sonny and how am I doing it…I said I cant go out in the desert but for now I am not the desert walker but the street walker…runner…bum knee…reckon getting old is the best…Street walker? Too funny.
Special secret. Turn you camera to black and white and be a “street photographer.”
It’s very hip.
Only have time to jump in quickly.
WantsToKnowTheTruth wrote on MAY 26, 2015 AT 3:46 PM:
“Neither Gabbert, MacLean or Neill mention one word about all the ERRORS that are in Kyle Dickman’s own book, as published.
…………..
But there is still no mention on MacLean or Neill’s part ( or Gabbert, either ) of how far off-base Kyle Dickman himself was.
If MacLean and Neill actually think the Dickman book itself IS ‘totally accurate’… then that doesn’t bode well for anything they might be thinking about publishing themselves.”
I just discovered that Holly Neill wrote a LONG and SCATHING critique of KD’s book on Amazon.com, citing many of the things we have noted. In fact it’s so long it is too long to completely quote here.
GoingDirect is Holly Neill:
“3 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Subject Matter Experts will undoubtedly note discrepancies…
May 15, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
As an avid inquirer into the Yarnell Hill Fire, I believe that reliable facts are critical in unraveling the events that led to this tragic loss of 19 wildland firefighters. As a former wildland firefighter with over a decade of seasonal wildland fire experience, I admit I can be a harsh critic of those, even other firefighters, who write about important wildland fire events. But I also have the greatest respect for accurate and true to life accounts.
There are factual errors in this book: some of them relatively minor and some not. In fairness, the available information about the fire is almost overwhelming, but it’s also incomplete. After all, the Serious Accident Investigation and a separate, later investigation by the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health contradicted each other and neither was comprehensive enough to satisfy anyone with an inquiring mind.
…………………………………….
A firefighter’s home unit identification matters in a fatal fire, especially when it defines the agency in charge. On page 182, Mr. Dickman identifies Russ Shumate, the first incident commander on the Yarnell Hill Fire, as “ an incident commander for the Yavapai County Fire Department.” This is inaccurate. Shumate was Assistant Fire Management Officer for the Phoenix District of the Arizona State Forestry Division, for whom he had worked for about 16 years. Shumate’s involvement on the Yarnell Hill Fire was significant. He served as incident commander Type 4 from the beginning of the fire until the day of the fatalities, a period of nearly 48 hours. Mr. Dickman does not offer comprehensive detail about this critical timeframe during which the fire grew into a large and deadly conflagration. Shumate’s actions during that time reflect Arizona state fire policies and procedures and are an important part of the story.
Of particular importance is Mr. Dickman’s handling of a critical radio exchange involving Eric Marsh, who normally filled the role of Granite Mountain superintendent, but was assigned Division Supervisor on the fire. Marsh has been accused of a 33 minute gap in communications as he led the crew down, and absolute conclusions state that no one knew of the crew’s plans to descend. It takes time and effort to sort out audio recordings in the Yarnell Hill Fire public records, to decipher what is being said and by whom. Mr. Dickman feels certain that a conversation time stamped 1614 hours in the audio evidence, (which is during the reported 33 minute gap,) has Marsh talking with Bravo 33 (call sign for Air Support Module).
This audio includes additional important dialog with Marsh, which is not included in the author’s account. It is critical to accurately identify who Marsh is speaking with during this timeframe. Available evidence strongly suggests that this particular conversation was between Marsh and someone else, not Bravo 33.
Marsh can also be heard in additional audio nearly 14 minutes later, which is also within the notorious 33 minute gap. He speaks with someone who urges the crew to “go a little faster”. This conversation is not discussed by the author and it also plays a very important role in the timeline.
……………………………………..
The surviving Granite Mountain hotshot Brendan McDonough is due to be deposed in May of 2015, telling his story under oath for the first time. Mr. Dickman spoke often with McDonough and I hope that Mr. Dickman’s account from McDonough holds up regarding a crucial point, supporting the view that there was no disagreement about whether the crew should leave their position and head for Yarnell, despite recent rumors that there was some kind of quarrel between Division Supervisor Eric Marsh and acting Granite Mountain hotshot superintendent Jesse Steed. Mr. Dickman writes: ”Ultimately the choice was Marsh’s, and the orders Donut heard him deliver were clear: Move the crew along the escape route. If Steed or anybody else questioned his decision, they did so discreetly, because on the crew’s radio channel, nobody openly disagreed with Marsh.”
It would have been Marsh’s ultimate decision to move the crew and this shouldn’t surprise anyone. The crucial unanswered questions remain why and what factors contributed to Marsh’s decision? The task of sorting out the Yarnell Hill Fire will take years. It is fluid, dynamic and constantly evolving. Mr. Dickman’s book is probably the first of many, but despite the publicity claim it’s a long way from being a “definitive” account.”
Oops, forgot the link:
This goes to page 2 of the comments on the Amazon Book Page for Kyle Dickman’s “On the Burning Edge: A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It,” where GoingDirect’s comment is located:
http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0553392123/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?k=On+the+Burning+Edge%3A+A+Fateful+Fire+and+the+Men+Who+Fought+It&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=helpful&reviewerType=all_reviews&formatType=all_formats&filterByStar=all_stars&pageNumber=2
Also just realized that, when I was having to edit out all the junk Amazon patched into my copy/paste, I lost “GoingDirect”
The header of the comment should read:
“4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Subject Matter Experts will undoubtedly note discrepancies…
ByGoingDirecton May 15, 2015
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase”
we too did an Amazon review as the hikers but it has not shown up but right on Holly—
clap, clap, clap.
Fact check is stated in back of book but it was not used at all for our account and now it looks like Shumate too.
Check out her wish list, Joy. LOL.
PS Will check my email this evening.
And I agree.
This book was NOT fact-checked, despite the vigor with which KD asserts it was.
My Kindle version of it has about 50 red-lined “notes” where I find what he is writing is not consistent with the evidence.
And I still find it APPALLING that he didn’t interview you and Sonny. For a whole host of reasons.
Ok, just found the email with the photos, and, after a couple of false tries (because I’m AWFUL at email) I forwarded it to WTKTT.
So we can look at them. I’m seeing some I’m familiar with and some I haven’t seen before.
I’m going to open them and put them in lightroom and look at them.
Thanks!
I still can’t see your comment on Amazon.
Good catch. Yes… I would put the odds at about 99 percent that ‘GoingDirect’ is, in fact, Holly Neill.
But even if not… the comments are spot on.
Kyle Dickman did seriously screw up his reporting on that 4:14 PM “Granite Montun… wuz yo status rat now?” radio conversation, and Dickman does completely ignore the crucial 4:27 PM YARNELL-GAMBLE video/audio capture.
Just these two screw-ups alone in the book make you wonder about the veracity of all those other things he says happened that can’t even be independently verified.
And ‘GoingDirect’ is right. If Brendan McDonough finally shows up for his under-oath deposition tomorrow and the content becomes known… we will then discover whether what Dickman has stated in his book is true… or whether McDonough has been playing Dickman like a violin along with everyone else.
If you click on GoingDirect, it’s, in fact, Holly Neill, unless someone is pretending to be her, which I can’t imagine, given that review.
Notice also that even as careful as Holly is with regards to assuming anything… in HER mind that YARNELL-GAMBLE video does, in fact, capture Eric Marsh responding to some still-unknown mystery person who IS, in fact, speaking directly to Marsh and urging him to HURRY UP.
Even here in this discussion we continue to at least try and hold out the possibility ( albeit very slim possibility ) that Eric Marsh was reporting GM’s progress to someone other than the person urging someone to HURRY UP.
It really IS still crucial to discover who that other mysterious speaker is in that video… and whether gt hey really were urging Marsh and GM to Hurry up’ that day. It MAY have been influencing the decision making.
Exactly.
And, for the sake of that “honesty” thing, I feel a need to remind readers who haven’t been with us through this long, winding, rocky, journey that…….
It was Holly and John who SHOCKED everybody, including us, with their theory, in January of 2014, that the videos demonstrated that Eric was “at” the Helms Ranch, AHEAD of the crew, in that video and thus, at that time.
We spent the next four or so next months mostly disagreeing with that, and being all, THAT COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE TRUE because………and because………and because…………………………….. . We, to some extent, to be honest, thought she was NUTS.
It’s only been since about August last summer that “we” (and that’s a loose “we” because we were very conflicted about this) started seeing more and more “evidence” that that, indeed, might have been the case.
But we’re still not 100% SURE about that. We still SON’T KNOW exactly where Eric was during that time.
So, it may be some kind of sign of progress that “we” and Holly have moved, over this time, to something like the same page.
When I was first reading KD’s book, mostly with my internet down, and marking it up with my red digital magic marker, I thought about writing a “review” of the book on Amazon. But I’ve never done that before, so I hesitated.
And then I forgot about it, and, frankly, have been so disappointed in what would otherwise be an interesting book, that I just put it all aside.
I appreciate Holly taking the time to write that up in at least enough detail to make the point. I wouldn’t even have been able to decide which of my many many red digital magic marker “errors” to begin with, much less continue to include, there are so many of them.
Seriously, if I had ever written anything like that in college or graduate school, I would have been “failed.” And if I had continued to do it, I would have been “booted.” I have no doubt in my mind about that, whatsoever.
And yes. The deposition is scheduled for tomorrow.
And, as you wrote downstream, it has to be included in the documents on the ADOSH site.
Maybe Kyle was so focused on “his story” which he has been developing all along, and “his contacts,” that he wasn’t paying any attention to what Holly and John were doing, much less what we and JD have been doing.
I went back and read thru his earlier articles and interviews, and the book is basically the same story expanded.
But, really, I was like, “wait, he’s saying Shumate was CYFD??????”
The one pretty much did it for me. That’s a HUGE blunder.
Plus, he said Gary Cordes was Structure Protection (I’m not looking at the book ATM, so I might get it slightly wrong) Specialist FOR the Town of Yarnell (like as if he was employed by them) and Darrell Willis was Structure Protection Specialist FOR the town of Peeples Valley (same tone).
It’s like he never bothered to even research how the fire was even staffed.
OK Gotta Run Will Be Back.
I think Dickman ended up with the best book that HE, himself, was capable of producing.
I think he WAS waiting ( and hoping ) like a lot of other people that Brendan McDonough would stop playing his bullshit games at any moment… but the longer that all went on I think he just started getting pressure from his publishers to go with whatever he had… and make it just a ‘human interest’ thing.
And I think Dickman was even relieved when his publishers basically gave him permission to do that. I think Dickman, himself, might have already had his own ‘moment’ with himself along the lines of…
“Holy shit… this is complicated. Someone REALLY doesn’t want the truth coming out here… and I’m not a professional investigator. I’m just gonna throw my interview notes together… lace ’em up with a basic storyline.. and I’m outta here. Let someone ELSE figure out what the hell really happened here.”
Could very well be. To at least a certain extent.
But still, a month or so in the midst of all that time, of paying some attention to some of the BASIC FACTS (like who the Overhead was actually working for and how they were structured on the fire) so someone like me wouldn’t have around fifty red digital magic marker notes in my Kindle edition about pretty basic things, would have done some wonders for his credibility, because Holly is not the only person increasingly questioning it.
At this point, the “talk-talk” is about how everybody is even more counting on John Maclean writing the “REAL” book.
And you know that ain’t gonna even BEGIN to happen until more of this legal stuff plays itself out a lot more. John Maclean knows how to not bow down to publisher pressure.
I do think it was time for SOMETHING book-like to come out.
And KD could have pulled this off with at least a bit more BASIC research, a LOT more humility (as in a disclaimer that a lot of stuff is still either muddy or still being SAT UPON, and so he has to “imagine” how things might have been — and drop all this crappola about this being THE DEFINITIVE narrative), and, what, a day or two with Sonny and Joy??????
There would be a whole lot more people appreciating the book (including me) rather than thinking, hmmmmmmm what else did he screw up on or make up and thus make it so I have no clue what to believe when I read his narrative(s).
Now that I’ve written all of this, I’m sitting here thinking about how it’s interesting that, given what Holly wrote on Amazon about the book, the article on Wildfire Today doesn’t include anything about her critique of his book, just her critique about the decidedly AWFUL review of the book.
And the world turns.
And I STILL can’t fathom, even though I’ve read other peoples’ comments in response to what I wrote, why, if it was so important to build that handline, Blue Ridge sat around playing cards all day while Granite Mountain was putting in the sweat equity.
I guess there’s just something missing in how my brain works.
Oh, and somebody asked about EN’s presentation to the American Meteorological Society on WildlandFire.com. It didn’t get much of a response.
And on her blog, “somebody” had a post about how their favorite professor gave this presentation and “they” had submitted a bunch of questions to her about it and were waiting for her reply, even though “she” had said “she” wasn’t going to post the presentation publicly, …….
……so it’s impossible to know what she actually presented unless you were there.
How convenient.
And now that I’m piling things that don’t go here into here, while thinking about that handline, I want to say that I appreciate peoples’ writing about how that handline was still necessary, even though the dozer was cutting that dozer line across the top of the bowl. It makes sense.
So thank you.
Marti,
Depositions are not public record. There is a possibility that none of tomorrows deposition will ever see the light of day. If the case gets settled, I think that’s a given due to certain peoples desire to continue with the story line that no one did anything wrong.
Also, even if the deposition information is given to the families as part of the settlement, it still may never see the light of day for the rest of us.
I understand what you are saying.
But I’m riffing off of WTKTT’s post a bit downstream that, because this deposition is in Mosesso’s court, and not the court of the lawsuits, it, legally speaking, doesn’t have anything to do with the lawsuits, and is, instead, ALL about the ADOSH vs ADOF tribunal, ALL of which, therefore, MUST be included in the (open, legally, to public inspection) docket on the ADOSH site.
Global Mediation = How to get everyone off the hook without anyone looking bad.
All of the above is true… except for the ‘MUST be included’ phrase in the last sentence. I can’t find the exact post but if I actually said that I really didn’t mean to.
Yes… ALJ Hearing Files are REQUIRED to be ‘public record’… and DURING the process itself.
But NO… not EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT that has to do with the challenge of the citations is required to be part of this ALJ Hearing file.
Notice already in the existing ALJ Hearing file that certain ‘documents’ are referenced but they have NOT also been included in the ALJ Hearing file.
Example: The LETTER that supposedly exists from Brendan’s supposed ‘therapist’ that Brendan would not be attending the February 26, 2015 under-oath deposition because he (supposed) had PTSD and this therapist (supposedly) thought it would be detrimental for Brendan to testify on that date.
That LETTER has NOT been included in the actual ALK Hearing File, even though it is now being referenced in other documents and it’s also now a give that such a letter would NOT represent any kind of HIPPA violation were it to become public.
TTWARE has it right up above.
If Brendan’s deposition takes place as part of the proceedings for this “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” hearing… it is NOT happening in the context of an actual “Civil Court Case” ( not really ) and that transcript MAY or MAY NOT actually end up in the online ALJ Hearing Files.
A case where a document that we hadn’t seen before actually DID show up there was when Arizona Forestry was arguing about this whole ‘privilege log’ issue and they felt compelled to show Judge Mosesso the actual MANIFEST of documents they delivered to ADOSH… and their origin as far as AZF knew.
We had never seen that ‘manifest’ before… even after many, many FOIA and Arizona Open Records requests were fulfilled by Arizona Forestry.
So once again Arizona Forestry made it perfectly obvious that they have always had *some* Yarnell Hill related documents in their possession that they were ‘withholding’ from previous FOIA and Arizona Open Records requests.
That COULD actually happen again with a transcript of Bredan’s interview. It COULD actually just become an ‘attachment’ to a filing to Jude Mosesso the way the SAIT document manifest did.
But alas… TTWARE is also correct that depending on how all this goes down… the content of any depositions taken as part of this “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” proceeding could become very difficult to obtain.
At any moment… Arizona Forestry could withdraw their contest of the ADOSH citations and just agree to pay the damn fines and be done with it.
If that actually happens… I am honestly not totally sure if even an Arizona Open Records request could get anywhere near that written transcription of Brendan’s under-oath deposition.
And then TTWARE is spot-on again to mention that this strange-and-winding tale of the elusive Brendan McDonough and the games he has always been playing with pretty much EVERYONE here COULD get absolutely BURIED if Arizona Forestry itself makes it a hard-and-fast negotiating point over in the other ‘wrongful death’ court proceedings.
Those ARE ‘Civil Cases’ duly registered and active in Arizona Civil Court… and in another judge’s courtroom.
Access to Brendan’s written transcript over in the “ADOF vs. ADOSH” case is then just a matter of one attorney in the Arizona State Attorney General’s office handing an Arizona Open Records request to another attorney in the same office.
Heck… in these twisted representations that could even come down to just one attorney in the AZ Attorney General’s office handing HIMSELF an ‘Arizona Open Records’ request.
But that still doesn’t make it immediately public or immediately available.
Arizona Forestry COULD start to play games and start to demand that the content of that deposition be SEALED as part of any ‘settlement’ with the families of the deceased.
It actually would NOT surprise me if Arizona Forestry tries to do that… even if they ARE willing to settle the ‘wrongful death’ suits.
Arizona Forestry still really, really, really, does NOT want ( and they have NEVER wanted ) the general media and the general public to know what actually happened out there that day.
Followup…
I am OPTIMISTIC that whatever Brendan finally has to say under-oath will become ‘common knowledge’ ( maybe not right away but in a reasonable amount of time )…
…but TTWARE is still right.
There are any number of possible scenarios whereby whatever Brendan has to say just becomes more ‘lost material’ just like the actual depositions and photos and videos that we KNOW were collected from the Peeples Valley Firefighters… but despite many, many FOIA and Arizona Open Records requests they still have yet to see the “light of day”.
Thank you so much, both of you TTWARE and WTKTT!
This stuff is SO complicated, and I appreciate mucho your helping me to better comprehend it.
It seems to me that ADOF’s relentless manipulations to with-hold evidence, that EVERYBODY KNOWS is going on, says, very clearly, to EVERYBODY, two things.
1. There is a bunch of stuff ADOF really really really really really doesn’t want anybody to know.
2. The above being true is some kind of acknowledgement that they know they/somebody didn’t do something right.
I understand an agency wanting to protect their “employees” from the kind of public scrutiny and BLAMING and legal damages that resulted from the Thirty-Mile Fire.
(Which is, of course, why the Arizona Legislature passed a bill and the governor signed it, to protect agencies from that).
However, I think, from what I’ve seen/read, that original “protectiveness” that originally influenced peoples’ thinking has been, all things considered, wearing thinner and thinner.
People know there’s something FISHY going on.
**
** STILL LOOKING FOR VERIFICATION ON EXPLOSIVES SIGN LOCATION
Reply to joy a collura post on May 25, 2015 at 6:12 pm
>> joy said…
>>
>> I will look again at the photos and when I see ANY photo I think you WWTKTT may be
>> interested being I do not have your email I will at least email Bob & Marti them and
>> they can say nah or yeah to you on here or private—sound oK?
That’s fine, Joy, but as I said down below, it’s also not nearly as important to see an actual PHOTO of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign as it is to simply get a confirmation ( from you, or someone, or anyone who knows ) regarding exactly WHERE IT IS out there on that two-track.
Again… as I said down below… if you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
Thanks in advance!
NOTE: If a ‘popup’ box appears saying “Welcome to Google Maps!” and it is obscuring the ‘red balloon marker’ on the map… just click the ‘X’ CLOSE button on this popup window and get rid of it.
There IS evidence that the dozer successfully improved that two-track leading away from the old-grader to the northwest all the way to the COLD BLACK… and that this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign did NOT deter them from doing that.
That means that by about 12:30 PM on Sunday, June 30, 2013… there already WAS a ‘fully connected’ east-to-west dozer line stretching all the way from COLD BLACK in the west to the Sesame Clearing area to the EAST… and that this essentially already fulfilled the ‘plan’ of having this ‘line work’ completed that could be BURNED OUT later that evening when the wind died down.
It also makes it more of a mystery what Granite Mountain was then CONTINUING to do up there all afternoon… until they got into serious TIME trouble and started making bad decisions that would then lead to their deaths.
WTKTT JOY is having some bad health issues form what she said to me on E-Mail so may not respond for awhile she was trying to find a picture of the sign and was still looking.
I understand. As I said above, though, it really isn’t nearly as important to see a photo of that infamous EXPLOSIVES sign as it is to just know exactly WHERE it is.
I was hoping that ANYONE who knows that area could just take a moment, click on that link above, and verify if that is the location.
Followup…
Satellite imagery doesn’t lie. The post-fire satellite imagery DOES already indicate that the ‘Jeep Trail’ that leads away from old-grader to the northwest was, in fact, improved with the dozer to a width of almost two blades ( 24 feet ) all the way west to where the COLD BLACK already was that Sunday morning.
Having someone finally confirm exactly WHERE this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign is would just help to verify things because there are a number of pieces of testimony in the public record regarding this EXPLOSIVES sign and how it was definitely a point on that two-track that was ‘reached’ and ‘improved’ by the dozer.
WTKTT said above:
**That means that by about 12:30 PM on Sunday, June 30, 2013… there already WAS a ‘fully connected’ east-to-west dozer line stretching all the way from COLD BLACK in the west to the Sesame Clearing area to the EAST… and that this essentially already fulfilled the ‘plan’ of having this ‘line work’ completed that could be BURNED OUT later that evening when the wind died down.
It also makes it more of a mystery what Granite Mountain was then CONTINUING to do up there all afternoon**
****************
All BLACK is not equal. There is COLD BLACK, and then there is HOT BLACK. There is no evidence that I can recall that indicates the black was all COLD BLACK.
With the burning conditions that existed that day, there were likely hot spots that were continuing to slowly chew against the wind into the un-burned grasses and brush. The only way to actually secure that section would be to line the edge, while working any threatening hot spots.
I feel it’s likely their determination was that there was enough heat around in the black that they felt they had to line the whole thing to secure it.
But, as you point out, any assistance that could have been provided to help in doing that, would seem to have been critical from a timing aspect.
ALL BLACK IS NOT EQUAL—You are correct how ever in fire terms cold or hot has to have a control LINE on it fully tied in. you can not contain or control the fir with out that line totally in.
When we were discussing Cold trailing on Saturday on Initial Attack that is totally different once you stop the fire spread you go back and build line in those cold trail areas.
Once the fire made the next day it required line on every inch of the fire direct or indirect. That is how it is done and that is what’s required. You do not cut corners.
You build complete and tied in line. COLD BLACK OR NOT.
The indirect cat line was a serious problem. Most tractor blades are 8 foot wide was this a 12 foot blade? In all those rocks a 8 foot blade would be more functional
Flip a coin on the BR crew they could have helped there and maybe not it was the Division Supervisors call. just more Chinese fire drill with lack of control and a plan by the IC. Division A did not lose the fire it was lost in the Northern part and burned under Division A Line The Cat line was the key but they could not fire it till night. their plan was to short sited.
Bob, you are correct. The control line has to be complete. In my attempt to explain that it, I made it sound like that was not the case.
TTWARE said…
“All black is not equal”.
Exactly. That’s why I made sure to say COLD BLACK in that comment and not just BLACK.
The point of convergence there where that dozer work seen in the post-fire satellite imagery meets the known black means the dozer would, in fact, have reached COLD BLACK created the day/night before.
There is also no question there WAS some HOT BLACK out in that general area… and NOT just the HEAT that Granite Mountain themselves started that day with their own attempted indirect burnouts.
There were ‘hot spots’ out there that are clearly visible even in the photos Joy Colours took before the GM crew even arrived out there and started lighting their own fires.
The real question now is how all this ‘work’ that was going on all ‘related’.
Did SPGS1 Gary Cordes KNOW that by 12:30 PM on Sunday he now already had a ‘completed dozer line’ all the way out to the cold black?
Correction for above. TYPO.
Obviously meant to type “Joy Collura” and not ‘Colours’.
That was on a Smartphone with terrible keypad.
yes Bob is correct. I am in Congress- health not up to par and selling off some assets to meet life insurance premium and be able to do my cancer marker blood labs and cat scan which I had covered until I had to dish out some heavy funds due to another’s dubious sot behavior. Sonny is out by Bill Williams/Alamo Lake area with his dogs…one eyed horse and all the animals…I do miss the 5 foot iguana though and some of the peafowls—what an awesome photo to capture of 3 jackass/horse/turkey/peacocks and an iguana on the hiking trails and us. I do know I hiked it 6-13-13 and even before that many times and I have taken a photo of the sign and I sent Marti and Bob and now even Elizabeth requested a copy too but I did send her just the photos not the forward as requested to Bob/Marti what I so far came across but the old gas tank is directly next to sign so if we can gps that photo that may help. I will be at Congress Library on my laptop borrowing their bandwidth to do my craigslisting…selling my 2008 Suzuki S40 Boulevard, silver, 650cc 4 valve single cylinder ($2950)(I think I just sold it too) and misc. stuff to get back the funds I just put out. Dana DeLong is my interest to reach to do my FOIAs thanks to Dickman’s book because I catch things most would not even think to…now, as for your question. I WISH I had an organized system but out on the trails I was too limited in organizing so when I had time enough to do laundry I would unload my sd card to a thumb ehd but than 3 of my ehd is on the bluff of Lovelock NV thanks to someone…I can tell you as you see on the GOOGLE+ photos—some photos are not in sequence and some are—I cannot even “search” by date or year…my system has been messed some time and I have not been there to pay attention so again I will look for your photo that will have a gps on photo because I used a different camera on that hike—in 2016 after court thing is over I am willing to hike that area with someone who is approved to and I am too but I have NO INTEREST to put myself in a situation that can cause me any further bs. I am a simple gal—just the desert walker/house wife. I do meet with an investigator this week so I am looking forward to that. Good way to begin my start home. I am sure many would rather me be on trails with Sonny vs. me being home because that means I have the time—may not have the energy yet but I am walking and running to build me back up—may be slow but I will get there…so yes after long rambles WWTKTT I will keep looking for it after or in between my craiglisting…k.
Thank you, Joy.
Having a photo of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign would be great… but in the meantime it is actually MORE important to simply know, once and for all, exactly WHERE this sign was out there on that Jeep Trail.
If you have just a moment or two… could you simply just click on the following link and tell me if the ‘red balloon’ marker that appears is where that EXPLOSIVES SIGN really is?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
Thanks in advance!
**
** ERIC MARSH TOLD BRIAN FRISBY THAT THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN CREW DID
** NOT NEED THE BLUE RIDGE CREW’S HELP TO DO ANYTHING THAT DAY.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 24, 2015 at 9:28 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I agree, and have said a number of times downstream, that given the futility of what
>> Granite Mountain was doing (apparently all by themselves–and why, if it was so
>> important for them to be doing that, why wasn’t Blue Ridge helping them????), all
>> things considered, and…..
>>
>> ….given the increasing severity of the weather forecasts (which, actually, had been
>> already severe leading up to this Sunday June 30), including the predicted
>> thunderstorms and their predicted chaotic impact on the fire…….
>>
>> …..since what they were doing was not completable and the conditions within which
>> they were doing that was increasingly dangerous……
>>
>> ……they should have been ordered by SOMEONE to disengage and head to a safer
>> place by 2:00 PM that afternoon, or, if that didn’t happen, to SIT THEMSELVES
>> DOWN IN THE BLACK AND STAY THERE NO MATTER WHAT.
>>
>> The question I have had in my head all weekend as I have been reading what
>> you and Bob have been writing is…….
>>
>> …..if, indeed, what Granite Mountain IHC was doing was because they were “assigned”
>> to do it (apparently because it was considered to be “important”), why in the world
>> was Blue Ridge IHC not lifting a finger to help them do that?
>>
>> I just don’t get it.
I thought this could use a quick ’roundup’ and a few quotes from the existing evidence record.
The truth is… not only did SPGS1 Gary Cordes tell ADOSH he basically had no friggin’ idea who Blue Ridge was actually ‘assigned’ to that day… Gary Cordes told ADOSH that Blue Ridge had, apparently, offered to HELP Granite Mountain with that ‘line work’ up there near the anchor point… but it was DIVSA Eric Marsh himself who turned them down and specifically told them their help ( the BR crew’s help, that is ) was NOT NEEDED.
Here is where SPGS1 Gary Cordes testified to ADOSH that ‘Division Alpha’ Eric Marsh himself had TOLD Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby that he (quote) “didn’t need him up there”.
From Gary Cordes’ ADOSH interview September 11, 2013…
——————————————————————————————
1119 Q2: Blue Ridge was uh, working for Eric?
1120
1121 A: Um…
1122
1123 Q2: (Unintelligible)?
1124
1125 A: …you know, it initially sounded like he was assigned to alpha. Um, Eric told
1126 him he didn’t need him up there and so Blue Ridge was kinda just, kind of
1127 um, I guess just, they, they jumped over and started helping me for the most
1128 part. They weren’t technically assigned to me but they were, they had jumped
1129 in looking, you know, looking for work, so we identified the need in there to
1130 improve this dozer line so that was their primary uh, primary goal.
———————————————————————————————-
But let’s ‘back up the bus’ for a moment and do a little ’roundup’ on what evidence we have ( or don’t have ) about whether Blue Ridge was ever actually ASSIGNED to anyone that day or whether they really were just pretty much ‘freelancing’ all day.
Let’s go back to the ‘horse’s mouth’ here and see if there is any evidence coming from any of the actual Blue Ridge Hotshots if, prior to the ‘Cutover Trail’ desperation effort in the later afternoon… they ( the crew ) had ever been given an actual ASSIGNMENT from any OPS or DIVS level person.
The answer seems to be NO.
Until someone can get the Blue Ridge Hotshots back into a room and able to freely answer questions about Yarnell… the only thing we have to go on are their own own heavily redacted Unit Logs, and there is NO EVIDENCE in those Logs that they were ever actually ASSIGNED to anyone in particular or that they ( the crew ) ever had any valid work assignment(s) until that desperation attempt to improve that Cutover Trail over to Shrine Road Youth Camp later in the afternoon.
From Brian Frisby’s handwritten Unit Log…
—————————————————————————–
We arrived on the fire and checked in at 0800 and we were to hang tight for a assignment. At about 0900 we were told to go to the Yarnell Fire department and stage.
At 1000 Operations called and asked if we could tie in with Structure group Cordes with a ( dozer boss ). We were instructed to go down Manzanita and Lakewood.
As we got down the road we tied into ( Cordes ) who had the ( dozer ) working in front of him. He informed us that the dozer didn’t have a radio and he would like him to clear out the roads that ran north and south off the main two track.
—————————————————————————–
From Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown’s Unit Log…
—————————————————————————–
0800 – Blue Ridge IHC arrives at Yarnell hill ICP and checks in and receives radio clone. Crew is told to stand by for an assignment.
0845 – Blue Ridge IHC instructed to head to Yarnell FD station by incoming ( ?? OPS1 ?? ). We are not given any type of a briefing and we are told that Roy Hall’s state team is taking over the incident.
0905 – Blue Ridge IHC arrives at Yarnell FD station and stages for an assignment. We are watching fire activity pick up while we are staged, this includes pockets of brush burning very actively. The north end of the fire is beginning to pick up significantly.
1000 – Blue Ridge IHC is instructed via radio by ( OPS1 Todd Abel ) to tie in with ( SPGS1 Gary Cordes ) off of Lakewood and Manazanita rd. We are to tie in with him and get a DOZB off the crew to relieve him of DOZB duties so that he can return to structure group.
—————————————————————————–
So according to BR Captain Brown… the ONLY reason they were given for leaving the Yarnell Fire Station was to go and deliver a DOZB to Gary Cordes so he could get away from the dozer and get out of the boondock and back to town.
There is NOTHING ELSE in Brown’s Unit Log about being told ( in the 10:00 AM timeframe by OPS1 Abel ) what the rest of the Blue Ridge crew should or shouldn’t be doing. The 10:00 AM call was just all about getting someone DOZB red-carded out there to relieve Gary Cordes.
From Blue Ridge Hotshot Cory Ball’s Unit Log…
—————————————————————————–
0830: arrival at Peoples valley School. Received radio clone. No Briefing.
Instructed to stage at school.
0900: Instructed to travel to Yarnell Fire department. Staged at YFD.
0930: Instructed to tie in with Structure group one. Inquiry about ( ??? ).
1030: Traveled into Yarnell subdivision staged in meadow near fire
Granite Mountain ( ??? ) assigned as ( ?????? ).
Granite Mountain IHC ( GMIHC ) conducting burnout operations along fires
edge near saddle off of two track road. ( XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX )
( XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX )
Blueridge One requested me plus one to travel to fires edge.
I was assigned ( HEQB for dozer because ) county employee not IA qualified
and did not have radio. Gave radio from BRIHC to operator ( ???? ).
—————————————————————————–
So that’s pretty much it for the Blue Ridge Unit Logs.
A LOT of testimony in there about OPS1 Todd Abel calling them at the Yarnell Fire Station circa 10:00 AM and jsut requesting that Cory Ball get delivered out there to relieve Gary Cordes on the dozer… but basically NO TESTIMONY that anyone had any actual ‘assigment’ for the Blue Ridge Crew. They just all ‘relocated’ from th eYFD to the Sesame area of their own accord without actually having any real reason to do that ( at 10:00 AM, anyway ).
Continued next message…
Continued from previous message…
** THE MANAGEMENT SIDE ( TESTIMONY )…
The ‘other side of the coin’ is whether there is any real evidence coming from ‘fire management’ of the Blue Ridge Crew being given any kind of official ‘assignment’ prior to the later afternoon desperation work on the Cutover Trail.
Again.. the answer seems to be NO.
Both OPS1 Abel and SPGS1 Cordes acknowledge they contacted Blue Ridge to find a DOZB qualified person to relieve Cordes on the dozer… but there is NO testimony coming from even them. either, about them ever instructing the Blue Ridge Crew to be doing anything until much later in the afternoon.
From OPS1 Todd Abel’s ADOSH interview on August 22, 2013…
—————————————————————————-
894 went down there, uh, after the briefing ran into, um, Blue Ridge out
895 there, um, and they said hey, what would you like us to do? I said hey, why
896 don’t you guys go stage at the school. I’m not sure exactly where I wanna put
897 you guys yet. But I wanted that hotshot crew in my back pocket.
898
899 Q1: Right.
900
901 A: So we staged them there ( at the Model Creek School ).
1053 Q1: Okay. So the dozer is, uh – the dozer is Gary’s – Cordes’?
1054
1055 A: Yeah, when – when the dozer showed up – it had been ordered the night before
1056 – when the dozer showed up, um, Gary got a hold of him, ‘cause he knew we
1057 wanted to start getting some work done as soon as possible. So he started, uh,
1058 directing them on where to, uh, start doing dozer work. And then we took a,
1059 uh, heavy equipment boss from Blue Ridge and assigned him to that dozer.
——————————————————————————
That’s pretty much it for OPS1 Todd Abel’s testimony about all this.
He does NOT specifically mention being the one to call Blue Ridge when they were staged at the Yarnell Fire Station… but he does say “We took an HEQB from Blue Ridge and assigned him to that dozer”.
The “We” is probably referring to Gary Cordes and Todd Abel.
It’s pretty obvious from other testimony that Gary Cordes communicated his need to be relieved off the dozer to OPS1 Todd Abel and that is when Abel either knew to call Blue Ridge ( since they would probably have someone HEQB and/or DOZB qualified ) or Abel was TOLD to call Blue Ridge.
Regardless… Todd Abel said NOTHING about also having any kind of ‘assignment’ for the rest of Blue Ridge. The only reason he called them at 10:00 AM was to tell them to get that DOZB person out to Gary Cordes.
Somehow… it *appears* as if it was Blue Ridge Supt. Frisby and BR Captain Brown who turned this simple request for a spare DOZB person into a “head ’em up and move ’em out” operation and they then proceeded to relocate ALL of Blue Ridge out there to the Sesame Clearing area where the GM Crew Carriers already were… even though there was no actual ‘assignment’ for the Blue Ridge Crew yet.
From Gary Cordes’ ADOSH interview September 11, 2013…
——————————————————————-
864 Q2: …okay. I think I have uh, I think I have most of that. Alright. Okay, I’d like
865 to go on back to, I’m on page two of your uh, activity log and uh, so 8:40,
866 8:45, you got – the dozer arrives, started on the work after briefing on Sesame
867 Street, I ordered the dozer boss uh…
868
869 A: Stayed with dozer, pushing the line until Ball from Blue Ridge took over as
870 the dozer boss.
871
872 Q2: Okay. And Ball was, what was that next one Ball was what, an operational –
873 oh, briefed. Ball was briefed on (unintelligible)…
874
875 A: Right.
876
877 Q2: …uh…
878
879 A: And the attempt of what we were doing with the dozer line.
880
881 Q2: Well where did you start off, you must’ve started down in the…
882
883 A: Right at the, at the ranch at um, at – on Sesame Street, where Sesame first
884 starts. That’s where we, we just improved that road so we would be able to
885 bring vehicles in and um, uh, they were to go up where the grater is and then,
886 and then branch there and then cut across the toe of the hill to that next trail.
887 We were trying to incorporate those jeep trails if we could.
794 transcends into 33. Um, basically what the fire had done is it continued to
795 move throughout the day, move uh, northeast and I guess to go back, you
796 know, let me go back and readdress the dozer line. We never finished the
797 dozer line along the toe of the hill because the fire pooched out on the
798 northeast corner of, of where you’re showing blue and advanced up that, end
799 of that section four and um, so that took away the ability to use that, that road
800 and, and tie into where we were gonna tie in. By the time they, they got up in
801 the place and, and um, I had turned the dozer over to Blue Ridge to finish out
802 the, the line, um, we couldn’t go north with the line so that created Sesame
803 Street as our, our contingency line to, to use.
804
805 Q2: And you have a recollection of perhaps when that occurred?
807 A: That was late morning, um, um, sometime after 10:00 or 11:00, somewhere in
808 that timeframe. It had, it had made enough activity that we, we abandoned uh,
809 the idea of putting that, that dozer line in on that side, um, it was – the activity
810 was starting to pick up so I’m guessing 11:00 to – about 11 o’clockish,
811 somewhere in that timeframe.
1119 Q2: Blue Ridge was uh, working for Eric?
1120
1121 A: Um…
1122
1123 Q2: (Unintelligible)?
1124
1125 A: …you know, it initially sounded like he was assigned to alpha. Um, Eric told
1126 him he didn’t need him up there and so Blue Ridge was kinda just, kind of
1127 um, I guess just, they, they jumped over and started helping me for the most
1128 part. They weren’t technically assigned to me but they were, they had jumped
1129 in looking, you know, looking for work, so we identified the need in there to
1130 improve this dozer line so that was their primary uh, primary goal. My
1131 understanding was that, maybe it’s just my interpretation, but I, I thought I
1132 had heard some conversation on the radio at one point uh, where Granite
1133 Mountain would come in and tie in that uh, western edge of that line and start
1134 working that back in. Um, that was my general understanding. Whether that
1135 was a face to face with somebody from Blue Ridge or whether I heard that on
1136 the radio, but that was my understanding of what the next, next work was
1137 gonna be done.
1138
1139 Q2: Well was tying a, some type of hand line into the dozer line?
1140
1141 A: Right…
1142
1143 Q2: (Unintelligible)…
1144
1145 A: …right.
1146
1147 Q2: …down by the grater somewhere?
1148
1149 A: Right. Right.
1150
1151 Q2: Uh…
1152
1153 A: And that was, that was the, you know, you – we plan as we go and as things
1154 occur through this and, and that was the, the idea then would be in the evening
1155 we would try to burn that out so the black would be tied into the dozer line on
1156 the west, we’d improve this dozer line, we’d burn off that dozer line and, and
1157 bring it all the way around to, into that rock pile. We knew everything was
1158 burning north of that ridge in there so we weren’t gonna save anything there.
1159 The whole intent was to try to create some kind of defensibility for the town
1160 because the town itself had nothing in there to really keep, keep fire out.
——————————————————————-
And once again ( because it’s worth repeating )… here is that same section where SPGS1 Gary Cordes testified to ADOSH that ‘Division Alpha’ Eric Marsh himself had TOLD Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby that he (quote) “didn’t need him up there”.
From Gary Cordes’ ADOSH interview September 11, 2013…
——————————————————————————————
1119 Q2: Blue Ridge was uh, working for Eric?
1120
1121 A: Um…
1122
1123 Q2: (Unintelligible)?
1124
1125 A: …you know, it initially sounded like he was assigned to alpha. Um, Eric told
1126 him he didn’t need him up there and so Blue Ridge was kinda just, kind of
1127 um, I guess just, they, they jumped over and started helping me for the most
1128 part. They weren’t technically assigned to me but they were, they had jumped
1129 in looking, you know, looking for work, so we identified the need in there to
1130 improve this dozer line so that was their primary uh, primary goal.
———————————————————————————————-
Since Blue Ridge ( the crew ) basically ended up doing NOTHING for most of the day… and the fact that TIME, itself, became the difference between living or dying that day for Granite Mountain… it’s still interesting to speculate how things might have turned out different that day if instead of them just sitting around on their asses by their Crew Carriers in the Sesame Clearing… the Blue Ridge CREW had been allowed to just “join the party” there out at the west end of the two-track and had jumped in to help with that ‘line building’ out there.
Blue Ridge ( or someone ) probably would have still been needed later for that desperation effort to improve that ‘Cutover Trail’ to the Harper Canyon area… but as far as the situation on the WEST end of the Sesame Trail two-track goes… things might have been much different if they had just simply been ‘pitching in’ with the line building out there where GM was working all day rather than sitting around doing absolutely NOTHING there by their Crew Carriers for most of the day.
Maybe Brendan McDonough actually knows a little more about why in the world Eric Marsh ( and Jesse Steed? ) would have REFUSED their help that day… and maybe someone will remember to ask Brendan a few more questions about this during his under-oath deposition less than 48 hours from now.
Copy. Thank you.
Good to “know” more about “the reason” Blue Ridge spent the day getting paid for mostly hanging out with their buggies while Granite Mountain spent the day, at least parts of it, hopefully getting paid for putting in a hand line that, all things considered, wasn’t going to be able to have much of an effect on anything, while Cory Ball and that dozer operator (who may or may not have almost gotten himself killed but apparently that didn’t really matter to anybody but us and Calvin) spent the day putting in a dozer line (in, as it appears, preparation for some kind of imagined burnout that evening) that didn’t have any effect on the fire when it (as was consistent with the weather forecast) reversed itself under the effect of a thunderstorm cell and burned over the whatevers they put in place in that big bowl, along with the several thousands of dollars worth of retardant that Bravo 3 put in because they were so concerned that the fire was going to do exactly that, that afternoon, except they didn’t bother to tell anybody about that concern except a “Division Supervisor” who didn’t communicate that to anybody.
And, yeah, I’ve read what Gary Olson has written.
And I’ve read what you have written about the conversation on Wildfire Today about what John and Holly have written about someone’s review of Kyle Dickman’s book.
This all is what makes me more and more inclined to throw my hands up in the air and wonder why I am even “here.”
If all of this is considered “standard operating procedure,” I’m not sure I have much of anything more to say. Seriously.
Marti, you are here because you care and because you are brilliant at what you do, and those are things that I can’t even begin to do. You and I just have some disagreement when it comes to, and I’m paraphrasing here, whether the system needs to be overhauled, broken down and reengineered, or whether the system is functioning about as well as can be expected given the amount of money spent on it. On it’s best day…NIFC is no SOUTHCOM and nothing else in wildland firefighting lines up in any kind of reality with the military. They spent trillions, WFF spends millions.
I think it says something that everyone including me acknowledges you and WTKTT are both brilliant at identifying variable, factors etc., I just disagree with you and WTKTT sometimes when it comes to concluding what the conclusions should be. So…please hang in there with as much time as you can afford to give away here.
I appreciate the hard work you do. And I have conceded many times that I don’t know either, we aren’t getting much help from those who could give us help if they wanted to. So…
And I’m just going to throw out a couple of things here off the top of my head. And that is as a result of the Yarnell Hill Fire…the general public became aware of two things almost simultaneously, there is a complex wildland firefighting apparatus they pay for…and that system fails to function as well as people assumes it would.
For example…there have been a number of comments made here that the GMIHC failed to meet the hotshot hype and were hardly the elite cream of the crop…best of the best blah, blah, blah.
That’s just one of the dirty little secrets most people didn’t and still don’t know about the WFF apparatus…yes, the GMIHC WERE the elite crème of the crop, best of the best because that hyperbole is all RELATIVE, they were graded on a Bell Curve, not whatever is not a bell curve. In other words, if you think they had issues…you should check out their competition.
You think some aspects are bad now? Let me give you some historical perspective. Hotshot crew bosses are GS-9’s today, with a staff of 6 full time employees as a minimum.
When I started as a hotshot crew boss, the highest a hotshot crew bosses could be was a GS-7 and it was common to have no one else who was in a career status with year round employment or any benefits, retention was a real challenge…all of the time. That’s how I got in, everybody else around me kept quitting to go get a “real” jobs.
In fact Marti…I will take it one step further as long as I am sharing and bring you up to speed on one of the hardest parts of my job as a hotshot crew boss. I was the door keeper for a revolving door.
My squad bosses and senior crewmen…my friends, comrades and peer group came and went out the door to other fire jobs into engines, helicopters, fuels tech, forestry jobs with the USFS and other land management agencies.
A hotshot job was a stepping stone on to bigger and better things back in the good ole days and most people didn’t stay for very long. And as you can imagine, this revolving door led in turn to a lot of problems when it came to professionalizing hotshot crews.
You have probably (at least I would hope you have, how could you not have looked at my magnificent work) looked at my video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlnmLnoXENE.
Anyway…watch it closely and you will see us using contract yellow school buses which led up to us using an open bed cattle truck one year because the USFS couldn’t reach an agreement over the cost of the school buses. This in turn led to us getting our own green school buses, but they were still school busses, not the crew carriers they use today…which are really, really bitchin’!
At almost every aspect of how hotshot crews are run these days I exclaim…WOW, THOSE GUYS ARE REALLY LUCKY! A chase truck…dream on…an ATV dream on…tents to sleep in…dream on…toilet paper on the fire line…no way, we used sticks, rough and dry sticks that still the bark on them.
In other words, things are really professional now compared to how it used to be, which of course really, really, really, begs the question, then what went so very wrong in such a big way on the Yarnell Hill Fire…smart guy? And I have to admit…you got me there.
One step further.
The FS created a fire God Job or what ever. If you were ready to move up the Fire ladder the best place to move to was a HOT SHOT CREW.
GS 5,6,7–From there with that background of 2 to 4 years you were in a position to promote to the Districts any where as GS 7 or 9 and many carriers were enhanced by the Crew positions.
People were given jobs biased on that back ground.
Both of my GS7 and 9 positions were because of the Hot Shots.
What Gary is saying is many good solid Fire fighters went thru the system and moved on few stayed a Hot shot Superintendent there full carrier. That in some cases created a lack of experience in the position as non Hot Shots began to fill Supervisory positions and no longer worked up thru the crew. New crews were formed with out the history or back ground of Hot Shot training.
Having a stepping stone of positions today keeps the crews more in tact. GS 5-6-7-9 The 9’s then can move to Management level positions GS-11 and Possibly further.
Dose the system weed out the week???? Maybe
A lot of crews today run in a lot of different ways some good some not so good.
I think that is what Gary was saying—
Yes, that is what I am saying and I am trying to get people to understand that they system is a lot stronger and better than used to be and justify to them (and myself) why I am defending a system that failed so badly by saying, “Hey…it used to be a lot worse, so don’t worry, that means it’s OK now.”
Or maybe “Hey…things could have been worse on the Yarnell Hill Fire….a lot more than 19 people could have died, so that means everything turned out as well as could be expected?”
Actually Bob….some days I don’t know what I’m trying to say because this event was so bad and so unprecedented and just so damn tragic.
And we both know it did not need to happen if they had stayed in the black.
So……I’ve picked up a whisper that you have moved from Flagstaff to Washington.
Which would make it impossible for me to get me and my daughter to make a trip with me to Flagstaff to visit her dad and visit you. (Well I can visit her dad, but not you. Which is what I REALLY want to do. I could really care less about visiting her dad.)
Which would make it impossible for you and I to sit down together in some location in Flagstaff and have a true in-real-live conversation/argument about all of this for a couple of hours or so about all of this — which is what it deserves.
Have you REALLY moved to Washington?
{just asking for a friend, as they say….)
Well…I am in the process of it, I made a comment back a little ways that said if my dear wife say’s it’s Easter…well you know the rest.
yes, and discussing things in this format loses so much so getting together sometime would certainly be best.
Thanks, Gary.
When are you “planning” on leaving Flagstaff?
Hello Everyone,
(Note: My comment was to long so I broke it into two parts….Part 1)
As some of you might have suspected, I did not go away for good, I just went away. I have just concluded a refreshing road trip on which I consumed way too much fossil fuel as I left way too big of a carbon foot print while driving thousands of miles in my Mongo (Blazing Saddles) van, mostly because I can.
Although in my defense, I did some important things while on the road at various destinations. I am going to start listening to Al Gore and others like him on ways I can save the planet when they stop flying in really big and expensive planes that really use a lot of fossil fuel while going to conferences where they all agree how I should live. I personally think they should all use teleconferencing instead of flying to Geneva, Switzerland to meet in person.
I have never understood how the far right can pillory Al Gore so savagely since he literally could have been the poster child for one of the greatest anti war anthems of the 60’s, “Fortunate Son” by Credence Clearwater Revival. You can probably guess I have been listening to my IPod playlist while on my not so little journey. And instead he volunteered to serve as a combat army infantry officer who ran the risk of not only being killed by the enemy, but being fragged by his own men. Normally his people liked to send my people and people of color to those kinds of places instead of their own sons and daughters.
I have been checking in on the thread as conditions permit and following some of the discussions about KD’s book, I am not going to buy it, nor am I going to ask any questions, but I will read all of the analysis of it others are willing to do with great interest. I am also jotted down notes on my trip because I am preparing my mother of all posts (MOAP) that I hope to finish now that I am finally home.
In my MOAP, I still fully intend to summarize everything I have picked up in side conversations or emails so you don’t have to wait for my book to come out to find out everything I think about where we are at in this investigation…as I know so many of you do. You see…I just can’t write with the appropriate gravitas this topic calls for, I know that Sonny and Joy get me and my quirky sense of humor and way of writing, even if so many of YOU PEOPLE do not.
Now take the you people comment for example, WTKTT seemed to take great offense to my use of that term, but I did not intend to offend anyone. It was an oblique reference to one of my most favorite satire movies of all time that I watch again every couple of years…”Tropic Thunder.”
I really enjoy watching quirky movies and especially everything that has ever been done by the Coen Brothers and I drive people around me crazy by intermixing movie quotes from a lot of movies, but especially their movies with everyday conversation and then I will say, “Do you know which movie that came from?” Now…I suspect that either WTKTT did not see “Tropic Thunder” or he didn’t think it was funny. WTKTT seems to always be able to write about this very serious topic with the appropriate amount of gravitas.
I really wish this thread had a reset button on it and I could make every post I have ever made disappear and a neuralizer (Men In Black) to make all of you forget I was ever here…but it doesn’t and I don’t. So I am going to try to clean up some of the mess I made by not explaining myself well enough. The biggest misconception that I am afraid I am responsible for is the recurring theme about hotshot being mindless robots and that one really bothers me. So that is the first one I am going to try my best to fix.
I like fire stories. I have spent countless hours on mop up and at bars both listening to, and telling fire stories about the last fire, the next fire or some other fire. Fire stories are what binds wildland firefighter together and they are how the present connects with both the past and the future. Fire stories are how wildland firefighters pass on the mores of their social group and culture. And so I am going to try to tell a few fire stories while I try to clean up my mess in the hope that using some actual examples will help you people understand what I am trying to say. If this one goes well…I have few others lined up.
Listening to fire stories from those who had gone before me was how I learned what was expected of me, telling fire stories was how I told those who came after me what was to be expected of them. And as you know, I am fond of saying chaos is usually in charge of most true wildfires for the first 36 to 48 hours? And as a matter of fact sometimes chaos never lets go of control of the wildfire and some fires are managed by chaos until the bitter end. The Clint’s Fire on the Long Valley Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest is an example of one such fire.
The “mindless robots” quote that so many of you people default to when you try to translate what I have said into language that you understand, I find…priceless. I never said hotshots were mindless anything. And as I said, maybe nobody should listen to anything I have to say on this subject. My last experience with a hotshot crew was in 1984. All of my experiences with hotshot crews were with Coconino National Forest hotshot crews (including the Santa Fe Hotshot Crew I built in the same image) that operated during the Bill Buck Era. FYI…Bill Buck who was the most feared and respected fire god who ever walked on the face of the earth who was hated by those who did not understand him and loved by those who did. Buck was also the Fire Management Officer on the Coconino National Forest who created his hotshots in his image.
And as I have said many times, we were a hyper hotshot program on steroids, but I think most, if not all hotshot crews are, they almost have to be to do such a difficult job for so few benefits and relative low pay unless you are working overtime with hazard pay at nighttime on the weekend during a federal holiday, and then the pay is okay…if you work a lot of hours. Hotshots really have to develop an alternative universe to live in during the fire season with kind of a reverse pride at being grunts and ground pounders so that you are conditioned to say, “We like it, we love it, we want more of it” no matter how bad it gets along with the standard reply…”Sounds Good” no matter how bad it really sounds and the age old, “Thank you Sir…may I another?” But that is really hard to explain to you people.
So my experiences might not have anything to do with the Granite Mountain Hotshots or any other hotshot crew for that matter? And it IS disturbing to me that they were mouthing off behind their crew boss’ back while he was discussing their options with Jesse Steed and maybe to his face if Steed had the transmit button pushed down at the time. Maybe the Granite Mountain Hotshots were so different from other crews, or at least crews I know that they were a democratically based gaggle of free thinkers and not a disciplined hotshot crew who trusted and believed in their crew leadership…I don’t know? I still don’t know why they went down that chute towards the fire below.
I always worked with people who were better than me at every job I ever did, and that certainly included being a hotshot. I was even an accidental hotshot. I was actually hired by the Coconino to be a Fire Prevention Technician because that is what I had been on the Prescott, but I went out early in the season as a fill in with the Happy Jack Hotshots because they were short to the Clint’s Fire that was blowing out at 360 degrees and I experienced the first real adrenaline dump in my life. I was immediately hooked. Some people can try meth several times and never get hooked, and some people just do it once and WHAM…they’re addicts for life. It only took once for me and I instantly became an adrenaline junky.
On that particular fire, there weren’t any mindless robots or they would have been in serious trouble! Well anyway, on this particular fire, the crew was instantly fragmented and was never able to regroup into any kind of cohesive unit. They say a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy. A single hotshot crew became several smaller hotshot modules because Chaos became the Incident Commander just as soon as we stepped off the crew carrier, each one with its own leader and followers, which ebbed and flowed and constantly changed as the circumstances and what was directly in front of them changed. So the point is, everyone there except for me, was an expert wildland firefighter, not a mindless robot who were able to step up and assume the role as leader or follower depending on their individual circumstances and we eventually caught the fire… when the wind stopped blowing.
Which brings up another point, wildland firefighters usually don’t ever really catch a true wildfire until the variables influencing that wildfire change. The wind dies down, the relative humidity goes up, the temperature comes down, the slope flattens out, the canyon ends, there is a break in the fuel either horizontally or vertically (maybe in part by a fire line), the fuel load is dramatically reduced, the fuel moisture content or type changes, and so forth and so on, or if you get lucky because sometimes it is better for wildland firefighters to be lucky than good.
The sum of a hotshot crew is always greater than the sum of its individual parts, which is why the concept works.
And as Marti described it, “But to, as you describe, totally denigrate the thoughts/perspectives/wisdom/experience of members of a crew and their hard-earned experience-based wisdom and disregard it because that’s how the system works??????”
Yes, that is how the system works. Because as a crew is forming at the beginning of each fire season, and even if the crew consists of mostly returning veterans, that crew develops its own personality as it jells into a cohesive unit not unlike a fine Swiss watch.
OK…that may be a slight exaggeration but I think you get the idea. A watch only works if all of the parts of it are working together to accomplish the same goal…to tell what time it is. And if all of the cogs, wheels, springs, and whatever else is in a watch are busy being individuals the watch isn’t going to be able to give very accurate times…right?
In other words, if all of the parts are all trying to be unique individuals who are unable to subjugate their own individual personalities and desires to unite behind the most experienced and capable leaders to achieve a group identity with common goals and objectives while at the same time maintaining their own individual identities and capabilities who are able to step forward at a moment’s notice and accept a key role and perform at an optimum level, well then…the sum of the crew will not be greater than the sum of its individual parts…will it? That was a tough sentence to get through and I hope you didn’t get as lost as I did.
Wildand firefighting agencies are looking for the best candidates they can find (given what the job offers in return) to fill their hotshot crews and some of the best people are the ones who do not need to be recognized for their own individual strengths and are happy to be contributing to the strength of the unit as a whole.
(Note: My comment was to long so I broke it into two parts….Part 2)
Marti went on to say,
“If that is how “the system” works, and I appreciate your candidness regarding this, I truly believe there is a SERIOUS problem with “the system.”
And if that “how the system works” process is, probably, related to what happened on June 30, 2013, leading to the deaths of so many of these awesome wildland Hotshots fire-fighters,
I think “we” REALLY REALLY REALLY need to challenge that System.”
To which I say, No… I don’t think we need to change the system, we just need to change the way you people view the system. The system works pretty good. Do you find it at all ironic that before the Yarnell Hill Fire, most of you had never even heard of a hotshot crew…and now most of you think you know the best way to run a hotshot crew. Please do not take offense at that comment, it sounds harsher than I mean it to, I just couldn’t think of a gentler way to say it.
As I always say, since the inception of hotshot crews in the 1940’s, there have only been four disaster fires on which hotshots were killed. The first three on which 24 hotshots died, 24 of whom were cutting fire line above the uncontrolled wildfire. I still don’t know exactly what happened on the last one that almost doubled the number of hotshot deaths in a single incident at a time when wildland firefighters had been figuring out how the whole wildfire thing interacts within the laws of nature while they developed numerous check lists and safety protocols pretty much starting with the “REPORT OF THE FIRE SAFETY REVIEW TEAM, MARCH 1967, A PLAN TO FURTHER REDUCE THE CHANCES OF MEN BEING BURNED WHILE FIGHTING FIRES.” BUT…I now think I have a pretty darn good idea.
I read some guys review on KD’s book. He said he wouldn’t read it because it was written by a hotshot about hotshots for hotshots and he said something about how he had never wanted to associate himself with young men who wanted to prove how macho they were in a militaristic culture with hazing.
Yaa…him and me both after my first couple of weeks on the crew, I got my head humped so many times I had several bald spots running at different angles on my poor head. It didn’t take me very long after I first reported for work at Happy Jack to figure out I had stumbled into an environment that was exactly what I imagined it would be like if Animal House met The Lord Of The Flies at a Special Forces, Forward Operating Base. Those Happy Jack Hotshots my first season were definitely off the reservation and none of them showed any interest in returning to any kind of normal life time soon at the time, but I needed the job and I didn’t have anywhere else to go because I had already been kicked out of my college dorm room.
Now I want to go over the Easter egg hunt again, since that analogy caused some confusion. After all, I am the guy who went from being a GS-5 Recreation Technician in 1984, whose primary job it was to clean out campground outhouses and take shit from everybody to being the guy who now only has to care what one person thinks…my dear wife. That occurred after the USFS tried to fire me because I could no longer fight fire because of smoke inhalation damage to my lungs and larynx. I filed a grievance and when I won, so they put me in charge of cleaning out the outhouses in campgrounds. The perch they built for me to preen myself on as a hotshot crew boss was very fine indeed, they just didn’t tell me the fall off it would be so precipitous and so far to the bottom when my time came to an end.
And that is because of how the laws work in this country work. You see, it’s like this…she controls all of her salary (I don’t think I could ever convince a judge to make her give me spousal support) and at least 50% of mine since we were married before I got a permanent job with benefits with the USFS and in fact, she actually predates the USFS in my life, bless her heart and I went to work for them when I was 19. And since she actually earns a lot more than I do these days, that means she controls more than 85% of our combined income and I control the remainder. So…when she announces in a loud voice that it’s Easter…I start to immediately look for Easter eggs.
That’s how it works in this life. Somebody almost always has the power to tell you when it’s time for you to start looking for Easter eggs. It’s just that now I have earned the right to literally tell everyone else to leave me alone. Now I know some of you must be wondering, “What kind of woman would spend almost all of a lifetime with a hotshot?” Much less somebody like me? Good question.
I have been asking myself that for a very long time and I haven’t figured it out yet, so if you do…please let me know. I can tell you though that she has spent the majority of our time together as a critical care registered nurse who has worked primarily in intensive care and cardiac care units, although now she tries to help difficult people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries…so that may give you a clue. I think I might be an actual living case study for her.
Anyway…back to the Easter egg analogy. You see…I figured that out a long time ago that somebody always had the power to tell you when it’s time for you to start looking for Easter eggs…NOW. And I have always been good with that. That is one reason I made a good hotshot…not a great hotshot, but a pretty good one. For all of you people out there who have neither understood that concept or accepted that fact, well…you probably haven’t done very well and it is unlikely it is going to get any better for you. Unless of course you are somebody like Lebron James or Steve Jobs or you at least have the potential to be like them…and that is highly unlikely to be the case for most of you.
But the primary moral to this story is…hotshots are not mindless robots and they have never been mindless robots. And if any are, they probably won’t survive a serious encounter with an unforgiving enemy who shows no compassion or remorse and often doesn’t give second chances to get it right.
Excellent.
There is no Hot Shot way just a Hot Shot Brother Hood. Black dirt and Two More Chains Put your head down and keep digging.
Thanks Gary
right on
I will always believe that as the crew stood at the top of the bowl contemplating their descent. at least one of them, and probably even several of them, or even more, had alarm bells clanging loudly in their minds caused by thoughts of the 10 & 18 violations about to occur.
Perhaps, even more so, some of the rookies, who had just had this information pounded into their heads over and over in classes at the beginning of the season.
In the case of those folks, some of the one’s whose radar might have been at the highest alert level, might have felt like they shouldn’t or couldn’t voice their concerns as rookies.
It has been my opinion ever since I watched the fade video made by WTKTT, that it would have been impossible for anyone who stood at that drop off point looking down into that boiling cauldron not to have fear coursing through their bodies. I am not talking about concern, or any of those kinds of descriptive words…I am talking about pure unadulterated fear.
I have been told on several occasions from a squad boss who used to work with me, and who never questioned anything I ever asked him to do, that if I would have told him to go down into that chute he would have said something to the effect of…”hey, I love you man, but if you think I am going down there, you need to rethink your position.” And of course, his assessment is based on the empirical and incontrovertible evidence that is clear for everyone to see and evaluate in WTKTT’s video.
Stunning…absolutely stunning. But yes, thank you for throwing me that softball so I could say this and thank you for your concurrence. I agree with you. There must have been a lot of terrified hotshots that day looking down into that valley.
That was more or less Dudley’s view from the video — that he at least hoped some had second thoughts. For the rookies, people don’t necessarily do a great job translating book learning when faced with 1) stress, and 2) directions from group leaders. So, there were several heuristics working against the more junior crew members really having too many second thoughts. Along with better rate of travel info for specific types of vegetation, these events do in my mind suggest the need for more controlled decisionmaking experiments. Though, the point that there in fact haven’t been that many accidents may mean that overall there is no particular crisis.
Yes, those are some of the reasons that I am having a really hard time blaming the crew itself for not speaking up, in fact I am having a hard time assigning blame in my own mind below Steed.
Anyone interested on Wild Fire Today has an article on the Dickman book review kind of interesting.
What is truly weird about what just showed up on Gabbert’s ‘Wildfire Today’ BLOG is that his posting is just a reprint of something that John MacLean and Holly Neill wrote regarding how wrong just one particular REVIEW of Dickman’s book is/was.
Neither Gabbert, MacLean or Neill mention one word about all the ERRORS that are in Kyle Dickman’s own book, as published.
What they are going on about ( and what they wrote the article about ) is how many ERRORS there were in some other person’s simple REVIEW of the Dickman work.
Granted, if Dickman and Neill are right about the things said the book review… then those those things ARE, in fact, “off the reservation” and need to be corrected. You have to wonder how in the hell even the reviewer could have been that wrong about anything Dickman had to say.
But there is still no mention on MacLean or Neill’s part ( or Gabbert, either ) of how far off-base Kyle Dickman himself was.
If MacLean and Neill actually think the Dickman book itself IS ‘totally accurate’… then that doesn’t bode well for anything they might be thinking about publishing themselves.
It would mean they are just as clueless as Dickman is/was about some of the events of the weekend of June 28 through June 30, 2013.
Here is what just appeared today over at Wildfire Today.
Wildfire Today
Article Title: Errors in a review of a book about the Yarnell Hill Fire
Posted on May 25, 2015 by Bill Gabbert
http://wildfiretoday.com/2015/05/25/errors-in-a-review-of-a-book-about-the-yarnell-hill-fire/
——————————————————-
By John Maclean and Holly Neill
Kyle Dickman’s new book, On the Burning Edge, about hotshot culture and the Yarnell Hill Fire, has been reviewed in the Saturday, May 23, edition of the Wall Street Journal by Mark Yost, who is identified as a firefighter and paramedic from Highwood, Illinois. The review makes a number of errors and misleading assertions about fire policy and the Yarnell Hill Fire independent of the material in Dickman’s book. Journal reviews receive respectful attention, but the review is wrong on so many points that it should be answered in a timely fashion–Maclean is preparing a review of Dickman’s book for the Journal of Forestry, but that won’t appear for several months.
——————————————————-
Here is a direct link to the Mark Yost review itself which is the actual
subject of the John MacLean and Holly Neill criticisms…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hotshots-in-hot-spots-1432317061
You may or may not need a subscription to the Wall Street Journal to access the Mark Yost book review above. It sort of depends on which DEVICE you are using when you hit the link above.
The Wall Street Journal still can’t figure out how to handle certain browsers on certain smartphones successfully so if you hit their site with the right ‘User Agent’ string they might just ‘let you through’ without a needing full access rights ( rather than crash your whole browser ).
But even if you can’t access this original book review by Yost… Gabbert’s Wildfire Today article ( link up above ) is already detailing most of the things that MacLean and Neill found wrong with Yost’s review.
Once again, however… reality check.
The MacLean and Neill article is NOT a list of all the ERRORS that are in Kyle Dickman’s actual book.
The MacLean and Neill article is only a list of the ERRORS they have found in just one of the REVIEWS of the book by another guy named Mark Yost.
Bill Gabbert’s article doesn’t reprint enough of the MacLean / Neill article to be able to tell what they think of Dickman’s actual ‘On the Burnding Edge’ book.
Gabbert’s article is only about how MacLean / Neill found factual ERRORS in a simply REVIEW of the book.
Followup…
One of the comments left on the article over at Wildfire today tells you how to get around any need to have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal in order to read this complete Mark Yost book REVIEW that MacLean and Neill are, themselves, reviewing.
>> Wildfire Today
>> Bob on May 25, 2015 at 8:58 pm said:
>>
>> I was able to read the entire review by going to news.google.com
>> then typing in “wall street journal yarnell” in the search bar and
>> clicking on the appropriate link in the search results.
>>
>> Hope that helps.
This actually DOES work.
The ‘first link’ that appears in the search results is as follows…
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hotshots-in-hot-spots-1432317061
You should be able to click to that and read a fully PUBLIC, unrestricted copy of the whole Mark Yost review.
SIDENOTE: It’s pretty strange what is happening in the comments over at Wildfire Today. It simply has NOT dawned on most of the commenters that MacLean and Neill are NOT actually saying anything about the Kyle Dickman book itself. Most of the commenters think they ARE.
They are NOT understanding that MacLean and Neill have simply written a REVIEW of a REVIEW… and NOT a review of the book itself..
Another followup here…
Sorry for this confusion… but even though that link in the message above IS the one that will appear in the Google News Search results… clicking it outside of Google News will NOT allow you to read the whole Mark Yost review.
Google is playing games here with something called ‘cookies’.
Google will ONLY let you read the whole Mark Yost review ( at the Wall Street Journal if you click on the link to it WHILE it is appearing on the Google News Search page.
Clicking the same link above sitting all by itself as posted to this forum just brings up the same ‘restricted’ interface at the Wall Street Journal.
So somehow Google News has PERMISSION to set some cookie in your browser to let the Wall Stree Journal know you are coming to read the Yost article from ‘Google News’ itself… and then the Wall Street Journal site lets you right in.
So I guess you need to just ‘play the game’ here, as user Bob described over at Wildfire Today.
Just go to news.google.com
In THEIR ‘search input’ field at the top of THEIR page… enter all FOUR of these words in this order…
wall street journal yarnell
When the search results page appears… just click on the first link ( which says this )…
————————————————————–
Hotshots in Hot Spots
Wall Street Journal-May 22, 2015
Nearly two years ago—on June 30, 2013—the Yarnell Hill Fire in central Arizona claimed the lives of 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, one of an …
—————————————————————
You will then be presented with the full ( unrestricted ) Mark Yost article.
One more time… for good measure…
As it turns out… Mark Yost himself has his OWN BLOG and he has apparently just DUMPED the text of his Wall Street Journal book review there on his own UNRESTRICTED BLOG.
You SHOULD be able to just click the following link without having to do the ‘Google News’ search bullshit detailed above.
Mark Yost’s own BLOG site isn’t checking for any secret ‘cookies’ or trying to verify where you have ‘clicked through’ from.
It just lets you read his Kyle Dickman book review…
https://markyost.wordpress.com/
NOTE: There really is something bizarre going on here with this Mark Yost book review and MacLean and Neill were right to ‘go after it’.
This ‘review’ of the Dickman book itself is really just completely full of shit.
Example…
——————————————————–
In far-away Albuquerque, meteorologists had seen the wind shift coming and had tried to relay their concerns. But dispatchers were unsure where the Granite Mountain crewmen were—under the confusion of events, they were not answering their radios. Mr. Dickman quotes a weatherman saying at the time: “This is going to get interesting quick. When [the wind] hits the fire, it’ll turn back on itself and blow up.” Thus the sudden inferno.
——————————————————
Yes… Kyle Dickman mentions the weatherman who KNEW it was going to be a ‘sustained wind event’ and a ‘complete wind direction reversal’… but the rest is total bullshit.
Even though Kyle Dickman is ‘playing his own games’ by choosing to NOT mention important ( and critical ) captured radio conversations such as the 4:27 PM YARNELL-GAMBLE quotes from Eric Marsh himself… Dickman does NOT fully support the ‘BLACKOUT’ theory as put forth by the SAIT.
Even Kyle Dickman acknowledges that Arizona Forestry SAIT commission’s story about a 30 minute blackout was a crock of shit.
So where this Yost fellow is coming from with some of HIS own comments about Dickman’s book is a mystery unto itself.
WTKTT & Marti
Went thru the Pictures you posted none of them were the one I was Looking for Thanks.
Also Joy sent a Bunch of Pictures around the Old Tractor I saw no sign in any of them or my lost picture. At this point I guess Ill give up on the Picture I still think it was from the crew and may have been sent to a family member and published from there it got lost in the shuffle.
I checked Wildfire Today thinking it may have been there but no luck.
Any way Line construction is a tedious and hot job weaving in and out of the Rocks on the Yarnell Hill Fire. Most of that line construction would be hard to detect in Grass and some Brush removal.
next to the black from one rock to another with the fire burning on both sides of the line would not show unless some one walked it if they could find it as in so of the after pictures Joy took where they found some line.
Marti— I know it is hard to understand why GM kept working on the Line assignment but it is something that happens all the time you build line towards an objective to tie into another crew or location as long as you are safe your assignment is a peace of the bigger picture.
Not enough resources dose not stop line construction. The one statement from Steed seems to indicate that they had another Hour to get to where ever they were going to tie into.
A predetermined location which I believe means they had built considerable line some where on that mountain. At the point BR said they were not going to make a line tie in that left a large chunk of open line with an active fire burning across the brush field. Open line in that situation is lost line nothing you can do about it so pull back to safe black and wait to see what happens I think that is exactly what Steed did. Had no one asked any thing else from Steed he would have sat right there in the Black as crews have done for many years. They were in the safe black the option they had all day and yet they move for absolutely no reason other than an order as WTKTT says death from above.
Again… thanks for sticking with this thread.
If we never hear again from people still alive who know more about this topic of exactly WHAT Granite Mountain WAS doing up there for upwards of SIX HOURS… ( Like McDonough, Frisby, Brown, Cordes, Mysterious dozer operator, Abel, Musser, etc )…
…I still think it’s important to try and ‘figure it out’ from whatever evidence / testimony IS available.
Example: We know have Sonny backing up some other testimony that the dozer improved that two-track leading away from the old-grader to the northwest… but ONLY as far as that infamous ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign.
Post-fire Google satellite imagery seems to show exactly where the bulldozer STOPPED on that northwest two-track, turned around, and pushed some more line on the way BACK to the old-grader location.
Guess what?
That place where the dozer tracks end, as shown by satellite imagery, is also where the EXISTING COLD BLACK from Saturday afternoon and evening ended.
In other words… if all the testimony is correct and we can trust the Google satellite imagery… then right around the same time that Marsh and Steed were having their face-to-face meeting with Frisby and Brown… the dozer ( with HEQB Cory Ball onboard ) actually DID finish ‘tying in’ that east-west two-track with the cold black.
It was a DONE DEAL… by about 12:30 PM.
If that is the case… then WHY was Granite Mountain staying up there at all past about 12:30 PM when the new Bravo 3 Air Attack ( Warbis and Lenmark ) relieved AA Rory Collins who had to leave to refuel?
If the dozer really already HAD ‘improved’ and ‘connected’ that upper jeep trail / two-track all the way to the COLD BLACK… then what else was there for GM to do?
The two-track leading west from the Sesame Clearing area ( where the GM Supt and Chase ) trucks were parked ) was now ‘dozered’ and ‘improved’ all the way to the old-grader.
From the old-grader… the jeep trail / two track that leads northwest from there was now ALSO totally ‘dozered’ and ‘improved’ all the was to the COLD BLACK.
So by 12:30 PM… everything WAS ‘connected’ all the way back EAST and the DID already have a ‘linebreak’ that could be ‘burned out’ later that afternoon when conditions were favorable for that ( which was the totality of the original plan ).
So why didn’t Granite Mountain COME DOWN in the 12:30 PM timeframe… when there really was already ‘line’ connected all the way to the COLD BLACK?
There was some OTHER TASK that didn’t get finished.
We’re just not sure what that was.
Even Steed said they needed another hour to finish that ‘other task’ ( whatever it was that was keeping them up there )… and in that second round of Aaron Hulburd videos we hear Frisby telling someone in response to a question like “Why didn’t Granite Mountain stay up there?”
Frisby said: “Because they didn’t have to. They didn’t complete the work they were doing.”
What WAS that work, really?
That’s what we’re still trying to nail down because THAT is what made them lose the time they needed to stay alive that afternoon based on the decisions they ended up making.
Followup…
>> I said…
>>
>> Even Steed said they needed another hour to finish that ‘other task’
>> ( whatever it was that was keeping them up there )
There is NO evidence that anyone from Granite Mountain OR Blue Ridge was ever assigned to do even more ‘improving’ of that dozer push from the old-grader off to the northwest and ending at that EXPLOSIVES sign.
Nor would they have needed to.
If you look at that jeep-trail in satellite imagery prior to the fire it looks like one of those deals where a small pickup or light utility vehicle probably COULD have made some forward progress on it ( the USGS TOPO maps had it officially labelled as a ‘Jeep Trail’ )… but the brush would have definitely been scratching the sides of the vehicle.
After the mysterious bulldozer operator and HEQB Cory Ball got finished ‘improving’ that ‘Jeep Trail’ with TWO passes of the dozer with that 12 foot fixed blade ( one push going OUT to the EXPLOSIVES sign and the COLD BLACK, and one push coming BACK to the old-grader again )… it was wide enough for two cars to pass at the same time.
And this ‘dozer push’ and ‘improvement’ of that ‘Jeep Trail’ to that two-blade width ( 24 feet ) is clearly visible in the post-fire Satellite imagery.
So that ‘improved Jeep Trail’ that actually connected all the way to the COLD BLACK didn’t really need any additional ‘improvements’… and there is no evidence Granite Mountain even went up there to do that.
Granite Mountain stayed down there to the south all afternoon near where the fire started.
Whether they thought they were going to tie some OTHER piece of line into some OTHER part of one of those two-tracks out there is what remains a mystery.
My first thought was they GM needed to build hand line to the Dozer line cold black or not line needs to be built to call containment.
The other could be some mop up and secure the anchor point.
More research I guess
Actually… the existing hard evidence ( photos of cuttings and obvious ground scraping ) just seems to indicated your SECOND thought…. that GM was primarily ( and only? ) concerened with ‘securing the anchor’.
It’s actually only the testimony we are getting from one of the unredacted parts of Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown’s Unit Log that indicates Steed was TRYING to TIE all that ground scraping up there INTO something else… like some point on one of the other two-tracks.
Steed thought they needed another HOUR to do that… but we really still don’t know exactly WHAT he was talking about.
It’s looking very much now like Jesse Steed could NOT have been talking about continuing that line work NORTH to “tie in” to that dozer push on the Jeep Trail that led northwest away from the old-grader.
Post-fire satellite imagery indicates that that particular ‘dozer push’ went all the way to the COLD BLACK already… and that part of the ‘line work’ connecting back to the EAST was already done sometime around 12:30 PM or 1:00 PM.
Brendan McDonough was asked by ADOSH investigators if he could SEE the men clearly from his lookout mound for the (quote) “rest of the afternoon”.
McDonough confirmed that he COULD ( actually SEE them all day ).
But neither the SAIT nor the ADOSH investigators ever really took the time to ask Brendan EXACTLY what Granite Mountain was DOING for those THREE hours that Brendan spent ‘watching’ them from his lookout mound ( 12:40 PM to 3:40 PM ).
And, remember, ironically even that double-wide dozer line didn’t stop the fire.
Once the FORECASTED thunderstorm-induced wind changes happened.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 25, 2015 at 12:38 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> And, remember, ironically even that double-wide dozer line
>> didn’t stop the fire.
No. It did NOT.
But I actually don’t think anyone working for Arizona Forestry that day ever had the slightest idea that it might.
AFAWK ( As Far As We Know ) the ONLY purpose for all that ‘dozer pushing’ and ‘line building’ out in that bowl was simply to prepare for some kind of massive two-plus mile BURNOUT along those two-tracks and dozer pushes.
It was only this supposed BURNOUT ( later on Sunday evening ) that stood a chance in hell of creating enough ‘firebreak’ to protect anything at all.
That seems to have been the understanding(s) out there all over that south side of the fire on Sunday.
Even SPGS1 Gary Cordes and BR Supt Brian Frisby didn’t think all that ‘Cutover Trail’ dozer pushing and line work ( which is what the FFs in Harper Canyon who almost died were doing ) was going to, in and of itself, do jack shit.
Even all THAT ‘line work’ was accepted in everyone’s minds as just prepartation for a burnout if their (quote) “hand was forced”.
Captain Darby Starr ( who has since been offered and has accepted an award for helping to save the lives of the other FFs in Harper Canyon ) himself says that he thought about ‘lighting it up’ as they were all running for their lives from Harper Canyon… but then thought better of it.
So it was all about BURNOUTS… and LATER in the day.
But don’t forget ( as well ) that even the moment Warbis and Lenmark showed up in ‘Bravo 3’ and took over Air Attack duties from Rory Collins circa NOON… the moment they flew around and ‘evaluated’ the fire they said they noticed all of the following on the SOUTH side of the fire.
1. The Type 1 IHC Crew Granite Mountain was ( their words ) “out of the game already”.
They were building too little line too far away from anything to make a damn bit of difference that day. What they could even see them doing seemed to be so pointless that Warbis and Lenmark were convinced ( as early as 12:30 PM ) that Granite Mountain must be just ‘staged’ out there and waiting to be told to come down or be given another assignment.
2. The other IHC Crew on the South Side of the fire ( Blue Ridge Hothshots ) were not even TYING to do anything. Zero. Zip. Nada.
They were all just standing around by their Crew Carriers. Warbis and Lenmark told ADOSH their only impression of Blue Ridge was that they (quote) “needed to either engage the fire or get out of there”.
Whoops. Typo above.
I left an ‘R’ out of that word in the last paragraph.
Should have been ‘TRYING’ and not just ‘TYING’… and with all the talk in this thread about “tying into things” I just wanted to be sure and make that distinction clear.
Last paragraph above should have read…
2. The other IHC Crew on the South Side of the fire ( Blue Ridge Hothshots ) were not even TRYING to do anything. Zero. Zip. Nada.
They were all just standing around by their Crew Carriers. Warbis and Lenmark told ADOSH their only impression of Blue Ridge was that they (quote) “needed to either engage the fire or get out of there”.
Thanks Bob!
I understand what you are saying.
Hpwever, the question I am ASKING is…….
WHY, if that was the big important thing for the hotshots to be doing that day, because that’s what they’re so good at doing……
……wasn’t Blue Ridge (who was being paid, also for, I would assume, doing what hotshots are so good at doing) helping build that line, also, rather than hanging out with their buggies all day?????
THAT’s what I DON’T GET.
Blue Ridge was evidently given another assignment with the Cat line.
Your guess is as good as mine as to why. This entire team really had no clew how to attack this fire where to best utilize their resources or hat the hell they were able to do to protect the communities. They did not have the resources to do what they planed to do and the whole thing caved in on them and the SAIT failed to acknowledge that and lay a lot of blame on the entire team and IC.
Was the hand line necessary—Yes
would BR crew have made any difference NO
The fire was out preforming the fire fighting resources and way ahead of the teams plan for the day. To much wind to much open line and to much unburned fuel between the lines and the fire. when they lost it Saturday night they were in a try and catch it mode and never had a chance. Urban interface just compounded the problem along with the lack of difensiable space.
Dose that help As we have said here it is a wonder more did not die on this FIRE Fire Fighters and The public both.
.
That pretty much says it all. It wasn’t just your run-of-the-mill FAIL on the part of management. It was an EXTRAORDINARY fail that even actually ended up a classic example of “Death from Above”.
Don’t forget that even without the ( expected ) wind reversal that day… Arizona Forestry management employees have acknowledged in their ADOSH interviews that the first would have marched right into Peeples Valley that day.
Nothing they were doing on the north side of the fire actually made any difference either.
Once Arizona Forestry’s initial attack failed miserably on Saturday… the future was set.
With those conditions and that much volatile fuel available… once that puppy came down off that ridge that entire area was a bowling alley with Peeples Valley the ‘stacked pins’ at the end of the lane.
It was ONLY the (predicted) wind shift that turned the ‘bowling ball’ around and now the bowling pins were Yarnell and Glen Ilah at the other end of the bowling lane.
One other point about Blue Ridge, though.
According to testimony… the only reason the entire Crew ‘gaggled up’ there where they were staged at the Yarnell Fire Station and headed out to the same clearing where the GM Crew Carriers were already staged is because Forces needed to be relieved as acting HEQB on the dozer.
Cordes relayed this ‘need’ to get off the dozer and get back to town to OPS1 Abel. Abel was somehow already aware that BR Hotshots had at least one person onboard who was HEQB qualified… so that’s when OPS1 Todd Abel called Blue Ridge at exactly 10:00 AM and told them to get that HEQB out to the dozer to relieve Gary Cordes.
There is little evidence that this 10:00 AM order from OPS1 Abel to Blue Ridge was any kind of full work assignment for all of Blue Ridge. All Todd Abel was trying to do at 10:00 AM was solve the dozer HEQB problem and allow SPGS1 Cordes to get out of the boondocks and back to town.
All that had to happen at 10:00 AM was for Frisby and Brown to unload their UTV and drive Cory Ball out to the dozer.
There was no need for Frisby to send all of Blue Ridge out there at that time. No one had anything they even WANTED them to be doing at that point ( 10:00 AM ).
Blue Ridge could have just remained staged at the Yarnell Fire Station all day until later in the afternoon when Cordes tried that desperation move with the Cutover Trail and the work in Harper Canyon.
Someone from here recently wanted to spend time with the hikers or hike or go over some stuff-
Public Notification.
We are no longer the hikers or in one another’s space.
It is just Tex Harold Eldon GIlligan (Sonny) and Joy A. Collura; two individuals that use to trail together.
Joy is tied to Congress for the mean time to get the explosive sign photo for WWTKTT…it has to be somewere in archives if not before or after fire…I will locate it.
If you need Sonny- he rarely goes online and best to catch him at po box 42 yarnell az 85362 for now—never know what state he will end up in—he has no phone and never goes to email much anymore. Yet his email is [email protected].
As for me; catch me here or in Congress on my desert hikes staying clear of the horrible nightmare of the Weaver Mountains. In a few days my phone time will run out.
Now, I will spend time lloking for that photo so be on later WWTKTT.
I am making it campfire night on Investigative Media tonight…
my internet is acting up on desk but I can take pic of the photos I think you may be interested in and email Bob and Marti in a bit with the cell photos I take via cell phone email area and maybe they can get it to you some way—
I think WWTKTT will be interested in the photos-
it has death, it shows the old grader road, and old grader and the path above it
still trying to find the explosive sign—
I lost alot of data last June 2014 on another’s behavior moment so I may have it still and may not—
keep looking,
Campfire Night with you WWTKTT…smiles
why you get photo 283
2 firefighter community men are on ridge top
278- a firefighter on top of mountain
275- a firefighter sitting near flames
274- a firefighter sitting near flames
268- right of the flames a firefighter-
I was there.
I can tell you Marsh who we met was by himself throughout that day but not always
233- Eric Marsh
232- best pic of old grader road from above to see Donut’s lookout—
I love photo 182 panaromic because it shows safety zone and fire
173 is next to saddle right above the box canyon- view of fire.
2 men on top of mountain- photo 134
As I am trying to locate photos—-
I do keep hearing the Lord’s prayer in my head and images of the men flashing including Donut.
I keep seeing the dirt clearing/parking lot where the buggies were parked and someone bothering the other men with girlfriend concerns—I wish Donut would talk to confirm as I went around that curve base to head to the 2 track. Please Donut speak up. Please Donut mention the radio equipment too. Who was the radio operators those final hours? both male or female? Is there a link to it in SAIT? or OSHA?
I want to know before I die the way we went in…is that the way the radio dispatcher thought the GMHS were taking their route to Helms and the men went down different path than what the people on the radio thought? Was the route I went in the missing link? who on the radios wore grey rimmed glasses grey hair male in a radio room? I wish that person would say “Me, Joy.”…I am not in this for accountability but if there is these rumors—squash them….omission though is not helping…
photo 157- that is Gordon Acri’s place in which they labelled in news Disneyland—???
photo of 380 shows the Congress subdivision view of fire where embers and ash fell there over ten miles away that 6-30-13 evening
I was THERE that weekend even at the fire line. I too am working through what some label trauma of that weekend—and if this is how I do it—I do not do it to interupt another’s grieving process…I too grieve. I should be respected my grieving process as well; it is not one-sided. I am not on IM to make conflicts but reach public clarity. This is my own experience of the fire and I need to work through it. This website has harmed me for my openness and emotional moments but more so HELPED me through the process. Thank you John Dougherty and everyone here.
Joy.. I am unable to make any sense out of the photo NUMBERS you have posted in all the messages above. I’m not sure what online FOLDER these photos are supposed to be found in.
With regards to the PANORAMA shot…
>> On May 24, 2015 at 6:30 pm, Joy A. Collura said…
>> I love photo 182 panaromic because it shows safety zone and fire
I don’t know what you mean by ‘photo 182’.
Here is that PANORAMA shot I was talking about below in your Google folder…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737936912483938?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737936912483938&oid=112068160404980104272
This photo is actually sequential number 543 of 998 photos in that folder.
If you go to ‘download’ this panorama… the Google site says it has
the following filename…
“files (825).JPG”
The number ‘182’ is nowhere to be found in any of these links/filenames.
Can you post at least one full (clickable) LINK to any of the photos you are referencing up above so I can see what online FOLDER you are talking about?
Joy’s photo numbers/descriptions aren’t making any sense to me either.
“Joy A. Collura says
MAY 24, 2015 AT 6:23 PM
232- best pic of old grader road from above to see Donut’s lookout—”
She has two photos of the old grader that I have seen/downloaded.
The photo of the old grader before the burnover is “files (554).jpg.”
The photo of the old grader after the fire is “files (211).jpg.”
And I have no idea what she is describing regarding the firefighters next to the fire.
She may be describing photos she emailed. I haven’t looked at my email today, because I’m having to download video courses related to my photography, and having email open will kill my already somewhat limited bandwidth. Will check that out later.
very quick- I am in my garage looking for some assets to sell to meet an annual quota but real quick to answer you…my desktop last night was acting funny on top of out of bandwidth so I took my cell and took photos of me looking through pictures on my laptop & sent to Bob/Marti and again I will retry but this week I have to list some items on craigslist as my main focus and when out of someone else’s bandwidth than I will look again at the photos and when I see ANY photo I think you WWTKTT may be interested being I do not have your email I will at least email Bob & Marti them and they can say nah or yeah to you on here or private—sound oK? Oh and does anyone know how bonds work? I found one that is a 30 yr one to me and it is from 98’…do I have to wait the thirty or can I cash it in now? Just curious…real near to meeting my private need but if anything Spring cleaned the garage. Hee hee.
good night.
Joy, Gotcha and Thanks!
I’ll look at the email tomorrow. (Still downloading and streaming class videos).
Namaste!
And, yeah, we’ve been selling stuff on Ebay and Craig’s List, so I totally know how THAT goes!
So I’m guessing the photo numbers she’s citing are the ones on the photos in her email.
I’m about to go look at them in LIghtroom.
I may, most likely, be able to make sense of them there. But I may not get to writing anything about them until tomorrow.
**
** THE ACTUAL POINT WHERE THE DOZER STOPPED CLEARING THE TWO-TRACK
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on May 22, 2015 at 12:10 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> WTKTT said…
>> Even as much as this ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign has been mentioned in the investigation
>> reports themselves and in other media articles… I don’t recall ever seeing
>> a PICTURE of it.
>>
.>> Joy replied…
>> YOU WOULD THINK IF MENTIONED IN A REPORT THEY WOULD OF DURING
>> INVESTIGATION TOOK A PHOTO OF THE SIGN FOR PHYSICAL DOCUMENT
>> OF A STATEMENT.
>>
>> WTKTT said…
>> Wherever this EXPLOSIVES sign was ( I’m still hoping you can
>> describe EXACTLY where it was out there )
>>
>> Joy replied…
>> YOU BET. AT THE OLD GRADER; HEAD UP THE MOUNTAIN WHERE THE
>> BULLDOZER MADE ITS SHORT DISTANCE ROAD AND WHERE THE
>> BULLDOZER TRACKS STOPPED IS WHERE THE SIGN IS…
According to Google Maps post-fire satellite imagery… that two-track which heads away from the old-grader to the northwest… and terminates at that old abandoned MINE has ‘bulldozer tracks’ extending quite some distance away from the old-grader.
Satellite imagery shows that the ‘bulldozer tracks’ stopped right about here…
Latitude: 34.233286
Longitude: -112.787277
34.233286, -112.787277
That point is exactly THIS FAR ( more than 1/4 mile ) to the northwest from the old-grader itself…
1,419 feet.
473 yards.
0.27 mile(s).
Do me a favor and click the following link.
What SHOULD happen is that you should be taken directly to a Google Maps Satellite view that has a ‘red balloon pin’ showing on it at the exact point where the satellite imagery seems to indicate the ‘bulldozer tracks’ have ‘stopped’.
I don’t see anything resembling a SIGN at that location ( no shadows on the road from any signage, either )… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Since there has never been an actual public picture of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign… I have no idea what I’m even trying to find in the satellite imagery.
So… is THIS where this this ‘WARNING: EXPLOSIVES’ sign actually is?…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
>> WTK also asked…
>> Was it a WOODEN sign?
>>
>> Joy responded…
>> NO
>>
>> WTKTT also asked…
>> and did it ‘burn up’ in the fire itself?
>>
>> Joy responded…
>> NO. STILL THERE YET CARNATION CANS IN THE AREA THE LEAD
>> BURNED OUT FROM BOTTOM OF THE CANS.
Well… if it wasn’t a WOOD sign and it didn’t burn up in the fire ( even though the fire
was hot enough to melt the lead right out of those other cans )… I’m assuming it must
have been a metal sign but up off the ground.
Do you actually SEE the SHADOW of it anywhere along that two-track there in that Google Maps image at the link I just posted above?
WantsToKnowTheTruth says
May 23, 2015 at 10:56 pm
>>
.>> Joy replied…
>> YOU WOULD THINK IF MENTIONED IN A REPORT THEY WOULD OF DURING
>> INVESTIGATION TOOK A PHOTO OF THE SIGN FOR PHYSICAL DOCUMENT
>> OF A STATEMENT.
((((Somewhere I may still have it from an earlier hike in June 2013 before the fire but if I see any photo I think you maybe interested in…I will send it to Marti and Bob because desktop is not working good.)))))
>>
>> WTKTT said…
>> Wherever this EXPLOSIVES sign was ( I’m still hoping you can
>> describe EXACTLY where it was out there )
(((I had it on my garmin and if you can go to the bluff of Lovelock NV and get my backpack Sonny had on him…my laptop and my important medical papers and etc…camera…cell…etc than maybe I could get off the garmin the gps coordinates because I had it all on there….lost alot of important things last June 2014…especially Yarnell Fire data—and I won’t hike out on the Weavers ever again—the joy was ripped from me to ever do that area…it may of once been my solitude area the Weavers but the bs around it all and not properly assessing a fire I eye-witnessed and people telling me just move forward…nah, someone else can get the gps for you all on that))))
>>
>> Joy replied…
>> YOU BET. AT THE OLD GRADER; HEAD UP THE MOUNTAIN WHERE THE
>> BULLDOZER MADE ITS SHORT DISTANCE ROAD AND WHERE THE
>> BULLDOZER TRACKS STOPPED IS WHERE THE SIGN IS…
According to Google Maps post-fire satellite imagery… that two-track which heads away from the old-grader to the northwest… and terminates at that old abandoned MINE has ‘bulldozer tracks’ extending quite some distance away from the old-grader.
Satellite imagery shows that the ‘bulldozer tracks’ stopped right about here…
Latitude: 34.233286
Longitude: -112.787277
34.233286, -112.787277
That point is exactly THIS FAR ( more than 1/4 mile ) to the northwest from the old-grader itself…
1,419 feet.
473 yards.
0.27 mile(s).
Do me a favor and click the following link.((((Unable to click on it tonight…try another time)))))
What SHOULD happen is that you should be taken directly to a Google Maps Satellite view that has a ‘red balloon pin’ showing on it at the exact point where the satellite imagery seems to indicate the ‘bulldozer tracks’ have ‘stopped’.
I don’t see anything resembling a SIGN at that location ( no shadows on the road from any signage, either )… but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Since there has never been an actual public picture of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign… I have no idea what I’m even trying to find in the satellite imagery.
So… is THIS where this this ‘WARNING: EXPLOSIVES’ sign actually is?…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
>> WTK also asked…
>> Was it a WOODEN sign?
>>
>> Joy responded…
>> NO
>>
>> WTKTT also asked…
>> and did it ‘burn up’ in the fire itself?
>>
>> Joy responded…
>> NO. STILL THERE YET CARNATION CANS IN THE AREA THE LEAD
>> BURNED OUT FROM BOTTOM OF THE CANS.
Well… if it wasn’t a WOOD sign and it didn’t burn up in the fire ( even though the fire
was hot enough to melt the lead right out of those other cans )… I’m assuming it must
have been a metal sign but up off the ground. ((((YOU BET))))
Do you actually SEE the SHADOW of it anywhere along that two-track there in that Google Maps image at the link I just posted above? (((TRY LATER)))
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on May 24, 2015 at 10:02 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> Unable to click on it tonight…try another time.
Okay. Thank you. If that link above is not working for you don’t forget that you can also just cut-and-paste the latitude and longitude coordinates themselves into the Google Maps address bar.
You SHOULD be able to just click the following link in any Browser ( even Mobile Smartphone browsers )…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2759.8%22N+112%C2%B047%2714.2%22W/@34.233286,-112.787277,17z/data=!3m1!1e3
But if that link isn’t working for some reason.. then here are just the latitude/longitude coordinates for that spot on the two-track the leads away from the dozer where the bulldozing seems to abruptly STOP…
Latitude: 34.233286
Longitude: -112.787277
34.233286, -112.787277
You should also be able to just cut-and-paste the line directly above this one ( including the comma ) into the Google Maps search input field… then press ENTER, and you will see that RED balloon marking the spot on the jeep-trail where the bulldozer tracks end. You may have to still click ‘Satellite’ mode after pressing ENTER to see the actual ground imagery.
That point is exactly THIS FAR ( more than 1/4 mile ) to the northwest from the old-grader itself…
1,419 feet.
473 yards.
0.27 mile(s).
Even if no actual PICTURE of this infamous EXPLOSIVES sign emerges… I would still be interested in someone ( anyone ) just verifying exactly where that sign WAS out there.
That is actually even more important to know than what this infamous ‘sign’ actually said or looked like.
Well I am back—Looks like some great comment and pictures.
To Marti and WTKTT——You covered and said a lot so will try to add some info for you.
Yes the first 24 to 48 hours of a fire can get really screwed up when its doing what it wants and you are in catch up mode. That’s when every one needs to be extra safe, near the black, post look outs and have really tight escape plans and close safety zones—#1 THE BLACK.
Yes to both of you the crew and the plan could not be accomplished that shift or even in 16 hours not enough resources I have and so have others said that over and over Chains of line to be accomplished that day were over whelming and weren’t going to happen. Work until you decide the fire has gone to hell which Steed did and move up into the Black.
So why was GM building line? Because that was there assignment. Because to control fires that is what you have to do. They were the only ones on direct line BLACK that day. We have all been there and the reason we would all not be concerned with that assignment was the line had to be build and tied in. The one thing that GM forgot was to stay in the black if the fire was lost that is where you go they had that option all day. When the rest of the fire went to hell they did not even have to run walk into the black and you a re safe no one else really had that #1 OPTION.
I went to the Rattle Snake Memorial and walked out to where the crosses stand in the middle of a Chaparral brush field on the side of that mountain the brush was only 6 to 7 Ft high compared to
1953 and 8 the 12 foot high. It was so thick no one could have moved very far and escaped that fire
just as GM moving was slowed. So I will say again 99% of fire fighters would have NEVER gone down that canyon one and a half miles to that Ranch it was the worst choice in the world no matter what the reason. No matter what the supervisors on the fire decided or wanted. The GM crew was safe the BLACK was and still is the only option leaving that was putting your life and your crew at risk.
If the fire had stayed inactive then the line would eventually all get connected. I have built line and lost line and built line again that is wild land fire suppression at its most basic. It takes time to get enough forces to build line and stop a fire just because you do not have enough hand crews dose not mean you stand and watch it burn you start a plan and change it daily.
You still gotta build line you still gotta contain and control the fire. Its a day to day and some times an hour to hour thing each shift brings you closer to control.
Your message is consistent… and ‘loud and clear’.
They screwed up. Big Time.
They went ‘off the reservation’ as far as what most other WFFs would even think of doing in a similar situation and under similar circumstances… and they paid for that mistake with their lives.
And this time I am actually using the generic ‘they’… meaning ALL of them.
What you are saying above is supposed to be the COMMON knowledge of ALL WFF’s, correct?
So it wasn’t just that Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed were deciding to go ‘off the reservation’ that day.
There should have been some “Slow down, sparky” moments coming from all the Squad Leaders and the scrape itself.
This was a BAD DECISION… and there should have more PUSH BACK from EVERYONE.
Lesson Learned: Always watch out for “Death from Above”. PUSH BACK against questionable decisions. STAY ALIVE out there!
The following photo emerged in the sequence below and it occurred to me that THIS might have been the photo you were thinking of somewhere down below when you and I were initially discussing this “What was Granite Mountain REALLY doing” topic.
I’m talking about THIS photo ( of Joy’s )…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732755684775826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732755684775826&oid=112068160404980104272
This is actually NOT a photo of GM doing any ‘line building’.
Joy corrected me on that down below… and rightly so.
There IS one GM Hotshot using his Pulaski there in the center of the road to ‘scrape’ something… but one Hotshot using his Pulaski does not ‘line building’ make.
They ( GM ) most certainly did not CREATE this ‘scrape’ we see them sitting / standing on.
That ‘road’ is nothing more than a section of the high-ridge two-track just several hundred feet south of what would become the ‘final rest spot’ where MacKenzie would take his photos and videos later that day.
It appears as if this picture was taken pretty early in the morning and right after Steed / Crew had ARRIVED up there on the two-track.
The men who are ‘sitting’ might simply be taking a first-break after that long hike up from where the GM Carriers had been parked… and the red helmet FF ( presumed to be Jesse Steed ) is only now checking out the situation there near the edge of the existing black and he is ‘pointing’ to some of the ‘hot spots’ seen in other photos that were already burning along on the edge of the line.
In other words… this photo appears to be capturing them both resting after their hike AND beginning to make those decisions to try some ‘indirect burnouts’ up there that morning before trying anything else.
Is this the photo you were thinking of about a week ago?
WTKTT First the picture you reference I believe was the crew using the 2 Track to improve and burn out from which would have been in the morning the smoke we are looking at may have been their first burn out as you can see some retardant.
When this one got dropped on then they went to direct line which was way more time consuming.
The picture I am trying to find is looking North I believe and along the burn a good 3 ft wide dirt line that one of the crew took and was posted very early on.
The reason I remember it was I mentally noted it was very good line just under the burn and could have been 300 to 600 Ft. There was no smoke on it and no crew..
I think the picture above may have been where they were building the Anchor line to the Fire. Using the 2 track as a starting point. Still just a guess.
Again you are putting a lot of push back on the crew I do not believe the crew was run that way. Note McDonough’s statements about not questioning the Bosses or calling them except to let them know where he was. This crew had 2 leaders and they did not question them. That is the Lesson learned.
Also they had good safety reference with the 10 and 18 to say this is unsafe lets talk it over? Some crews are so tightly controlled that they do what they are told
even if they have warning bells going off in their head.
Again it is also reflective of bad decisions with good out comes. the bosses are always right and we do not question there decisions.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 23, 2015 at 10:33 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT First the picture you reference I believe was the crew
>> using the 2 Track to improve and burn out from which would
>> have been in the morning
That’s correct. As I said… this picture seems to have been taken just shortly after Steed and the Crew ARRIVED in that area up on the high-ridge two-track and Steed was allowing some of the crew to ‘rest up’ from the hike itself while he evaluated the situation.
That would have been around 9:00 AM… and the retardant drops onto their indirect burns didn’t come until 11:36 and 11:45 AM ( according to the SAIR ).
That’s just 10 minutes before Frisby and Brown would arrive for that first face-to-face at 11:55 AM. The timing there is so close that we still don’t know if Marsh requested the face-to-face BEFORE or AFTER AA Rory Collins dumped retardant all over GM’s indirect burnouts.
From page 18 of the SAIR…
————————————————————————–
As the Granite Mountain IHC continues its burnout, DIVS A and Air Attack discuss options. Air Attack directs two SEAT drops at 1136 and 1145 directly onto the burnout. DIVS A is frustrated. This is not what he wanted but he has Granite Mountain IHC shift tactics and go direct along the fire’s edge.
—————————————————————————–
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> the smoke we are looking at may have been their first burn
>> out as you can see some retardant.
Perhaps… but it’s actually not likely any of that retardant in these photos we are talking about now had anything to do with those Sunday drops.
In addition to the fact that the photo above seems to have been taken about 2 hours BEFORE all that happened… look at page 14 of the original SAIR report and the photograph on that page.
It was what the fire looked like at 1924 ( 7:24 PM ) the night before ( Saturday night ) just shortly before dark and everyone was about to just ‘give up’ on fighting it for the day.
It clearly shows that all that retardant right there around the edge of that black as seen in Joy’s photo links below was ALREADY THERE in that area and along the edge of that black… even as early as 7:24 PM on Saturday night.
In that photograph on page 14 of the SAIR report… Brendan’s lookout mound and the old grader are seen on the right-side-center edge of the photo.
The place on the two-track where we see Steed standing and ‘pointing’ in the photo linked to above is pretty much at the bottom-center of the photo
on page 14 of the SAIR.
Also… Christopher MacKenzie’s CANON camera image named IMG_0882 has always been an actual photo of the 11:45 SEAT drop onto their direct burnouts. It shows the retardant falling on that EAST half of the edge of the black and that NOTCHED ROCK is also clearly visible in this MacKenzie photo.
That puts the first intentional SEAT drop onto GM’s burnouts ( at the direction of AA Rory Collins ) at least 2 hours after this photo of Steed and the other standing up on the two-track.
That actual photograph that Christopher MacKenzie took of Rober Caldwell actually performing at least one of these ‘manual burnots’ ( with his torch lit and his sleeves rolled up ) wasn’t taken until 10:45 AM.
So if we see them ‘resting’ up there on that high-ridge two-track circa 9:00 AM and shortly after they arrived… and then the MacKenzie photo of Caldwell doesn’t show them ‘burning out’ until 10:45 AM…
…then we actually now have another mystery.
What were they doing for they 1 hour and 45 minutes between 9:00 AM and 10:45 AM?
Brendan says he worked with a ‘squad’ over on the west side for a while… but what about the other ‘squad’? What were THEY doing between 9:00 AM and 10:45?
I’m not sure we know. Brendan didn’t know because he was with the other squad that went to do mop-up on the WEST side.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> When this one got dropped on then they went to direct line
>> which was way more time consuming.
Yes… but if we are to believe the SAIR and the 11:36 and 11:45 AM times for the SEAT drops onto their indirect burnouts… then just 10 minutes later was the start of the 30 minute long face-to-face with Frisby and Brown… then that all means they couldn’t have even really started ‘going direct’ unto around 12:25 PM, after the face-to-face and just around the time Brendan was being dropped off at his lookout mound.
It would have now been 12:30 PM… and that only leaves 180 minutes ( 3 hours ) for ANY kind of ‘direct line work’ before the 3:30 PM ‘tools up’ out there.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The picture I am trying to find is looking North I believe and along
>> the burn a good 3 ft wide dirt line that one of the crew took and
>> was posted very early on.
Posted by who? I’m sorry… but I’m not ( myself, anyway ) recalling such a picture. This one from Joy of Steed and the other GM Hotshots just ‘resting’ on that two-track road is the closest my memory is getting to what you are saying you have seen.
You already posted direct links to the various MacKenzie photos ( taken starting at 10:45 AM ) of Robert Caldwell operating his lit drip torch… but I don’t see any obvious ‘line work’ in those ‘crew photos’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The reason I remember it was I mentally noted it was very
>> good line just under the burn and could have been 300 to 600 Ft.
>> There was no smoke on it and no crew..
I’m still not recalling the photo. If there was ( as you say ) no smoke and no crew… I would say it is likely it was NOT one of Christopher MacKenzie’s photos from Sunday. Sounds more like an ADOSH photo or one of Joy’s photos.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I think the picture above may have been where they were building
>> the Anchor line to the Fire. Using the 2 track as a starting point.
>> Still just a guess.
Yes. I think we can assume that was the case.
What we still do NOT know is WHERE they thought any of this work
was supposed to ‘tie in’ to anything.
Sonny is now suggesting ( actually, he says it was obvious ) that this ‘line work’ along the edge of that existing black was supposed to ‘tie in’ to the dozer work that was done on two-track that heads northwest away from the old-grader… but that the distance was too great for that to have been feasible during that work cycle.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Again you are putting a lot of push back on the crew I do not
>> believe the crew was run that way. Note McDonough’s statements
>> about not questioning the Bosses or calling them except to let
>> them know where he was. This crew had 2 leaders and they did
>> not question them. That is the Lesson learned.
That is not actually a “Lesson Learned’. That simply seems to be a ‘fact’ with regards to how THIS crew was run and managed.
The “Lesson Learned” I was speaking of would be more along the lines of being able to recognize that this management approach can be unhealthy and dangerous. In this case… it got people killed.
So somewhere the industry has to decide what is acceptable ‘loyalty’ and ‘obedience’ and when all of that can get ‘unhealthy’ and ‘dangerous’.
There IS such a thing as too much emphasis on ‘obedience’ and ‘discipline’ even in a civil job that tries to pretend to be the military… when it most certainly is NOT the military.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Also they had good safety reference with the 10 and 18 to say
>> this is unsafe lets talk it over? Some crews are so tightly
>> controlled that they do what they are told even if they have
>> warning bells going off in their head.
Then that is more the “Lesson Learned” I was speaking of.
If there ARE crews behaving just like Granite Mountain… then it is time for a “reality check” in the WFF industry before these kinds of obvious correctable “human factors” get more innocent kids killed.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Again it is also reflective of bad decisions with good out comes.
>> the bosses are always right and we do not question there decisions.
Obviously the bosses are NOT ‘always right’.
Sometimes they are so ‘not right’ they KILL people.
One of the keys to making sure something like this doesn’t happen again is to make SURE that all members of every crew understand the “Death from Above” concept and how it is their RESPONSIBILITY to SPEAK UP when they, themselves, have serious doubts about their own safety.
Again…
Better to be live hillbilly than a dead smart guy.
Followup…
The TIME of about 9:00 AM for when Steed and the Crew actually arrived up on the high-ridge two-track that morning actually comes from testimony from former Yarnell Fire Chief Peter Andersen.
He is the one who was SURE he didn’t see the Granite Mountain Crew Carriers passing by his house on Lakewood Drive in Glen Ilah until 8:03 AM that Sunday morning. It would have taken another 5-10 minutes for the GM Carriers to park and then at least 45 minutes for all 19 men to ‘gear up’ and then hike all the way WEST to arrive up on the two-track around 9:00 AM ( or even 9:15 AM ).
The SAIR report itself never actually bothered to put a definite TIME on when Granite Mountain actually arrived up on that high-ridge two-track that morning.
InvestigativeMEDIA article…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-investigation-ignored-major-mistakes-by-the-state/
————————————————————–
Former Yarnell Fire Chief Peter Andersen sat under a tree in his front yard having his morning coffee on Sunday, June 30, when the Granite Mountain Hotshots drove past his Glen Ilah home.
“At 8:03, [their] two buggies went by,” Andersen says. “Right after they went by, the leaves started to blow. I shook my head. [The state] didn’t listen to me.”
Andersen, who resigned as Yarnell chief in 2011 after 12 years of service, was aggravated because he had warned an Arizona Forestry Division fire manager the night before that it was crucial to attack the steadily expanding fire in the hills above Yarnell at dawn, before prevailing southwesterly winds picked up about 8 in the morning.
————————————————————–
WTNTT—-Got you about the Drop time so old retardant from Saturday.
On tying into the Cat line that would mean indirect line with a lot of fuel between the line and the fire edge That would be a major NO.
If they could not BURN OUT they had to go direct or the line would not hold.
Back to the picture I am trying to find. It may have been inserted in one of the many news articles. and I believe it was a cell phone picture.
from one of the crew that was sent to family but I could be wrong here too. It is not in any of the SAIT or ADOSH photo files. There were some other pictures that came out early on that were not McKenzie’s but some of the crews.
As some one that always checked line as a Division Boss I was interested in this photo and studied it a little and recall it was good line construction I am sure it was way back in the 2013 period most at that time would not have been interested in it as there was no fire or excitement just a big piece of fire line. It was hand line and was not any part of a 2 track.
Had they been able to use the 2 track and burn out they could have got a lot of line in and any place the fire sloped over the 2 tract they could go direct and tie back to the 2 tract.
Not being able to do that it was go direct or screw around which we seem to be following back on. I am stumped as well.
Following should have been falling back on—-
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 24, 2015 at 8:02 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Got you about the Drop time so old retardant
>> from Saturday.
Yes… at least for the photos ( Joy’s photos ) that are currently under discussion. The SEAT drops onto GM’s indirect burnouts didn’t happen until 11:36 and 11:45 AM, respectively, and the 11:45 AM one is absolutely verified with that photo of Christopher MacKenzie’s showing that second retardant drop still actually falling from the sky there in the NOTCHED ROCK work area.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> On tying into the Cat line that would mean indirect
>> line with a lot of fuel between the line and the fire
>> edge That would be a major NO.
Well… this is one of the things that continues to confuse me.
If the actual PLAN was to simply do a ‘protective burnout’ much later in the evening on June 30, 2013… when the winds had died down and/or were completely favorable ( as in… blowing AWAY from Yarnell and Glen Ilah )… then wouldn’t this sort of ‘indirect line’ connecting things together have been AOK and ‘acceptable’ as ‘part of the plan for later’?
I mean… a controlled burn is supposed to be just that, right?
CONTROLLED.
If they were planning on actually lighting up that entire ( almost two mile ) east-to-west line all the way from the Sesame Clearing area, past the old-grader, and then on up to the ‘line work’ that GM had been doing up at the anchor point…
….then whenever they actually started executing that ‘burnout’ there would have to have been all kinds of resources in place to catch all the possible ‘slop overs’, right?
To execute a 2 mile burn like that WITHOUT having all the right resources in place ( Like Type 6 engines that could cruise the two-track and attack slopovers ) would have been pretty insane, yes?
As close as that line really WAS to Yarnell and Glen Ilah… any bad slopover and we could be hear talking about how all that damage obviously came from Arizona Forestry’s OWN botched ‘line burnout’ on Sunday evening.
I guess the ONLY way we can REALLY be sure what some of GM’s actions and intentions were up there that day is to one day hear testimony from Blue Ridge Hotshots Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown about the FULL CONTENT of that 30 minute face-to-face meeting with Marsh and Steed.
Arizona Forestry still wants us to believe the men talked for 30 minutes about no more than bad briefings, tone problems on the radios, whether BR could spare any cubies and Gatorade, and would they run Brendan down the hill.
There HAD to be a part of that face-to-face conversation where they Superintendent and Captain of 1 Type 1 IHC were telling the Superintendent and Captain of a second Type 1 IHC exactly what THEY were going to be doing, and WHY, and how the other Type 1 IHC could support that work ( or not ).
I would believe that Brendan McDonough might not have heard any of the actual real ‘planning’ for the work that GM was going to be doing… but I would NOT be able to believe that this ‘work plan’ was NOT discussed between Marsh, Steed, Frisby and Brown between 11:55 AM and 12:25 PM.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If they could not BURN OUT they had to go direct
>> or the line would not hold.
See above. I’m still wondering if they WERE planning to BURN OUT… but that any further burnouts ( after the Rory Collins incident ) were now all simply part of the overall plan for LATER that afternoon… when the wind died down.
It is still perfectly obvious that any number of people working that fire that day ( Especially Warbis and Lenmark in Air Attack Bravo 3 ) knew that it was going to be heading into Yarnell THAT DAY… during THAT BURN CYCLE.
It also seems obvious that this whole ‘plan’ that Granite Mountain was working on all day was TOTALLY dependent on executing a BURNOUT later that day ( Sunday ).
So what we still don’t know is when what Warbis and Lenmark knew circa 12:45 PM became obvious to Cordes’ , DIVSA, OPS1 and Granite Mountain.
We are still talking about just a 15 minute margin here.
If Eric Marsh or Todd Able or Gary Cordes or Roy Hall ( or whoever in the hell was able to tell Granite Mountain what they should or should NOT be working on ) had only told Steed to get those men out of there just 15 minutes earlier that afternoon… they would probably still be with us.
Granted.. they might still have had quite a story to tell… but if they had been told to do “TOOLS UP” and just get off that ridge just 15 minutes earlier… then even this ‘risky’ move through the unburned fuel with no lookout might have turned out to be just one more “Bad decision that still had a good outcome”.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Back to the picture I am trying to find. It may have
>> been inserted in one of the many news articles.
>> and I believe it was a cell phone picture.
>> from one of the crew that was sent to family but I
>> could be wrong here too. It is not in any of the SAIT
>> or ADOSH photo files. There were some other pictures
>> that came out early on that were not McKenzie’s but
>> some of the crews.
I am not saying you are mistaken… but I honestly don’t recall seeing such a picture. Then again… I’m the one who still beleives I actually SAW a still-frame photo being used as a background shot for a TV segment and the sub-caption said “Photo taken by a security camera at the Boulder Springs Ranch”… but it was definitely NOT coming from the ‘Security Camera” focused on the front gate. The photo I thought I saw definitely looked like it was taken from a “Security Camera” that was point to the NORTHWEST somewhere there on the WEST perimeter of the BSR.
So this photo you are remembering might be out there.
I’m just sorry I can’t help you find it because I don’t, myself, recall seeing it.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> As some one that always checked line as a Division
>> Boss I was interested in this photo and studied it a
>> little and recall it was good line construction I am
>> sure it was way back in the 2013 period most at that
>> time would not have been interested in it as there
>> was no fire or excitement just a big piece of fire line.
>> It was hand line and was not any part of a 2 track.
Hmm… the only photos like that I recall seeing would have been the ones in the ZAZF Misc folder of the SAIT FOIA release that show the handline that some OTHER crews were building that day back towards Yarnell.
One of them is even a video of a crew building some ‘scrape’ near a house to the south of Glen Ilah. No fire in the video at all. Just close-up of handline on the ground.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Had they been able to use the 2 track and burn
>> out they could have got a lot of line in and any
>> place the fire sloped over the 2 tract they could
>> go direct and tie back to the 2 tract.
Copy that. Standard stuff… but I think the big question is still whether ALL of their planning and ALL of the work they were doing that day was ALL based on this idea that the wind was going to fade away later in the afternoon on Sunday… and then there would be this MASSIVE two plus mile burnout along that two-track all the way from that black where the original lightning strike was on Friday back EAST to at least the Sesame Clearing where both the GM and BR Crew Carriers had been parked that day.
We just don’t know if, after that face-to-face between the only two Type 1 Hotshot Crews that were there that day ( GM and BR ), this massivbe BURNOUT later on Sunday was still even ‘the plan’… or NOT.
It was WHILE the management for these 2 Type 1 IHC Hotshot crews was having that ‘face-to-face’ planning session out on that ridge that ‘Bravo 3’ Air Attack ( Warbis and Lenmark ) arrived on the fire and decided for themselves that there was no way in hell a plan like that was going to work… because the fire THEY were now observing ( circa 12:30 PM ) was definitely going to be going into Yarnell THAT DAY and during THAT burn cycle.
That is why they decided to start spending thousands and thousands and thousands of Arizona Taxpayer dollars dropping retardant in the middle of unburned fuel.
That’s how SURE they were that nothing they saw happening on the ground was going to do jack-shit to protect Yarnell and they ( someone ) better start doing SOMETHING.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Not being able to do that it was go direct or screw
>> around which we seem to be falling back on.
>> I am stumped as well.
Even though we know now that pretty much everything Granite Mountain was doing out there was ‘pointless’ from at least about NOON onward… I don’t think they felt like they were just ‘screwing around’.
It’s actually now part of the tragedy that they DID actually think they were doing some good out there long beyond what others in fire management that day knew to be true.
Even the ADOSH investigation discovered this to be true.
Granite Mountain was ALLOWED to keep working on what was basically a pointless exercise far longer than they should have been, thus robbing them of the critical TIME and ability to make better decisions and stay alive that day.
For the sake of just small blocks of minutes… GM could have gone “TOOLS UP”, come back down the way they hiked up, and moved their own vehicles out of harms way THEMSELVES… and we would not be here having this conversation.
Anyway.. thanks for sticking with this thread that is revisiting the actual WORK that Granite Mountain was doing that day… and revisiting what the actual PLAN might have been.
I still think this thread is sort of a ‘reaction’ to us all hearing that Judge Gama is NOT even going to let two of the Yarnell ‘property damage’ suits even have their day in court.
That means a lot of questions will never even get to be asked ( much less answered ) about what Arizona Forestry and the people working for them were actually DOING that weekend.
Couple that with the fact that the first BOOK is now out and it is basically a JOKE with regards to answering any of these questions… and I guess there’s a feeling that if someone doesn’t revisit all this.. we will NEVER fully know what happened that weekend.
I still think understanding what Granite Mountain even THOUGHT the plan was or WHY they spent so much time working on a ‘plan’ that other people thought was ‘worthless’ is key to understanding why they died.
As early as 1:00 PM… Air Attack was SURE that Granite Mountain was “out of the game” that day and that they were just “staged and waiting for new orders” ( even at 1:00 PM )
( both of those things are actual testimony from Warbis and Lenmark ).
They could also SEE ( circa 1:0o PM ) that the Blue Ridge Hotshots were not even ‘engaging’ the fire and were just sitting on their assess by their Crew Carriers.
So between GM being “out of the game” at 1:00 PM and Blue Ridge doing NOTHING… that’s when they decided to lay that desperation retardant line to try and save Yarnell.
It’s still inconceivable that the actual AIR ATTACK over a fire could be so sure about all this… but then the ground forces still just continued to ‘screw around’ for even hours after that wasting precious time they would need later on to stay alive.
“Dropping the ball” doesn’t even begin to describe what really happened that day.
Nor does the phrase “Everyone was in their own little world”.
The only reason I would not put in indirect line that far from the burn and not burn it out is because it put the crew in harms way being to far from the black.
They would have been totally hung out if the main fire started spotting as was McDonough. It is just not standard procedure in that situation.
But then what was standard in this freeking mess?????
If all they truly built was 100 Yards of line then they were screwing around looking busy and as you said should have pulled out back to their trucks at no later than 1400 2 PM————-Once that fire was in full creep towards McDonough they should have moved especially after the wind prediction. Weather forecast right or wrong you don’t wait and see with that kind of forecast..
I also found a statement back in the SAIT report that the
YCSD did in fact start the door to door evacuation notice at 1330– 1:30 PM–At least that is the SAIT report.
Working on a whole bunch of other big projects this weekend, but still reading and still thinking.
WTKTT, You wrote, quoting Bob:
“>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> As some one that always checked line as a Division
>> Boss I was interested in this photo and studied it a
>> little and recall it was good line construction I am
>> sure it was way back in the 2013 period most at that
>> time would not have been interested in it as there
>> was no fire or excitement just a big piece of fire line.
>> It was hand line and was not any part of a 2 track.
Hmm… the only photos like that I recall seeing would have been the ones in the ZAZF Misc folder of the SAIT FOIA release that show the handline that some OTHER crews were building that day back towards Yarnell.
One of them is even a video of a crew building some ‘scrape’ near a house to the south of Glen Ilah. No fire in the video at all. Just close-up of handline on the ground.”
What exactly do you mean by:
“Hmm… the only photos like that I recall seeing would have been the ones in the ZAZF Misc folder of the SAIT FOIA release that show the handline that some OTHER crews were building that day back towards Yarnell.
One of them is even a video of a crew building some ‘scrape’ near a house to the south of Glen Ilah. No fire in the video at all. Just close-up of handline on the ground.”
I don’t have anything like that in my downloaded files, but I would really like to have those. Can you give me a link or something?
Thx in advance.
PS I agree, and have said a number of times downstream, that given the futility of what Granite Mountain was doing (apparently all by themselves–and why, if it was so important for them to be doing that, why wasn’t Blue Ridge helping them????), all things considered, and…..
….given the increasing severity of the weather forecasts (which, actually, had been already severe leading up to this Sunday June 30), including the predicted thunderstorms and their predicted chaotic impact on the fire…….
…..since what they were doing was not completable and the conditions within which they were doing that was increasingly dangerous……
……they should have been ordered by SOMEONE to disengage and head to a safer place by 2:00 PM that afternoon, or, if that didn’t happen, to SIT THEMSELVES DOWN IN THE BLACK AND STAY THERE NO MATTER WHAT.
The question I have had in my head all weekend as I have been reading what you and Bob have been writing is…….
…..if, indeed, what Granite Mountain IHC was doing was because they were “assigned” to do it (apparently because it was considered to be “important”), why in the world was Blue Ridge IHC not lifting a finger to help them do that?
I just don’t get it.
Reply to Marti Reed post on
May 24, 2015 at 9:28 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> What exactly do you mean by:
>>
>> “Hmm… the only photos like that I
>> recall seeing would have been the ones
>> in the ZAZF Misc folder of the SAIT FOIA
>> release that show the handline that some
>> OTHER crews were building that day back
>> towards Yarnell.
>>
>> One of them is even a video of a crew
>> building some ‘scrape’ near a house to
>> the south of Glen Ilah. No fire in the video
>> at all. Just close-up of handline on the
>> ground.”
>>
>> I don’t have anything like that in my
>> downloaded files, but I would really like
>> to have those. Can you give me a link or
>> something?
>>
>> Thx in advance.
** VIDEO VID_20130701_155419_842.wmv
Video showing line construction. ( NOT Granite Mountain ).
Date/Time stamp is in filename. Shot at 3:54:19 on July 1, 2013.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/20inrene9tcx74a/AADxp5M6M2k4bI2a7ydQnj3Ba/ADOSH%20Yarnell%20Hill%20Investigation/Photos%20and%20Video/ASFD%20Photos/Miscellaneous%20Photos/VID_20130701_155419_842.wmv?dl=0
** VIDEO VID_20130701_160242_536.wmv
Another video showing line construction. ( NOT Granite Mountain )
Date/Time stamp is in filename. Shot at 4:02:42 on July 1, 2013.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/20inrene9tcx74a/AABZNBwmaM7cN3gt9D8sWas0a/ADOSH%20Yarnell%20Hill%20Investigation/Photos%20and%20Video/ASFD%20Photos/Miscellaneous%20Photos/VID_20130701_160242_536.wmv?dl=0
Line construction photos and videos that are in this ADOSH Dropbox folder…
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/20inrene9tcx74a/AACltJPUFfvmZqibRwGSJwWLa/ADOSH%20Yarnell%20Hill%20Investigation/Photos%20and%20Video/ASFD%20Photos/Miscellaneous%20Photos?dl=0
IMG_0556 through IMG_0561 all show ‘line building’ by a hand crew ( not GM ).
IMG_0611 through IMG_0625 all show ‘line building’ by a hand crew ( not GM ).
IMG_20130630_133213_221.JPG
IMG_20130630_133216_790.JPG
** VIDEO VID_20130701_155419_842.wmv – Line construction ( not GM ).
** VIDEO VID_20130701_160242_536.wmv – Line construction ( not GM ).
WTKTT you wrote:
“that show the handline that some
>> OTHER crews were building that day back
>> towards Yarnell.”
The photos and videos you are posting are not from “that day.” They’re from July 1.
Reply to Marti Reed post on
May 25, 2015 at 12:21 pm
>> Marti wrote…
>>
>> WTKTT you wrote: “that show
>> the handline that some
>> OTHER crews were building that
>> day back towards Yarnell.”
>>
>> The photos and videos you are
>> posting are not from “that day.”
>> They’re from July 1.
Some of them, yes.
Even I was not fully remembering what I thought I saw that might have matched Mr. Powers’ recollections ( which was the whole point of the post above ).
The VIDEOS I was recalling of ‘line scrape’ that I was recalling definitely turned out to be a day later, on July 1, but some of the photo sequences mentioned above showing line construction definitely WERE taken on Sunday, June 30.
Example… all of the following ‘line building’ photos in the folder above say they were taken during a 10 minute period on the morning of Sunday, June 30, 2013, between 11:10 and 11:20 AM…
IMG_0556.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:10:29 AM
IMG_0557.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:14:33 AM
IMG_0558.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:14:44 AM
IMG_0559.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:15:21 AM
IMG_0560.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:15:31 AM
IMG_0561.JPG – 2013:06:30 11:20:50 AM
I BELIEVE these are all photos of ‘line work’ being done on Sunday at the Double-Bar-A ranch… but my thinking in mentioning them was that they could ( perhaps ) easily have been mistaken as photos of GM building line and ( perhaps ) some of the photos Mr. Powers said he was recalling.
BOTTOM LINE here is that NONE of the photos / videos I have mentioned
above appear to be the one that Mr. Powers was trying to recall.
I ( me, personally ) still don’t even recall ever seeing this particular ‘GK line building’ photo that Mr. Powers thought he remembered seeing at some point… but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Couple that with the fact that the first BOOK is now out and it is basically a JOKE with regards to answering any of these questions… and I guess there’s a feeling that if someone doesn’t revisit all this.. we will NEVER fully know what happened that weekend.
SECOND BOOK-
FIRST BOOK CAME FROM YARNELL HILL RECOVERY BOOK/CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
The TIME of about 9:00 AM for when Steed and the Crew actually arrived up on the high-ridge two-track that morning actually comes from testimony from former Yarnell Fire Chief Peter Andersen.
And number one…Pete Andersen is not the only witness in area on time—others in Glen Ilah nearing Sesame Street as well plus you forgot to factor this—yes, they had to get buggies parked but you forgot to calculate the time for any GMHS that was not complete in gearing up and did so at time of arrival and in gearing up I am sure Donut can confirm that demeanor he was in and the radio concerns before heading up—also let us remember when I saw them as tiny ants they were way way behind Marsh…
THERE WAS RED RETARDANT DROPS NEAR THE FOUR BURNING BUSHES DONE PRIOR DAY—IT WAS NOT FRESH LIKE WE SAW LATER MORNING ON SUNDAY WHEN WE GOT TO FIRE LINE
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5921668975860555490?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5921668975860555490&oid=112068160404980104272
In this photo we want people to really get no more if it was HOT or COLD or raining or not—we did our hikes freely to you all never to be an insert to any book or article but to get fire properly assessed and this has to stop people publishing books saying something that never happened—
sample of what the men faced in that bowl that day:
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5921665252396410418?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5921665252396410418&oid=112068160404980104272
Thank you ( again ) Joy.
Once again… your photos just prove to be absolutely invaluable for anyone trying to understand what it was really like out there in that area where 19 men died.
If this photo really does resemble what those men had to contend with down in the fuel-choked box canyon ( and there is every reason to believe it does )… then what we are probably about to hear Brendan McDonugh finally testify to in just 6 days is going to be all the more unbelievable.
Brendan McDonough is ( apparently ) about to testify that even AFTER Eric Marsh himself was ‘scouting ahead’ ( way too late in the day ) for Steed and the Crew and he had descended into that fuel-filled box canyon… Marsh not only was telling Steed it was OKAY to bring the men down into that kind of bushwhacking nightmare ( with an active and dynamic fire in the same area ).. Marsh was actually ORDERING him to do so.
As Sonny has said… one man on his own might be able to make some ‘time’ through that kind of nasty overgrowth… but 18 other men trying to ‘stay together’ and walk in a single-file line would NEVER have been able to make the same ‘time’ even along the same route the ‘single person’ had taken by themselves.
For Marsh himself to not have even realized there would that kind of discrepancy in the time HE could make versus what the MEN were going to be able to do is still just… well… Unbelievable.
I am on the disappointed side that so much time went by and this man who is about to do deposition/book/movie…not too keen on what he says is what it is…
I hope he is focused and realizes the world is watching for this moment as well as me. I have seen Donut now a total times of six since the fire but none face to face talking but almost was going to when I saw ex GMHS we hiked with…Phil M and him and some other men when I said “Hi Phil” a lil over a year ago.
I am much more interested in hearing more from Radio Dispatchers/Hall/Frisby/Cooley/Bunch/Packer/Alumni GMHS/plus anyone on fire that day not to gain to create accountability but to go over a fire we all saw that day and learn different perceptions of the same fire we all saw—
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5921669416143651730?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5921669416143651730&oid=112068160404980104272
if you can gps this photo—the crew’s work was done to the right of this where 4 tiny bushes were on fire 6-30-13
Joy A. Collura says
Reply to Joy post on May 22, 2015 at 1:53 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> if you can gps this photo—the crew’s work was done to the right of
>> this where 4 tiny bushes were on fire 6-30-13
There is no need for anyone to go ‘GPS’ the photo.
You have already done that yourself.
The following is a photo of the EXACT SAME LOCATION that you also took but this time you are holding up a yellow legal pad that has the actual GPS coordinates on it.
The rocks in the foreground are identical in BOTH photos… as are the cactus plants in the middle-background. It’s the same location for BOTH photos.
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911795877097573698?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911795877097573698&oid=112068160404980104272
Small yellow legal pad being held up in the bottom of the photo at the link above says…
——————————————————-
Yarnell Side fire line
( 4 small Bush fires when we saw Eric Marsh
for 2nd time here 9:09 AM )
Elevation: 5681
N 34 13.618
W 112 47.380
——————————————————-
Those GPS coordinates correspond to the following GPS Decimal values…
34.22696666666667, -112.78966666666667
Jut cut-and-paste the line above into the input bar of Google Maps and a marker will appear at that exact location up on the high-ridge two-track road.
In the dead center of the photo.. the words FIRE LINE have been written onto that boulder in white chalk.
So thanks to Joy… there actually IS and AMAZING amount of photo evidence of exactly WHERE Granite Mountain was working up there on Sunday… and how much they were actually getting accomplished.
The answer to the first part regarding where they were working all day is… “always right there in the same general area by that NOTCHED ROCK”.
The answer to the second part about how much they were even able to accomplish after working in that area for upwards of SIX and 1/2 HOURS is “Not much”.
About 100 yards of handline. That’s it… and it was never really near actually “tying in” to anything.
This is a direct ‘clickable’ link to a Google Maps satellite view of the latitude/longitude point listed in the message above.
A ‘red balloon marker’ will automatically appear pointing to the spot on the high-ridge two-track where the photo was taken.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B013%2737.1%22N+112%C2%B047%2722.8%22W/@34.2269667,-112.7896667,18z/data=!3m1!1e3
Sonny is working on something and I am trying to locate something where it should show Donut in photo of mine…it takes me to look because I took it because someone was walking in dense area—in photo link below- you can see distance from saddle in far back to where we passed the men…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5921664983292589970?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5921664983292589970&oid=112068160404980104272
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on May 22, 2015 at 1:50 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> in photo link below- you can see distance from saddle in far back to
>> where we passed the men…
Just for orientation… this photo was taken looking SOUTH.
Just to the right of the tip of the ‘flag’ ( in the background ) is that ‘T’ intersection where the two-track road coming up from the old-grader meets that high-ridge two-track.
That ‘T’ intersection is the spot that has always had the label ‘Mystery Panel found here’ on it in the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data background map. There has never been any explanation what ‘Mystery Panel’ means… or who put that label onto the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data background map.
The ‘pile of rocks’ in the far background, top center of photo, is actually the north ridge of the box canyon down there to the south.
On September 9, 2013… during the hike with ADOSH… one of the ADOSH investigators took a photo of this same ‘memorial’ that started out with just 19 rocks piled together.
That ADOSH photo has the exact GPS coordinates for this ‘pile of stones’.
Here is a direct link to that ADOSH photo…
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/20inrene9tcx74a/AAAinaAuhZBkKF24X05fC3iJa/ADOSH%20Yarnell%20Hill%20Investigation/Photos%20and%20Video/ADOSH%20Hiking%20Photos%209%2018%20w%20GPS?dl=0&preview=IMGP1785.JPG
The EXIF GPS data embedded in the ADOSH photo is as follows…
GPSLatitudeRef: N
GPSLatitude: 34 13 31.99
GPSLongitudeRef: W
GPSLongitude: 112 47 13.27
GPSAltitudeRef: Sea level
GPSAltitude: 1505.50 m
GPSTimeStamp: 18 6 44.00
GPSImgDirectionRef: True direction
GPSImgDirecton: 170.65 (degrees)
GPSDateStamp: 2013:09:18
GPSDecimal: 34.225553, -112.787019
NOTE: All of the photos in this ADOSH Hiking Photos folder from the hike they took with Joy and Sonny on September 18, 2013 have GPS data embedded in them.
Some of these photos in this folder match exactly with other photos in Joy’s folder from the same hike.
TWO of those photos show the exact same moment when Joy was taking a picture of one of the ADOSH investigators taking a picture and so these two photos can be used to at least determine the time offset for Joy’s camera on THAT day ( September 18, 2013 ).
** TIME COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO PHOTOS…
Joy’s Google photo 100_0383.JPG
Date taken: 9/18/13, 7:32 AM
ADOSH MGP1790.JPG
Date/Time Original: 2013:09:18 10:23:10
10:23:10 AM minus 7:32:00 AM equals = 2 hours 51 minutes 10 seconds
Followup…
The comparison of the timestamps for the two separate photos above ONLY tells us what the time offset was between the ADOSH camera and Joy’s camera on THAT DAY ( September 18, 2013 ).
On THAT DAY it appeared that Joy’s camera was timestamping photos just a little under 3 hours EARLIER that what the REAL time was that day. ( 2hrs and 51 mins early ).
I’m not sure this 2 hour and 51 minutes offset can be used to determine the actual time for other photos such as ones that were taken 3 months earlier on June 30, 2013.
Marti has already successfully narrowed the time difference down for THAT day to a pretty small window of 5 to 10 minutes based on the photos of the Blue Ridge Crew Carriers arriving in the Sesame clearing area where they would be parked and where the Blue Ridge Crew would end up just ‘hanging around’ for most of the day and doing no real work at all.
I hope in a future book on the YARNELL HILL FIRE they would do us the honor of making like a YEARBOOK of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Agency in completion from every season alumni roster. I am very sad this wildland organization is not still active and maybe some day someone will rekindle the agency as an honorable thing for these fallen. I think dissolving it is not healthy but pausing the agency understandable—
I would of loved to hear more from Tom Cooley-
Based off principles for which he was raised upon and publicly stated 4/14/12 and because of his “thirst for knowledge” and wanting to teach the youth attitude I would LOVE for Renan Packer to SPEAK MORE to investigators as well as taking this tragedy and run with it and I can so see him as a coach in some type of field…
Besides Brandon Bunch being a bravo squad and four year sawyer and the connections he had what can he tell us about the sole survivor to help coach us the public how to be with Donut…we understand his challenges but we also know how crucial his information was needed long ago when it was all “fresh”…like I said on here before…
In Dickman’s prologue he starts off with in a sense a narrative because without all the pieces to this puzzle that can only be his perception versus facts. Phone records and other elements will always remain important to this fire.
Page Xii Prologue hardbook Dickman- the wind had numerous shifts that day and at 1:38pm was one of the strongest gusts on top of the mountain. I would love to see more photos of this veil of wispy white smoke flame scenario because we saw higher flames and as well fire twisters. The part were it said the town only had hours to stand—we can thank media drama probably for that insert- How about more people on THAT fire publicly talking about fire breaks/burn outs/back burns…squash rumors please. The videos and photos we saw I am still on fence and do not support that yet except an insert from channel 12 news and I wish…is it possible to order their raw aerial video? is their an foia on that…I saw something in that…Embers so close…Dickman, did DOnut show photos complimenting that? I was disturbed by this statement in book “Marsh was about to watch flames overrun his crew member- then an entire town.” I was UP THERE and that fire did not look like that from up top and Donut cannot say nor Dickman that Marsh was watching such- that is an add-in…The prologue Xiv on Donut’s tattoo is journaled as one of my dreams so would be interesting to match date to my online journaled dream to his date of tattoo because I journaled my dreams on that google page as time unfolded—in that prologue gave the hikers more information so we can do additional foias and areas to look into…
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on May 22, 2015 at 1:17 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> I hope in a future book on the YARNELL HILL FIRE they would do us the
>> honor of making like a YEARBOOK of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Agency
>> in completion from every season alumni roster.
What is still making this tragedy VERY different from even other situation-similar WFF tragedies is this ongoing fact that anyone who USED to be a Granite Mountain Hotshot seems almost AFRAID to admit it… either publicly or privately.
That aspect of this tragedy and the ongoing investigations / litigations is still truly remarkable.
At the same time… we are being asked to believe that everyone who was involved with this organization had the utmost of pride in it and the highest respect for its organizers and leaders…
…but we are ALSO being asked to believe that not one person who used to ever actually WORK for this organization has anything to say about it… Good, Bad, Indifferent, or Ugly.
That is till truly, truly WEIRD.
Maybe someday we WILL find out why pretty much no one who is still alive and USED to be a Granite Mountain Hotshot seems willing to even ADMIT it.
Earlier I was trying to explain I never asked the man (Eric Marsh) “a question” about pink ribbons but what happen was as I got near to him I said “”pink. tying pink ribbons (with soft giggles)…is that because your in Yarnell…a gay community ” that was it and he said his crew was following him to the top for a meeting and we turned around and the men following look like tiny ants.
This whole adding hikers in a book is not necessary especially the way you did. I know it is not slander but I just get disappointed…especially when you never interviewed us and referred to an already narrative SAIR report…You book stated you did a fact check but that is not facts on the hikers.
Yet thank you Kyle for your book.
Serious.
We have learned some valuable information that requires more foia and looking into had it not been for your book…it has been hard to read some…yet grateful deeply for this book and when I can have real sit down time at pc I will too join in on notes..I have bawled sooo much reading people who loved the men and I can see how some’s perceptions on hikers are what they are or were but please know we will keep trying to assist in getting more areas peeled to that tragic weekend…so sorry for this tragedy and anytime we have been perceived any way different than just trying to get more information public…I know the challenges and the layers but in it all I hope we all can just stick together and us correcting media and journalists and authors comes from keeping this pure to be properly assessed even the dumb comment I made…let us not forget I said dumb stuff when hiking an by chance ran into some of the widows…but keep in mind how many miles my feet had travelled & the heat, etc. before judgment ALSO a lot of this fire is HUMAN FACTORS and LEADERSHIP CONCERNS and that does not yet name a SPECIFIC individual(s)…in time it will…
Reply to Sonny post on May 21, 2015 at 10:14 am
Thanks for the response, Sonny. A few questions below.
>> Sonny said…
>>
>> Referring to the handline–one hundred yards is about right.
It was Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown himself who first put this ‘100 yard’ distance number onto the line work that Granite Mountain had accomplished up there.
But Captain Brown said it was already at about 100 yards when he and Brian Frisby first arrived up on the ridge for that face-to-face meeting with Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed for 30 minutes at exactly 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM.
From Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown’s Unit Log…
—————————————————————————
I notice that they have about 100 yards of line secured.
We talk to them about the situation and comments are made
about how neither crew received a breifing. We also discuss the
issue about the radios. We gave them all the extra water and Gatorade
that we had in the Ranger and told them what we saw from below
and we ALL noticed that the activity to the north was picking up.
I remember making a comment about a finger in the bottom that
was beginning to heat up and make its way into the flats below the
ridge/saddle.
—————————————————————————
There still isn’t much evidence that this ;100 yards’ of line ever got much bigger after Frisby and Brown left and during the next THREE hours ( 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM ).
>> Sonny also said…
>>
>> It can be easily followed by someone knowledgeable in wildland firefighting.
>> Wayne Neal and Dr. Ted Putman showed us the path after we hiked them to where
>> the Hot Shots were at that Sunday morning. It curves around the slope and
>> undoubtedly was intended to meet up with the dozer that was blading up from
>> the old grader.
When you say the dozer was “blading up from the old grader”… which DIRECTION are you describing?
There were basically TWO ‘trails/two-tracks’ that led away from the old-grader location and up towards that ridge.
One led away from the old-grader to the northwest. That’s the one that is sort of a ‘dead-end’ and never actually makes it all the way up to that high-ridge two-track. That’s the one that Frisby and Brown tried to use at first when they were driving their Polaris Ranger up to meed Marsh and Steed… but when they found out that it didn’t make it all the way up to the higher two-track up on the ridgeline… Frisby and Brown turned around, went back to the old-grader, and then took that OTHER two-track with led away from the old-grader in a southwesterly direction.
So that is the OTHER two-track that leads away from the old-grader. It’s the one that DOES make it all the way up to the high-ridge two-track and meets it with that ‘T’ intersection up there.
So when you say the dozer was ‘blading up’ from the old-grader.. WHICH of these two-tracks do you mean it was ‘blading up’ on?
OR was it not even improving either of those two-tracks and just coming ‘cross country’ and towards where Granite Mountain was building line?
I doubt it. It seems MUCH too rocky in that area for the bulldozer to have just been going ‘cross country’ off the two-track(s).
>> Sonny also wrote…
>>
>> What stopped the continuation of the dozer is said to be because he read
>> that old danger, do not proceed sign put up by the state some 30-50 years back.
We keep hearing about this supposed “DANGER EXPLOSIVES” sign and that it DID force HEQB Cory Ball and the dozer operator to alter their plans that day.
Exactly WHERE was this now infamous SIGN?
No one seems to ever say for SURE exactly where this SIGN really was.
Was it on the two-track that led away from the old-grader to the NORTHWEST? …OR…
Was it on the two-track that led away from the old-grader to the SOUTHWEST?
How FAR DOWN the two-track from the old-grader was this ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign?
And that sign was known to be BOGUS, right?
There never really were any explosives and it was just to keep trespassers out?
The reason I ask the last question is because if there really was a chance there were active/live explosives out there in that area… then there was even more ‘negligence’ taking place out there that day and that threat should have been taken more seriously. ADOSH should have also picked up on that since it would have represented even MORE ‘unsafe workplace’ citation(s).
I actually don’t think this EXPLOSIVES sigh had anything to do with the decisions being made with the dozer out there. I believe those decisions had more to do with just the fact that the dozer had the WRONG BLADE on it to even attempt to go up the steep part of the two-tracks.
But regardless.. I’d still like to know exactly WHERE this infamous ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign was.
Followup…
Even as much as this ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign has been mentioned in the investigation reports themselves and in other media articles… I don’t recall ever seeing a PICTURE of it.
Wherever this EXPLOSIVES sign was ( I’m still hoping you can describe EXACTLY where it was out there )… was it a WOODEN sign… and did it ‘burn up’ in the fire itself?
Followup…
Even as much as this ‘EXPLOSIVES’ sign has been mentioned in the investigation reports themselves and in other media articles… I don’t recall ever seeing a PICTURE of it.YOU WOULD THINK IF MENTIONED IN A REPORT THEY WOULD OF DURING INVESTIGATION TOOK A PHOTO OF THE SIGN FOR PHYSICAL DOCUMENT OF A STATEMENT.
Wherever this EXPLOSIVES sign was ( I’m still hoping you can describe EXACTLY where it was out there ) YOU BET. AT THE OLD GRADER; HEAD UP THE MOUNTAIN WHERE THE BULLDOZER MADE ITS SHORT DISTANCE ROAD AND WHERE THE BULLDOZER TRACKS STOPPED IS WHERE THE SIGN IS… was it a WOODEN signNO.… and did it ‘burn up’ in the fire itself?NO. STILL THERE YET CARNATION CANS IN THE AREA THE LED BURNED OUT FROM BOTTOM OF THE CANS
WTKT The two track divides about 50 yards below the two track. That dozer was being followed by a white forest truck earlier down the two track as seen by Joy’s photo. It was dozing a new track all the way—we lost sight of it due to a hill between us so there was about a half mile we could not see its progress. The y below the dozer that leads to the southwest was dozed only a short distance toward where it could have eventually reached the men on the two track where they were working. Instead it started bulldozing from the old grader to the northwest on that two track that dead ends at a mine near the top. That mine sits below a steep bluff and a very steep climb around the bluff that will take you to the two track above it. I am certain that the reason they dozed to the northwest was to help cut off the progress of that fire down the north slope of that ridge where the manzanita and other brush was so thick. The going past the grader to the northwest had to be pretty rough even with what looked to be about a D-8. My mos was bulldozer operator after I was drafted and I did own one of the old cable job D-8 dozers that I used at mygate mine from years ago. So I know that old boy in that granite was feeling the ground. He could have dozed on up to the mine but as I said before that fire had to be coming down that slope toward him and would have trapped him and dozer had he gone farther. That line they were cutting toward the North and down that slope was hard going and rocky all the way to the dozer line. Where they quit was where they came to the thick brush where they could now see the fire advancing down that side of the ridge in that thick brush. Mr. Donut was in a perfect position to witness it as well. I suspect that is where they backed off into the black until further instruction from headquarters. That danger sign is along the NW two track road and more or less in line with where the men would have met the dozer had they been able to continue their fire line. The dozer had quit maybe a hundred yards or so before reaching the sign so apparently someone had walked ahead and then returned to the dozer to stop his dozin. The operator did a good job as far as he could go. The danger sign itself was very official and had statutes written on it as I remember. I would not be afraid to pass but I can see how someone not experienced in mining could be concerned. My own concern would not be explosives so much as cyanide that might have been disposed in that area. The state never puts up signs to my knowledge in an old mining area like that unless there would be pollutants or poisons in the area at least in those days. Since the 60,s things have changed much and signs go up if they find moose shit.
I hope that answers the question there and if I happen to hike that area again–it is off the restricted zone–then I should be happy to photo the sign and the old rusted junk around it.
Now for Donut, he is damn fortunate that he did not deploy at the grader. The tires on that old grader were burned off and old carnation cream cans that in old times were sealed in the center with lead had laid near the grader for years. They gave evidence to the heat of the fire with freshly melted lead melted out of that center piece.. You see that old grader area had to have also been a camp of sorts, likely miner’s tents and the old broken down grader was part of the camp. There is plenty of old cans, bottles and similar camp trash near the grader showing that people had spent a good bit of time at that spot.
Meant to say the two track divides below the old grader.
second correction– the Y in the two track below the old grader is what I should have written.
Gotcha. Thank you.
And THANK YOU for ALL of that (important) information above about exactly where that EXPLOSIVES sign we keep hearing about really is… and what the dozer was actually able to accomplish.
It’s amazing that even now… after two full investigations and now the first ‘independent book’ ( which calls itself a ‘definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire ).. that we would still even be ‘nailing down’ things as important as these issues…
….but that’s what happens when investigators and authors don’t even bother to have conversations with people who were THERE… and remain very important witnesses to what happened that day.
Your account of what the dozer was able to accomplish there on that two-track that leads AWAY from the old-grader to the northwest ( and dead-ends near that mine shaft ) now matches other testimony in some of the Blue Ridge Unit Logs and in SPGS1 Gary Cordes’ testimony.
So thanks for sticking with this thread.
We actually ARE ( finally ) getting a better picture of exactly WHERE Granite Mountain was doing any ‘line work’… and exactly WHERE the dozer was able to ‘clear’… and whether there really was any chance in hell of them having enough resources out there to even come close to accomplishing ‘the plan’ that day.
They really didn’t.
Between the Blue Ridge Hotshots doing NOTHING for most of the day… and the Arroyo Hotshots refusing to even come to the fire just because ONE of their Support vehicles ( but not either one of the actual Crew Trucks ) was having a problem that day…
…there was simply not enough manpower out in that valley to do what some people in fire command wanted to do… and there was also NO reason for Granite Mountain to have even stayed out there working on that useless assignment that day for as long as they did.
That is what was a MAJOR contributing factor to their deaths.
They stayed ‘tools down’ and ‘heads down’ on a task that was basically pointless for far too long… until the point where they actually lost the very TIME they needed to stay alive that day given the decisions they were going to make.
Given that so many investigations have referenced this EXPLOSIVES sign and said it made a big difference in decision making that day… YES… if you ever happen to be able to get an actual PHOTO of this now-infamous sign… that would be great.
As Joy has already said… you would THINK some investigator or author would have already done so ( actually gotten a picture of this important spot on the fireline )… but such is the Yarnell Hill Fire and its investigations ( or lack thereof ).
You would be wrong. No one has bothered to do it (yet).
Up above I said…
“Your account of what the dozer was able to accomplish there on that two-track that leads AWAY from the old-grader to the northwest ( and dead-ends near that mine shaft ) now matches other testimony in some of the Blue Ridge Unit Logs and in SPGS1 Gary Cordes’ testimony.”
That was by no means meant to suggest that the scant information about the dozer and what it was ACTUALLY doing/accomplishing that day which showed up in the investigation reports was ‘enough information’.
It wasn’t.
Evne Sonny’s description above makes it clearer than the reports themselves ever did.
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911734896575529474?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911734896575529474&oid=112068160404980104272
THAT IS THE OLD GRADER
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911733917341317042?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911733917341317042&oid=112068160404980104272
THIS WAS THE MEN TOO…MOVING FROM ONE PART TO ANOTHER SECTION
AREA…THE LINE THEY DID…THAN AERIAL DROPPED RETARDANT
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737929204964658?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737929204964658&oid=112068160404980104272
And in that photo of yours at the link above… you have also managed to photograph that now-famous NOTCHED ROCK which has become the virtual ‘anchor point’ for so many of these photos of that area where these men were working that day ( Sunday, June 30, 2013 ).
In this photo of yours linked to above.. that NOTCHED ROCK is *almost* in the dead center, and there behind the smoke.
If you look at the little SPOTS of FLAME along the edge of the black here in your photo and you count these SPOTS of flame from left to right as your eye moves DOWN the slope… there is one distinct SPOT of flame that then becomes the LAST one before that big smear of reddish retardant begins there on the slope.
That LAST bit of flame is actually a little more on the ‘interior’ of the black and not on the ‘edge’ itself. That is because it is actually a large bush that is ‘candling’ there in the interior, about 30 feet in from the edge.
Just directly ABOVE this last bit flame ( in the photo ) is this now-famous NOTCHED ROCK.
There are actually TWO more photos of this same scene there in your Dropbox after the one you have linked to above.
The SECOND one after the one linked to above is an actual CLOSEUP of this last bit of flame and it clearly shows this bush ‘candling’ and that now-famous NOTCHED ROCK right there above it.
That other photograph clearly showing the NOTCHED ROCK and its location inside of the photo above is here…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737910425212898?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737910425212898&oid=112068160404980104272
This is also a REALLY clear shot of that bush ‘candling’ intensely there just below the notched rock. Notice that even in this closeup there is now evidence of any Granite Mountain FFs being around either setting these ‘burns’ or watching over them in any way.
So it is still difficult to know if these areas of flame were manual burns along the edge of that black area… or just continued ‘flare-ups’ of the fire itself.
Question: In this 3-shot sequence of yours in the Dropbox… we CAN clearly see those little ‘spots of flame’ burning along the edge of the black…
…but there really is NO SIGN of ANY Granite Mountain Hotshots anywhere near these ‘spots of flame’.
Do these photos actually show some of those manual ‘burnouts’ that were being set by Granite Mountain in the morning… but were then getting ‘dumped on’ and ‘put out’ by SEATS directed by Air Attack Rory Collins…
…or are these just independent FLARE UPS of fire along the edge of that black… either because of wind or because of Helicopter activity?
One more… the photo that is IN-BETWEEN the two links posted above that is sort of just a ‘medium’ closeup of the same ‘spot fires’ burning is here in that same album;…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737919879095826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737919879095826&oid=112068160404980104272
In THIS photo.. that ‘candling’ tree and the now-famous NOTCHED ROCK are actually just our of the camera frame to the RIGHT.
What the heck… here is even MORE.
These have ALWAYS been simply GREAT photos taken by Joy that day ( Sunday ) and they really have not been studied near enough.
Here is ANOTHER one that simply BEGINS that revealing sequence posted above.
This one is a PANORAMA that Joy took from the same location where she was about to take the other photos linked to above.
On the LEFT side of this PANORAMA is what would become the actual ‘work area’ for Granite Mountain up around that anchor point on Sunday.
The SMOKES that are burning in the LEFT of this photo are the same ones that Joy is about to focus on and and ZOOM IN on in the next sequence of photos in this folder ( and the ones linked to above ).
In the RIGHT side this PANORAMA are the two ‘mounds’ that were sitting out there in that middle bowl just south of the old-grader that we have ( for lack of any better names ) come to call “Big RoundTop’ and ‘Little RoundTop’.
So in about the CENTER of this photo ( but mostly hidden from view ) is that actual two-track leading southwest from the old-grader location and the one that was used by GM to hike up to the ridge and would also be used around NOON by Brian Frisby and Captain Brown to come up for that face-to-face with Marsh and Steed.
Notice in this PANORAMA, then, the actual lateral DISTANCE between that area where Granite Mountain was working where those ‘smokes’ are showing on the left.. and on down the slope towards that two-track leading from the old-grader.
It was actually quite a distance.
So if they really were any plans to tie all that black seen on the left into that road system on the right and over by the old-grader… it’s no wonder that work was never completed by just 1 hand crew that day.
They did NOT have enough resources to even accomplish whatever little planning they WERE doing that day.
Here is that PANORAMA shot… ( and once again, a big fat THANK YOU to Joy Collura for taking all of these amazing photographs )…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737936912483938?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737936912483938&oid=112068160404980104272
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911795877097573698?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911795877097573698&oid=112068160404980104272
Small yellow legal pad being held up in the bottom of the photo at the link above says…
——————————————————-
Yarnell Side fire line
( 4 small Bush fires when we saw Eric Marsh
for 2nd time here 9:09 AM )
Elevation: 5681
N 34 13.618
W 112 47.380
——————————————————-
Those GPS coordinates correspond to the following GPS Decimal values…
34.22696666666667, -112.78966666666667
Jut cut-and-paste the line above into the input bar of Google Maps and a marker will appear at that exact location up on the high-ridge two-track road.
In the dead center of the photo.. the words FIRE LINE have been written onto that boulder in white chalk.
**
** THE ACTUAL LOCATION OF THE PHOTO OF GM HOTSHOTS DOING LINE WORK
The following is a direct link to Joy Collura’s own online copy of that famous photo she took on Sunday, June 30, 2013 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots both ‘resting’ and doing ‘line work’ up there on the western ridge.
This is the ONLY known photo from that day that captured ANY of the Granite Mountain Hotshots actually DOING any of that line work that was known to have taken place up there near the anchor point…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732755684775826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732755684775826&oid=112068160404980104272
It’s always been a bit of a mystery exactly which piece of ‘road’ that is in the photo and where the men were actually standing ( and sitting/resting ).
As it turns out ( after another round with Google Earth )… I’m about 99 percent sure now that this photo shows the men both resting and working up on the high-ridge two-track itself, right at the top of that ‘drainage’ that would soon become featured in other photos.
It has been reported that this ‘road’ seen in this photo was some kind of pre-exsiting firebreak that was built in 1967 or 1968. That might still be the case…but it was ALSO just a ‘part’ of that high-ridge two-track that ran up there along the entire western ridge.
The GM Hotshot in the Red Helmet ( presumably Jesse Steed at this point ) seen in the photo is standing exactly here in that ‘bend’ in that high-ridge two-track…
34.226756, -112.788956
That point is exactly at the top of that ‘drainage’ that they were then going to be using for more ‘line work’ a little later on.
So this ‘line work’ we seen being done in this photograph was really nothing more than just a little bit of ‘improving’ being done to that existing bit of the high-ridge two-track at the top of that drainage… and this section of that two-track is NOT part of that ‘green squiggly line’ labeled ‘Completed Handline’ on page 20 of the SAIR document.
The ‘black’ that is seen in the background of this photo is actually just the same ‘black’ that will be seen later right in front of that ‘last rest spot’ where Christopher MacKenzie would shoot his photos and videos circa 3:50 to 3:55 PM.
ALL of the work that Granite Mountain was doing up there for SIX and 1/2 hours that day ( 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM ) was all pretty much in this same general area ( and down in that drainage that was right there by that black ) for no more than about 100 yards down that slope.
Followup…
Just to put things in perspective… if we assume the FF in the RED Helmet standing on the two-track as seen in the photo above is, in fact, Jesse Steed…
…then Jesse is pretty much standing at the same exact spot up on that high-ridge two-track road where Joy Collura herself would be standing weeks later when she took THIS picture looking DOWN that drainage, to the EAST, and towards the old grader…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5925106969717310546?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5925106969717310546&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
And once again… in the photo just linked to above… that NOTCHED ROCK seen in the upper left corner of the photo is that exact same NOTCHED ROCK that would then be featured in just about all of Christopher MacKenzie’s photos and videos taken later that afternoon in the same general area.
Marsh was ‘scouting around’ by himself most of the day… but for pretty much SIX and 1/2 hours ( 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM )… Steed and the GM crew stayed right in this general area doing some light cutting and ground scraping until it was “tools up” circa 3:40 PM.
Thanks for this, WTKTT.
Can you, in a spare moment, post the coordinates for the “notched rock”?
Thx.
That “Notched Rock’ is here…
34.228218, -112.788940
In some of the MacKenzie photos taken looking EAST from that final ‘rest spot’… you can’t see the ‘notch’ in the rock but you can still see the (pointy) TOP of it sticking up in the photo just a few hundred feet in front of where the men were ‘resting’. Also visible in MacKenzie’s 2 videos.
WantsToKnowTheTruth says
May 21, 2015 at 5:18 pm
**
** THE ACTUAL LOCATION OF THE PHOTO OF GM HOTSHOTS DOING LINE WORK
The following is a direct link to Joy Collura’s own online copy of that famous photo she took on Sunday, June 30, 2013 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots both ‘resting’ and doing ‘line work’ up there on the western ridge.THEY WERE NOT DOING ANY LINE WORK IN THIS PARTICULAR PHOTO- THE MAN WITH A TOOL IN HAND WAS TOSSING ROCKS—WHERE RED HELMET IS THAT MAN WAS LOOKING AT ANOTHER RED HELMET MAN ON TOP OF MOUNTAIN AND THE WORK LINE WAS RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER (BLINDED DUE TO RIDGE) FROM THIS DIRT ROAD AREA
This is the ONLY known photo from that day that captured ANY of the Granite Mountain Hotshots actually DOING any of that line work THEY WERE NOT DOING LINE WORK IN THIS PHOTO. WE WATCHED THEM “LIVE” AND THEY WERE AT EASE. THE WORK WAS DONE AROUND THE CORNER FROM THIS SPOT AND LATER CONFIRMED WITH HIKE WITH DR TED PUTNA/HOLLY/WAYNE N. AND BROUGHT UP ON HIKE WITH OSHA that was known to have taken place up there near the anchor point…RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732755684775826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732755684775826&oid=112068160404980104272
It’s always been a bit of a mystery exactly which piece of ‘road’ that is in the photo and where the men were actually standing ( and sitting/resting ).RIGHT AROUND CORNER FROM THE 4 TINY BUSHES THAT WERE ON FIRE https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911795877097573698?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911795877097573698&oid=112068160404980104272
As it turns out ( after another round with Google Earth )… I’m about 99 percent sure now that this photo shows the men both resting and workingNOT WORKING JUST AT EASE—ALL PRESENT IN PHOTO- ANY WORKING WOULD NOT BE IN PHOTO AND AROUND THE CORNER IF THERE WAS ANY up on the high-ridge two-track itself, right at the top of that ‘drainage’ that would soon become featured in other photos.
It has been reported that this ‘road’ seen in this photo was some kind of pre-exsiting firebreakTOO MANY HAVE CONFIRMED THIS AS FACTS that was built in 1967 or 1968EXACTLY. That might still be the caseIT IS THE CASE AND THE MEN DID NO WORK ON THIS ROAD BUT NEAR IT…IT WAS OFF THE ROAD HEADING IN DIRECTION OF PEEPLES VALLEY NOT UP OR DOWN BUT SIDEWAYS…but it was ALSO just a ‘part’ of that high-ridge two-track that ran up there along the entire western ridge.BUT NO WORK WAS DONE ON THAT ROAD AT ALL BUT ON THE SIDE OF IT. THE LEWIS CREW DID WORK UP TOP AND THERE IS PHOTO EVIDENCE OF THAT NEARING HELISPOT AREA
The GM Hotshot in the Red Helmet ( presumably Jesse Steed at this point ) MOST LIKELY BECAUSE WE SAW ERIC MARSH BY HIMSELF THE MAJORITY OF THE TIME EXCEPT AT TIMES WITH ANOTHERseen in the photo is standing exactly here in that ‘bend’ in that high-ridge two-track…
34.226756, -112.788956
That point is exactly at the top of that ‘drainage’ that they were then going to be using for more ‘line work’ a little later on.
34.226203, -112.783403 I AM NOT GOOD AT GPS MAP BUT I PUT THE DOT HERE AND THE THING GAVE COORDINATES 34.226203, -112.783403 BUT I DO NOT KNOW BUT IT IS THE BOULDER RIGHT THERE WHEN ERIC MARSH WAS FIRST NOTICED ON 6-30-13 BY ME. WE WERE 1/2 WAY TO SADDLE WHEN WE FIRST SAW HIM WAY BELOW US AND SONNY SAID I THINK WE WILL BE AT FIRE BEFORE THE FIREFIGHTERS.
So this ‘line work’ NOPE. THIS WAS NOT LINE WORK, MAN WITH TOOL WAS TOSSING ROCKS. we seen being done in this photograph was really nothing more than just a little bit of ‘improving’ being done to that existing bit of the high-ridge two-track at the top of that drainageHEY I AM NO FIREFIGHTER BUT EVEN AFTER I WAS TOLD BY DR TED PUTNAM AND WAYNE/HOLLY I DID NOT AGREE OF LOCATION NOR THE RESTARDANT BEING DUMPED ON THAT FIRE THEY JUST DID…STRANGE ALWAYS FOR ME. I WOULD THINK MORE LIKE MAKING FIRE BREAKS CLOSER THAN ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN THAT HAD ONLY FOUR TINY BUSHES ON FIRE AND A YELLOW AND WHITE HELICOPTER HOVERED THAT AREA MAKING FLAMES BURST HIGH AND INTENSE—… and this section of that two-track is NOT part of that ‘green squiggly line’ labeled ‘Completed Handline’ on page 20 of the SAIR document.WHAT IS THE LINK TO THE SQUIGGLY LINES…THE MAP NORBERT SHOWED ME IS THE SAME MAP?
The ‘black’ that is seen in the background of this photo is actually just the same ‘black’ that will be seen later right in front of that ‘last rest spot’ where Christopher MacKenzie would shoot his photos and videos circa 3:50 to 3:55 PM. EXACTLY. ALSO RETARDANT DROP TOO
ALL of the work that Granite Mountain was doing up there for SIX and 1/2 hours that day ( 9:00 AM to 3:30 PM ) was all pretty much in this same general areaNONE IN THE HIKERS’ VIEW THAT DAY ( and down in that drainage that was right there by that black ) for no more than about 100 yards down that slope.
Joy… THANK YOU for everything you wrote up above.
You are absolutely right.
I was ‘assuming’ they were doing ‘line work’ based on not much evidence, even in the photograph itself.
Looking at the photo again.. the only thing that even qualifies as ‘evidence’ that someone ( anyone? ) was doing any actual ‘line work’ is that fact that one of those GM Hotshots standing in the middle of the road just in front of the red-helmeted Jesse Steed APPEARS to be ‘scraping the ground’ with his Pulaski took and trying to ‘clean up’ the two-track itself a little bit.
That’s the only thing in this photo that could be construed as ‘line work’.
ALL the other men are RESTING… including that one other GM Hotshot in front of that group that is obviously ‘sitting down’. Even that one who is standing is obviously a SAWYER who was just LEANING ON HIS SAW there in the middle of the two-track road.
And as for the GM Hothshot in the RED Helmet there at that ‘bend in the road’… he really is NOT using a ‘took’ as one might think.
That had to be Jesse Steed.. and what he is doing is POINTING down the drainage at something.
Based on other photographs ( of yours )… it’s perfectly possible that Jesse Steed could have just arrived at that point and what he is ‘pointing’ at are the ‘spot fires’ down there in the drainage and along the edge of the ‘black’.
And Steed does look like he is either ‘talking’ or ‘gesturing’ to someone who is ‘around the bend’ there on that two-track and just out of being seen in the photograph.
As you suggested.. that was most probably the OTHER red-helmeted Hotshot who was out there that day… Eric Marsh… who was simply standing a little further north on the two-track as they ‘assessed’ the situation together.
tried again…guess bad day for pcs…do another time…tried another library
sonny did what he wanted and he is hungry
so I had LOTS more but gotta run
but please everyone focus to 20c s09 t10n ro5w 203-02-002
and meet again soon to write about exactly where I saw Marsh for the very first time before he met us—which was not on saddle but more on the base—k….
KD, good job!
I put you right there with the narrative we saw from AZ CENTRAL Sean McKinnon article…
go to Yavapai gis mapping to see what I am saying
talk soon
POST IT ONE SENTENCE AT A TIME
FROM WantsToKnowTheTruth says
May 20, 2015 at 10:30 pm
“Shortly after 8 A.M., Marsh reached a saddle on the ridge below the fire’s edge,”
NOT FACTS.
ERIC MARSH DID NOT REACH THE SADDLE SHORTLY AFTER 8AM
POST IT ONE SENTENCE AT A TIME
FROM WantsToKnowTheTruth says
May 20, 2015 at 10:30 pm
REPLY IN CAPS BELOW
“and encountered a man TEX and a woman JOYfrom the nearby town of Congress”FACTS ARE JOY IS FROM CONGRESS ARIZONA AND DESERT LIVING 100%SERVICE CONNECTED VET TEX HAD YARNELL’S OAK PARK CABIN NUMBER 15 AS OUR HIKING HEADQUARTERS ONLY SINCE 6-8-13
who had hiked up to see the blaze.AND KEEP IN MIND THAT WEEK WE HIKED FROM THE PRESCOTT DMV TO JUST ABOUT WILHOIT WHEN MY HUSBAND PICKED US UP AND HIKED FRIDAY AND ON SATURDAY WE WENT TO YARNELL FIRE STATION AND KNOCKED ON THE DOOR AND A DARK HAIRED MAN ANSWERED AND I TOLD HIM WE ARE HIKERS AND PLAN TO HIKE AREA, WAS ALL OKAY TO DO SO AND HE SAID THE FIRE WAS UNDER CONTROL. THE ONLY THING ON SATURDAY THAT PREVENTED US FROM ALERTING CAMPER FOLKS OUT THERE ON SATURDAY WAS OUR RUN IN WITH THE BEAR AND I SAID TO SONNY CAN WE TURN AROUND AND REST. THAT SATURDAY NIGHT THE VIEW FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP WAS AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL BUT IT DID NOT LOOK UNDER CONTROL SO WE WERE GOING TO PEAK OUT TO THE MOUNTAIN TOP AND TAKE A LOOK AND ALERT THE FOLKS AND TAKE OUT WEE MORNING BEFORE THAT FREAKING HOT SUN HIT…WE DID WHAT WE WENT OUT THERE TO DO…ONE PERSON IN TOWN SAID ANYONE OUT THERE CAN SEE THE FIRE BUT THAT IS NOT TRUE UNTIL YOU HIKE IT DIFFERENT RIDGES HID THE FIRE…GORDON ACRI CAN CONFIRM BECAUSE HE HAD CAMPING OUT FOLKS IN HIS AREA TOO.
“What are you doing with them pink ribbons?” the woman JOYasked him.
WE HAD THREE CONVERSATIONS WITH THE MAN (ERIC MARSH) AND THAT IS A SWEET QUESTION THE WAY HE SAID IT BUT MINE WAS EARLY MORNING TIRED DUMB ASS COMMENT SAYING ARE YOU TYING THE PINK RIBBONS BECAUSE THIS HAS ALOT OF GAYS IN THE COMMUNITY?
I LIKE HIS WAY BETTER…
Marsh, who must have been surprised to see hikers so close to the fire,
HELL NO
NEVER ACTED SURPRISED
NEVER QUESTIONED WHY WE WERE THERE
ON THE FIRST ENCOUNTER I STATED OUR BEING UP THERE AND THE FIRST TWO CONVERSATIONS GOING UP THE HILL HE NEVER SAID GET OUT OR LEAVE…HE WAS KIND SOUTHERNLY AND CORDIAL—IT WAS HIS LAST TALK THAT HAD THE FATHERLY TONE WHERE HE STATED MY MEN ARE DUE UP FOR A MEETING AND HE LOOKED AT TOP OF MOUNTAIN TO A MYSTERY MAN AND SAID THE PLANES COULD NOT DROP RETARDANT WITH CIVILIANS IN AREA BECAUSE WE ARE NOT GEARED FOR IT SO WE HAD TO START HEADING OUT AND I SAID BETTER YOU TO TELL US THAN SOME AUTHORITY AND HE JUST NODDED WITH SLIGHT TO SIDE GRIN AND OFF WE WENT BUT NOT EXACTLY WHEN MARSH WALKED AWAY I SAID TO SONNY I HAVE TO PEE AND WENT TO HEAD TO DO THAT UNTIL I SAW THE PLANES AND THE MAN ON TOP OF MOUNTAIN THAN FIGURED FORGET IT AND THIS MYSTERY MAN CAN CONFIRM THIS ALL TOO…HE WAS IN HEARING DISTANCE.
explained that the flagging was to mark a path in for the crew, and asked what the couple were doing up there.
explained that the flagging was to mark a path in for the crew,HIS EXACT WORDS TO MY PINK RIBBON COMMENT WAS HIS CREW IS FOLLOWING BEHIND HIM AND AS WE LOOKED THE CREW LOOKED LIKE TINY ANTS THAT IS HOW FAR IN DISTANCE THEY WERE FROM MARSH and asked what the couple were doing up there.BULLSHIT, THAT IS SLANDER AND MISLEADING AND NOT TRUE!
ERIC MARSH NEVER EVER ASKED US WHY WE WERE THERE I JUST TOLD HIM OUR INTENTIONS ON FIRST CONVERSATION…KD, WHAT KIND OF NARRATIVE YOU TRYING TO PLAY THERE?
They’d come up the mountain to see the fire and take pictures for a friend(HIKING PAL) of theirs(JOY), a cashier I HAVE SPOKEN ABOUT RONDA CARNES ON HERE BEFORE HOW WE USE TO HIKE BEFORE SHE BECAME A GRANDMA at the the local gas station,BUT LETS US REMEMBER I WAS TEXTING AND CALLING FAMILY/FRIENDS/RETIRED LOCAL SHERIFF/MY BIBLE STUDIES PAL they said.NEVER SAID KD! THEY NEVER SAID IN MANNER YOU SAY IT… It quickly became clear to Marsh that they’d spent a lot of time in the area. WHAT. HORSEHIT. FIRST ENCOUNTER I STATED WE ARE AVID HIKERS. The couple told him that they started hiking at Glen IlahEXACTLY! GOT ONE PART RIGHT!!!, bushwhacking through brush so thick “a bear couldn’t roll in it” to a thin road that ran parallel to the ridgetop. NEVER SAID THAT STATEMENT. THE STATEMENT WAS NEVER MADE TO ERIC MARSH OR EVEN IN EVACUATION BUT SONNY SAID NOT JOY TO ROLLING STONES EDITOR MENS JOURNAL EDITOR JOSH EELS AS HE TOOK HIM THROUGH A SAMPLE IN PERSON. WHERE YOU COMING UP WITH WE SAID THAT TO MARSH—
They told Marsh that if they had to do it again, they’d skip the bushwhacking and just walk in on the road that ran from the fire’s edge, along the ridgeline, straight back to Glen Ilah, and almost directly to the Helms’ place. THAT WHOLE PART YOU JUST WROTE KD WAS NEVER EVER SAID EVER…The hikers left the mountain shortly after.NOPE. WE HAVE PROOF OF THAT!!!
—————————————————————————————
From the original SAIR narrative… page 34…
—————————————————————————————
While scouting, DIVS A encountered two local residentsCORRECT
, avid hikersCORRECT
who are familiar with the area.JOY IS …SONNY CAME TO AREA 6-8-13
The hikers took a path down the
two-track road along the ridge to the southeast toward the Boulder
Springs Ranch.WE EXPLAINED THIS AREA TO SAIT IF YOU FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ OUR ACCOUNT WE GAVE THEM:
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5913183715556994226?sort=1&authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5913183715556994226&oid=112068160404980104272
They discussed their route with DIVS A prior to leaving.EVERY CONVERSATION WE DID- WE DID NOT SAY IT IN DESCRIPTION BUT AS YOU SEE JOHN DOUGHERTY YOU TUBE VIDEOS ON BOTH HOW I USE HAND GESTURE MOVEMENTS THAT IS HOW IT WAS DONE SAYING WE WOULD GO TO THE TOP AND HEAD LEFT AND CURVE BACK INTO GLEN ILAH WHERE WE PARKED…NO MENTION OF HELMS OR ANYTHING EVER…
I DONT KNOW IF I HAVE THE PATIENCE TO REDO IT
I JUST CANNOT BELIEVE THIS
I WROTE A DETAIL MESSAGE AND THE PC MESSED UP
SHEW
I CANNOT BELIEVE ALL THAT 2 HOURS OF WRITING IT AND I NORMALLY SAVE AS I GO BUT I WAS SO DETAILED AND WRAPPED AND TYPING AWAY AND THE PC ON ITS OWN DOING JUST BLANK—
FUDGE
….
CHEESE AND CRACKERS!
KD, I WILL CORRECT YOU ANOTHER TIME
TOO FRUSTRATED!
THAT BLEW…
IT WAS MY MOST DETAILED ACCOUNT TOO
EVERYONE KNOWS I USUALLY TYPE IN WORD THAN COPY/PASTE TO BLOG AND SAVE AS I GO BUT I JUST WENT TO TYPING LIVE AND WELL I HAVE TO WALK AWAY…
I lost my comment too–Bad connections? DK did educate me a bit. He says 30,000 gallons of retardant were dumped on this area. I had thought 10,000. Either way it was an overdose of NH3 lung cell killer in the soup with 8% of unknown chemicals called trade secrets.
You can now add 50 deaths to the 19 in the Yarnell area since the Yarnell fire. That figure will increase. Most of the people whom have died were elderly but it would not take much NH3 and other unknown chemical garbage in the air to put them down. Consider that both Joy and I have diminished lung capacity since the fire and granted she has her health problems and I am elderly–but we have talked to many in this Yarnell area who tell us they have experienced respiratory problems since the fire. Now granted people in the 20 year age group can loose a lot of lung cells before missing them, so those in their 40’s on are the ones who notice the problems . You would think there could be no secrets when it comes to people dispersing chemicals we have to breath. Especially this should hold true for firefighters who breath that shit regularly. If those chemicals are like Uranium, and they generally are, the effects don’t show up for years. Like asbestos miners, and people that licked brushes to paint the radioactive material on glowing watch numbers, their cancers and health problems did not appear for years. Every fireman needs this information even if he reaches retirement alive.
**
** JOY COLLURA’S ONLINE PHOTOS
In case it wasn’t altogether obvious to folks down below in Joy’s recent posting… I thought I would point out what is going on with the LINKS also posted in those replies
Joy ( and Sonny ) figured out a long time ago that one of the easiest ways to get around the WordPress Software’s ‘one link per message’ rule and put MANY URL links in one message ( and without that message falling into to moderation void ) is to simply put some SPACE CHARACTERS into the ‘http’ address part at the front of the URLs. This causes WordPress to not ‘recognize’ the rest of the line as a valid URL and so you have then have lots of these in the same message.
ALL of the URLs that Joy has included directly below to photographs in her Google album are REAL links… and they DO work… but you MAY have to ‘clean up’ the front of the link a little bit and remove some space characters in order for it to work in your browser.
Here’s an example from one her first postings just below…
>> On May 19, 2015 at 11:30 am, Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> We just picked up the book ON THE BURNING EDGE at the post office and
>> reported to Yarnell library so they can purchase on Amazon a copy for their
>> library because it is important that people SEE the different perceptions on
>> the hotshots and the YHF…again, can someone tell me WHO is the SOURCE
>> to these stories he is writing about on the GMHS
As far as the ‘stories’ from the 2013 season from the training and through the fires they worked on (right up to Yarnell)… it seems Dickman’s PRIMARY source was Brendan McDonough and the other surviving GM Hotshot from the 2013 season…. Renan Packer. The only reason Renan survived is because shortly before GM was dispatched to the Yarnell Fire… Renan had a ‘seizure’ and for that ( and other ) reasons, he had to leave GM during the 2013 season… but right BEFORE the Yarnell Hill Fire.
It’s also possible a lot of the details about what was really happening during trainings sessions and during some of the 2013 fires they worked on were coming from family members of some of the deceased GM Hotshots. Wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, etc. may have heard ‘stories’ direct from the men themselves following the events Dickman mentions in his book.
Good example might be the way the book itself STARTS. Brendan McDonough was there at that initial ‘meeting’ at the start of the 2013 fire season… but for Kyle Dickman to even be suggesting he knew exactly what Grante McKee was THINKING and FEELING would most likely have to have been one of his relatives recalling Grant’s own recollections of that day.
OR… it is also still possible Dickman is must ‘imagineering’ most of this and just ‘making most of it up’.
Unfortunately, Kyle Dickman does NOT list his ‘sources’ in a clear enough way to know exactly WHAT was coming from WHERE in his own ‘narrative’.
>> Joy also said…
>>
>> Why isn’t EX GMHS speaking up now on this very topic on this very site?
>> HUGE QUESTION RIGHT THERE—where are you ex GMHS?…you all need
>> to be interviewed.
Kyle Dickman doesn’t say a word about whether he even attempted to get any of the DOZENS and DOZENS of former GMHS to even consent to any interviews.
It still remains a VERY strange part of this ‘story’ that with so many former employees of this organization still among the living… that basically NONE of them have ever had anything to say about what it was really like working for the ‘Granite Mountain’ organization. Nothing good, bad or ugly. Basically just ‘no comment’ the whole way. Very strange.
>> Joy also said…
>>
>> Frisby, what are you thinking about all this and the book? On Oct 1, 2014 we had
>> communications by email and you had the fire season ending and prior plans with
>> family plus you had your hunting time and travelling to do…I know you said if we
>> had any future hikes you would try to make it but ONE DAY I very much after all
>> the litigation part is over would like to hike it with you because I watched you that
>> day and I would love to hike it with you…
Interesting to learn that Brian Frisby was willing to respond to email requests and that he WOULD like to ‘hike the fire’ someday.
>> Joy also said…
>>
>> I find Frisby to be the ONE to write a story on the YHF.
Yes. One of the most important ‘stories’ that remains to be told for this historic event is Brian Frisby’s… in his OWN words… and WITHOUT ‘redactions’.
>> Joy also said…
>>
>> REPLY IN CAPS BELOW TO WTKTT:
>>
>> Joy said… Donut showed to be ill and we affirm that even early
>> morning 6-30-13 & Norbert of STERN magazine
>>
>> https: // plus. google. c o m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums
>> /5922175655744920065/ 5950589754816056338?%
>> 20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950589754816056338&oid=1120681604049801
>> 04272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
>>
>> THIS WAS THE FIRST MAP WE SAW OF THE YHF SHOWN TO HIKERS BY
>> NORBERT DURING MEAL. MICHAEL KODAS AND HIKERS PRESENT.
>> ON THAT PHOTO IS HIS CONTACT INFORMATION IS ON THE RIGHT COMMENT
That is a perfectly valid URL that Joy has put in the message and it takes you right to the photograph in her album she is referring to… but you have to REMOVE the SPACE characters from the ‘address’ part of the URL.
Once you do that… it looks like this…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950589754816056338?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950589754816056338&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
The photograph itself is simply page 20 of the original Arizona Forestry SAIR document.
That ‘map’ is one of the only ones in that document that actually showed…
1) What the fire perimeter looked like on the morning of Saturday, June 29, 2013 at 10:00 AM before Shumate got any of the Lewis DOC crew up there to beging their 5 hour long ‘cold mop’.
That Saturday morning fire perimeter shows as a BLUE LINE.
2) There is a short GREEN LINE on this particular SAIT map that has a label which says it is showing ‘Completed Handline’ up near the anchor point where GM was working on Sunday.
This ‘Completed Handline’ indicator is only about 100 yards long… and it really does NOT go in any direction which matches a lot of the other descriptions in investigation narratives about WHERE they were building this handline and whether they were trying to CONNECT it to anything.
If that little GREEN ‘squiggly’ line on page 20 of the SAIR really is all the evidence they could even find of any ‘line building’ going on up there all day Sunday… then the real mystery would be WHY that is ALL that could be found after a full Type 1 handcrew had been working that location for upwards of 6 hours ( before picking up tools and leaving ).
It’s also a complete mystery ( still ) what they even THOUGHT they were trying to ‘connect’ to.
The ‘Completed Handline’ indicator is going AWAY from the two-track they walked in on and it is not even going TOWARDS the ‘old-grader’ location.
It does, however, match other photographs of Joy’s ( also linked to below ) showing this ‘line work’ right there around the anchor point.
So the short location / distance represented by that GREEN LINE on page 20 of the SAIR for ‘handline’ does match Joy’s photos… but only for that 100 yards or so.
What ELSE that full Type 1 Handcrew was doing up there for a full SIX HOURS ( or why they didn’t come down much earlier than they did ) remains one of the big mysteries of that day.
So once again.. a big THANK YOU to Joy Collura.
The SAIT seems to have gotten their little squiggly GREEN LINE right on page 20 of the SAIR… but they, themselves, included no photographs of their OWN to back that up.
It is ONLY Joy Collura’s photographs that are showing us where those men were actually doing any WORK up there that day.
Just to make it easier to follow:
Cuttings 01:
Nov 25, 2013
“we did go out where Ted and Wayne and we can confirm the cuttings as we saw them as well as Michael and Norbert. Also we confirmed in page one video that it was done by GMHS because my video show it was not cut that morning when we were there so it was not the prison crew.”
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682273225248194?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682273225248194&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
“
Cuttings 02:
Nov 25, 2013
“cuttings are there”
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682379634270146?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682379634270146&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
Cuttings 03:
Nov 25, 2013
“cuttings”
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682486569670450?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682486569670450&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
Marti… thank you for posting these ‘clickable’ links into Joy’s amazing Google folder.
I was actually about to do the same thing ( post a list of photos that show line work out there ) since I believe we really ARE still in the middle of that renewed ( ongoing ) discussion about exactly WHAT Granite Mountain was DOING up there all day Sunday, and WHERE they were doing, and WHY.
It’s still really, really important to understand what it was that even THEY thought they were trying to accomplish out there for SIX HOURS… since their seeming inability to admit that the work became ‘pointless’ at the same time that day that a lot of other people ( Warbis, Lenmark, Bravo 3, etc ) actually became one of the reasons for their eventual demise.
It was them ‘sticking to’ whatever they were doing for so long that afternoon which robbed them of the time needed later to stay alive.
So in that context… it is still REALLY important to understand what THEY thought they were doing… and why SIX FULL HOURS still wasn’t enough time to accomplish it.
So YES… I think the imting of Joy reminding us about her PUBLIC photographs is perfect and one of the key sto at least understanding WHERE they ( GM ) were doing whatever the hell it was they thought they were accomplishing out there.
Regarding THIS photo ( Cuttings 03 )… It’s important to remember that the ROCK up there at TDC ( Tod Dead Center ) is that infamous NOTCHED ROCK which is visible in MOST of Christopher MacKenzie’s CANON photos and the ‘landscape feature’ that anchors all these photos to the same location.
That NOTCHED ROCK shows us not only where that ‘last rest spot’ really was… it shows us where GM was ACTUALLY doing this ‘line work’ for 6 hours that day.
In THIS photo… we are looking at that same NOTCHED ROCK from further down the slope in that drainage there… which is where they had been clearing line all afternoon but it is still not fully understood WHY or WHERE they thought this line work in that drainage was supposed to ‘tie in’ to anything.
And I still say that is the ongoing problem here.
The MAP on page 20 of the SAIR has always had that little green squiggly line on it that says “Completed Handline”. The reports then all go on to say that Granite Mountain was working to ‘tie this handline in’… and THAT is what was keeping them up there all afternoon even beyond the SAFE time to be up there…
…but no report ever gets specific about this “tie in” crap.
“Tie in” to WHAT? WHERE?… and WHY was SIX HOURS not enough to do that?
Thanks to Joy ( and NO thanks to the SAIT or Arizona Forestry )… we DO have pictures that show where this WORK was being done and it DOES pretty much match the location of that little green squiggly line…
…but not even any of that explains WHY that work was right there where it was and what in the heck they were even trying to ‘tie in’ to that day.
So as long as we’re creating this ‘collection’ right here of ‘work done’ photos… here’s another important one of Joy’s photos from early on in the Google album.
Once again… it shows that NOTCHED ROCK in the very upper left corner of the image and it’s a WIDE VIEW taken from up on the two-track of this very ‘drainage’ they were cutting line in. The Old-Grader is seen WAAAAY in the distance and it’s not realisitc that it could have been the target of that line work or the place they were planning to do this infamous “tie in”.
Here is that important “Where were they cutting line” photo of Joy’s…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5925106969717310546?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5925106969717310546&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
** Top right corner = The infamous NOTCHED ROCK seen in MacKenzie photos.
** Dead Center – Bottom – Foreground – on the two-track = Saw cuts.
That little ‘bush’ there on the two-track has SAW CUTS right there in front of it and the very next sequential photo in Joy’s Google album is a CLOSEUP of these saw cuts. This appears to be the exact spot up on the two-track where Granite Mountain STARTED that line-cutting work that would then head down that drainage there in front of Sonny and the guy in blue with the walking stick.
This is also the point up on the two-track that the Sawyers were headed to in the MacKenzie photos taken farther down the slope which shows them slinging their saws to come back up the slope and join the others when it was finally “quittin’ time” that day circa 3:40 PM.
More later.
Whoops. BAD Typo above…
I said…
** Top right corner = The infamous NOTCHED ROCK seen in MacKenzie photos.
That is WRONG.
That infamous NOTHCED ROCK is in the TOP LEFT in this photo.
Gotcha.
So you said:
“It was them ‘sticking to’ whatever they were doing for so long that afternoon which robbed them of the time needed later to stay alive.”
I agree.
And I just want to “frame” this, time-wise.
Both Bravo 3 and Sonny are realizing, by 12:30 PM, that this fire is going to go to some version of completely crazy by that afternoon. And also Chuck Maxwell is, too.
There are nowhere enough resources ACTIVE in the area for the plan that Marsh and Abel put in place that morning to be accomplished that day. Not even remotely.
Granite Mountain continues, apparently, in some version of “diligently,” at least vis a vis its sawyers (even though anybody else isn’t all that apparent), “cutting a line” from the two-track in some direction that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything and we have absolutely no idea what they were intending to tie that line into.
“They” continue “diligently” working on that line (which apparently didn’t get all that far) until the 3:30 PM weather warning (and that’s the SECOND warning) comes through the pipeline and Brendan gets knocked from his lookout point and has to be rescued by Frisby)……….
…..even though it’s pretty clear to us arm-chair quarterbacks and a few others working in-real-life that day, that the fire was very likely going to go to helacious in a handbucket that afternoon and therefore the crews should have been Dis-Engaged from the fire that they weren’t going to be able to essentially fight (and therefore the risk was greater than the potential value) by somewhere around two in the afternoon.
Because there really was NOTHING they could do, all things considered, to protect anybody or anything from what that fire was most likely going to do, all things considered — and which it DID.
And so by, for WHATEVER reason, continuing to do something that, given the circumstances, was increasingly becoming meaningless and pointless, and thus, given the DANGER, increasingly DANGEROUS,
………they also blocked themselves from taking advantage of the opportunity (and, as it turned out, NECESSITY) to just rein in all the galloping horses and stop and THINK.
“Slow down, SKIPPY!!!!”
They should have done that after the 2:00 PM National Weather Service Briefing. But, apparently, that briefing went by essentially un-noticed, for all intents and purposes.
They just, apparently, kept building their essentially worthless handline for a full HOUR AND A HALF after that.
I’m starting to think that some kind of mental exhaustion thing could be a factor here. It’s like everybody just went essentially brain-dead somewhere around 1:30 to 2:00 in the afternoon. And it just kept getting worse after that. To the point that at 4:20-ish when they decided to drop down into that explosively-fueled bowl, there wasn’t any mental activity even left.
We’re gonna build this pointless line……………
Even though…………
Whatever…………….
And we’re gonna keep marching on this pointless path……..
Even though…………….
Whatever………………….
“”It was them ‘sticking to’ whatever they were doing for so long that afternoon which robbed them of the time needed later to stay alive.”
Yep.
I just want to ask what ever wildland fire-fighters may be reading this:
Is this “normal”?
Are we missing something here?
Because I’m really stumped.
Also, it’s important to be aware of the fact that in the photo Joy shot of the crew working, in which part of the crew is resting and part of the crew is working, is on a fire-line that had been constructed in the late 1960’s (although I’m a little bit confused as to the conflicted details in Joy/Sonny’s annotation).
So basically they’re just cleaning it up an already existing fireline a bit.
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732755684775826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732755684775826&oid=112068160404980104272
It’s also still a bit of a mystery exactly WHERE this firebreak / two-track really is. Is this really any part of that two-track they used to hike up there… or no?
I’ve actually been unable to totally pinpoint this location so far. I BELIEVE that infamous NOTCHED ROCK seen in all the other photos is right there but just slightly ‘out of frame’ in this photo… but not 100 percent sure yet.
I’m also not sure this photo shows any work that corresponds to that little squiggly green line with the label “Completed Handline” on that map on page 20 of the SAIR report.
There doesn’t even seem to be a feature near that green line of their’s that matches what is seen in this photo.
I was beginning to think the same questions.
Hadn’t had time to go wandering into that.
And I’m in a class today, so probably won’t get there.
Wondering if Joy/Sonny can tell us where it is on a map.
**
** THE ACTUAL LOCATION OF THE PHOTO OF
** GM HOTSHOTS DOING LINE WORK
The following is a direct link to Joy Collura’s own online copy of that famous photo she took on Sunday, June 30, 2013 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots both ‘resting’ and doing ‘line work’ up there on the western ridge.
This is the ONLY known photo from that day that captured and of the Granite Mountain Hotshots actually DOING any of that line work that was known to have taken place up there near the anchor point…
https://plus.google.com/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732755684775826?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732755684775826&oid=112068160404980104272
It’s always been a bit of a mystery exactly which piece of ‘road’ that is in the photo and where the men were actually standing.
As it turns out ( after another round with Google Earth )… I’m about 99 percent sure now that this photo shows the men both resting and working up on the high-ridge two-track itself, right at the top of that ‘drainage’ that would soon become featured in other photos.
It has been reported that this ‘road’ seen in this photo was some kind of pre-exsiting firebreak that was built in 1967 or 1968. That might still be the case…but it was ALSO just a ‘part’ of that high-ridge two-track that ran up there along the entire western ridge.
The GM Hotshot in the Red Helmet ( presumably Jesse Steed at this point ) seen in the photo is standing exactly here in that ‘bend’ in that high-ridge two-track…
34.226756, -112.788956
That point is exactly at the top of that ‘drainage’ that they were then going to be using for more ‘line work’ a little later on.
So this ‘line work’ we seen being done in this photograph was really nothing more than just a little bit of ‘improving’ being done to that existing bit of the two-track at the top of that drainage… and this section of that two-track is NOT part of that ‘green squiggly line’ labeled ‘Completed Handline’ on page 20 of the SAIR document.
I have to say I’m kind of frustrated because I copied to my downloads a bunch of photos from the Google albums, images that I didn’t have and wanted to attempt again to sort out the time-stamping.
Unfortunately, the images that downloaded were itsy tiny and stripped of all the metadata. So I can’t “mess around with them” in LIghtroom and try to see what’s going on. And the problem is there are photos that appear to have been taken on Sunday, but since the camera was stamping them June 29, I don’t think they made it into the collection we now have in John’s dropbox.
So there’s still some uncertainty as to exactly when some of these very important images were captured.
But I’m kind of getting a “feel” of it.
I just have to say, Joy may have said down below that Brian Frisby “has a book.”
I would say that Joy and Sonny equally “have a book.” It’s been awesome to browse through these albums today.
Which makes it even MORE FRUSTRATING that KD didn’t even bother to interview them. They’ve really been an important hub of LOTS of networking and information sharing with some pretty significant people via these albums.
And all the wonderful images and stories of all the wonderful wildlife living and dying in the Weavers and all around. I LOVE all of that.
Thanks Joy for posting these links so I could find my way back into your really invaluable “citizens’ photo-journalism”.
Kyle is fictional on our account. on page 194 and 195.
Copy
I’m assuming you’re meaning pages 194-195 in the hardback book, not the Kindle (which can get weird in regards to paging(.
Why am I not surprised????????
Kyle is fictional on our account. on page 194 and 195.
Reply to joy post on May 20, 2015 at 8:40 pm
>> Joy said…
>>
>> Kyle is fictional on our account. on page 194 and 195.
Kyle Dickman is basically doing nothing there but regurgitating that original 1 paragraph of text from page 34 of the SAIR report, which has also already been established as ‘untrue’.
Here is Dickman’s ’embelishment’ of that 1 paragarph…
—————————————————————————-
Shortly after 8 A.M., Marsh reached a saddle on the ridge below the fire’s edge, and encountered a man and a woman from the nearby town of Congress, who had hiked up to see the blaze.
“What are you doing with them pink ribbons?” the woman asked him.
Marsh, who must have been surprised to see hikers so close to the fire, explained that the flagging was to mark a path in for the crew, and asked what the couple were doing up there.
They’d come up the mountain to see the fire and take pictures for a friend of theirs, a cashier at the the local gas station, they said. It quickly became clear to Marsh that they’d spent a lot of time in the area. The couple told him that they started hiking at Glen Ilah, bushwhacking through brush so thick “a bear couldn’t roll in it” to a thin road that ran parallel to the ridgetop. They told Marsh that if they had to do it again, they’d skip the bushwhacking and just walk in on the road that ran from the fire’s edge, along the ridgeline, straight back to Glen Ilah, and almost directly to the Helms’ place. The hikers left the mountain shortly after.
—————————————————————————————
From the original SAIR narrative… page 34…
—————————————————————————————
While scouting, DIVS A encountered two local residents, avid hikers
who are familiar with the area. The hikers took a path down the
two-track road along the ridge to the southeast toward the Boulder
Springs Ranch. They discussed their route with DIVS A prior to leaving.
—————————————————————————————
‘Imagineering’ is when you take a small amount of ‘fact’ and then start ‘imagining’ that other things must also be true.
Kyle Dickman does a LOT of ‘imagineering’ in his new book.
But I’m not ever sure WHAT you call it when you start with information that has already been proven to be false and they you do your ‘imagineering’ on THAT (incorrect) information.
All Dickman had to do was talk to Joy and Sonny to ‘get this right’.
He didn’t even TRY to do that.
That really casts all kinds of doubts on the veracity of practically anything between the covers of this book of his except the things that can absolutely be verified in the public record.
The ‘Definitive story of the Yarnell Hill Fire’?
Not so much. Not even close, really.
And, yeah, WTKTT.
There was just no way in Hellacious they could have accomplished much of anything. at the apparent rate they were going, to have “protected” much of anything, especially with Blue Ridge sitting on their butts the entire day and that other IHC not even showing up.
The whole thing just seems so……………pointless.
I know I know I know I know I know……..
Gary says the first 36-48 hours of a fire are pretty much CHAOS. And I think we “civilians” in our desk-chairs observing things via our computers need to realistically comprehend that.
But I’m still experiencing a whole bunch of cognitive dissonance about this. And I can’t even find inside my brain the frameworks much less the words to describe that cognitive dissonance.
Is it because EVERYBODY was thinking more about some kind of “setting things up” for TOMORROW than paying attention to TODAY?????
When the weather and fire-danger forecasting and alerting were practically SHOUTING to EVERYBODY (and this is one of the serious points involved in the ordering of a deposition of Scott Hunt by Judge Mosesso) that on ANY GIVEN DAY at that time, to EXPECT the worst, and PLAN for it, and BE PREPARED for it, THAT VERY DAY.
I think that there’s an extent to which the fire-fighters etc on the north end of the fire (where the head was aiming most of the day) were focusing on today, not tomorrow. (Even though I still don’t comprehend how Darrell Willis was justifying inside his head the throwing of all those resources at “saving” the Double A Bar Ranch, all things considered).
But the stuff going on in that Division A Division Z south end of the fire just doesn’t even make an iota of sense.
OK I can look at it at the time Eric and Todd Abel were standing there, fairly early in the morning in the parking lot of the Yarnell Fire Department and thinking, we need to get an anchor on that southwest corner and start building lines to contain it, even as it is currently burning to the northeast under the prevailing winds.
The problem is there were never enough resources actually, in reality, assigned to that plan to actually ACCOMPLISH it.
Blue Ridge showed up and drove in but never ever even involved themselves in any of that plan, except for providing a Dozer Boss to the Dozer that didn’t have a credentialed (or radio-ed or maybe even, according to some, ALLOWABLE) Operator.
And even though I see Brian and Trew as being, as things played themselves out, majorly conscious and responsible and, as things got worse and worse, seriously BRAVE…….
I don’t see them as having, in any discernible way, taken, in any kind of responsible fashion, ANY ownership or commitment or ANYTHING regarding the PLAN that Eric and Todd Abel seem to have committed themselves to for that day.
And so we have this “plan” agreed to by Eric and Todd, while the two resources that managed to get there to help accomplish it being either insufficient or uninterested/uncommitted (while a third just didn’t even make it and nobody bothered to try to replace them), ……
…..and so this one crew that actually gets themselves active kinda sorta kinda sorta begins to act on the “plan” but just doesn’t get very far…..because really there’s not all that far that they can actually get all by themselves…….
……and nobody actually seems to be very concerned that this “plan” isn’t going to be able to get done that day, but oh well………..we’ll kinda sorta focus on “setting ourselves up for tomorrow” (including kinda sorta setting ourselves up to do “something of a back-burn tonight on at least part of this “line”…………
…..while MEANWHILE the ACTUAL wildfire is doing basically what the fire-weather forecasters have been, essentially, SHOUTING (in spite of what Our Counselor would have you and the American Meteorological Association believe) that wildfires at that time would most likely do — ie get really wild and crazy and be subjected to dry thunderstorm conditions that would include winds every which way driving fires every which way….. ON THAT DAY (not in theory but in reality and not tomorrow but today)
And so, yeah, Granite Mountain managed to put in some handline.
As if, in the great scheme of things, that was going to even matter.
Am I getting this right, or am I missing something?
I find myself grinding to something of a halt in my thinking.
It just seems to me that there must be some kind of Lessons Learned to be learned here. But I, a civilian, don’t seem to be able to nail it. I think the actual wildland fire-fighters are going to have to figure this one out, for themselves, and for us.
Is this really how we fight wildfires????
Because if it is, Houston, we’ve got a problem.
And also, I guess this is as good of a place to put this as anywhere.
Sonny/Joy make a NUMBER of references/annotations on their photos in these albums regarding Joy’s CONCERN about the wind WASHING of the fire by the various/numerous helicopters and aircraft flying the fire on Sunday morning.
I found that to be seriously prescient, given how we spent the month of January this year dissecting the Saturday June 29 events and finally coming to the conclusion that it may have been extremely possible that what CAUSED THE FIRE TO JUMP THE TWO-TRACK, that was its eastern fire-line, on Saturday afternoon, was the helicopter apparently flying and hovering directly over the fire as it delivered a sling-line of supplies.
We don’t KNOW that that’s what happened. But what are aware of is that there’s a convergence of narratives that may lead in that direction.
Unfortunately, nobody in either of these investigations actually investigated the various factors that were at play on Saturday, the day that this fire really truly could have and should have been PUT OUT, and wasn’t, for a variety of reasons.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 20, 2015 at 9:28 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Am I getting this right, or am I missing something?
You ARE getting it right.
It is just as perplexing now as it was when the SAIR first came out and we never even got any good explanation from THEM about any of this.
Willis spoke to Marsh at 6:00 AM. Told Marsh “We need an anchor”.
Marsh stands in the parking lot with Abel and says “We need an anchor”.
Abel and Marsh walk over to Shumate, Musser, Hall, say “We need an anchor”.
Current ICT4 Shumate says “Ok… let’s put in an anchor”.
Incoming Type 2 Short IC Roy Hall says “I agree.. let’s have an anchor”.
Marsh tells Steed I’m DIVSA, you’re GMIHCS today. Let’s do an anchor.
Marsh scouts ahead. Didn’t even wait for a map.
Bumps into Joy and Sonny. They have to tell HIM how to finish his hike.
Steed follows pink ribbons, Brings crew.
Once there… we are back to “Let’s anchor this, boys!”
A squad ( with McDonough in it ) does mop-up on the west side.
Other squad tries to do indirect burnouts on the east side.
Air Attack Rory Collins dumps retardant all over burnouts. Forces direct.
At this point in the SAIR narrative… there really still isn’t any proof that DIVSA Marsh or GMIHCS Steed had any frickin’ idea what they were supposed to be doing… or what the overall ‘plan’ really was… other than exactly what Darrell Willis had told Marsh needed to happen at 6:00 AM in a cellphone call.
“We need to get an anchor on this thing”.
Marsh could see Cordes using the dozer down in the flats, but there is no evidence that any kind of elaborate “You guys tie into this dozer line and we can burn it later and protect the entire frickin’ town” had ever actually been discussed.
Cordes originally thought they were going to use the dozer to ‘improve’ some of those trails and two-tracks that ran south-to-north out there and have those improved two-tracks be ‘firebreaks’ for the EAST flank of the fire.
By the time anyone go their shit together… that plan was already obsolete.
The fire had come down off the ridge too far for the south-to-north two-tracks to be used a firebreaks. Fall-back plan was then to improve that east-to-west two-track out to the old-grader and MAYBE ( just maybe ) that could come into play later as some kind of place to ‘burn out from’.
But still… even that point… there isn’t much evidence any of that was being communicated or coordinated with Marsh or Steed.
It might not have even been until Frisby/Brown/Marsh/Steed even had the face-to-face from 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM that this whole idea of ‘tying in’ to the dozer push out to the grader even became a viable idea.
But even then… even after Frisby and Brown left that meeting and dropped Brendan off at the lookout mound… they did NOT immediately order the Blue Ridge Crew to hike out to the end of the already-improved dozer push and then start working WEST to meet the line work that GM would be doing coming from the EAST and have them ‘meet in the middle’ like the east and west branches of the intercontinental rairoad, or something.
It didn’t happen.
After dropping Brendan off… Fisby and Brown just told their own crew to keep hanging out by the BR Crew Carriers doing NOTHING while they took off bombing around in the Polaris Ranger and heading NORTH to see if the whole idea of using a south-to-north two-track to establish an EAST flank was still viable.
It wasn’t. It was way too late for that… but that ‘bombing around’ chewed up another half-hour and then Blue Ridge Crew was still just sitting around doing nothing at all.
So it all sounds very ‘busy, busy’ and whatnot… but somewhere in here was just a slow moving fuster cluck… with NO ONE really taking charge of what was happening… OR making sure that anything actually productive or useful was actually getting done.
Just ‘wheel spinning’… and the Incident Commander for the fire itself was now just tucked away in the air-conditioned principal’s office at the Model Creek School ( with no radio ) and arguing on the PHONE with Arizona Forestry’s Jim Downey and David Geyer about what TOMORROW was going to look like.
The only physical evidence we have left ( and can see, thanks to Joy ) is that Steed thought it was their job to ANCHOR the damn fire.
I’m not seeing any evidence in either the SAIT’s own ‘little green squiggly line’ or in the photographic evidence of saw cuts and scraping that that work was nothing more than just securing the ‘anchor’ and at least having a place to even START fighting the fire from.
There is SOME evidence that Jesse Steed DID also understand that he was supposed to be getting the men to scrape ground and “Tie in” to SOMETHING… but whatever that was… it was FIVE HOURS later and he’s telling Frisby on the radio it was still “slow going” and would take at least another hour.
That was another hour that no one had that day.
But all we have there is more incessant “Tie in” references without any good explanation what in the hell that was even supposed to mean… and WHERE in the hell this “Tie in” point was even supposed to be.
And all of this DOES matter… because all of this ‘busy work’ that wasn’t going to amount to jack shit that day is what KEPT Steed and the Crew ‘tools down’ and working up there all afternoon and was eventually the reason they lost the time they needed that day to stay alive.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I find myself grinding to something of a halt in my thinking.
>>
>> It just seems to me that there must be some kind of Lessons Learned
>> to be learned here. But I, a civilian, don’t seem to be able to nail it.
>> I think the actual wildland fire-fighters are going to have to figure
>> this one out, for themselves, and for us.
>>
>> Is this really how we fight wildfires????
>>
>> Because if it is, Houston, we’ve got a problem.
I think if you ‘read between the lines’ of what many WFFs keep saying about all this ( Powers, Olson, etc. )… then the anser is YES… this IS how ‘transitions’ go.
It’s pretty much ALWAYS just loosely organized chaos.
It’s just that NORMALLY… people don’t up and DIE ( much less 19 people ).
In other words… classic SNAFU task management.]
The ‘normalization of deviance’.
Things seem pretty screwed up… but then they always do… so we must be doing OK, then.
But all along… with THIS one… you can even feel the ‘oldtimers’ in ‘the brotherhood’ putting out the hints that THIS one was ‘over the top’… and ESPECIALLY screwed up and chaotic.
So even THEY seem to be ready to admit that there IS a point where SNAFU management becomes life-threatening… and (yes) even life-taking.
Sometimes confusion IS because of sheer incompetence.
Sometimes incompetence DOES amount to actual negligence.
Sometimes actual negligence DOES result in ‘wrongful deaths’.
There is NEVER a good reason to accept confusion, incompetence and negligence as NORMAL.
The “Lessons to Learn” are somewhere right there.
It’s way too late fore me but ……..
You wrote:
“There is NEVER a good reason to accept confusion, incompetence and negligence as NORMAL.”
There was never an Incident Action Plan written……………until it was written after the fact.
There was never a Plan.
There was never an “Escaped Fire” report/plan written.
There was never a formal analysis of the fire. There was never a Plan.
Because there was never a (Slow Down Skippy!!!) stop-and-think-about-it Analysis of the Escaped Fire done, much less a (Slow Down Skippy!!!) stop-and-think-about-it Incident Action Plan created, there was also no (Slow Down Skippy!!!) stop-and-think-about-it basis created for determining what kind of Incident Management Team was actually needed (thus the one that was dispatched spent the day filling in the holes in itself rather than being able to actually fight the fire it was supposed to be fighting) and, thus, there was actually no meaningfully thought-out PLAN for what those two Hotshot Crews (lacking the OTHER Hotshot Crew that didn’t even get there) were supposed to be doing that day, other than “we need an anchor” and then let’s just ad hoc it from there regarding putting in some scrape scrape “hand-lines” from wherever to wherever, just in case they might help maybe sometime. Oh, and maybe we might also burn out some stuff “this evening” when the fire kinda sorta “settles down” even though the weather forecasts are predicting a possible reversal in the winds and the fire and all things going to helacious before we ever even get close to “this evening.”
I guess what bugs me is that I don’t even know where, in this whole scenario, “the buck stops.”
Which leads me back to what we discovered regarding the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. In my mind. This is so similar.
The “swiss cheese” thing I encountered here while learning about all of this wildfire realm was really helpful in my understanding of both events. A host of otherwise possibly inconsequential things lining up.
On both of these, a number of people were making a bunch of decisions while thinking inside their own “little boxes,” each of which, by themselves, seemed to be “competent” and “adequate.”
On both of these, nobody was thinking on the basis of “the larger picture.”
Someone wrote an analysis of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, calling it a “Failure of Imagination.” As we “Citizens Investigators” were both monitoring and documenting the intervention into that and wresting among ourselves about what had happened, that “Failure of Imagination” analysis just really went BOOM! It really resonated with what we were perceiving and struggling to articulate.
All these various and sundry people were thinking and acting within the realms of their own expertises and responsibilities and no-one was keeping track of the “whole picture,” the whole thing that was going on, which was a combination of all these various other components that were aligning themselves, like the Swiss Cheese model, into a catastrophe of ultimate proportions.
That’s what I’m seeing here.
Everybody’s in their own little “boxes.”
Eric and Todd Abel made up a piece of a “Plan.” GMHS went to work on that piece of “Plan.” But there was never actually a “Plan” made for them to fit their “Plan” into.
There was never any overall coherence to anything anyone was actually doing as they were interacting with the FIRE. It was just these “bits and pieces.”
That’s exactly what was going on with the various decision-makers who were creating the various pieces of the process of drilling the Macondo well from the Deepwater Horizon platform.
There was nobody in that decision-making process who was tasked with “imagining” the whole enterprise and thus, “imagining” the possibilities of the various things that could (and did) “go wrong.”
In my understanding of things wildfire, it is the responsibility of the Incident Commander to do that “imagining” of the whole enterprise.
Unfortunately, on the Yarnell Hill Fire, that Incident Commander was so busy filling in the holes in his team and trying to “imagine” what would need to be done “tomorrow” that he wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on “today,” and thus the fact that the whole strategy and tactics that were being pursued in that southern area of “his” wildfire was not only pointless, but, given the weather forecasts, DANGEROUS and needed to be dis-engaged from at somewhere around 2:00 that afternoon.
This is what I see having happened right now, as late as it is, way beyond what should be my bedtime.
Compartmentalization. Something that can be useful. And also something that can become deadly.
That is what I see in this, as I struggle to see in this.
Failure of Imagination.
The Key Component.
Couldn’t agree with this more.
It was just ‘reactionary’ management… from soup to nuts…
And it got people KILLED.
And it’s not something to just be dismissed as a ‘bad day at work’.
This was the kind of incompetence and negligence and lack of imagination that, when present, gets people killed.
Referring to the handline–one hundred yards is about right. It can be easily followed by someone knowledgeable in wildland firefighting. Wayne Neal and Dr. Ted Putman showed us the path after we hiked them to where the Hot Shots were at that Sunday morning. It curves around the slope and undoubtedly was intended to meet up with the dozer that was blading up from the old grader. What stopped the continuation of the dozer is said to be because he read that old danger, do not proceed sign put up by the state some 30-50 years back. We were watching the fire going out of control sometime before 11 am and that fire had to be advancing down that really brushy area toward where the dozer turned around. Actually he turned around quite a piece below the sign or at least there quit dozing and cleaned out a space where I though he intended to leave the dozer. He must have seen that fire coming down the mountain at him that also stopped the Hot Shots from completing their run down to where he wanted to complete his dozing up toward that old gold mine. They had perhaps another couple hundred yards down the hill to meet up to his dozer line—could not happen considering the brush and that fire advancing down the hill between the two of them.
Sonny… thank you for this important information.
Thanks to you ( and Joy’s photos )… we really are finally getting a better picture of what Granite Mountain was even trying to do out there that day… as well as what they were trying to do with the dozer.
They really didn’t have the resources to do what they were trying to do.
Wrong dozer. Wrong blade type. Not ENOUGH dozers… Not ENOUGH hand crews, etc. etc.
Reply to that fire did not look like it could overrun Yarnell. The answer would correctly be once it advanced from the boulders down into that tanglement of dense manzanita anything could happen. Truthfully when I saw it take over a mountain in less than 14 minutes with the fireworks we were seeing on that Sunday, June 30, 2013 I figured Peeples Valley was gone. It was obvious that any kind of wind shift and Yarnell and anything else in that wildfire path would be destroyed. As bomb proof as the Helm’s is, I thought even it would go up considering the absolutely dense growth of manzanita that place was surrounded by. We know that tires burned off an old vehicle parked on the edge of their firebreak perimeter. I think Marsh and his crew would have said Holy Shit, back off and let the big dog eat,
Shew. thought I would never get here…so many setbacks. I tried answering you WWTKTT even sent Marti Reed an email 5-16-15 8:12pm but my cell which is really not mine but Sonny’s— I have not had a physical cell since June 2014—it is hairy and goes back back back when trying to post but that link below had a lot more writing than just that but that is all that posted. I did answer all questions that day.
Now I am going to just scroll and copy/paste now that I am at the library desktop and I am able to do that…and re-answer you plus some…
“WantsToKnowTheTruth says May 18, 2015 at 8:44 pm Just a few days ago there was an elaborate ceremony in the middle of the lobby of the Boise airport… and Darrel Willis …”
I think when I typed in at GOOGLE “vomiting” this article above came back in results-
or was this “Just ONE of the ‘Vomit Comet’ stories from the Kyle Dickman book.”
Who knows but ENOUGH on statues and accolades—WHY are we NOT hearing in the MEDIA the support to Turbyfill’s dad and granting him any funds to make his needs happen—ROSS PEROT’S PLANE? Serious Ross? Your funds should not be involved in transport of a statue but GETTING what these men who fight these fires what they NEED—to make for better SAFETY plus USE the FUNDS to make CHANGES how you fight those fires…knock off this horseshit MONEY MONEY MONEY mentality…
Tex Harold Eldon Gilligan (Sonny) seems along with some accountability is a factor in this fire as a necessity and I differ STRONGLY. Focusing on CHANGE THE WAY THEY FIGHT WILDFIRES and LESSONS LEARNED and SAFETY and BETTER EQUIPMENT mean more to me than accountability-
I am the desert walker and house wife. God has led me to some people who “claim” they “live life” and go with the punches and toughen up…get over it mentality like shown in WWTKTT comment/reference to Dickman’s stories in his book…I mean I have even heard recently “I have had my face fallen off and I did not cry or go to the ER about it…I just toughen up and move forward..that’s life.” My reply to that person was “This was not something that person did to themselves but the action of another done to them” which brings me to THIS YARNELL HILL FIRE…you see this person THINKS “hey, it was an accident, get over it, move on” YET the FACT is there is a strong difference in ACCIDENT and AVOID ABILITY. I am a HUGE person who BELIEVES in the DIFFERENCES of those two; accident and avoid ability.
Let me pause…mmmmmm…thank you L. Frances Caramel Company…I loved that pause…soft, fresh, and made with the finest ingredients.. slowly cooked in copper kettles which allows the cream to develop an amazing caramel flavor and a beautiful golden color. Thank you Congress Country Corner gas station for that product you now offer 3 for 99 cents. I am sure CCC gas station employees will gain some weight on those yummy delights…Yarnell resident Amanda (Russ Reason’s niece), Congress resident who saw the YH fire immediately and called me that Friday June 28th, 2013 Ronda Carnes (my ol’ hiking pal and good gal and girlfriend to the most unique taxidermist Brian Shepherd (928) 427-6201 if you ever want to make an appointment to see his art/work or commission him for your needs.), manager and Yarnell resident Seth, Yarnell resident Stephanie (who just lost her mother Jo who cooked at the Yarnell senior center…YES, another oh my God UNEXPECTED death to Yarnell…WAKE UP people and start seeing there is MORE to the fire than homes destroyed and nineteen died…much more are dying of upper extremity concerns since the fire mainly respiratory…change the way they fight these fires from the funder blunder way aerial attacked Marsh’s area and we saw that frustration moment as well as we were frustrated by it too.)
I make have to post in pieces because library is packed and limited on pc time…but I will get around to it…
Thank you WantsToKnowTheTruth for bringing attention to this:
WantsToKnowTheTruth says May 18, 2015 at 9:09 pm
“NO GPS Unit ever entered the evidence chain following the Yarnell tragedy… not even the one that we KNOW was out there that day and attached to Robert…”
We just picked up the book ON THE BURNING EDGE at the post office and reported to Yarnell library so they can purchase on Amazon a copy for their library because it is important that people SEE the different perceptions on the hotshots and the YHF…again, can someone tell me WHO is the SOURCE to these stories he is writing about on the GMHS because I am sitting on the edge of my seat right now because I wish I had freedom to speak freely but dang it I no longer do until the beginning of 2016…Sonny could but I doubt he will because he does not want one of the things I got…but one FACT is in 2015 we met HUNDREDS and let me not exaggerate but this moment is on video surveillance and was by chance and I had no idea and in that night I can tell you the stories I heard on the GMHS differs from this book so I would like to KNOW the source to WHERE Dickman received such stories…Why isn’t EX GMHS speaking up now on this very topic on this very site?
HUGE QUESTION RIGHT THERE—where are you ex GMHS?…you all need to be interviewed…Fernanda Santos; where are you? If I know anyone in this that has GONE THE DISTANCE and in the end most likely will have the best written book on the YHF…this lady even went to firefighting school and so much more…the things she has done for the people of Yarnell and loved ones…it is ABOVE AND BEYOND any editor or author…freaking HEART that woman has…Fernanda, heed my words above…grab these people if you have not already…Frisby, what are you thinking about all this and the book? On Oct 1, 2014 we had communications by email and you had the fire season ending and prior plans with family plus you had your hunting time and travelling to do…I know you said if we had any future hikes you would try to make it but ONE DAY I very much after all the litigation part is over would like to hike it with you because I watched you that day and I would love to hike it with you…not for any gain of information but to go back to that day and see it from your view from my view as to why you all can even say that old grader area was a clearing because that density and the old grader hid your quad well but I saw it moving here and there…I find Frisby to be the ONE to write a story on the YHF…a definite good seller too…
REPLY IN CAPS BELOW TO WTKTT:
WantsToKnowTheTruth says May 16, 2015 at 5:59 pm Reply to Marti Reed post on May 14, 2015 at 4:41 pm
Marti wrote…
Joy~ You wrote:
>> Donut showed to be ill and we affirm that even early morning 6-30-13 & Norbert
>> of STERN magazine
https: // plus. google. c o m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950589754816056338?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950589754816056338&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
THIS WAS THE FIRST MAP WE SAW OF THE YHF SHOWN TO HIKERS BY NORBERT DURING MEAL.
MICHAEL KODAS AND HIKERS PRESENT.
YES SOME QUESTIONS WE HAD ON DONUT WERE CONFIRMED THIS DAY AND YOU CAN DISECT PHOTO TO SEE TIMESTAMP AND DATE YET NOV 25, 2013 IS WHAT I DO STRONGLY REMEMBER.
ON THAT PHOTO IS HIS CONTACT INFORMATION IS ON THE RIGHT COMMENT AREA IF YOU WANT TO BUY A COPY OF THE STERN MAGAZINE OF THIS YHF ARTICLE IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE.
WE NEVER HIKED OR REHIKED SINCE THE YHF FOR FAME OR NOTARIETY OR TO BE IN ANY REPORT OR BOOK BUT FOR SONNY IT WAS FOR THE LOSS OF HIS OWN SON—THE UNANSWERED PAIN AND FOR ME WELL, I WAS NEVER EAGER TO SHARE MY PHOTOS AND ARE YOU READY WHY—BECAUSE NUMBER ONE IT HAD ZIP TO DO WITH THE FIRE BUT SELFISH MEANS THAT SOON A FAMILY MEMBER WHO DISMEMBERED A BODY AND EVENTUALLY WILL BE RELEASED SOONER THAN LATER BECAUSE OF THE CHARISMATIC SCREWED UP SYSTEM WE HAVE THAT LET BAD BAD PEOPLE OUT ON GOOD BEHAVIOR AND KNOW HOW TO WORK THE SYSTEM AND WELL I JUST NEVER WANTED HER TO BE ABLE TO GOOGLE MY NAME AND FIND ME AND IT WORKED BEFORE THE FIRE BUT NOT THE CASE NOWADAYS…ESPECIALLY THANK YOU TO PUBLICLY ADDRESSING MY PHYSICAL ADDRESS PLACED OUT THERE DUE TO MY RECENT CASE…I WAS MORE UPSET ON THAT THAN THE ACTUAL CAUSE OF CASE. THEN SONNY SAID MY SON DIED AND I WOULD WANT ANSWERS AND THEN JOANNA DODDER HAPPENED AND THE REST IS JUST PLAIN OLD HISTORY…BUT BETWEEN ME AND THE WORLD MY HEART ACHES ARE FOR THE WILDLIFE BECAUSE OF HOW THEY FIGHT THESE FIRES…I BURIED MY BABIES…I LOST SO MUCH JOY BECAUSE ONCE IN A WHILE I SAW A RUNNER, A HIKER, A PROSPECTOR, A CAMPING COUPLE, A RANCHER WITH HIS DOGS ON A HORSE, GEOLOGIST…HERPATOLOGIST…AND WELL NOW THAT THE AREA IS RESTRICTED…IT USE TO BE MY SOLITUDE AREA…MY PLACE FOR PEACE…BUT I FELT ROBBED FROM IT FROM STATE ORDERING IT CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC…I KNOW EVERY INCH OF THAT AREA…IT WAS MY HOME AWAY FROM COOKIE CUTTERVILLE…DO YOU KNOW “HOW WELL’ I KNOW THAT AREA, I HAVE WRITTEN PERMISSION TO CROSS IT FROM MANY…SO LET ME PRETEND WE ARE HIKING THE YARNELL HILL YOU AND ME FROM BOTTOM TO TOP ON THE LEFT SIDE OF 89…READY…LITTLE HORSE RANCH- TIED TO OX RANCH/MURPHEY…WHICH THAN IS STATE LAND WHO AS WELL HAS TO HAVE A WRITTEN EASEMENT FROM THOSE FOLKS TO GET TO THE STATE LAND PARCEL BECAUSE THEY OWN THAT MOUNTAIN…THAN THERE IS STATE LAND ONLY 800-20-049E AND THE ONLY LEGAL WAY UP THE MOUNTAIN WITHOUT SCREWING WITH EASEMENTS WHICH I HAVE MY STATE LAND PERMIT. THAN THERE IS GORDON ACRI WHO’S CASE WAS JUST DISMISSED AND IS IN APPEALS IS AFTER STATE LAND. THAN TODD SULLIVAN, THAN ACRI THAN FUQUAY, SANDER, HYATT, CLOUDCROFT, CARLSON, KAPFER. THE HIKE IS NOT EASY AND I CAN PROMISE YOU MANY OF LOCALS ASK ME TO RELOCATE CRITTERS AND RATTLESNAKES AND THAT IS THE AREAS I DID RELOACTE THEM AWAY FROM PEOPLE AND NOW YOU WANT TO MAKE A PATH TO THE MEN THAT WAY…BESIDES THE OTHER WILDLIFE LIKE THE LIONS….SO NOW THE LIONS COME IN CONTACT MORE WITH HUMANS AND IF THEY HURT THEM ARE THE GOING TO BE RELOCATED OR KILLED? I AM FOR THE WILDLIFE ( htt ps: //plus.google.c om/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911727648563323346?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911727648563323346&oid=112068160404980104272 ) ON THIS…MAKE YOUR PATH BY THE OLD CROUDCROFT AREA…BUY MCCRARY PLACE OR THE NUHART LLC AREA AND GO IN THAT WAY. IT IS A EASY HIKE FOR ALL FIREFIGHTERS RETIRED OR NOT…MAKES SENSE…USE THE OLD BURRO HORSE TRAIL TO THE CATTLE POND RIGHT UP TO THE TWO TRACK…I KNOW THAT DESERT AND THE ONLY ANIMALS THAT HANG THERE IS SOME OWLS…NOT MANY CAT ENCOUNTERS RIGHT IN THAT AREA…I KNOW THAT AREA BETTER THAN GAME AND FISH AND THEY KNOW THAT AS FACT. LISTEN TO ME ON THAT. LEAVE MAUGHAN AND WHITEHEAD AND BALUCO AND ALL THEM OUT OF THIS…OR GO IN BY THE OLD MONICA MINE AREA AND TAKE THE OLD GRADER ROAD TO THE TWO TRACK…I MISS HIKING TO SONNY AND MY MEMORIAL ROCKS (https :/ /plus.g oogle.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950681467713063346?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950681467713063346&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ)
THIS IS THE TWO MEN FROM THAT HIKE:
http s://plus.go ogle.c om/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682055703698354?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682055703698354&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
YOU SEE THAT TO THE RIGHT IN THIS PHOTO- THAT WAS THE DENSITY THE GMHS WENT THROUGH THAT DAY:
htt ps:/ /plus.go ogle.c om/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682237708179362?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682237708179362&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
YOU ASKED SONNY ABOUT WHERE THE FIRE BREAK ENDED FOR THE GMHS- HERE IS A PHOTO:
http s:/ /plus.goo gle.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682273225248194?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682273225248194&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
http s:/ /plus.go ogle.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682379634270146?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682379634270146&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
HERE IS SOME OF THEIR WORK…GMHS:
htt ps://plu s.google.c om/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5950682486569670450?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5950682486569670450&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
in his interview with Donut answered some of our questions
>> on Donut but many would like to know his verbal demeanor amongst the men
>> THAT very morning. Was he opted as look out because some of the men had
>> enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut?YES WE WANT TO KNOW DUE TO A RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH EA IN JANUARY AT 11:30AM. I AM TELLING YOU 2015 HAS BEEN THE MOST INFORMATIVE BEHIND THE SCENES FOR THE HIKERS BUT NOW WE SEE WHY PEOPLE AREN’T SHARING…I WOULD LOVE TO MEET ANTHONY ROSE’S GIRLFFRIEND SOME DAY—
>>
>> What do you mean by this? Do you have a link or something to that? JUST MY PRIVATE GOOGLE PLUS LINKS I POSTED LONG AGO ON HERE—FROM JUNE 30 2013- JUNE 2014 I POSTED ON THAT FOR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. I USE TO POST ALL MY CAT SCANS AND THERMOGRAMS ( ht tps://plus.google.c om/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911731014559268050?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911731014559268050&oid=112068160404980104272 … htt ps://plus.google. co m/photos/ 112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732569060966530?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732569060966530&oid=112068160404980104272 ) AND BLOOD LABS UNTIL I WAS GETTING TOO MANY LECTURES OF WHY THE HELL I OPT TO NOT BE IN HOME IN BED VERSUS WHAT I AM DOING—PEOPLE WOULD FEEL LIKE THEY HAD TO TELL ME HOW TO LIVE MY LIFE SO I STOPPED POSTING IT ALL ON THERE—I HAVE HAD SOME TOUGH TIMES HEALTH WISE BUT I AM STILL HERE AND WELL, STUBBORNLY STILL WILL BE AT AGE 125 SOME DAY.
I haven’t seen any response to this so I thought I would add the following.
Joy has referred to this ‘Norbert’ fellow before, and this moment where he apparently verified to Joy and Sonny that the fellow they saw that morning who looked ( to them ) as if he was “sick” was, in fact, Brendan McDonough.
TRUE WWTKTT.
So I think Joy was just confirming that Brendan McDonough most definitely even LOOKED sick that Sunday morning… to the point where even though Joy and Sonny had no idea who anyone was that morning… they were still able to remember Brendan as the one who ‘looked ill’.
TRUE WWTKTT.
Sometime after the tragedy… Joy and Sonny took a number of media people AND FIREFIGHTERS AND RETIRED CIA/SPECIAL FOLKS/GOVERNMENT/INVESTIGATORS/EX GMHS/LOVED ONES OF THE GMHS/ETC on a hike on November 25, 2013… and this ‘Norbert’ of STERN magazine was one of them.
TRUE WWTKTT. I NEVER POSTED HIS LAST NAME BECAUSE I DID NOT KNOW IF GERMAN WITH DOTS ABOVE CHANGE THE ENGLISH ONLINE TYPING OF LAST NAME-
He appers to be ‘Norbert Becke’… a very famous photographer ( and occasional feature writer ) who works for STERN magazine.
NO. IT IS NOT THE PHOTOGRAPHER. YET WE DID HIKE WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPHER BRIAN FRANK FOR BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT’S PIECE ON YHF:
http s://plus.google.c om/photos/11206 8160404980104272/albums/5922175655744920065/5986766339500544034?%20authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ&pid=5986766339500544034&oid=112068160404980104272&authkey=CNDDgaG_gt2UAQ
THIS IS MY HUSBAND
http s://plus.go og le.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911731847116830866?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911731847116830866&oid=112068160404980104272
SO IT IS CLEAR WHO IS WHO IN MY LIFE- WE HUMOR THE WORLD SONNY AND I THAT WE ARE THE OLD MARRIED COUPLE- HES OLD AND I AM MARRIED BUT I GUARANTEE YOU THIS IS MY HUSBAND…KNOWN SINCE THE 80’S AND MARRIED 22 YEARS. THIS IS THE RATTLERS WE RELOCATED THAT YOU WILL SEE ON STATE LAND ON THE MEMORIAL BOARD PATH THEY DESIRE
ht tps://plus.google.c om /photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911738084704593042?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911738084704593042&oid=112068160404980104272
I DO LOVE THE DESERT MORE THAN ANYONE YOU WILL MEET:
http s://plus.google.c om/ photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911732591092299986?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911732591092299986&oid=112068160404980104272
THIS IS SONNY’S HISTORY:
http s://plus.google.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911736889301648866?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911736889301648866&oid=112068160404980104272
SONNY’S KID HE LOST TO UNANSWERED TRAGEDY:
ht tp s://plus.goo gle.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911735776077436034?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911735776077436034&oid=112068160404980104272
SONNY”S MOM:
ht tps:/ /plus.g oogle.co m/photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911737002203555106?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911737002203555106&oid=112068160404980104272
MY INTEREST WILL ALWAYS BE HERE AS WELL:
htt ps: //plus.google.c om /photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911735782147848370?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911735782147848370&oid=112068160404980104272
WAS I NOT IN THE AREA THAT VERY DAY OF THE TRAGEDY…THAN HOW IS IT I GOT THIS PHOTO OF THE HELMS?
I WAS THERE IN THAT SPOT BETWEEN 445-515 TIME SPOT.
http s://plus. google.c om /photos/112068160404980104272/albums/5911726150683632913/5911733208274584178?authkey=CMSBuJL2pZXeOg&pid=5911733208274584178&oid=112068160404980104272
SOON I HAVE TO STOP LOOKING AT PHOTOS AND WRITING…TEARS ARE FALLING DOWN MY FACE, I AM TORN UP BY THIS FIRE AND HOW THEY DID NOT PROPERLY INVESTIGATE THIS…I AM SO SORRY FOR THE PEOPLE WHO LOST THESE MEN…SO VERY SORRY-
I don’t know what ‘interview Norbert had with Brendan’ is being referred to because I can’t find any evidence that ‘Norbert Beck’ and/or STERN magazine ever published any article that had any kind of interview with Brendan McDonough in it. YOU CAN REACH HIM—NICE MAN. SPEAKS FLUENT GERMAN THOUGH..AND ENGLISH
Norbert Becke – Photographer – STERN magazine
http://no-miedo.blogspot.ie/2014/09/norbert-becke-photographer.html?m=1
———————————————————————–
They are insights into the souls of the people and MOMENTS of great dignity.
I WISH THIS PHOTOGRAPHER COULD TAKE THE HIKE INDEED—
———————————————————————–
>> Joy also said this…
>>
>> …but many would like to know his (Brendan’s) verbal demeanor amongst the men
>> THAT very morning. Was he opted as look out because some of the men had
>> enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut?
YOU BET!!!!!!!!!!!
Now that we can see in the Dickman book that Brendan could be quite the ‘loudmouth’ when he was with the crew ( even though he was only in his third season )… I wonder myself if this means that there is a possibility Brendan was give the lookout assignment that day not so much because he was sick… but because the others were sick of him by around NOON and Steed just wanted to get the guy away from the rest of the crew.
There is that ‘suggestion’ in the quote above.. when it says “some of the men had enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut’.
That’s the first time I’ve heard that suggested and just wondering where that might be coming from.
THAT COMES FROM JANUARY RECORDED INTERVIEW AS WELL AS VIDEO SURVEILLANCE AREA WHERE I MEAN BY CHANCE HUNDREDS OF FIREFIGHTERS WHO KNEW AND KNEW OF THE GMHS MEN SPOKE TO THE HIKERS. THAT WAS A SINCERE MOMENT IN THIS ALL.
Copy, Joy, I’m looking.
And thank you.
I spent all day today looking through your album.
(When I was supposed to be watching a class about how to use my new Canon 70D. Which is sitting all lonely and relatively unused on the camera bench in my living room.)
Somehow I’d managed to get “booted out” of that album about the time everything was going up on John’s site so I didn’t worry about it.
But what I found today that I had been missing is all the wonderful commenting you had been doing on those photos. Really really valuable to read. And also those pages you typed up.
And I found myself, at this point in time, MUCH more interested in all of your photos of, well, the FIRE! Can really see it just, as they say, “skunking around,” and then as it gets warmer and hotter and windier REALLY starting to kick up and run.
And how it just explodes when it hits those manzanita bushes.
And thanks for the info regarding the old fire line that they are working on in that photo.
Seriously, after 12:30 there was nothing for them to do except hang out and wait until that fire flipped around and headed right toward them. They should have been OFF that fire by 2. Hands down. The whole thing was just pointless by then.
Especially given the FORECASTS.
Still scratching my head (AGAIN) about the time-stamps.
Were those night-shots Saturday or Sunday night?
It’s like the camera does one thing for a time and then switches and does another thing for awhile, and then does a whole NUTHER completely different thing for awhile.
What I THINK I’m seeing is DEFINITELY when it hits 12 AM or PM and also, possibly something when the camera may power down and then be “turned back on again.” It doesn’t “remember” where it was.
Fortunately there’s that whole string of Sunday morning photos that are at least consistent.
And they can be anchored (which I did) to the photo of the Blue Ridge buggy driving in, which we KNOW via Cory’s iphone photos, happened from about 10:25 AM to 10:35 AM, which anchors that photo of yours just about right if the camera stamp is four hours early.
Which, also, unfortunately, doesn’t jive with your saying you saw Eric first at about 8 AM. Because this four hour “earliness” would put your photo of him more at around 9 AM.
And also, the four-hour “earliness” also jives with your photo of the DPS helicopter carrying Abel and Musser flying over the crew at around 10:AM which is what Abel’s interview said, if I recall correectly.
You have a sunrise photo. I’m not sure when sunrise was that day, but that shouldn’t be too hard to find.
Also, that photo of the Moki helicopter in the parking lot is interesting and I hadn’t seen that before. Was that on Saturday or Sunday? It had to have been around noon-ish because the sun is right overhead, judging by the shadows.
And Joy is also an awesome photographer. Just sayin…………
Joy, you wrote:
“again, can someone tell me WHO is the SOURCE to these stories he is writing about on the GMHS”
It seems to me that he is sourcing his stories about GMHS via interviews with Brendan and other people who had been on the crew but not on the Yarnell Hill Fire, and also some significant others of some of the Hotshots and also their families.
Regarding the fire, I think he is sourcing mostly Brendan and his reading of the SAIR and the ADOSH interviews. Possibly, it seems to me, he might have also talked with Todd Abel. And maybe Darrell Willis. And a couple of others. But not enough others, imho.
The problem is he is “all over the place” regarding these narratives, and he only has those sketchy “Notes” at the back of the book to refer to.
It really is very sloppy and, given the enormity of all of this, irresponsible. Heck, my daughter had to write better sourced papers when she was an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. Not to mention, I had to source my writing exponentially better when I was an undergraduate at Prescott College.
Hate to say it but it looks to me like we’re going to have to wait til John Maclean publishes HIS book before we’re going to see anything responsibly written on this fire.
Unless we do it ourselves. But it needs the interviewing. Lots of interviewing.
And REAL fact-checking, something disturbingly lacking in this book, especially since KD says so-and-so and so-and-so and so-and-so REALLY DID fact-check it, which doesn’t appear to be a credible claim in either my or WTKTT’s eyes.
Hey JD are you working on a book??????????? Who knows??????????
So much for books. I can’t wait to see the mooooooooo-vie.
All the above being said.
I confess.
The point at which I slowly broke into tears, while reading the book, was after the Doce Fire. I don’t know if it’s true, or a figment of KD’s imagination. Or the imaginations of those he interviewed.
But what I was reading was essentially that, it was only during/after the Doce Fire that the crew actually began to “come together.” The Thompson Ridge Fire was MUCH harder on them, as individuals and as a crew, than I had realized.
But they started, I don’t know how to say it, “getting it together,” both as individuals and as a crew on the Doce Fire, and the whole experience of saving the ancient Juniper tree was kind of a culmination of that, along with a few other things.
The younger newer members were finally getting a sense of their own strength and power and were finally being treated with more respect by the “older” ones, and some kind of sympatico was starting to emerge. They were starting to somehow “blend” themselves into a relatively coherent team.
And then, off they went to Yarnell. To die.
That’s what cracked me.
This is just so heart-breaking. They deserved better.
And what is so frustrating is that even at this point, almost two years later, I can’t even definitively say from whom, because we still don’t know enough about what actually happened to answer that question.
In spite of Kyle Dickman having written the so-called “Definitive Book.”
PS Joy.
I wrote downstream that I have a hard-back copy of the book that I am willing to donate, whatever. I accidentally bought it.
I’m doing all my work with it on the Kindle edition, so I don’t need the hard-back.
If you have an idea of who I could give it to, or put into circulation somehow, just let me know.
With all my concerns about the ACCURACY of the book, I still think it may be worth reading. So if you know of anybody you thing should be reading it, I’m willing to make it available.
Thank you and I would love for Congress to have a.copy besides Yarnell but they are not always allowed to order until certain quarter in the year so please some moment send your copu inside and if possible personalize the feont area so we always know where the generosity came from
Attention Maryanne Paulic
(Name sounds familiar because her mom in law is on destroy damage list in Yarnell) She is head librarian
Congress Public Library
> P.O. Box 280
> Congress, AZ 85332
>
>
Cool beans! Thank you! I’ll do it!
Namaste!
THANK YOU MARTI
**
** ANOTHER PHOTO OF GRANITE MOUNTAIN AT THE STATION FIRE
I just wanted to get this one ‘off my desk’ ( so to speak ).
It’s a photo I found while actually searching the InterWeb for the photo that matches the one from the Wallow fire that Kyle Dickman used for the cover of his book about the Yarnell Fire.
It’s a really good picture of seven firefighters ‘taking a break’ at the STATION fire in 2009, and the FIVE that in the right half of the photo are Granite Mountain Hotshots.
It’s a really HIGH-RESOLUTION photo… and it appears someone had just said something funny.
If I had to pick a caption for this photo it would be something like “The calm before the storm”.
The fire was obviously there in the background.. but for the moment ( in this photo )… the GM Hothshots are calm, relaxed, and comfortable in their ‘natural element’.
It’s the 13th photo down from the top of the following page.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/wildfires_in_southern_californ.html
I just thought it was a really GOOD photograph of these men… in a happier moment… and in case no one had found it or seen it before it deserved a link.
SIDENOTE: There is ONE very ‘investigative’ point of interest in photo. Look at the field pack in the lower left front of the photo, lying on the ground. Just to the left of the pack itself and lying on the ground ( in pretty much the extreme lower left corner of the photo ) is a small BLACK CASE that appears to be holding an electronic device.
It’s too big for a smartphone, and doesn’t look like a digital camera case…. but it DOES look like the standard soft-leather case that comes with Garmin Oregon 450 handheld GPS units.
The device is attached to the pack with a ‘ring’.
So this MIGHT be just one more bit of evidence that backs up what Brendan told ADOSH investigators… that Granite Mountain normally carried at least FOUR handheld GPS units with them ‘in the field’.
NO GPS Unit ever entered the evidence chain following the Yarnell tragedy… not even the one that we KNOW was out there that day and attached to Robert Caldwell’s pack strap because that Oregon 450 GPS unit was clearly visible there on his pack strap in the same Christopher MacKenzie photo from Sunday morning showing Caldwell using his drip-torch out on the ridge.
Here is a direct link to the PHOTO itself…
http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/cafires_09_02/c13_20189897.jpg
It really is a SUPER HIGH-RES photo and there’s just something about it that I like.
It almost says something ( all on its own ) about the GOOD TIMES associated with being a Wildland Firefighter. They look ‘comfortable’… and ‘in their element’.
Even this photo ( IMHO ) would have been better as a cover photo for Kyle Dickman’s book entitled “On the Burning Edge” than that unrelated photo from the Wallow fire.
There is also something about the ‘composition’ in this photograph.
It’s damn near perfect… and I think Marti knows what I mean by that.
There are times when the ‘composition’ and the ‘balance’ of a photograph ( exactly as it is framed in the viewfinder ) is just a pice of ‘art’ all by itself… and between the foreground and the background ‘balance’ and the subject matter and the ‘focus’ of this photo ( as in… where it takes your eye )… it definitely has that undefinable ‘something’ that makes a GOOD photograph rise to the level of being a GREAT photograph.
I’m really surprised this particular photo hasn’t seen more ‘air time’ since the tragedy.
There is also something about the ‘composition’ in this photograph.
It’s damn near perfect… and I think Marti knows what I mean by that.
There are times when the ‘composition’ and the ‘balance’ of a photograph ( exactly as it is framed in the viewfinder ) is just a pice of ‘art’ all by itself… and between the foreground and the background ‘balance’ and the subject matter and the ‘focus’ of this photo ( as in… where it takes your eye )… it definitely has that undefinable ‘something’ that makes a GOOD photograph rise to the level of being a GREAT photograph.
I’m really surprised this particular photo hasn’t seen more ‘air time’ since the tragedy.
Thanks for posting this, WTKTT.
It is really a WONDERFUL photo.
(And, I might add, all those other photos of the Station Fire are amazing. Great collection!!)
The eye first lands on the GM Hotshot seated in the front, then follows around to the others and then, given where they are looking, to the two on the left and from there…..back into the smoke of the fire itself.
And that’s always the goal, to lead the eye through the image to to the subject. (It’s called “the hero.” I’m always looking at my images, asking what really is “the hero?”)
As much as the fire-fighters “seem” to be the “subject,” they actually aren’t. The subject of this photograph is the brown ugly smoke of the fire.
Which, given a bunch of other photos in this collection, obviously was a pervasive presence during this fire.
Good catch on the GPS unit. Seems a bit “dangly” to me. I didn’t even think it was attached to the pack when I first looked at it.
Speaking of which, just got a GPS unit for my new Canon 70D. I didn’t even know it existed until three weeks ago. Slides into the hotshoe and tags every photograph. Will be fun to play around with.
This really is a great photo of the crew.
>> Marti said…
>>
>> The eye first lands on the GM Hotshot seated in the front,
>> then follows around to the others and then, given where
>> they are looking, to the two on the left and from there…..
>> back into the smoke of the fire itself.
Yes!… EXACTLY!
As with all GREAT photographs… there is a ‘story’ being told and the ‘eye’ is led right through ‘the story’.
It’s really quite brilliant.
FIRST we see the FF in the foreground finishing his ‘laugh’… so we know it’s a lighter moment that is taking place.
Then your eye ‘travels’ around to the right and to the back, past Wade Parker, and then to the left… and finally lands on the other two Glendale firefighters on the left side of the photo.
But now the one FF seated is looking straight back… into the distance… and our eye follows and now the story is complete. There is a frickin’ FIRE right there!
If I was to teach in class in photography and how important composition is ( and how intricate it can be in just one photo )… then THIS is the photo I’d use to ‘teach’ that.
One more thing about this photo.
The original EXIF data was not preserved for this online copy of the original photo… but I just wanted to make it clear that this photo was NOT taken by Christopher MacKenzie, even though this HIRES photo looks just like his own Canon images from the Yarnell Fire.
This photo of Granite Mountain at the STATION fire in 2009 was taken by Associated Press photographer Jae. C. Hong. That would explain the near-perfect framing, composition, and exposure. Hong is a pro.
There is still a metadata COMMENT embedded in this photo which says…
“Firefighters take a break during the Station Fire in La Crescenta, Calif., Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)”
That’s what you do. You come back after shooting a bazillion photos (now that the “film” is “free”) and go thru them and pick for composition.
And yep. Chris was on his way to becoming a really good photographer.
DAMMIT.
**
** WILDLAND FIREFIGHTER STATUE RETURNS TO BOISE AND
** DARRELL WILLIS IS INVITED SPEAKER AT INSTALLATION…
Just a few days ago there was an elaborate ceremony in the middle of the lobby of the Boise airport… and Darrel Willis ( who has now retired for the second time from the Prescott Fire Department ) was one of the guest speakers along with the legendary Jack Wilson ( now 96 years young ).
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2015/05/15/3804718_foundation-returns-firefighter.html?rh=1
The ceremony was the ‘re-installation’ of that Bronze ‘Wildland Firefighter’ statue that Vick and Burke Minor had just unbolted from the floor of the Boise Airport back in July of 2013 ( without all the right permissions ) and had it flown to Prescott in that plane that Ross Perot loaned them.
It’s hard to hear Willis in the video that accompanies this Idaho Statesmen article… but here is exactly what he says starting at +1:28 into the video.
NOTE: It picks Willis up in mid-speech but he is apparently referring to the COPY of this ‘Wildlland Firefighter’ statue that now resides in Prescott even though this ORIGINAL has been re-installed back at the Boise Airport.
Darrell Willis…
“…which currently resides in Prescott represents the heart and soul of the American Wildland Firefighter. These symbols also serve as a solemn reminder of the approximately eleven hundred selfless and valiant firefighters who have given their lives ( since ?? 1950? )”.
Willis was NOT wearing his ‘official blues’ or any ‘uniform’ at all.
Just one of his signature ‘plaid’ short-sleeve shirts.
And here is part of the original Idaho Statesmen article linked to in the article above which explains how the ‘Wildland Firefighter Foundation’ felt ‘dissed’ over the original Granite Mountain incident and ended up just unbolting this statue from the Boise Airport and putting it aboard that plane the Ross Perot loaned to them and the flew the thing down to Prescott, anyway, so as not to be ‘left out’ of the memorial services.
Darrell Willis was originally quoted in THAT article as well… explaining that it was the Prescott Local Fireman’s Unions that had pissed the Vicki and Burke Minor’s WFF organization off back in July of 2013…
——————————————————————————
The foundation ( Vick and Burke Minor’s WFF foundation ) was one of the groups seeking to help the families and organize the memorial service. Arizona 100, a group that helps the survivors of slain police and firefighters killed on duty in that state, the Prescott Fire Department and the firefighters union also were helping the families and working on the memorial.
“The firefighters union had kind of set up and taken charge (of planning the memorial) and were moving in another direction,” said Darrell Willis, a division chief of the Prescott Fire Department and the direct supervisor of the lost Hotshots. “Some were excluded, including the Wildland Firefighter Foundation.”
The Boise foundation was going to be left out of what Birk Minor called “the biggest event in wildland fire history.”
The Minors decided the best way to give the foundation and wildland firefighters in general a presence at the ceremonies was to pull out the 8 1/2-foot statue of a wildland firefighter – installed at the Boise Airport in a ceremony in May 2005 – and take it to Arizona.
As Boise Airport officials protested, Burk Minor unbolted the statue that had welcomed firefighters to Boise and the National Interagency Fire Center for eight years. The foundation had retained ownership; it promised airport officials to replace it later.
———————————————————————–
No great revelations here… but interesting to note that even this whacky little side-story of this Bronze Statue features Darrell Willis on both ends… coming and going.
You really still can’t throw a rock anywhere near this Yarnell story without it landing too far away from Darrell Willis.
**
** THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN VOMIT COMET
Just a quick note for folks who might still be reading through the Kyle Dickman book and through all the stories about the VOMITING and how squad leaders would hover over the heavers yelling “GET UP” or “DON,T QUIT”.
This is no joke. Just Google the two words EXERTION and VOMITING and see how SERIOUSLY that needs to be taken.
The Dickman book is describing any number of situations where Jesse Steed and squad leaders and Scott Norris were NOT paying correct attention to the safety and the health of these men in their charge.
In some of the Dickman stories the behavior indicates a a clear DISREGARD for the safety of the men… so is it really that much of a stretch to wonder what happened in Yarnell on June 30, 2013?
Just ONE of the ‘Vomit Comet’ stories from the Kyle Dickman book.
This one is early on, on page 17, when Dickman is describing the first GM ‘training run’ for the 2013 season. They go outside of town and pretend there is a ‘fake’ fire that’s been premarked with pink tape. Then they ‘pretend’ to ‘attack it’.
Scott Norris is the one who just ends up cussing at Grante McKee when he starts to VOMIT ( again ). Norris wasn’t even a squad leader nor was he in any way qualified to assess someone’s medical condition. He ( apparently ) just loved ( and was allowed ) to cuss out the rookies.
From page 17
—————————————————————————————
The rest of the crew didn’t pause. They kept racing to their objective: the series of pink plastic strips of flagging tied to tree branches that marked this ( fake ) fire’s perimeter. Grant (McKee) with the extra weight of the cubie (a 5 gallon, 45 pound box of water), was struggling to keep up, and finally he, too, peeled off from the single-file line and dropped to his knees, gasping for air. With his face inches above the sun-baked pine needles, their sweet vanilla smell drowned out by the sheer volume of air sucking into his nostrils, Grante returned to the question he’d been asking himself for weeks now:
What was I thinking volunteering to chase a fitness-obsessed ex-Marine up the side of a mountain?
“Get your ass UP! Don’t you fucking QUIT!”
Back on the side of the mountain, Scott Norris, a wiry twenty-eight year old redhead who’d transferred to Granite Mountai from a Forest Service hotshot crew that spring ( the Payson hotshots ), pounced on Grant before he could catch his breath.
It was usually the squad bosses’ job to discipline the rookies, but Scott, who’d wanted to make a career of firefighting, took it upon himself.
A few of the guys marching behind Steed glanced back.
Grant was still down on his knees, but now he was VOMITING again.
———————————————————————————————
Followup…
This article appeared just the day before yesterday.
It’s about a girl in Alabama who was over-exerting herself and started to VOMIT… but her mother made her keep running.
She DIED… and the mother is charged with murder.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Article Title: Defense expert: Alabama girl’s running death not a
homicide, but exertion still the cause
Published: March 17, 2015 by The Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/03/17/defense-expert-alabama-girl-running-death-not-homicide-but-exertion-still-cause/
SIDENOTE: The reason the Alabama case involves a murder charge is because the woman was FORCING the girl to keep running as some kind of ‘punishment’ for stealing some candy, or something.
Obviously anyone ‘trying out’ for Granite Mountain was never being FORCED to do anything… but it’s also pretty obvious that the whole VOMITING because of exertion thing was NOT being taken as seriously as it should.
The Kyle Dickman book makes it sound like Jesse Steed himself took PRIDE in creating workout routines that would make some/all of the crew VOMIT on a regular basis.
I getcha here.
Totally.
I would REALLY be interested to hear back from wildland fire-fighters about this.
Is this kind of stuff considered NORMAL?????
I understand pushing beyond your “limits.” I’ve done it. My daughter has done it.
Heck, Freshman Orientation at the first incarnation of Prescott College was three grueling weeks of Outward Bound and it was seriously CHALLENGING. And even sometimes DANGEROUS.
But not to this point.
I found these repeated narratives totally disgusting.
Oh, but, yeah, Safety First is the overall number one presiding principle……while we expect our fire-fighters to push their systems beyond anything even remotely safe, just to prove……………..themselves capable of just exactly………..WHAT?
If this is considered “normal,” I have no doubt whatsoever that that is EXACTLY the kind of mindset that may have gotten the Granite Mountain Hotshots……
…….dead.
I think this is a blending of Crossfit culture into WFF the way these facts are. Google rhabdo and “pukie the clown” and you’ll see that, while WFFs among others do get rhabdo as well, there’s an odd pride in Crossfit culture about this sort of thing.
It’s not a good way to actually get fit for the relevant tasks, but it’s also dangerous.
From…
Crossfit Impulse ( Online ) – Life.Changing.Fitness
Article Title: Rhabdo and Crossfit
http://crossfitimpulse.com/rhabdo-and-crossfit/
From this ‘Crossfit’ training article…
———————————————————-
Why Should I Care About Rhabdo?
Because it can kill you.
Rhabdomyolysis (rhabdo) is a rare but serious health condition sometimes caused by working out at very high intensity. CrossFit workouts, just like all high intensity workouts, have the potential to cause rhabdo under the right circumstances.
…
If you feel terrible after a workout, then the next day extreme swelling and soreness starts, and then you start peeing brown urine—you have rhabdo. Go to the ER immediately. This is no joke. It can be fatal if not treated. Rhabdo happens when your muscles break down to the point that muscle tissue enters your bloodstream. Your kidneys can’t handle this. They freak out and eventually shut down. This is how rhabdo can be fatal—kidney failure. The most important thing you can learn from this entire article is this: If you experience dark urine after a grueling workout, then go to the ER immediately.
———————————————————-
NOTE: The gym near Granite Mountain Station 7 where the Hotshots all worked out was called “Captain Crossfit”.
“Pukie The Clown” has his own Facebook page…
https://www.facebook.com/PukieClown
Title for the Facebook page ( just above the logo of him puking his guts out and loving it )…
————————————————————
If you Crossfit, you will meet me at some point.
I am here to motivate.
Follow me on Twitter @ PukieClown
OR
Go to the CROSSFIT TRAINING HOME PAGE at…
htt p://www. crossfit. com/
———————————————————–
Reply to J. Stout post on May 15, 2015 at 11:50 am
>> J. Stout also said…
>>
>> There remains, however, a certain degree of curiosity as to whether KD
>> talks about the matter of Bad Decisions With Good Outcomes. And, if so,
>> in what context.
>>
>> Marti Reed says
>>
>> May 15, 2015 at 6:24 pm
>>
>> As a related aside, I have to say that the narrative about how Brendan and Chris
>> almost got burned over on the Doce Fire is possibly “relevant.” That was before Eric
>> was back as supervisor, but still……. They had a really close call there.
Yes, they did… and I actually just stumbled across a video that shows Granite Mountain actually doing a ‘burnout’ at the STATION fire… and there are some eerie similarities to this ‘close call’ during this other manual burnout that Kyle Dickman is talking about at the Doce fire.
This video is NOT of Brendan or Chris… but it DOES show Granite Mountain doing a ‘burnout’ along a road that STATION Fire and what’s eerie about it is the way the GM Hotshot with the lit drip torch sort of comes ‘stumbling’ out of some VERY high dry-grass-fuel that is already ‘lit’.
He isn’t ‘hauling ass’ out of the brush like the Dickman story of Brendan and Chris at the Doce fire… but it’s a little weird how DEEP he seemed to have been in the tall, dry fuel itself ( just like Chris and Brendan at Doce ) and he was ‘igniting’ it while he was STANDING in the middle of it.
He makes it to the road and we see him continue to use his drip-torch, which he didn’t have to ‘throw away’ like Chris and Brendan did at the Doce fire… but here’s the kicker.
Even in this video… showing a GM Hotshot actively ’emerging’ from tall, dry grass that he was standing in the middle of and igniting with his own drip torch…
…his SLEEVES are both ROLLED UP and BOTH of his bare forearms are showing WHILE he is performing the burnout in the tall, dry grass.
That’s about ( at least ) the THIRD piece of photographic/video evidence which shows that no one on the Granite Mountain Crew cared about having shirt sleeves down when either working with gasoline ( Superintendent Eric Marsh himself in the pictures in Dickman’s book ) OR even when actively USING a lit drip-torch ( This video and the acual MacKenzie photos of Caldwell on the morning of the day they were all going to die ).
YouTube Video Title…
Granite Mountain Hotshots Firing Out during the Station Fire
Uploaded by: Eric Neitzel on June 30, 2014.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxXQeguvRWw&list=PLTErVrHH6uJja-ljtn7z9Q5Sz9WtCPGw1&index=7
YouTube About Information…
Published on Jun 30, 2014
Raw Video: Granite Mountain Hotshots working behind a subdivision saving homes from the 2009 Station Fire with Glendale Firefighters
Correction for above… the ( still unidentified ) GM Hotshot in the video above with BOTH of his SLEEVES rolled up WHILE he is actively using his drip-torch does not actually come ‘stumbling’ out of the brush.
It’s not like he actually ‘trips over anything’… or something like that.
And he is certainly not ’emerging’ from the man-high dry brush in a FRANTIC way, as Dickman reports Chris and Brendan having to do on the Doce fire.
But the similarities are still there with the story Kyle Dickman is telling in his book about what happened on the Doce fire.
I guess I’m not seeing what you see here, WTKTT. It’s great if you can velcro cinch your sleeve ends over your gloves, but they’re likely to pull right up to the forearms once you start working, anyway (just from reaching, picking stuff up, etc.). It kind of looks to me like his velcro cuffs stuck where is forearms where thick enough to stop them, not that he’d rolled his sleeves. His PPE isn’t by the rulebook, but I don’t see this as evidence of wild risk taking. It looks pretty much like any lighting operation I’ve seen. The fuels aren’t being preheated by hot gases from below, so they aren’t going to explode when lit. He’s taking his time, making sure the material behind him is lighting like it’s supposed to.
I was expecting to see something completely different from the description you gave above. I just don’t think this gives us much evidence about crew culture (as opposed to, say, the video of the crew rigs being saved).
Fair enough. I have never worn a Nomex shirt. I can’t comment on the distinction you are making between a ‘ride-up’ and a an actual ‘roll-up’.
All I know is the guy is dripping liquid flame out of a bottle… INSIDE a patch of tall, dry grass and brush at least as tall as he is… and his bare forearms are showing… and that does NOT match other videos I’ve seen of people doing the same thing, nor does his attire even match the other Glendale FF in the same video.
He DOES seem to have gloves on, though. That’s good.
Have you read KD’s book?
Are you familiar with the ‘ignition almost gone horribly wrong’ story that is being referred to involving Chris and Brendan?
They were in a similar operation… wading into brush as tall as they were and then ‘igniting’ it on the interior… and then ‘backing out’. They misjudged things and ended up having to throw their torches away, run for their lives, they crashed into each other… and then basically ended up crawling out of the man-high dry brush ( as seen in the video above ) onto an access road.
It is NOT known if Brendan and Chris also had their sleeves rolled up while they were doing that. Kyle Dickman doesn’t ‘go there’.
What I see here is someone walking ‘around’ a patch of brush to get to the other side. While that brush obscures the view of what’s behind it, I have a strong feeling that what’s behind it, is the same as what’s in front of it.
Well.. I guess the ‘similarity’ with the story in the Dickman book that seemed evident to me was that this FF using a drip torch with his sleeves apparently rolled up ( which is totally against all NWCG published regulations ) is simply ’emerging’ from an interior section of the unburned fuel that he was manually igniting WHILE he was inside of it. THIS instance seems to be under control. He does NOT slip and fall down or otherwise almost get trapped inside the unburned.
But in the Dickman recounting of a simar deal on the Docs fire… things didn’t go nearly as well. Drip torches being ejected, people trippk g and falling even after the interior ignitions started.
TTWARE… same question. for you as for Sitta. Have you read the Dickman book?
I guess I’m sort of ‘polling the room’ about that. I am not saying for one second that anyone SHOULD read this book, or anything. I do totally understand anyone who says they do not wish to put one dime into the pocket of anyone trying to make money off this tragedy.
The truth is also that unless you really want to read the stories about ‘what it’s like to be a Hotshot’… you’re really not missing a thing by giving this Dickman book a clear miss.
It provides no more real insights into what happened in Yarnell that weekend than the original SAIR and ADOSH reports.
But still… I guess I’m just curious as to who has actually read this Dickman book, and who has not.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 14, 2015 at 4:41 pm
>> Marti wrote…
>>
>> Joy~ You wrote:
>>
>> Donut showed to be ill and we affirm that even early morning 6-30-13 & Norbert
>> of STERN magazine in his interview with Donut answered some of our questions
>> on Donut but many would like to know his verbal demeanor amongst the men
>> THAT very morning. Was he opted as look out because some of the men had
>> enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut?
>>
>> What do you mean by this? Do you have a link or something to that?
I haven’t seen any response to this so I thought I would add the following.
Joy has referred to this ‘Norbert’ fellow before, and this moment where he apparently verified to Joy and Sonny that the fellow they saw that morning who looked ( to them ) as if he was “sick” was, in fact, Brendan McDonough.
So I think Joy was just confirming that Brendan McDonough most definitely even LOOKED sick that Sunday morning… to the point where even though Joy and Sonny had no idea who anyone was that morning… they were still able to remember Brendan as the one who ‘looked ill’.
Sometime after the tragedy… Joy and Sonny took a number of media people on a hike on November 25, 2013… and this ‘Norbert’ of STERN magazine was one of them.
He appers to be ‘Norbert Becke’… a very famous photographer ( and occasional feature writer ) who works for STERN magazine.
I don’t know what ‘interview Norbert had with Brendan’ is being referred to because I can’t find any evidence that ‘Norbert Beck’ and/or STERN magazine ever published any article that had any kind of interview with Brendan McDonough in it.
Norbert Becke – Photographer – STERN magazine
http://no-miedo.blogspot.ie/2014/09/norbert-becke-photographer.html?m=1
———————————————————————–
NORBERT BECKE | PHOTOGRAPHER
From a Press Report 2013.
After studying graphic design and holding a teaching position at the Merz Academy (a design school) in Stuttgart, Norbert Becke worked as a freelance graphic designer.
Since 1991, he has been the Art Director and managing partner at the JBW GmbH advertising agency, which he founded. Norbert Becke works for many national and international companies, groups and institutions primarily from the IT and consulting industries.
Photography was always an essential part of his work as a designer.
Ever since his first trip to Africa in 2001, it has become ever more important. Journeys to Botswana, Morocco, Namibia, Ruanda, Zambia, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda then followed. Wildlife photography is his great passion and contact he is inspired again and again from his contact with the natives.
His photo documentary work in Laos, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and India as well as various countries in Africa created from 2008 to 2013 was published in various magazines and awarded numerous prizes. He has created many photo calendars for calendar publishers and companies including MOUNTAIN GORILLAS 2011 with large format wildlife pictures from the rain forests of Ruanda, NAMIBIA 2013 with spectacular wildlife pictures or PEOPLE(S) CHILDREN 2012 with child portraits from all around the world. In addition, his photos have appeared regularly in magazines such as VIEW, the photography edition of Germany’s STERN magazine or on stern.de. The editors at STERN have selected Norbert Becke’s pictures as among the best of the year for 2011 and 2010 and have published them in their VIEW magazine.
Norbert Becke makes insightful portraits of people from the remote corners of the planet and displays them in large-format, black and white photographs. They are expressive recordings of individual moments – some proud and self-confident, but also sad and filled with melancholy.
They are insights into the souls of the people and MOMENTS of great dignity.
———————————————————————–
>> Joy also said this…
>>
>> …but many would like to know his (Brendan’s) verbal demeanor amongst the men
>> THAT very morning. Was he opted as look out because some of the men had
>> enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut?
Now that we can see in the Dickman book that Brendan could be quite the ‘loudmouth’ when he was with the crew ( even though he was only in his third season )… I wonder myself if this means that there is a possibility Brendan was give the lookout assignment that day not so much because he was sick… but because the others were sick of him by around NOON and Steed just wanted to get the guy away from the rest of the crew.
There is that ‘suggestion’ in the quote above.. when it says “some of the men had enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut’.
That’s the first time I’ve heard that suggested and just wondering where that might be coming from.
Followup… the link below jumps back into Chapter III (3) of this discussion and the first time that Joy Collura mentioned this ‘Norbert’ fellow and STERN magazine.
In the following exchange… Joy was actually answering a question of MINE where I was wondering if she could get Mr. Russ Reason to confirm exactly WHEN he was interviewed on camera there in front of the Ranch House Restaurant.
Mr. Russ Reason’s video interview is the one that took place right after the burnover in the canyon and shows all the following going on in the Ranch House Restaurant parking lot…
– Brendan McDonough is standing at the back of Marty Cole’s white Toyota Tacoma that says FIRE on the side with one of those magnetic door signs. McDonough looks distraught and a tall Blue Ridge Hotshot ( but not Frisby or Brown ) is comforting him there at the back
of Marty Cole’s pickup.
– The Blue Ridge Hotshots are all standing around there in the parking lot and looking out to the west where the deployment took place.
– There is a ‘command huddle’ taking place between the front of Marty Cole’s white Tacoma pickup and the Ranch House Restaurant itself. Lots of white helmets are in this ‘huddle’ as well as the Blue Ridge Polaris Ranger.
– A fireman is standing on the top of an engine just beyond this ‘command huddle’ and appears to be shooting video out to the west. This video has never been submitted as evidence and has never been seen by anyone ( AFAIK ).
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-investigation-ignored-major-mistakes-by-the-state/#comment-4496
————————————————————————–
WantsToKnowTheTruth says
November 23, 2013 at 2:29 pm
Again, Joy… THANK YOU!
Your information continues to provide very valuable details about the events of that terrible day.
If there is ANY way you could possibly ask Mr. Russ Reason himself exactly WHEN he had that TV interview right there in front of the Ranch House Restaurant, that would be extremely helpful.
I totally understand that he might not recall a TIME, since he had just lost his home of 28 years and had probably also just escaped with his own life…
…but if he DOES recall the TIME… that would put a time on some other events that are very important to know about, as represented in the video itself.
>> On November 26, 2013 at 2:54 pm
>> Joy A Collura and Tex (Sonny) Gilligan responded…
This is Joy. On my hike yesterday with author Michael Kodas and as well US correspondent for STERN magazine Norbert –
I did ask your question directly to Russ and he said 4:30 pm without hesitation yet the waitress pulled me aside and said I passed by 4:45-5 pm when he was being interviewed so could be that time. Russ as well as some other peoples’ homes we know were already on fire or about to be gone or tires melted on cars by 4:15 pm and tonight we will try to read and answer a lot but I prefer people go to my private link versus posting on blogs or comment walls—I prefer the ones that want to read what we saw can head to the link so I know where I publicly comment- I skim the blogs to see if I read anything about the missing people so we stop and read at times if we see our names—I am so drained so it may be another time we look at the comment wall and reply—we have hikes all week and we had only planned on doing one but we know how important it is for the fallen and the community so I have not yet said no to any of them. Yet I am drained. Some hikes are 16-25 miles we do up steep areas and day in and out—the sun—the chilly wind—just makes one drained to do my hikes for the suicide hiker as well as the fallen 19—soon I told Sonny we need a breather 🙂 A VERY important person to reach who saw Brendan come out is Jim next to the Helm’s and as well Pat Bernard has raw footage that compliments our day-
————————————————————————————-
So Joy apparently hiked with Norbert ( US correspondent for STERN magazine ) on November 25, 2013.
One more followup…
Photographer Norbert Becke’s own website.
There are some truly AMAZING photographs on this page…
http://norbertbecke.com/?lang=en
I didn’t look through them all, but the ones I perused were stunning. #9 of the Birds of Prey absolutely blew me away!
With his obvious photographic skills, it sure would be nice to be able to see his photographic impressions of the YH area.
As Joy herself seems to confirm just below…. the ‘Norbert’ person from STERN magazine that she dealt with was “Norbert Hoefler’… and not STERN photographer ‘Norbert Becke’…
…but everyone really should take a moment to click that link above and take a look at Norbet Becke’s work.
Absolutely stunning stuff. ( Look at the EYES in these photos! ).
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE )
post on May 16, 2015 at 7:10 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>> #9 of the Birds of Prey absolutely blew me away!
Holy cow. I hadn’t seen that one.
Eagle swallowing a DEER!…
Direct link to the “Birds of Prey” folder…
http://norbertbecke.com/galerien/greifvoegel/?lang=en
He will probably need a couple of Tums after that meal!
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/norbert-hoefler/7b/234/63b
Thank you, Joy!
So Norbert Becke is just a photographer that sometimes works with STERN magazine, but Norbert Hoefler is the STERN correspondent you actually spoke with.
Do you know if STERN magazine ever ran an article on the Yarnell Fire, or on Brendan McDonough?
I’m not finding anything online.
Thanks for catching this WTKTT! And also Joy! Very curious indeed.
My Internet totally died on me yesterday, and after much trouble-shooting (again!!) we determined it’s somewhere on CenturyLink’s end, but they couldn’t send some one out til tomorrow.
So I’m briefly “around-the-corner,” invading Terra’s privacy, kinda, and only have a brief time to comment. But, hey, I’m paying for the fancy high-speed Internet here, so there’s that.
To keep it quick, I’ll also respond to your comments down below, responding to what I wrote.
Since I haz no interwebs to distract me, I spent all day yesterday just reading “the book” from beginning to end (and DEFINITIVE it is NOT), while annotating the bejeezuz out of it. Hopefully, when the tubes are up again I can sync it to the computer and share some of the stuff I found, have Q’s about, etc. And, much of what you caught I caught too.
But I hadn’t caught the part about the Three Precotteers. Thanks.
And I agree with your overall assessment, including how he handled the “Decision-Making.” As they say, “He knows just enough to be dangerous,” at least with regards to “The Truth.”
People are gonna think somehow that, because it IS a really interesting read, that it is somehow reliable. Which it isn’t. Because once you see all the “messed up stuff,” you really have no way to know what to believe.
So, anyway, that’s pretty much all I have time to say, here in my exile from the Internet. I’m hungry so I’m out of here!
Namaste!
Thanks, Marti.
Two minds but of a single thought.
Yes… I have been keeping my own ERRATTA list here and it’s not only a comprehensive list of what this Dickman guy is simply getting totally wrong… it is also a list of obvious OMISSIONS like the ones I was reporting down below ( No mention of YARNELL-GAMBLE video, refusal to identify Jason Clawson, Aaron Hulburd or KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell… etc. etc. ).
I figure this is about the only way to show how far off the track this book really is.
As you said below… it’s basically impossible for us to know anything about the veracity of the ‘background stories’ he’s relating that haven’t been heard before. Maybe they are true… maybe not.
But it IS possible to ‘fact check’ him on a number of things that ARE known and documented in the public evidence record.
Dickman has even gotten a lot of this stuff just plain WRONG.
More examples…
Dickman is saying that Brendan called Steed on the intra-crew radio even AFTER the GM vehicles had arrived at the Youth Camp. Dickman says that is when Brendan had his “Ok… see ya soon” conversation with Steed.
That TOTALLY goes against everything Brendan himself testified to to ADOSH. Brendan told ADOSH that happened as he was getting picked up by Frisby and that that is the last time he spoke to Steed.
Dickman also seems to totally screw up the reporting of the actual MAYDAY radio transmissions. Dickman says ( for sure and certain ) that the SECOND MAYDAY was coming from Eric Marsh.
That really is NOT the case. The first time Marsh enters that MAYDAY sequence is about 1 minute and 40 seconds later when he comes on with his casual “Bravo three threeeeeeee… this is Division Alpha here now with Granite Mountain”.
There is a LONG LIST of things that Dickman appears to have gotten just plain WRONG in this’ ‘definitive account of the Yarnell incident’ of his.
I was thinking of just turning my own ERRATTA list into something resembling just what Dickman himself did as far as trying to attribute his narrative to actual sources.
Just list each CHAPTER.. and then talk about all the ERRATTS in each and every chapter the way he talked about his sources.
Since you seem to be assembling the same kind of “here is where Dickman got it wrong” list… I guess the best thing to do is for anyone who DOES have a list like this to just post it… and then we can work it into a master list of everything this guy is getting WRONG.
It really is much worse than I thought it would be.
This Dickman guy is really getting a lot of even the already published information just plain WRONG in his “definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”.
PS: Another thing that Dickman also screws up on and gets it completely wrong is the 4:16 PM radio exchange that was captured i one of the Panebaker videos.
It’s the one where the person with what appears to be a slight Cajun accent called out to GM and asked “Granite Montun… wuz you status rat now?”… and eventually led to Marsh’s dodging the question of whether he was WITH Granite Mountain, or not.
Dickman says this was most definitely John Burfiend asking question but then Dickman also gets the question wrong and the response from Marsh wrong as well.
So it’s hard to understand how he screwed that one up so bad.
The QUESTION that most needs to be asked there is actually WHO that really was talking to Marsh.
It really could NOT be construed to have been John Burfiend. No match on the voice(s) at all.
It’s still just as important to know who this ‘mystery person’ was that Marsh was talking to at 4:16 PM as it is to know who the other ‘mystery person’ is that Eric Marsh appears to ‘reporting to’ following being asked to ‘hurry up’ in the YARNELL-GAMBLE video shot 11 minutes later at 4:27 PM.
So I got my internet back last night, and have been busily having to do some other things today. The month of May just keeps throwing rocks at me.
I did all my annotating on the Kindle edition of my iPad. Wondering how to synch that to the Kindle edition on my iMac, so I can copy/paste stuff here. Would love to find a way for us to look at each others notes.
Are you reading it on Kindle?
I caught what you wrote above. Along with a variety of other things.
Rather than taking up all kinds of space here back and forthing, it would be great if we could go “somewhere” and compare our notes.
I’ve pretty much decided KD just kind of threw this book together. I guess the part that bugs me most is how he said so-and-so and so-and-so so hugely FACT-CHECKED the book, when it’s totally clear that, if they did, they didn’t know what they were fact-checking about.
To be honest, I don’t know even how much it’s worth to go through it bit by bit here.
Suffice it to say, the fact-checking didn’t get done even remotely to the extent that we’ve been trying to do it here, and therefore, what’s useful about the book gets lost in the noise of so many points of lack of credibility.
The metaphor that just hit my brain is that it’s like kind of a coloring-book version of “The Granite Mountain Hotshots and the Yarnell HIll Wildfire.”
They deserve better. And so do we. And so do all their loved ones. And so do all those people who are out there fighting wildfires.
Because I’m not so good at reading printed books these days (the eye-doctor appointment keeps getting postponed), the only one of John McLeans’s books that I”ve read is the Kindle one on the Esperanza Fire.
I don’t remember how long it took him to get that written and published. It was a while, as he waited to observe what happened with the trial of the guy who set the fire.
I think he may have done a BIT of conjecturing on that book (because sometimes you kind of have to when there’s no first-hand witnesses, but nothing like KD has done here.
So, yeah, I’m waiting for John McLean’s version. And I’m not holding my breath. Barring the invaluable ability to actually interview people, what KD’s book tells me is that we — gathered around this little campfire — are, in fact, right here, more “the keepers and tenders of the fire of the truth” than we may even recognize.
Hi Marti –
The best way I’ve find to pull annotations from Kindle is through the free software Calibre: http://jetshred.com/2012/07/26/how-to-backup-and-view-kindle-highlights/
And for document collaboration maybe Google docs, where you can have multiple users collaborate on a live document and use the “review history” option to see who made what changes?
Hope this helps!
Referring to D. Willis, I see he certainly likes the limelight. He even showed up as a witness for the plaintiff in Markham’s court room, Prescott AZ, where Amanda wanted to gag order Joy and take away her hiking rights. To Darrell’s credit he did email Joy after and with no animosity wanted to continue communications. He did benefit though, more limelight and He got to meet Dr. Ted Putnam where everyone seemed amicable enough, except Amanda–at least in my perspective.
Joy has a perfect record and was upset by any restraining order against her verbal rights and especially her hiking rights. But then we had been taking flack from several different directions and even authority figures such as a local fire chief who threatened to have us arrested if we were found hiking in the area. Let it be know we had not hiked illegally in any of those areas and the time we did go right to the site it was with the OSHA authorities who were investigating the wild fire and I assume the deaths of the 19 as well. Former Marathon runner and OSHA official, Brian was able to get down the mountain from where the Hot Shots left the two track to where they perished in 22 minutes, Joy in 33 and that was with all the brush burned away on a cold and blackened terrain. This has been said before, but I think needed repeating.
I will stand on my first amendment right and facts are facts, if public record ought to be public. Please do not attempt to take them away.
OK DK did educate me some. I thought only 10,000 gallons of retardant were dumped here near Yarnell. He has a figure of 30.000 gallons. Wow, did we get an overdose of NH3 and other unknown chemicals. Both Joy and I have lost lung capacity and feel it on our hikes. There again I am an elder and she has her health problems so that it may not take as much chemical to harm us as it would for a young person. She tells me the Yarnell area death toll is now almost 50 good citizens gone since the fire. When will someone let us know what that other 8% of the “trade secreted” chemicals are in that retardant soup? Every fireman ought to have that information so he can determine how much he will allow his lungs or other health problems to develop. He might want this information upon retirement to refer back to as well. If those chemicals are like Uranium their effects won’t show up until years later. However, for many elderly people of Yarnell we do know the effects came on quickly and not just for those that have died–we have talked to many that complain of respiratory problems since the fire.
In my way of thinking at this point add at least 50 deaths to the 19 due to this fire. That figure will increase with time, but who will expose this tragedy as it really is and was.
Just for info I will be gone for a week starting tomorrow not like some I will not be able to follow till I get Home So all enjoy and I’ll catch up when I get back from a little vacation..
Thanks for the heads -up and have a great little vacation!
Namaste
Trying to keep up with my sons practice/time trials/ and race to night at Iowa Speedway Iowa. K&N pro west and east NASCAR 150 Rob Powers. 06– His first time on a 1 mile track. He took after me. Been Racing for 18 years went big this year.
I want to copy this to the top because I owe someone an apology and everyone an explanation.
J. Stout asked an important question downstream about Kyle’s book. I basically blew him off by saying, essentially, go buy your own book and read it.
Fortunately, WTKTT patiently responded to J. Stout’s important question about whether or not Kyle mentioned “bad decisions with good outcomes.”
This is my apology and my explanation:
————————————————
Marti Reed says MAY 16, 2015 AT 7:32 AM
I apologize, J. Stout, and thank you WTKTT.
I’m just…………..TIRED.
Of doing somebody else’s work for the past year and a half.
On my own mountain of dimes.
When I don’t really have the time to keep doing that. All things considered.
So I kind of mitigate that by pursuing my own interests, questions, concerns, and curiosities.
And the past four weeks have been particularly rough, picking my way through mazes of car problems, computer problems, and internet problems (I just sunk $200 on my system here before sinking $200 on the system at the house-around-the-corner which I need to be moving into, and MY internet crashed last night and is up but SLOW this morning, and I almost don’t have any more hair to pull out of my head).
So that’s kind of the context of my saying that.
And thank you, WTKTT, for replying to J.Stout, which I kinda sorta figured you would. Because you are more generous than I am at this point.
I, too, have been sort of “hopping” around inside the book. I knew where that first statement, in the prologue, was, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to just post it, because I knew it was complicated and I hadn’t finished perusing enough to sense whether that was more pervasive.
Thus my bringing up the incident on the Doce fire, which is the clearest indicator I’ve found so far of a “bad decision that almost didn’t have a good outcome.”
And I share WTKTT’s frustration with Kyle’s “referencing” of his sources. It sucks big time. Somewhere in my head I have it that one of Kyle’s sources is Fred Schoeffler, but I haven’t had time to finish searching for that, and his name is not on either of the Notes for the Yarnell Fire chapters nor the Prologue.
But I’m willing to bet, all things considered, that’s where that’s coming from.
The other log-jam I ran into is in the very last chapters of the book, where he’s taking a more overall descriptive/evaluative look at the fire and the crew. He’s specifically quoting people — experts and such — without even identifying THEM.
And it bugs the heck out of me that I can’t seem to figure out how to easily search my bookmarked pages on Kindle on the iPad. I’m not liking Kindle at all for this job.
So I’ll generously put this out there. I accidentally ordered the hard-back version of the book. I can’t read books anymore, at least until I have TIME to go get my eyes checked and buy two pairs of new glasses.
I’m willing to put that hard-back copy out there to circulate, in case ANYBODY contributing to this conversation wants to read it but doesn’t want to invest the money into it.
I think the book is worth reading, especially for those of us who have followed this so closely for so long. It adds a lot of much-needed (imho) context to our work.
And, that being said, it is (imho) sloppily written, terribly sourced, unreliably fact-checked (by WHOM??), and just another wasted opportunity. He threw it out there too quickly. (Where have I encountered THAT before??????)
And if he’s not ABSOLUTELY sure and CAPABLE of PROVING that narrative about what happened in Harper Canyon, I STILL think he could be finding himself in some SERIOUS hot water.
Good Morning!!!
And PS. Speaking of wildfire, drought, the Southwest, and such.
Awhile back I wrote that I would LOVE for it to rain enough to force me to replace my mildly leaking roof.
Looks like I’m gonna have to call a roofer.
Thank You Grandmother!!!!!
I think El Nino is here.
And, I have to admit, I’m currently sitting here biting my tongue regarding something related to that above post.
We’ll see.
Clarification. This refers to the post about Kyle’s book, not the post about El Nino.
Altho they could be related.
Just having fun.
**
** DID BRENDAN MCDONOUGH TELL KYLE DICKMAN THAT HE HEARD
** MARSH ORDER STEED TO LEAVE THE SAFE BLACK?
So is the following (short) paragraph from the new Kyle Dickman book actually just a verification from Brendan to Kyle that he DID hear Marsh order Steed to leave the safe black?
It sure sounds like it.
On page 220… there is this…
“Ultimately the choice was Marsh’s, and the order Donut heard him deliver were clear:
“Move the crew along the escape route”. If Steed or anybody else questioned his
decision, they did so discreetly, because on the crew’s radio channel, nobody
openly disagreed with Marsh”.
So either that is complete ‘imagineering’ on Dickman’s part or he really is saying that Brendan admitted to him hearing Marsh order Steed to leave the safe black… but Dickman also seems to be saying Brendan told him he did NOT hear ANY DISAGREEMENT or ‘arguing’ on the radio.
It sounds that while Brendan might have been telling the truth to Dickman… it still wasn’t the ‘whole truth’.. It still sounds like it was possible Brendan was HIDING information, even from Dickman.
Example: Brendan might have heard Marsh ORDER Steed to leave the safe black… and there was no great disagreement at THAT time… but then Brendan might have chosen to NOT tell Dickman what happened when Steed reached the ‘Saddle’ and realized that Marsh expected him to bring the men down into the fuel-filled box canyon.
That is even the point when Mike Dudley said the FFs that talked to the SAIT ( Multiple FFs ) alleged hearing this ‘argument’ between Marsh and Steed. Even SAIT Co-Lead Mike Dudley said it was “at the saddle” and the argument was about “which way to go from that saddle”.
So it’s hard to tell what to make of this blurb in the new Dickman book.
Was/is it just a little bit more of the truth coming out from Brendan… but still not the WHOLE truth?… or is this complete ‘imagineering’ on Kyle Dickman’s part?
** THE LONG STORY
Here is that same paragraph and the ‘context’ in which it appears…
Page 220
———————————————————————————-
On the radio, Donut could hear Marsh and Steed discussing whether the crew should stay in the black or come up with a plan to move. Marsh said he was scouting the escape route: the two-track that ran along the top of the ridge to Glen Ilah and the Helms’ place. Staying put in the black was obviously the safest option, but it also meant agreeing to be spectators to the macabre show unfolding beneath them. The alternative was for Granite Mountain to follow the ridge out to their escape route and to the safety zone at the Helms’ place.
It was an appealing option. The Helms’ place would put the hotshots in a better position from which to reengage the fire . With all its defensible space, the ranch was not under threat, and if they could wait out the firestorm there, the crew would be a short walk away from Glen Ilah, where they could help homeowners whose lives were soon to go up in flames. Moving Granite Mountain was also the type of tactical decision that might surprise and impress Abel and the incident commanders. Granite Mountain had been sidelined on the fire’s cold heel all day. But when the flames swept through Yarnell, Abel and Cordes would immediately need all the help they could find. For Granite Mountain to emerge unexpectedly into the action, just minutes after the fire had torn through Yarnell, would be a slick move–a coup that could win an ambitious division accolades with the incident management team or a recently absent superintendent the the admiration of his unfamiliar crew.
But moving Granite Mountain to the Helms’ place came witih substantial risks. I compromised manyu of the Ten and Eighteen that both Marsh and Steed had memorized:
– Weather is getting hotter and drier.
– Wind increases and/or changes direction.
– Terrain and fuels make escape to safety zones difficult.
– Unburned fuel between you and the fire.
The safety zone was more than a mile and a half away from the crew, and as soon as the hotshots left the safety of the black, a sea of dry chaparral would lie between the men and the fire. Steed and Marsh considered the rules but found ways to justify ignoring the Ten and Eighteen. From the escape route along the ridge, the hotshots had an expansive view of the fire’s spread. If the fire got too close, they could always bail off the south, southwest, or west side of the Weavers into the thinner fuels in the desert below.
Ultimately the choice was Marsh’s, and the order Donut heard him deliver were clear: “Move the crew along the escape route”. If Steed or anybody else questioned his decision, they did so discreetly, because on the crew’s radio channel, nobody openly disagreed with Marsh.
—————————————————————————————–
Followup… the convention that Kyle Dickman decided to use to even remotely give us a chance at knowing what ‘evidence’ he was basing his narrative on was that at the end of the book… he would list the Chapters and then just give his own sort of quick ‘narrative’ about the ‘sources’ for things in that particular chapter.
Unfortunately, the chapters that contain the most outright ERRORS are the ones that concern the timeframe of leaving the safe black and on up to the deployment… and the just lumps all the ‘sources’ for Chapters 17 through 23 ( SIX full chapters ) into one single sort of hodgepodge mess.
That includes the chapter above where he is (supposedly) telling us in no uncertain terms that Eric Marsh ORDERED Jesse Steed to leave the safe black… but that there was no disagreement heard over the radio.
Nowhere in his ‘sources’ listing does Dickman actually say that that piece of information was coming directly from Brendan McDonough… or whether this is just one more ASSUMPTION Dickman himself is making and then wants us to believe it came from “a source”.
Dickman’s book really is like that age-old advertising idiom.
“We know the public knows that half of what we say is false.
The key is making sure they can never tell which half.”
I totally agree with what you are saying. I had high-lighted that passage and bookmarked those pages. And had the very same questions.
You said:
“Dickman’s book really is like that age-old advertising idiom.
“We know the public knows that half of what we say is false.
The key is making sure they can never tell which half.””
That made me chuckle. One of the other things I do a lot of is ahem Photoshop.
“The key is making sure they can never tell” is the fundamental, and often broken, rule of Photoshop for “Professionals.”
It separates the Masters from Everybody Else.
So I guess you could say the vast majority of people who buy this book probably won’t see where the badly done seams are.
But we do.
I want to say that at least KD isn’t playing out that “OMG OMG the fire did this totally unpredictable thing that nobody could have known could have fatally bitten Granite Mountain in the butt!!!” narrative.
He goes to some length and detail about how much warning was coming to the fire overhead etcetera that things were MOST LIKELY going to go way to hell in a handbucket THAT AFTERNOON.
And he picks through how those variables were (either literally or via his theorizing) within the contextual mix of Granite Mountain’s decision-making process. He doesn’t let them off the hook on this. And I really appreciate that, all things considered.
It’s like, well, they took a CALCULATED risk……………..
They BROKE the rules……………………………………..
And they LOST.
KD doesn’t “soften” that by any kind of apologetics. As many many other people have tried to do.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 16, 2015 at 9:13 am
>> Marti said…
>>
>> It’s like, well, they took a CALCULATED risk……………..
>>
>> They BROKE the rules……………………………………..
>> And they LOST.
>>
>> KD doesn’t “soften” that by any kind of apologetics. As many
>> many other people have tried to do.
That’s true… and I agree with what you are saying.
There IS a point where he lists the most important ‘rules’ from the 10 and 18 and LCES that he ( Kyle Dickman ) thinks were broken… and he ‘theorizes’ that every single one of them had to have been ‘considered’ by Steed and Marsh… but that they still ( in Dickman’s words ) “found a way to justify breaking those rules”.
But then ( even with as much theorizing as he does throughout the rest of the book ) he only leaves the reader with HIS two ‘theories’ about how/why they “found a way to justify breaking those rules”.
And BOTH of Dickman’s theories are ‘related’. Number 2 just reinforces number 1.
1) They just wanted to be in a better position to reengage after the firestorm blew through Yarnell and Glen Illah. Dickman is automatically assuming that Marsh and Steed never once realistically thought they could ‘beat the fire’ all the way to Yarnell and Glen Ilah before it was going to ‘pass through’ those communities.
2) It would be really, really COOL if they could just ‘show up like the cavalry’ all of sudden down there and OPS1 Todd Abel ( and other fire command ) would be really, really impressed and they would be saying “Wow… those Granite Mountain guys are amazing!”.Looks like they stay at a Holiday Inn EVERY NIGHT!
All that being said… I actually think Kyle Dickman has just significantly “added to the problem” of trying to discover the real truth about Yarnell.
Because of his “laziness” as a writer/journalist/investigator combined with his obvious AGENDA as a former/current member of the WFF community… all he has done here is create a situation where people reading this book will be under the false impression that they are now hearing the TRUTH about what happened that day.
That is NOT the case.
There is just as much GUESSWORK ( if not MORE? ) in this tome as there was in the also-had-an-agenda SAIT narrative.
Dickman is simply makign it sound like it’s taken him almost two years to come up with this because of all the diligent research he was doing.
Also NOT the case.
Yes… he was collecting interviews and interesting stories from people who knew the deceased… but he was NOT actually ‘investigating’ this incident.
He just makes it SOUND like he was.
He is still making choices here that are meant to just FOOL the reader into thinking the whole story is being presented… when it is NOT… and so I’m not really sure WHAT his agenda was.
But that kind of blatant ‘omission of evidence’ would also constitute a decision to somehow try and ‘soften the blow’ for people.
Exampe(s)…
1) Dickman makes ABSOLUTELY NO MENTION of even the existence of one of the most critical pieces of evidence that OTHER PEOPLE knew exactly what Granite Mountain was doing and were, indeed, not only encouraging them on their ‘mission’ but actually telling them to HURRY UP.
I’m talking, of course, about the clear audio captures in Blue Ridge Hotshot Ronald Gamble’s video/audio that he captured at exactly 4:27 PM which sitting in the Driver’s seat of one of the Blue Ridge Crew Carriers.
Dickman NEVER MENTIONS THIS EVIDENCE or even says he lifted one finger of his own to find out more about it.
Dickman DOES mention other pieces of obvious evidence and other ‘statements’ from the evidence record that are still equally ‘un-verified’ ( such as the SAIT’s mention of Burfiend thinking he heard Marsh say “That’s where we want retardant”. ).
So, since Dickman was obviously not AFRAID to put testimony and/or evidence that has never been fully ‘vetted’ ‘or ‘verified’ into his narrative… it is perfectly obvious that he was purposely CHOOSING to not mention Blue Ridge Hothshot Ronald Gamble’s video.
And speaking of other places where it is obvious Dickman is making conscious choices to EXCLUDE information from this (supposed) “definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… we have stuff like…
1) Almost a total ‘avoidance’ of what happened on Friday or Saturday. At best… all Dickman does is regurgitate the known stuff from the public record. He made no attempt himself to find out MORE about what happened on Friday and Saturday and why all those men were even there in Yarnell on Sunday trying to fight that fire. I’m not sure how ANYONE can say they have written ANY kind of ‘definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire” without including a DEATAILED analysis of Friday and Saturday.
2) Even though Dickman is actually QUOTING THEM all over the place AND talking about their actions and their participation in the incident… Dickman is PURPOSELY refusing to NAME the “3 Prescotteers”.Jason Clawson, Aaron Hulburd and KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell.
The closest Dickman gets is just saying there were “3 firefighters from the Prescott National Forest” there.
Even in his criticla re-telling of the ground rescue mission… his REFUSAL to name these men makes that whole recounting incredibly stilted and awkward.
Anyone reading that ( who doesn’t know that Dickman is talking about Clawson, Hulburd and Yowell ) must be scratching their heads during that dynamic section and asking themselves…
“What… all of a sudden the best this guy can do is say that there were 3 other guys out looking for the bodies… but he has no frickin’ clue who they were? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
It really doesn’t ‘make any sense’.
Dickman could have decided to TOTALLY try and HIDE the fact that Clawson, Hulburd and Yowell were even THERE in Yarnell ( just like Mike Dudley and Jim Karels decided to do with their SAIR report )…
…but he didn’t. Dickman knew that between the ‘Helmet Cam’ videos and their actual participation in the ground rescue mission… Jason Clawson, Aaron Hulburd and KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell are now ( and forever ) a ‘critical part of the story’ of Sunday afternoon.
But Dickman won’t even dare print their names.
What in the HELL is up with THAT?
Even just these kinds of things ( Dickman’s refusal to even MENTION the existence of the YARNELL-GAMBLE video and his absolute REFUSAL to even NAME 3 of the most important ‘players’ in the deployment story ) makes you call the entire narrative ( and the agenda behind it ) into question.
Sort of just like the SAIR report… only with more stories about getting into fights in bars, finding Jesus on the fireline, and Donut being a loudmouth and saying lots of inappropriate things all the time.
This book is really kind of SAD.
All that time… all that effort… and its net effect is the same as the original SAIR.
New files just posted in the AJL current file concerning McDonough.
as well the Judge refused to Subpoena McDonough but stated the Notice was sufficient to do The deposition. A lot more including a Deposition of Mr. Hunt the Retired State Forester for the 26 Th.
Thanks for the heads-up, Bob!
To me, that deposition of Scott Hunt seems to be a pretty “big deal.”
I wish I could copy/paste the “important areas of inquiry” (given that I’m too lazy to type it all). It’s pretty serious. Like seriously. I recommend going and reading it.
Here’s the way to get to the pdf:
Yarnell Hill AlJ Hearing File:
https://sites.google.com/site/yarnellhillinformation/home/yarnellhillaljhearingfile
Scroll down to where it says “2015_05 Updated 05.13.15.pdf” and click on View.
The deposition notice is just a little ways down from the top of the pdf.
ADOSH is seriously not backing down.
They may think Brendan’s deposition is not all that consequential for their purposes, but that deposition of Scott Hunt is major, all things considered. in my opinion.
PS It’s scheduled for Friday, May 22.
I wonder how much of a legal push-back Arizona Department of Forestry is going to mount. I can’t imagine they’re going to just sit back and let it happen without a fairly major fight.
Especially not since we have already seen how BALLISTIC things went when Arizona Forestry wanted to subpoena the firm that ADOSH lead investigator Marshall Krotenberg works for ( and WAS working for at the time of the ADOSH Yarnell investigation ).
Arizona Forestry could just come right back with the same “No way in hell” documents that ADOSH filed back then… and just change the name from “Marshall Krotenberg” to “Scott Hunt”, but keep all the same arguments being made about why that person should NOT be forced to testify.
Whatever they do ( Arizona Forestry )… they need to be quick about it.
We are on the exact same ‘timeframe’ now as we were back in February.
All of the lawyers want a whole lot of shit to happen right BEFORE they have to sit across the table from each other again and continue these ‘global mediation’ talks.
It really is doubtful that the Judge will agree to yet ANOTHER ‘extension’ if they can’t reach a settlement by the end of June.
Also, most of the “paperwork” in that file is all about (I just really have a hard time comprehending how this could get to be so convoluted — more taxpayer dollars burning) how ADOSH posted the July 1 Incident Action Plan without redacting it of all the personal phone numbers and email addresses etc. So ADOF requested it be replaced by a redacted version. That took about seven legal filings to accomplish, apparently.
Also the reason Brendan’s deposition was postponed was because the original date, May 26 was the day after Memorial Day, and therefore inconvenient for Brendan. So it was pushed to Thursday May 28 instead.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 15, 2015 at 5:45 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> The reason Brendan’s deposition was postponed was because
>> the original date, May 26 was the day after Memorial Day,
>> and therefore inconvenient for Brendan. So it was pushed
>> to Thursday May 28 instead.
Actually… it’s even more convulted than that.
The ORIGINAL date for the deposition was May 25 itself… and then they realized that is Memorial Day itself and ( after another round of paperwork ) they changed it to May 26.
Only THEN did they discover that even this wasn’t good enough and that lawyer Shapiro himself even had a conflict on May 26.
So here comes YAROP ( Yet Another Round Of Paperwork ) and now the McDonough deposition is (supposedly) scheduled for May 28 and everyone can (supposedly) make THAT date.
It’s the year 2015.
Don’t these people have access to telephones?
You know… the things with little buttons on them that let you talk to someone who has one, too?
LOL!!!
TELEPHONES!!!! YES!!!!
Telephones was MY first thought!
And then I thought, “well maybe I’m just being naive.”
I keep waiting for a letter from Mosesso to show up in the ALJ file addressed to BOTH sets of lawyers saying…
———————————————————
Gentleman ( and ladies )…
We are still only in the frickin’ DISCOVER”Y phase here.
Will you ALL please pick up the god-damn telephone(s) and just ‘figure this out’ and stop ‘informing’ ME every time one of your classmates has spilled your milk and you can’t seem to clean up the mess?
If there really are things that you people absolutely CANNOT come to an agreement about even in just this ‘Discovery’ phase… then again… just pick up the phone and call my secretary and we’ll have a conference call where I can learn who really needs to be spanked and we can move. on.
Yours
The Judge you keep bothering.
——————————————————-
IAAKOC ( I Am Actually Kidding, Of Course ).
There are perfectly good reasons some of this ‘back and forth’ needs to be actually DOCUMENTED in the court case if/when it all goes off-the-tracks or ends up in an appeal process… I know that… BUT…
…even so… it still seems like a lot of crap coming from people who are REFUSING to just ‘talk to each other’ and work things out like actual ADULTS.
I have a question which is outside the current topic, but I’d like to raise it before the subject of KD’s book starts to fall into the realm of Old Business.
While my ‘healthy skepticism’ regarding this book has grown even more healthy to the point of being downright robust (side note here, I will not be reading the book for reasons that are closely akin to those mentioned by Mr. Powers) there remains, however, a certain degree of curiosity as to whether KD talks about the matter of Bad Decisions With Good Outcomes. And, if so, in what context. I have appreciated seeing the comments posted here recently concerning various parts of the book.
Reply to J. Stout post on May 15, 2015 at 11:50 am
>> J. Stout said…
>>
>> I have a question which is outside the current topic, but I’d like to
>> raise it before the subject of KD’s book starts to fall into the
>> realm of Old Business.
I don’t think we’ve even begun to talk about the book that was just published.
I think a lot of people are still reading/analyzing it.
That’s what I’m (still) doing, anyway.
>> J. Stout also said…
>>
>> …there remains, however, a certain degree of curiosity as to whether KD
>> talks about the matter of Bad Decisions With Good Outcomes. And, if so,
>> in what context.
Again… speaking for myself… I am still reading the book.
But there is definitely THIS in the PROLOGUE about Marsh being known ( to at least one other Hotshot SUP that worked with him ) as a ‘bad decisions, good outcomes’ style manager…
In the PROLOUE ( Page XV )
Much of Granite Mountain’s unique personality and culture stemmed from
the crew’s leader, Eric Marsh. When I first met his widow, Amanda, at their
horse ranch outside Prescott, she told me, “People are going to build him
up — make him a hero — and then tear him down”. Her husband’s personal
history was colored, but, more significantly, his fire-line record was varied.
One hotshot superintendent who’d worked with Marsh called him a
“bad-decisions, good-outcome guy”, while others considered him among
the most skilled firefighters they knew. Marsh emerged as a highly intelligent
and deeply complicated figure. He was key to understanding this tragedy.
As a related aside, I have to say that the narrative about how Brendan and Chris almost got burned over on the Doce Fire is possibly “relevant.” That was before Eric was back as supervisor, but still……. They had a really close call there.
I have to say, I think, even with all of Kyle’s faults describing the Yarnell Fire (at least as we see them — even though he wrote that it was fact-checked, but I don’t know by whom or how), I found it absolutely fascinating to read the book.
It really opened up and rounded out my perception of this crew. At least in the context of 2013.
I have a personal interest in the Thompson Ridge Fire, although I hadn’t found the time to actually read much about it. Kyle’s description of that fire was really important for me to read. It was a really tough fire, and the first really big fire Granite Mountain was on in 2013.
Not everything went well for them on that fire, even though they were featured in Kristen Honig’s photographs (which I really love). By the way, Kyle describes Kristen Honig and narrates how Clayton Whitted escorted her around that night burnout.
He also narrates how Renan Packer had a serious seizure on that fire, which landed him in the hospital. That really affected the crew. Especially his “buddy” Grant McKee and also Brendan. Eric drove all the way to the hospital in Albuquerque to bring him back to Prescott. Renan was terrified of how Eric would “judge” him for that. Eric didn’t. But Renan had to leave the crew, and he was heart-broken over that.
I really think if anyone wants to know something about what’s in the book, they should just fork over the minor $11 for the Kindle edition. I mean really. Because I think it’s worth that $11.
If you’re not willing to make that minor sacrifice, don’t ask me what’s in it. All things considered. I’m willing to discuss the book. I’m not willing to buy it and read it “for you.”
You can rest assured, Marti, that there won’t be another question from me concerning the book.
Ask away. Some will ( or won’t ) chose to answer… but don’t hesitate to ask.
I perfectly understand anyone who doesn’t want to spend one single dime on any of these ‘books’ coming out about the Yarnell tragedy… even if one of them says the proceeds are going to the families, or something.
Followup… I still haven’t finished reading the whole book. Meant to do so tonight but life has a tendency to intrude.
In the middle of the book there is the obligatory ‘picture portfolio’ section and the very first picture is that now-famous Jakob Schiller photo of Marsh pouring gasoline into cans on the back of the GM Superintendent Truck with his shirt sleeves rolled up.
The caption for this photo repeats the “bad decisions, good outcomes’ label and says…
“Granite Mountain Hotshot superintendent Eric Marsh ( red helmet ) filling gas canisters during a burnout operation. Marsh’s role in the fatalities at Yarnell Hill was highly controversial. Some longtime firefighters counted him among the best firefighters they knew; others called him a “bad-decisions, good-outcome guy”.
In the Prologue, Kyle Dickman said it was just ONE Hotshot Superintendent who had worked with Marsh who said he was a “bad-decisions, good-outcomes” style manager.
** MORE THAN ONE CO-WORKER HAD THE “BAD
** DECISIONS, GOOD OUTCOMES” VIEW OF MARSH’S
** MANAGEMENT STYLE.
Now… later in the book, Dickman is clearly making it sound like that same description was coming from a NUMBER of ‘longtime firefighters’ ( as in… more than just one longtime FF ).
Dickman clearly uses the word ‘others’ ( plural ) this time instead of attributing the opinion to just one other person.
I’m afraid I have , myself, sort of been ‘jumping around’ in the book and I have ‘skipped’ some chapters… so I’m not sure there are any descriptions like you are asking about.
Such as… descriptions of ‘near misses’ on other fires.
I’m not even seeing any explanation or stories associated with the known prior ‘burnout of a safety zone’ on the Nevada fire.
We KNOW it happened because it was testified to ( by more than one GM crewman ) during those March 2013 interviews to find a successor for GM crew boss Philip Maldonando… who left GM for a stable job with the Prescott Solid Waste Division.
I thought at least Kyle Dickman would look into this KNOWN “safety zone burnout”.
Apparently… he did not.
Dickman really is just ( overall ) trying to write a book that lets you get to know the men that died better. That’s really about all he was setting out to do.
And he has accomplished that. No question.
People have told him ( Dickman ) a LOT of interesting stories and he has worked hard to string them all together into a readable narrative…
…but as far as expending any effort to find out what really happened in Yarnell that entire weekend… ( starting with the botched intiial attack(s) )… fuhgeddaboudit.
I apologize, J. Stout, and thank you WTKTT.
I’m just…………..TIRED.
Of doing somebody else’s work for the past year and a half.
On my own mountain of dimes.
When I don’t really have the time to keep doing that. All things considered.
So I kind of mitigate that by pursuing my own interests, questions, concerns, and curiosities.
And the past four weeks have been particularly rough, picking my way through mazes of car problems, computer problems, and internet problems (I just sunk $200 on my system here before sinking $200 on the system at the house-around-the-corner which I need to be moving into, and MY internet crashed last night and is up but SLOW this morning, and I almost don’t have any more hair to pull out of my head).
So that’s kind of the context of my saying that.
And thank you, WTKTT, for replying to J.Stout, which I kinda sorta figured you would. Because you are more generous than I am at this point.
I, too, have been sort of “hopping” around inside the book. I knew where that first statement, in the prologue, was, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to just post it, because I knew it was complicated and I hadn’t finished perusing enough to sense whether that was more pervasive.
Thus my bringing up the incident on the Doce fire, which is the clearest indicator I’ve found so far of a “bad decision that almost didn’t have a good outcome.”
And I share WTKTT’s frustration with Kyle’s “referencing” of his sources. It sucks big time. Somewhere in my head I have it that one of Kyle’s sources is Fred Schoeffler, but I haven’t had time to finish searching for that, and his name is not on either of the Notes for the Yarnell Fire chapters nor the Prologue.
But I’m willing to bet, all things considered, that’s where that’s coming from.
The other log-jam I ran into is in the very last chapters of the book, where he’s taking a more overall descriptive/evaluative look at the fire and the crew. He’s specifically quoting people — experts and such — without even identifying THEM.
And it bugs the heck out of me that I can’t seem to figure out how to easily search my bookmarked pages on Kindle on the iPad. I’m not liking Kindle at all for this job.
So I’ll generously put this out there. I accidentally ordered the hard-back version of the book. I can’t read books anymore, at least until I have TIME to go get my eyes checked and buy two pairs of new glasses.
I’m willing to put that hard-back copy out there to circulate, in case ANYBODY contributing to this conversation wants to read it but doesn’t want to invest the money into it.
I think the book is worth reading, especially for those of us who have followed this so closely for so long. It adds a lot of much-needed (imho) context to our work.
And, that being said, it is (imho) sloppily written, terribly sourced, unreliably fact-checked (by WHOM??), and just another wasted opportunity. He threw it out there too quickly. (Where have I encountered THAT before??????)
And if he’s not ABSOLUTELY sure and CAPABLE of PROVING that narrative about what happened in Harper Canyon, I STILL think he could be finding himself in some SERIOUS hot water.
Good Morning!!!
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 16, 2015 at 7:32 am
>> I apologize
>> I’m just…………..TIRED.
>> Of doing somebody else’s work for the past year and a half.
No apologies necessary. Really.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And thank you, WTKTT, for replying to J.Stout, which
>> I kinda sorta figured you would. Because you are
>> more generous than I am at this point.
I’m not sure ‘generous’ is the right word.
Believe me… I’m also tempted to type “want fries with that?” on a regular basis as well… but I also really DO understand about people not wanting to put one dime into anyone’s pocket just for writing books or screenplays or making movies about this terrible tragedy.
It does get tiresome… but when it comes to the full PUBLIC evidence record, this ongoing discussion, and now the books that are emerging… if I can answer someone’s question… I will.
I think that’s partly/mostly what this discussion is FOR.
Answering questions if/when possible.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I, too, have been sort of “hopping” around inside the
>> book. I knew where that first statement, in the
>> prologue, was, but I didn’t feel like taking the time
>> to just post it, because I knew it was complicated
>> and I hadn’t finished perusing enough to sense
>> whether that was more pervasive.
Copy that. I still can’t say for sure and certain there aren’t some actual “bad decisions with good outcomes” stories in a few of the remaining chapters I have yet to read… but it’s not looking like there will be any.
It’s really looking like this is just one more thing in Dickman’s book where he just mentions something… but then never lifts a finger to explain either where that is coming from or what it means.
In his prologue… Dickman seems to say it was just ONE ( singular ) other Hotshot Super that thought Marsh was a “Good outcomes from bad decisions” kind of manager… and basically just an “accident waiting to happen”.
Later in the book ( in the photo section ) Dickman then says the same thing but is now attributing that to MULTIPLE ( plural ) ‘others’ all sharing that opinion about Marsh.
So which is it?
Was Dickman just quoting ONE other ‘mysterious’ unnamed Hotshot SUP… or did he discover there was a ‘general opinion’ out there with regards to Granite Mountain just being an “accident looking for a place to happen”?
>> Marti also wrote…
>>
>> Thus my bringing up the incident on the Doce fire, which
>> is the clearest indicator I’ve found so far of a “bad
>> decision that almost didn’t have a good outcome.”
Even with regards to THAT incident… we aren’t getting enough detail to know if that was just Chris and Brendan with their heads up their asses… or whether they had been TOLD to do exactly what they were doing and as deep into the unburned fuel as they had gotten.
I’ve heard of “drop packs and run”.. but that’s the first I’ve heard of “drop torches and run”. When they ran into each other and knocked each other down… it sounds like it was a bloody miracle they even had the time to get up again and scramble back to that road.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And I share WTKTT’s frustration with Kyle’s “referencing”
>> of his sources. It sucks big time. Somewhere in my head
>> I have it that one of Kyle’s sources is Fred Schoeffler,
>> but I haven’t had time to finish searching for that, and
>> his name is not on either of the Notes for the Yarnell
>> Fire chapters nor the Prologue.
Nor are the names Jason Clawson, Aaron Hulburd or KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell ( The 3 Prescotteers )… yet Dickman is actually QUOTING from them extensively in the book itself.
Even with all the quotes and him ‘including’ them in the narrative… the closes he gets to saying who the hell he’s really quoting and/or talking about is the vague “3 firefighters that worked for the Prescott National Forest”.
Still a total mystery why he would seem to be AFRAID ( yes… actually afraid ) to just name those men. We all know that’s exactly who they are. Why would Dickman be afraid to even just mention any of them by name? It’s weird.
>> Marti also wrote…
>>
>> The other log-jam I ran into is in the very last chapters
>> of the book, where he’s taking a more overall
>> descriptive/evaluative look at the fire and the crew.
>> He’s specifically quoting people — experts and
>> such — without even identifying THEM.
Exactly… stuff line the following exact line from his page 276 where he’s indicating ‘sources’ for his version of the near-collision of the DC10 VLAT and the Skycrane Helicopter…
“Aviation experts speculate that the aircraft were, in fact, a safe distance apart”.
Really? WHICH ‘Aviation experts’? and WHICH photographs or videos are they basing those ‘opinions’ on?
>> Marti also wrote…
>>
>> I think the book is worth reading, especially for those
>> of us who have followed this so closely for so long.
>> It adds a lot of much-needed (imho) context to our work.
Well.. yes… I suppose it does.
But overall… it’s really a ‘failed effort’.
It most certainly is NOT what the publisher is touting it as.
“The definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire “.
Not even close. It’s really just the SAIR all over again with a bunch more ‘personal stories about the FFs’ thrown in.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And, that being said, it is (imho) sloppily written, terribly
>> sourced, unreliably fact-checked (by WHOM??), and
>> just another wasted opportunity. He threw it out there
>> too quickly. (Where have I encountered THAT before??????)
It wasn’t even proofread very well.
I have my own list of ERRATTA that I’ve been jotting down and there are all of these simply STUPID “Brain farts” in the final published text that make it look like nobody even bothered to proof read it.
Just ONE Example…
Text on Page 215…
“Granite Mountain’s lookout was in serious trouble.
Smoke cloaked the north side of the knob where he and Frisby
had dropped Donut off earlier in the day. Frisby accelerated,
bouncing the ATV over the rutted and dusty bulldozer tracks.”
ERRATTA: Sentence above should have obviously been…
“Smoke cloaked the north side of the know where he and BROWN
had dropped Donut off earlier in the day”.
The paragraph is written from Frisby’s perspective.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And if he’s not ABSOLUTELY sure and CAPABLE of
>> PROVING that narrative about what happened in
>> Harper Canyon, I STILL think he could be finding
>> himself in some SERIOUS hot water.
There is no question that Brian Frisby was ‘yelling’ to some of the firefighters in that Youth Camp area that they needed to ‘get out’.
Frisby himself says he was doing that in his own handwritten Unit Log.
But for Dickman to ‘make the leap’ that this also means it MUST have been Brian Frisby being the one having that extended back-and-forth exchange with Bob Brandan and Matt Keehner and that it was Frisby that ORDERED them to take the vehicles out and abandon their own men because they couldn’t “outrun the fire”… is a HUGE LEAP on Dickman’s point.
What is ASTOUNDINGLY disappointing here is that if this author was worth his salt… then he would have made an effort to ACTUALLY solve this ongoing mystery and find out who Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner were actually talking about.
Instead of just ‘assuming’ anything… this ‘independent author’ could have just TALKED to Brandon and Keehner himself.
Blue Ridge and its leadership and members make a concerted effort to stay ‘out of the limelight’ and they purposely turn their backs on cameras and whatnot… but there ARE a whole bunch of PUBLIC pictures around of Brian Frisby, Trueheart Brown… and everyone else on that Blue Ridge squad.
Ditto for plenty of pictures around of Gary Cordes and Tyson Esquibel.
It would have been very, very easy for Dickman to just talk to Brandon and/or Keehner and get him to IDENTIFY this person who was ordering them to abandon their crewmates.
But Dickman (apparently) didn’t lift a single finger to do that.
Dickman was just content to codify his own GUESS about that into a published book… regardless of whether it was right or not.
At this point… I really feel for poor Brian Frisby, and Trueheart Brown, and ALL of the Blue Ridge Hotshots.
This is just one more case where things are being attributed to them, and thoughts put into their heads and words put into their mouths… but we have no idea if any of it is TRUE or not.
And in this case… the ‘connotations’ are not good at all.
I will be ( once again ) that either Frisby or Brown have smashed their fists on a keyboard and wished they were free to tell their OWN damn side of this story.
Whoops. TYPO in last paragraph above.
Meant to type BET instead of BE.
Last paragraph above should have read like this…
“I will BET ( once again ) that either Frisby or Brown have smashed their fists on a keyboard and wished they were free to tell their OWN damn side of this story.”
The “first” book out is going to have a significant financial boost from being the “first book out” no matter how much new information is provided, or even how much is just speculative, for that matter.
A lot of people may think that book is going to be the ‘only’ one published and buy it simply to try and find out what the hell happened that day.
The three Precotteers are feds, likely also under a gag order, and they may be freaking out that this released information is being attributed to them, when they might have been hoping there would be no identifiable link to any information they may have provided.
While KD probably had easier access to a lot of information due to his prior status as a hotshot, all of the due diligence that WTKTT and Marti are alluding too that should have been accomplished for a proper accounting of GM and the YH fire could not happen if your primary mission was to be “the first book out” for the reason mentioned above.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive
(TTWARE) post on May 16, 2015 at 6:59 pm
>> TTWARE wrote…
>>
>> The “first” book out is going to have a
>> significant financial boost from being the
>> “first book out” no matter how much new
>> information is provided, or even how much
>> is just speculative, for that matter.
As is the case now with just about anything that has to do with the Yarnell Hill Tragedy… there is always a ‘side story’ to just about ever ‘mainline’ story going on.
In other words… you are RIGHT. The decisions that went into the making ( and the release ) of this FIRST (supposedly) independent account of the tragedy are now just as interesting as the work itself.
WHEN did they really decide to go to press with this?
Were they just waiting for the results of the March mediation in the wrongful death suits… and thought that would make a good ‘last chapter’… but then came to realize that pie-throwing-contest was going to go on through the summer, at least, so they just decided to go to press with what he ( Dickman ) had?
Was it an RTP ( Rush To Publish ) the minute they ( Dickman and Ballantine Press ) found out that Brendan signed another book deal with the guy who wrote the book that the Captain Philips movie was based on?
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> A lot of people may think that book is going to
>> be the ‘only’ one published and buy it simply
>> to try and find out what the hell happened
>> that day.
It actually might be. A lot of other ‘rumors’ out there but nothing definite.
If this actually does end up the only book published about the tragedy… then “Holy not knowing the truth, Batman!”.
This book is so milktoast ( and outright inaccurate ) there almost has to be another book just to correct this one.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> The three Precotteers are feds, likely also
>> under a gag order, and they may be freaking
>> out that this released information is being
>> attributed to them, when they might have
>> been hoping there would be no identifiable
>> link to any information they may have provided.
It was simply never realistic for ANY of them to think their names would not be revealed at some point.
Forget about Aaron Hulburd’s Helmet Cam videos.
The minute they decided to be the other THREE firefighters out of the FIVE that were actually out there looking for the Granite Mountain bodies… they became ‘key witnesses’ and ‘part of the story’.
It is also not realistic for them to think they can CONTINUE to stay ‘in the shadows’ and never have to give their own accounts of what they did, saw and heard that afternoon.
Example: Jason Clawson had worked with Granite Mountain any number of times and as recently as the Doce Fire. It has ALWAYS been perfectly possible he had the GM intra-crew frequency punched into his radio and he heard everything Brendan McDonough did.
One of these days Jason Clawson is going to get the chance to say with his own mouth whether he DID or did NOT hear that kind of radio traffic that day.
Same for Aaron Hulburd.
One of these days he’s going to get to say with his own mouth if the video clips released by U.S. Forestry actually represent the completed, un-edited raw footage that he captured in Yarnell.. .or whether there are still some video/audio sequences MISSING from the public evidence record.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> While KD probably had easier access to a lot of
>> information due to his prior status as a hotshot,
>> all of the due diligence that WTKTT and Marti
>> are alluding too that should have been
>> accomplished for a proper accounting of GM
> and the YH fire could not happen if your primary
>> mission was to be “the first book out” for the
>> reason mentioned above.
I tend to agree… but if you are saying that after almost TWO YEARS this Dickman guy didn’t have enough TIME to even consult with certain people to find out more of the TRUTH… then I disagree.
I think he’s had MORE than enough time to actually ‘investigate’ this fire.
That is NOT what this guy ever intended on doing.
His was just playing his ‘former Hotshot’ status for all it was worth and used that ‘status’ to get interviews.
But in just a few weeks… if the content of Brendan McDonough’s under-oath deposition becomes known… we might all discover ( Mr. Dickman included ) that Brendan was always “playing him like a violin” like he’s been doing with everyone else.
The ‘story’ of this Yarnell disaster just continues to develop more and more ‘layers’.
If you look at it in the context of “The fire that still hasn’t stopped burning”… then this Dickman thing is now just a ‘finger’ that has started burning in another direction and has its own ‘story’ now all unto itself.
If Brendan was bullshitting Dickman… and that soon becomes obvious… then it calls the entire book into question.
Prescott Dailey Courier—-This morning News
Brendon McDonough and his Attorney agree to the Deposition on the requested date.
So looks like its going to happen.
The PDC Home page just has a ‘short’ version of the story.
Their FULL Story is here…
Prescott Daily Courier
Hotshot survivor agrees to May deposition
Published: Friday, May 15, 2015 by Joanna Dodder Nellans
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&subsectionID=1086&articleID=145284
From the article…
————————————————————————-
McDonough’s attorney David Shapiro confirmed that McDonough has agreed to give a deposition on May 28 to an attorney for the Arizona State Forestry Department that is appealing $559,000 in fines for alleged safety violations during the wildfire. It was the lead agency battling the blaze near Yarnell about 30 miles south of Prescott.
————————————————————————-
TWO things abou this latest report…
1) McDonough is (apparently) still not under a subpoena and his appearance at this THIRD attempt to get him to do what he should have always done in the first place ( tell what he knows ) is still voluntary.
2) The article now seems to go out of its way to say that only ONE attorney will be ‘questioning’ Brendan at the deposition… and it’s an attorney for Arizona Forestry. There is no mention that any attorney for ADOSH will be present at the deposition.
That doesn’t even match what I understand to be a valid deposition in cases like this.
This means that ONLY ‘Arizona Forestry’ will be asking Brendan the questions and so ONLY Arizona Forestry will be able to ‘steer’ the deposition in the direction THEY want it to go.
Usually… in a case like this ( and the way it was going to be both time previous to this )… BOTH sides of the case would agree to accept a deposition from a key witness like this… and it can become a substitute for being “called to the stand”… but only if both sides AGREE to this… and only if BOTH sides to get to ask questions just like they would if the witness was actually called to the stand in a courtroom.
Something tells me we ( the public ) are never going to hear a word of anything this McDonough guy now has to say in this deposition.
Another interesting paragraph from the PDC article…
———————————————————-
State Forestry contract attorney David Selden said the date was moved to May 28 from the May 26 date listed in documents filed with the Industrial Commission of Arizona appeal case that State Forestry filed to contest its Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) fines.
———————————————————-
That means McDonough’s under-oath deposition is still being ‘arranged’ in the context of the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” proceeding… and in ALJ Judge Michael Mosesso’s ballpark… versus the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits over there in Judge Gama’s ballpark.
It also means these documents are SUPPOSED to be showing up in the (public) online ALJ Hearing File(s).
They haven’t shown up yet.
The latest document posted to the ALJ Hearing file still dates back to May 4.
See new posting above by Bob Powers. The documents in question showed up just a few hours after I posted the message above saying they were NOT there (yet).
I would like to add a question/comment/observation to the way-downstreram thread regarding the Friday night to Saturday morning actions/non-actions given the “boundary” status of the fire-start and all of that.
Without causing all of that back-and-forth to get repeated up here. I’ve been reading that back-and-forth. I’m agreeing with WTKTT’s statement that, all things considered, it would really be nice, given hindsight, if the Peeples Valley guys would have just “followed their instincts” and gone over and found that thing and put it out.
Given that that didn’t happen, and given that those much-discussed (downstream) Mutual Aid Agreements call for the dispatching (by whomever) of the MOST LOCALLY AVAILABLE crews to be dispatched for Initial Attack (the (theoretically) most SPEEDY kind)…..
….and given the irony that that very evening the Prescott Hotshots and the Granite Mountain Hotshots were hiking into and putting a line around a lightning-sparked fire near Prescott as the DARK of evening was falling…….
….something has bothered me all along and I mentioned it once and I’m going to mention it again. And I think WTKTT alluded to it downstream, but I want to put it in italics in bold and underline it, although I can’t actually do that here.
WHY did Shumate, completely ignore/overlook/whatever the fact that there was a perfectly capable highly experienced federal Helitack rappell crew (thus not even needing that helispot) with its own bigger helicopter that could have carried more crew (all ready to just rappell down onto the fire) located one driving hour away from Yarnell when he was planning for Saturday morning??????
So, instead, he dispatched a helicopter with a helitack crew that was staged over in Payson, requiring the crew to make a much longer drive to get to Yarnell than Prescott Heli-rappell would have required, apparently AFTER he determined that the DOC crew wasn’t capable of hiking in (much less, apparently, successfully containing that little fire)?
To be perfectly honest, I’m guessing that may have had to do with the fact that Shumate was “tied in” with the BLM honchos at that point. Who had their very own helicopter and crew, but it wasn’t the “most local” one. Or, to be perfectly honest, the most NEEDED one, all things considered.
So, the question I am asking is this. The dissection of the “border fire” deal downstream has, not unexpectedly, shed light on the “who’s gonna pay for what and who’s gonna get payed for what” decisions that get made in these kinds of circumstances.
That being said, once the fire was “taken on” by an ADOF Incident Commander, I still don’t understand this decision. And I think it was a critical one.
It totally flies in the face of the need for/policy of “the fastest first reponders” for an initial attack.
And it doesn’t even make sense “financially.” I just don’t get it.
Maybe it’s just “the fog of war.”
Oh, and by the way. All things considered.
The first responders to the Slide Fire were the Sedona Fire Department.
That was a “boundary fire” too. The people closest to it got there. No ifs ands or buts. It had road access, so there’s that.
And it was right on Sedona’s side of Highway 89, just across from the Other Side of Highway 89, which was USFS land. That close.
Soon after they started tackling it, a USFS (non-Hotshot) crew pulled up and the head of that crew was then named Incident Commander and the USFS took over the fire. I’m guessing this whole “passage” lasted about an hour and a half.
No conflict, no confusion, no nada, no nothing. No paralysis based on “who’s gonna pay for what.”
Of course, after awhile, this “boundary fire” Mutual Aid Initial Attack wasn’t enough, and a Type 1 Incident Management Team was dispatched to it and the rest is a different kind of history.
I think a bunch of that has to do with “This is Sedona not Yarnell” with all that THAT entails.
I also think a whole lot of “with all that THAT entails” included a whole bunch of PRE-PLANNING.
I think Initial Attacking “something that might happen” in Sedona had been extensively pre-planned, especially after what happened in Sedona in 2006. Which was Seriously Not Pretty.
I really do believe that’s the difference between what happened regarding the Yarnell Hill Fire between Friday night and Saturday morning and what happened on the Slide Fire.
Still……………………….
You answered all your own Questions.
It has to do with politics with real co-op agreements working to gather training to gather.
There may very well be a problem between the fire departments and the State.
That may be the only real explanation.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 14, 2015 at 4:08 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I would like to add a question/comment/observation to the way-downstreram
>> thread regarding the Friday night to Saturday morning actions/non-actions
>> given the “boundary” status of the fire-start and all of that.
I am obviously not the most qualified person to be commenting on why Wildland Fire Management operates the way it does… or how it could be doing things differently… but one thing to remember about the Yarnell Hill Fire is that it started out ( on Friday afternoon ) with a whole bunch of CONFUSION.
Even the WildCAD Incident Report that was created at exactly 5:36 PM on Friday afternoon ended up with two wildly different LOCATIONS for the fire.
The ‘Reported location’ lat/long values were quite a ways away from what ended up being the ‘Actual location’ values.
The ‘Reported location’ ( which appears to have originally been given to Arizona Forestry Dispatch by Congress Fire Chief Suitor ) was much closer to Congress than the actual lightning strike location… and was being reported in Section 20 of Township 10 North, Range 05 West. ( instead of actual location in Section 8, same Township and Range ).
So it ORIGINALLY looked like it was on BLM Land… not Arizona State Trust Land.
Because of the ‘checkerboard’ nature of the land distribution right there in that area… Arizona Dispatch alerted BOTH of the ‘on call’ Duty officers for BOTH agencies Arizona Forestry on-call Duty Officer was Arizona Forestry AFMO Russ Shumate Bureau of Land Management ( BLM ) on-call Duty Officer was Dean Fernandez.
So from that moment on… Shumate and Fernandez WERE treating it like it was a “Boundary Fire” ( as defined in the actual Arizona Cooperative Fire Agreements ) and were planning on ‘pooling resources’ for the FOLLOWING day ( Saturday ).
They firmly believed there might be any number of ‘new starts’ showing up on Saturday so all their actions on Friday night were in preparation for that.
They couldn’t have cared less what the visible smoke was doing on Friday, or whether anyone wanted to go up there to ‘take care of it’ and ‘put it out’.
Shumate and Fernandez were totally preoccupied with what was going to happen the NEXT day ( Saturday ) and whether there were prepared for that.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Without causing all of that back-and-forth to get repeated up here.
>> I’ve been reading that back-and-forth. I’m agreeing with WTKTT’s
>> statement that, all things considered, it would really be nice, given
>> hindsight, if the Peeples Valley guys would have just “followed their
>> instincts” and gone over and found that thing and put it out.
Somewhere down below I believe someone ( Bob Powers? ) was also wondering how we can be sure that the Peeples Valley Firefighters even had any Wildland FF credentials.
There are no actual personnell files for the Peeples Valley FFs in the public evidence record… but there is one pretty obvious piece of evidence which proves they were ‘Wildland qualified’ and perfectly capable of going up there on Friday and just “taking care of things” as they had offered to do.
These are the SAME Peeples Valley firefighters who were working the fire on Sunday and almost died out there in Harper Canyon.
On Sunday… these SAME Peeples Valley firefighters were assigned to Task Force Leader TRAINEE Tyson Esquibel’s Task Force 1 operating underneath SPGS1 Gary Cordes’ Structure Protection Division.
They were the ones sent to finishe that ‘line building’ out there in Harper Canyon along with Darby Starr and some others from the Sun City FD.
So SOMEONE had checked their ‘red cards’ on Sunday and determined they were fully qualified for that kind of WFF work and that kind of ‘line building’ out there in Harper Canyon.
They obviously would have also been qualified ( and able ) to take care of that small smoke up on the ridge on Friday… if either Russ Shumate had allowed them to… OR they had realized themselves that they did NOT need Russ Shumate’s permission at all.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> WHY did Shumate, completely ignore/overlook/whatever the
>> fact that there was a perfectly capable highly experienced federal
>> Helitack rappell crew (thus not even needing that helispot) with
>> its own bigger helicopter that could have carried more crew
>> (all ready to just rappell down onto the fire) located one driving
>> hour away from Yarnell when he was planning for Saturday
>> morning??????
Two reasons?
1) Money
2) Too late in the day
As for (1)… I believe if Shumate had lifted a finger to call in that FED Helitack Crew ( at ANY time )… then that would have consituted ‘resource ordering’ and somehow, somewhere, there would have ended up some kind of ‘funny money’ paper invoicing for that ‘resource’.
As for (2)… there is a passage from Jim Downey’s own ADOSH interview that addresses this directly and seems to be Downey telling ADOSH that he specifically had this conversation on Friday with Shumate about why they were NOT going to call in that ( or any other ) Helicopter Crew…
From Jim Downey’s first ADOSH interview 8-14-2013…
————————————————————————–
539 …So Russ ( Shumate ) was out there the night of the 28th ( Friday ),
540 I want to say ’til nine or ten o’clock, went home, uh, reported back out there
541 the next morning. Um, uh, due to the inaccessibility of the fire, it wasn’t safe
542 to put firefighters out on the hill that night. Um, there wasn’t enough time to
543 get resources out there in the form of – of, uh, a helicopter to fly troops in,
544 then…
545
546 Q: Mm-hm.
547
548 A: …you’re looking at leaving the troops out on the hill overnight, um, so they
549 engaged that next morning. He was out there…
550
551 Q: Okay.
552
553 A: …the 29th through the night, to the 30th, and was released from the fire mid
554 morning on the 30th.
555
556 Q: Right. And you went to an IC 2. Right?
557
558 A: Yes.
————————————————————————–
So there is Jim Downey himself telling ADOSH that he seemed to have this specific conversation about using Helicopter/Helitack resources on Friday night… but that either HE alone… or both HE and Shumate had decided there wasn’t enough daylight left and that it was took risky. Whoever they put out there Friday while it was still daylight would have had to have ended up spending the night out on the ridge and that was ‘unacceptable’ to Downey ( and Shumate )… or something like that.
The irony is that the next day… that is is EXACTLY what ended up happening, anyway. The guys they put out there on Saturday ended up having to spend the night
Continued next Reply…
Continued…
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> So, instead, he dispatched a helicopter with a helitack crew that
>> was staged over in Payson, requiring the crew to make a much
>> longer drive to get to Yarnell than Prescott Heli-rappell would have
>> required, apparently AFTER he determined that the DOC crew
>> wasn’t capable of hiking in (much less, apparently, successfully
>> containing that little fire)?
Well… it now turns out that according to Jim Downey… Russ Shumate had ALREADY decided as early as Friday night ( while he was ordering the inmate crews ) that there was no way in hell the crews he was ordering were even going to be able to hike out to where the fire was.
According to Jim Downey… Shumate KNEW he was not going to be able to depend on the inmate crews doing what even the simple ‘pack test’ is supposed to prove a ‘Type 2’ crew is SUPPOSED to be able to do.
So Shumate KNEW that he was going to need a chopper come Saturday morning even BEFORE he asked any Inmate Crew Bosses to ‘scout out’ access routes to the fire.
From Jim Downey’s first ADOSH interview…
A = Jim Downey
—————————————————————————-
560 Q: Um, so he ( Shumate ) makes a decision on what resources are needed at that point ( Friday night ) to
561 control that small incident on top of the ridgeline there?
562
563 A: Yes.
564
565 Q: And what his decision? A couple of SEATs, a couple of helicopters, uh, DOC
566 crews?
567
568 A: The first night, uh, Russ and I discussed, uh, what his plan of action was. Um,
569 when we talk about this or things of this nature, we would defer to the
570 individual on the scene to make the best call they can and so, uh, he would
571 report to me that – what his plan is. Would like to order up…
572
573 Q: Right.
574
575 A: …a crew. We decided, with unknown fires out there, to order a second crew
576 and we would stage them and, while we could not use an engine on this fire,
577 we ordered up one of our engines to report, not knowing whether the fires
578 could be out there.
579
580 Q: Mm-hm.
581
582 A: So I believe, that first night, he ordered up, uh, uh, two hand crews and an
583 engine, um, probably placed an order for a helicopter.
584
585 Q: Okay.
586
587 A: Uh, I’m sure he ordered a – a helicopter, uh, knowing that there – it was
588 inaccessible for the next day. Um, there was other resources out there, uh,
589 from the BLM office. Um, they don’t work out of our dispatch center, so they
590 were responding to reports of fires that were – they had BLM land out there, as
591 well, so…
592
593 Q: Mm-hm.
594
595 A: Um, at that point, they are sharing information and, uh, initial attack resources
596 as needed.
————————————————————————–
Jim Downey also said…
————————————————————————–
958 A: So, basically, you’re – you’re hiking (crews) through the chaparral or
959 flying in. Um, they each have, uh, safety concerns or hazards.
960
961 Q: Mm-hm.
962
963 A: And – and hiking a crew in is not something – when it’s that thick, we – we
964 don’t want to be doing that. That there is a little bit too much exposure and
965 risk. It takes too long to get them off the hill if something bad happens, so the
966 helicopter would have been the only appropriate action.
967
968 Q: And you’re using inmate crews, right? From Lewis and Yuma, I believe?
969
970 A: Those – the – those two were inmate crews. Yes.
971
972 Q: So they were like two six man crews with some kind of a supervisor with ’em
973 and…
974
975 A: Crews are standardized. Approximately 20. Those numbers may fluctuate.
976 They may have come out with 21, 22 or 17, 18. I don’t have the, uh, exact
977 crew counts.
978
979 Q: But you couldn’t take 20 up there at one time? You said they only took…
980
981 A: Not in a helicopter.
982
983 Q: …several.
984
985 A: Well, helicopters are limited by their capacities, so some of those capacities is
986 dense – density altitude…
987
988 Q: Mm-hm.
989
990 A: …where the hotter it gets, the less weight they can carry.
991
992 Q: Mm-hm.
993
994 A: So they were able to fly in three at a time in the morning and, in the…
995
996 Q: Three at a time?
997
998 A: …afternoon, I believe it was two at a time due to density altitude.
999
1000 Q: Okay.
1001
1002 A: So they had to do multiple shuttles, so trying to fly in 20 guys and, if
1003 something bad happens, having to – trying to…
1004
1005 Q: Yeah.
1006
1007 A: …fly out 20 guys isn’t practical, so one squad was sent up and if, uh, a storm
1008 cell blew in, they would have enough time to get that number of people out at
1009 one time.
1010
1011 Q: Okay. Are you listening to the communications at all during this whole
1012 time…
—————————————————————————-
*** IMPORTANT SIDENOTE
Jim Downey was trying to explain both HIS and Shumate’s thinking about NOT hiking the inmates through that explosive fuel when he said this…
963 A: And – and hiking a crew in is not something – when it’s that thick, we – we
964 don’t want to be doing that. That there is a little bit too much exposure and
965 risk.
** TOO MUCH EXPOSURE AND RISK
What does that say about what Granite Mountain decided to do, then?
Jim Downey is automatically saying that their decision to cut through that fuel-filled canyon under those conditions automatically amounted to ‘Too much EXPOSURE… too much RISK” as far as Arizona Forestry is concerned.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> To be perfectly honest, I’m guessing that may have had to do with
>> the fact that Shumate was “tied in” with the BLM honchos at that
>> point. Who had their very own helicopter and crew, but it wasn’t
>> the “most local” one. Or, to be perfectly honest, the most NEEDED
>> one, all things considered.
But that N14HX chopper and support crew WERE already part of that ‘pre-positioned’ forces program and were basically already paid for because of that ‘standy-by’ status.
Again… for Shumate ( and Fernandez )… it was all about NOT spending money. That also explains the inmate crews who were supposedly ‘Type 2’ qualified but couldn’t even hike out to the damn fire on Saturday.
What has still never been explained is that BOTH of the DOC inmate crews ( all 40 firefighters ) were there in Yarnell by 8:00 AM Saturday and “ready to rock and roll”… but they all then FORTY of these firefighters sat around doing NOTHING for FOUR HOURS.
The BLM N14HX Chopper didn’t show up until around NOON and so we didn’t see ANY FFs ( out of the 40 available all morning ) actually out there fighting any fire until NOON-THIRTY or so.
What did these FORTY ( 40 ) firefighters actually DO for FOUR HOURS?
Play solitaire? Lawn darts? Take naps?
Did they bring their own volleyball net and amuse themselves that way for those FOUR HOURS that Saturday morning?
WHY was that ‘cheap option’ N14HX Helicopter not there at EIGHT AM like it should have been? Still no good answer to that question.
Thanks, WTKTT, for breaking that out. And, yes, I was talking about “for Saturday morning” rather than “for Friday night.”
Actually, I don’t really care what happened/didn’t happen Friday. I think that’s a toss-up. But Saturday morning was critical. So much wasted time.
What you wrote is pretty much what I was thinking but wasn’t quite sure. So it had to do with the “pre-positioning” of a BLM (already paid for) chopper and its crew (who came with it — eventually).
There is a Saturday morning message at 7:52:43 from PIFC to NT saying “Stated that BLM did call a threat – Will have a FS Engine and BLM Engine at Weaver – also will b e moving 5HX from Payson to Weaver.”
So, apparently, a Forest Service Engine was considered “available” and “positioned” at Weaver. Never “saw” that FS Engine on Saturday, I don’t think, and there’s no more mention of it on Saturday.
Good thing they were financially responsible!! Wouldn’t want to waste any of those tax-payer dollars!!
Yah know, sitting here waking up via a nice cup of java, that term “bad decisions with previously good outcomes” is floating into my mind.
I can see how some of this decision-making would have appeared “reasonable” Friday evening, all things considered. There was a LOT going on all over the place.
Enough that I’ve never even been sure the Prescott Heli-Rappel was even considered “available” for Yarnell. It’s impossible to tell because they were never “asked for.”
Still wandering around in my thoughts. AA from Doce, while working the Spruce Fire, made the Friday evening recon of Yarnell. Did that have to get “paid for”? How much did THAT cost?
Just kind of trying to figure the stuff out.
It’s probably fairly irrelevant, all things considered. Or maybe not, all things considered.
I mean, seriously. Prescott Heli-Rappell could have put that fire out by noon on Saturday, I’m sure.
I guess we’ll never know.
And they were contemplating using the DPS helicopter for the Saturday morning recon. Would they have had to “pay” for that?
Any ordered Helicopter from BLM or FS would have to be Paid by the State for a State Fire.
Many reasons the BLM Helicopter was late.
Working other Fires
Mandatory work times/breaks
Relief Pilot
Helicopter Maintance requirements like 100 hour full Checks of the motor rotors Etc.
The Rappel Helicopter costs at least 3 times the cost of the BLM helicopter.
We already know the State was using a Tractor operator that was not Fire Certified —-Were the Peoples valley crew WL Fire Certified?
We also know that Yarnell FD had no one available for Friday night.
If the State ordered it the State Paid for it if the City took action with out an order they paid for the actions.
The decision it was unsafe to work the fire that night was the real decision change for any IA. Saturday Night I will Lay you 10 to 1 Odds that the Crew on the Fire crashed in the black at the Heli-Spot and waited to be flown out. In other words they did not work the fire.
City’s, County’s and the State do not like to spend money unless they have to. Also Inmate crews costs are very low compared to type 2 Contract or type 1 Crews.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 15, 2015 at 7:46 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Any ordered Helicopter from BLM or FS would have
>> to be Paid by the State for a State Fire.
But there is no evidence that Arizona Forestry AFMO Russ Shumate ever actually ORDERED BLM Chopper N14HX.
There was a ‘game’ being played on Friday night between Shumate (AZF) and Fernandez (BLM).
They really did expect there to be ‘other smokes’ on Saturday and that some of them would be on BLM land as well as even new ones popping up on AZ State Trust Land.
So they were just doing a ‘cooperative management’ thing and just making ‘promises’ to each other about who was going to bring what to the party the next day. Shumate ‘promised’ at least TWO cheapo DOC inmate crews. Fernandez ‘promised’ a Chopper that was already being paid for with ‘pre-postiioning’ funds and allocations.
They ( Shumate and Fernandez ) were trying to not spend one single dime more than they might need to.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> We already know the State was using a Tractor operator
>> that was not Fire Certified —-Were the Peoples valley
>> crew WL Fire Certified?
I guess you missed my response to that yesterday.
That’s the second time you have wondered whether the Peeples Valley Firefighters had any WFF training and/or certs.
There are no actual personnel files from Peeples Valley Fire Department in the public body of evidence. No investigators ever asked for that data.
But don’t forget… it was these same Peeples Valley Firefighters who had offered to just “go up and take care of it” on Friday night that then became the primary LINE BUILDING Crew there in Harper Canyon on Sunday June 30, 2013.
These same Peeples Valley Firefighters are the ones who were running the saws and doing the swamping and the line building there in Harper Canyon… and who also then became the ones who almost lost their lives because no one was properly monitoring them or warning them about what was happening.
This Peeples Valley ‘Crew’ was assigned on Sunday to be working as part of Task Force Leader TRAINEE Tyson Esquibels’ Task Force 1 under SGPS1 Gary Cordes’ Yarnell Structure Protection Group.
So that means just one of two things…
1) ALL of these Peeples Valley FFs being used on Sunday were fully qualified ( and certified ) to be off by themselves doing WFF work and ‘building line’ there in Harper Canyon.
2) The Peeples Valley FFs were NOT WFF qualified or certified and were NOT actually qualified to be off doing saw work and building line in Harper Canyon on Sunday… but on one who was managing the Yarnell Hill Fire gave a shit and they assigned them that task, anyway.
I think it’s more likely ‘Door number 1’ up above.
These People Valley FFs like Moder and Brandon and Keehner ( and others ) WERE ‘fully qualified’ to do WFF work… and they WOULD have been able to easily put that lightning strike out on Friday night if Shumate had just let them go up there and do that as they wanted to.
It was THEIR backyard… and their terrain.
They would not have offered to go up there on Friday afternoon and “just take care of it” if they didn’t think they could do it.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> We also know that Yarnell FD had no one available
>> for Friday night.
Well… we actually do NOT know that.
Yarnell Fire Department Volunteer Leroy Andersen is still the one who told the media that he and just 1 or 2 other YFD volunteers could have EASILY gone up there on Friday night with ( in his words ) “Just buckets and shovels” and taken care of it.
But no one even bothered to contact Andersen ( and other YFD on-call volunteers ) on Friday night.
So if anyone was reporting to anyone that YFD didn’t have enough ‘resources’… it was someone who hadn’t even bothered to poll the YFD volunteers to see who was available.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If the State ordered it the State Paid for it
See above. It all came down to whether something was actually, officially being ‘ordered’ ( or not )… or whether these men were just making under-the-radar ‘promises’ to each other about who was going to bring what to the party the next day.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> if the City took action with out an order they paid
>> for the actions.
After reading all the interview transcripts… I actually get the feeling that Arizona Forestry AFMO Shumate was so conscious about whether he was spending any money on Friday or not that he actually did think that if the local Fire Departments asked him if he wanted them to just “go take care of it” and Shumate said YES…
…that his YES would constitute someone thinking they were now a ‘resource’ that had been officially ‘requested’ by Arizona Forestry.
If either the Peeples Valley FD or the Yarnell FD had actually decided to go up there themselves on Friday ( either together in a combined effort or with separate incursions )… there is no way that Russ Shumate could have either physically or legally stopped them.
The lighting strike WAS (technically) on State Trust Land… but it was also only just some hundreds of feet ( feet, not yards ) away from the City Limits of BOTH Peeples Valley and Yarnell.
It QUALIFIED as a “Boundary Fire” even according to Arizona’s own Master Coopertive Fire Response Agreements. A portion of that agreement actually could be construed to say that Peeples Valley FD and Yarnell FD were REQUIRED to respond to this ‘Boundary Fire” along with Arizona Forestry because of the THREAT it posed to lands in all THREE of those ‘jurisdictions’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The decision it was unsafe to work the fire that night
>> was the real decision change for any IA. Saturday Night
>> I will Lay you 10 to 1 Odds that the Crew on the Fire
>> crashed in the black at the Heli-Spot and waited to
>> be flown out. In other words they did not work the fire.
Arizona Forestry AFMO and Yanell Hill Fire ICT4 Russ Shumate basically TOLD those men to NOT work the fire after dark on Saturday night.
SEVERAL TIMES during his ADOSH interview(s)…. Russ Shumate says that he really had no plans at all for those men after dark and he told them to not (quote) “spin your wheels” or “take any chances up there”.
Even Moki Helitack Nate Peck’s SAIT Interview notes verifies this.
The men just went into ‘observation mode’ once it got dark.
There isn’t even any evidence they were sleeping in shifts and making regular reports throughout the night.
It’s sounds like they all just “went coyote” and crashed up there without even leaving anyone awake to watch the fire.
There really was very little they could have done in that steep, rocky terrain after dark unless they all had night vision goggles… but they were never even told to TRY and do anything.
Shumate had no PLAN for them other than to “be safe and we’ll get you out of there in the morning”.
I disagree with your #1 because they are working dose not mean they were qualified– we have no proof one way or the other. Were they used like the Tractor with out certification?
While Peoples valley FF may have been working the fire Sunday it was also in their city limits and they were under Co-op with the State still dose not mean they were certified. They were working with in their city boundary no certification required????? Were they Volunteers or City Paid Employees With their own Engine?
There was a Statement By Anderson in the SAIT that he called the State and Said he had no FF that Night.
All Crews Carry Head lamps in case they get caught at Night Standard in Carry Packs or Belt Packs. You do not need Night Vision Goggles and Fire Fighters Have never Carried them.
HEAD LAMPS Used for over 70 years—–
Same old same o no night line construction Shumate was not going to put a Inmate crew on line construction at night– as well to few to do any thing with a out of control fire in the Rocks. A good 20 man hand crew would have Anchored and started building line done it a hundred times 24 hour shift your there you work you are still in IA phase. The type 2 Inmate crew was a total Wash.
All those Volunteers on Peoples Valley FD knew they would get paid if they got a direct order from the state they were begging for that from the State by telling the state they could go do it. It was Out side their city Jurisdiction on State land. They weren’t going up there for free City volunteers do not get paid by the City. That what VOLUNTEER means.
The State Pays under the CO-OP.
You have to understand the politics here which I am Gathering you do not.
Back in my day Peeples Valley FD put a lot of time, effort, and training dollars into WFF, and they kept their people certified and ready, because that was such a huge concern during fire season. But, I was told that Peeples Valley personnel were assigned to Yarnell and Yarnell Personnel were assigned to Peeples Valley so that they could get paid for their efforts (something about not being paid if you are working a fire in your own jurisdiction). Koile was also real gung-ho to send YFD FF’s and equipment out on State Fires, but he was at a party in Prescott Friday night, and when he did finally come down he spent all of his time at the ICP in Peeples Valley (‘cause that’s what wanna-be bigshots do).
So, if there was a Forest Service Engine “there” at Weaver along with the BLM Engine, does that mean that “they: had to “pay for” that Engine being “there”? Even though, apparently, it was not used on Saturday?
Just trying to figure this stuff out.
If they ordered it they paid for it. If BLM staged the 2 Engines then they paid for them. IA Fires can become very confusing at times–
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 15, 2015 at 7:50 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> If they ordered it they paid for it.
But that is where the ‘games’ were being played.
Whether or not ( on Friday night ) Shumate was actually, officially ORDERING certain things.
If you read all the interview transcripts and what everyone had to say about Shumate ( AZF ) and Fernandez ( BLM ) deciding that they were going to treat this as a ‘cooperative management’ deal…
…then it gets pretty muddy as to who was ‘ordering’ anything at all from each other and who owed who any invoices.
Yes… there were PROMISES being made between Shumate and Fernandez about who was going to bring the potato salad to the party on Saturday and who was going to bring the beer…
…but it’s never been clear if these ‘promises’ amounted to actual RESOURCE ORDERING, or not.
Example: The testimony says that Fernandez just told Shumate that N14HX Chopper was already ‘pre-positioned’ and being ‘paid for’ with those funds… and Ferndandez just sort of ‘promised’ Shumate he could get it into the area on Sauturday.
Shumate then actually did ‘order up’ TWO DOC Prison crews… but the promise to Fernandez was that one of those two DOC crews would be staged at YFD the next day in case any new smokes popped up on BLM land ( as they really thought might happen ).
So there was a helluva lot of “you scratch my back tomorrow and I’ll scratch yours” going on on Friday night… but it’s still a mystery as to whether that was all official ‘resource ordering’ on anyone’s part or whether it was just sort of off-the-record promises being made.
The only “entities” in the Resource Order for Saturday morning were the two DOC crews and the ADOF Type 5 Engine 151.
So, yeah, you scratch my back, I scratch yours, and a Forest Service Engine is also somehow “staged” there, too, just in case.
I was thinking the Dean Peak Fire might have been in the “thinking-mix,” also, but it wasn’t ignited until 3-ish that afternoon.
I don’t see 5HX getting there all that “late” via the planning. It was on its way, landed/staged at Weaver, then did the recon before landing at Yarnell Fire Department.
It was just “late” if you really wanted to put the fire/fires out using a helicopter and a helitack crew. Which, in my mind, should have been done. Even if you didn’t know exactly which fire might pop up and need to get put out.
That whole reliance on DOC crews for that kind of situation just seems pretty inefficient, all things considered. So much for all the Initial Attack lingo.
Well, gotta go get a high-speed line installed in the house around the corner. So I can start camping out there.
Hmm the number for the BLM helicopter is actually N14HX. I don’t know why it is labelled 5HX in the CAD note. But that’s a typo.
First BLM an STATE are working under a Co-op agreement. IA not knowing whose property the fire is on they were ready to take action when determined.
The Fire would be given a resource number for payments State or BLM would take the initial action.
NO the helicopter was not free the Pre position was paid in place once sent to a fire the Fire paid the Hourly rate plus crew cost. T
he preposition of the FS Engine was under the request of the BLM to assist with any fire they had
it is a FS BLM payment thing for IA.
I also do not understand how the Tractor got on the Fire with an Uncertified Operator That has to be cleared with the State Finance section under all rental agreements for Fire equipment. With out a qualified operator you can not contract the equipment.
Exactly Marti concerning why would a Helitac crew from Payson be summoned when a local more efficient set up was available. Runs to cronies and perhaps who wins the profit from these types of disasters as far as I can see. Why bother to put out a small fire when it can be put out when you can let it run a while and enjoy great profit margins. After all you give a lot of men work, much government money is spent to the
benefit of retardant suppliers, pilots, firemen, bosses who appear. And just think of the public adoration of such actions. It demands awards to such great work. Who would have known 19 men would succumb to such actions. But that has to be glossed over, and tell the people that their deaths were there own fault–no one to blame but themselves, albeit we do intend to merit them with great heroism in spite of no one taking responsibility for running this fire like a bunch of bozo’s.
We know there are plenty of men who would have done this right and there are plenty of people here who should have done it right, yet instead they do things like patting each other on the back and handing out great awards to such ignorant action as we saw here.. Shame on those that did this–plenty of the widows and mothers, fathers and children of the disExactly Marti concerning why would a Helitac crew from Payson be summoned when a local more efficient set up was available. Runs to cronies and perhaps who wins the profit from these types of disasters as far as I can see. Why bother to put out a small fire when it can be put out when you can let it run a while and enjoy great profit margins. After all you give a lot of men work, much government money is spent to the benefit of retardant suppliers, pilots, firemen, bosses who appear. And just think of the public adoration of such actions. It demands awards to such great work. Who would have known 19 men would succumb to such actions. But that has to be glossed over, and tell the people that their deaths were there own fault–no one to blame but themselves, albeit we do intend to merit them with great heroism in spite of no one taking responsibility for running this fire like a bunch of bozo’s.
We know there are plenty of men who would have done this right and there are plenty of people here who should have done it right, yet instead they do things like patting each other on the back and handing out great awards to such ignorant action as we saw here. Shame on those that bossed this fire–many widows, parents, children and friends of the deceased will agree on that one and those that do not either have their eyes so fogged and are so ignorant of the facts already revealed in this case that they will likely never look at the picture as it is here.
Whew, 19 men are passed and we cried at every hike–and our hearts and souls continue to mourn their useless passing. Brave men and there is more to this story. That is why Joy and I continue to follow this site, the only one I know where the people insist on finding all the facts and revealing them to all that want or need to know..
Joy designed a navy blue sweat shirt–it has the statement “REMEMBER JUNE 30, 2013” and “CHANGE THE WAY THEY FIGHT WILDFIRES”. Both are appropriate to this Yarnell disaster, and rather than cover up we need clean up and clean out as well.
We just got that book in the mail, I hope I don,t vomit as much as WTKT says he reads, that is upon my reading it. Maybe you need a good strong stomach–have for 20 years used baking soda on a regular basis to cure acid digestion. Don’t follow my medical advice but it will kill acid stomach in less than a minute where tums, omeprazole and other doctor remedies seem to take forever. So if the book gives you a case of indigestion–20 years of use and my heart is still beating, though a certain doctor thinks I ought to be dead.
Thanks for continuing the drive for the facts in this Yarnell incident. I know it is trying but there are too many out there that deserve the truth and there is not one man that died that would not want it to be known to his loved ones.
And to those fools that do not like this site or the back and forth manner that is exposing all the skullduggery and the slow and sloppy fire fighting management and methods, I say keep your eyes closed. You don’t need to be on JD’s site unless you want to know what really went down..
Forgive the repeat there. Was not intentional, Do not get that but should have reread. Here in the library at Yarnell you get 60 minutes and I was down to five so had to post quickly. Joy and I enjoy keeping up with this site and she loves answering questions. Since we are living in the desert some ten miles out of Aguila, AZ and tending to a one eyed mare, three burrows, plenty of chickens, two peafowls, six guinnes, one that will flat out attack you, three dogs, a tom turkey, and now a pet Iguana–we find it sometimes slow to get into the library to reply, even lately to do our hikes and explorations of remoter areas.
We did get fences up and chicken coops made on the five acres here so maybe things will get back toward normal for us.
We are looking forward to hearing more and Joy can pick up pretty well on here Straight Talk phone, but replying there is a pain since she looses what she writes more often than getting posted.
Good tidings to all good people who are doing their best to get this riddle unraveled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaNp2PvQ2og
1:17 of 7:55
source to a recent comment I made-
Reply to Joy A Collura post on May 14, 2015 at 11:07 am
>> Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaNp2PvQ2og
>> 1:17 of 7:55
>> source to a recent comment I made-
I believe this is the recent comment being referred to…
>> On May 14, 2015 at 9:56 am, Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> When Donut speaks up many including us want to know his demeanor
>> THAT morning and not WHO made him the look out but WHY and who
>> was that other person who belonged there with him as he stated
>> in ABC news long ago.
And here is what is actually said to ‘ABC news’…
At +1:17 Brendan McDonough says ( to ABC reporter Brian Ross )…
“Why am I sitting here… and why isn’t someone else?
Why aren’t THEY sitting here… with me?”
I don’t think McDonough’s statement to ABC reporter Brian Ross can be taken any way other than that Brendan has ofter wondered why HE was chose to be to lookout and not someone else that day… and why either THAT ‘other person’ ( or, indeed, all of them ) aren’t sitting there instead of him.
I’ve always thought that to be a bit of proof that Brendan himself really had no idea at all WHY he was picked to be the lookout.
Brendan might have actually THOUGHT he was doing ‘okay’ that afternoon in the 100+ degree heat… but Marsh and Steed might have had their own opinion(s).
Brendan might have actually LOOKED like he was on the verge of heatstroke and Marsh and Steed knew they better get him ‘off the line’… but they might also have NOT been making an issue out of the reason and might NOT have been telling Brendan exactly WHY they were giving him the lookout assignment.
To this day… Brendan himself might think it was just the ‘luck of the draw’, or something, and not some conscious decision on Steed and Marsh’s part to avoid him getting heatstroke that day.
Joy~
I was going to ask you what you meant by that comment, ie, why was that other person not there,
But WTKTT, I think, beat me to it, and I agree with him. For the most part.
I also see this as, having been through some of this myself, and having been assisted through it by somebody having gone through something closer to what Brendan was going through…..
…..I have interpreted his “Why” questions in the context of survivor guilt. I doesn’t have to make sense. Usually it DOESN’T make sense. It’s quite a bit more existential. It’s an emotional, even spiritual, question.
I don’t think, in August, Brendan was even remotely in a place where he was capable of distancing himself from it all, emotionally, enough to look at any of it rationally.
I really, really hope he is now. Even if WE, as TTWARE has written below, never see the testimony he may soon be, hopefully, giving.
And now that I’m thinking about that, wouldn’t it be ANOTHER Shakespearean twist if he were to give that deposition, under oath, and THEN be put under an actual court-ordered GAG ORDER forbidding him to speak to anybody ELSE regarding that narrative because the court has sealed all of that?
And the above happening as a part of the Settlement Negotiations (Horse-Trading) going on between ADOSH and ADOF and the lawyers for the Plaintiffs — i.e. the families who have been saying all along that what they really want is the Truth to get out in order to help make sure this never happens again.
Especially if one of the major Lessons Learned that is begging to be Learned from this fire is to Never ever ever ever ever under NO UNCERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES EVER choose a Lookout on the basis of his “needing a break” instead of his experience, knowledge, leadership, maturity and all that because a Lookout’s job is to, whatever it takes, keep an eye on the crew and the fire and KNOW what that relationship IS AT ALL TIMES??????
My brain is hurting.
I personally believe there are about three tons of Lessons Learned that are Begging to be Learned from this Fire.
But they WON’T be learned if our current state of “What In the WORLD actually happened on this fire, TRUELY????” ……..
….continues to be the case.
So WTKTT is saying upstream that, since Brendan’s deposition, although being conducted by SOLELY an Arizona Department of Forestry lawyer, is still under the purview of Judge Mosesso’s court, i.e. it is still within the boundary of HIS “court,” which means it SHOULD be posted on the PUBLIC page of ADOSH’s investigation/tribunal.
So there’s that.
As it turns out… just hours after we noticed that these documents were NOT there in the ALJ Hearing File… they suddenly appeared.
So YES… it looks like even this THIRD attempt to get Brendan to testify is happening in the context of “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” and in Judge Mosesso’s swimming pool rather than in the context of the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits hanging fire over in Judge Gama’s pond.
I’m still finding it hard to believe this under-oath deposition is going to take place with ( as the Prescott Courier article seems to suggest ) just ONE lawyer who is ONLY from the ‘Arizona Forestry’ side.
That just doesn’t even make any sense… legally speaking.
It means that if it goes down that way… then the ADOSH lawyers now have the legal right to call Brendan back AGAIN for ANOTHER deposition where ( this time ) THEY get to ask the questions.
WTKT–I do know the reason they did not continue the fire break near the black–Dr. Putnam was stymied as to why until I described the brush they had come into on the north side of the slope–See there was much rock and much less density in brush on the south side and that fire could not advance so quickly there–You can see the photos Joy took in that area and we watched Marsh cross the fire line easily more than once in that rocky and less dense south side. That fire was coming down in that dense brush on the north side of there and it halted their work on the north side–Dr. Putnam got the answer after I described how things were on that north slope. In fact the brush covering the north side of that area above the grader was how the brush was that they dropped down into later in the day. Dense–and when we hiked that before to an old gold mine up near the top and just a couple hundred yards below the two track, even the old road to the mine was dense enough to slow progress.
I did get a laugh when Joy told me the dozer operator turned around when he saw those signs of danger dont pass. They were put up by the state and the old rusted sign looks to be about 50 years old. There are some old rusted 55 gallon driums and as I remember a couple old rusty vehicle tanks at the point he was scared off from. The old gold mine at the top has completely filled in with debris and sand and the tunnel below between the grader and the old gold mine goes back in maybe 75 feet. It is good hard rock and safe enough for an old miner to go in and I did to see what they were after–not much showing there so they had a stringer that petered out. However, there could have been cyanide in the area at the time of the sign–just walk around it if found–It is white and easily seen if in the area unless it had dissolved into the soil. Those ladies wanting to buy that side might want to exclude that area.
The retired fire man at Basha’s yesterday asked if we had found any problems with our lungs since the fire–He said he has been having breathing problems. Well damn sure. We hear this from many of the Yarnellites since the fire. What do you expect when over 10,000 gallons of NH3 producing retardant with 8 percent trade secret chemicals added to the concoction and only a doctor can find out that 8 percent. The State Forest people say that shit won’t hurt you. Sounds like what I was told as a uranium miner. I did notice that geologists and bosses were given dosimeters–miners never got one as far as where I worked anyhow. Now we have plenty dead miners and if you get one of so many lung diseases and lung cancer you can apply for a consolation prize of 150 grand. The radon and radioactive particles adhered to especially smoker’s lungs and stayed there until cells metastisized. I am a non smoker and at this point one of the few remaining Uranium miners that has not gotten the lung cancer.
But this NH3 is a different animal. It kills off lung cells and there is no regeneration–hope you firefighters have plenty of lung cells–Joy and I both have diminished lung capacity after the fire, and 45 dead Yarnell citizens since the fire —have expired–and too many from COPD. Zach Ashoor was only twenty nine-my son’s age when he died. I hiked Zack onto the two track–he had friends in the crew and had wept the moment he saw the disaster on TV. He had diminished lung problems–told me asthma — he has expired since the fire–Did his hikes to the area push him over the limit like so many others?
Now about that fellow and his book–it mentioned that he interviewed us. Oh I do wish he had but it did not happen. KD likely would have had a little different view of what went on that day, or at least we would have steered him to witnesses who have not been interviewed by anyone. No, Joy does not have photos of the quads that were up there on Friday, but they would really be something to put in a book since they are time stamped and witnessed by more than one party. I have not seen the photos but the man who described them is a reputable person with no reason to lie. Joy believes him and so did I.
Yes I think many home owners should have had “defensible space”, yet according to the Wooten report 6% of the ones that did lost their homes and 30%of those that did not lost their homes. First off, that was a dire situation when that lightening struck if indeed it was the cause of the fire,. The situation was so bad that absolutely no burning was allowed. Any sort of spark could have started a fire in that hot and dry brush.. The State knew that and so did the locals–It was so bad the area was restricted so you could not even smoke a cigarette. Yet no fire department or state official bothered to consider it an emergency situation that had to be handled immediately. Do the people need compensation for careless action on the part of the State and fire fighting community. Damn sure–but whether they will get it depends on whether they can get justice in such a closed circuit of cronies.
I think the families of the firefighters have a better chance. But some of them are not bothering to sue–those that seem to want to hold onto evidence. I don’t get that one–why every cell phone was not investigated, especially Steed and Marsh–but all. Maybe they were and we have not been told.
This is an ongoing thing–but the lives of 19 fine young men deserve the truth.
Yea a lot seems to rest on Donut who held back, but he is not the only one that heard those conversations. There are some others but they have had fears of their job and as Pete was told–you ought to keep your talk within the ranks and not go public. There are some that seem to forget that those men were paid with public funds and are 100% public in all they do on their jobs.
Yes I had two teeth pulled and some dental surgery with more coming up today. I am glad my dentist is an honest guy–I would hate to have good teeth yanked out. I picked up two roosters for Joy–they are in my pickup right now. Maybe they will do well with that one eyed Tennessee Walker we have. At least we won’t need an alarm clock now–The three burros we have beside are about enough though–I can hear them early morning even with bad hearing.
Keep at it– some of you are plain geniuses in unveiling this coverup. Well the folks that lost loved ones have you– and those home owners that did not deserve their losses as well. Thanks again to JD for a site that can’t be beat for professionalism and for consistent search for the real story.
Sonny… thank you for all of that.
As always… great information and nice reading.
Sorry to hear about your dental issues. Hope everything turns out AOK.
Yes… I remember now you ( and Joy ) discussing the time you spent with Dr. Putnam when he was finally allowed to go out there himself and investigate things. I remember you helping him try and locate the spots where Granite Mountain was actually working both in the morning and afternoon.
Question for you… do you think Dr. Putnam ‘figured it out’ well enough to the point where he was able to draw a MAP of that area that was also showing exactly where this ‘line building’ was going on… and what the ‘goal’ was?
All we have been hearing for almost two years now is this incessant phrase “they were going to tie in”.
“Tie in” to WHAT? WHERE?
That has NEVER been clear.
The ‘dozer push’ stopped at the old-grader when that operator put a ‘ring’ around that old-grader and then headed back EAST with the dozer. There is also a report that the dozer operator ( or BR Hotshot Ball acting as HEQB that day ) ‘offered’ the dozer to Eric Marsh for continued work farther up the slope… but DIVSA Eric Marsh actually just said he (quote) “didn’t need it”… and THAT is when Ball and Cordes had it turn around and go back EAST towards the ‘Sesame Clearing’ area again.
But it is still a mystery as to whether that ‘old-grader’ cleared area was the actual ‘tie in’ target for the work that Granite Mountain was doing.
Were they actually trying to ‘tie in’ ( somehow ) to where that ‘dozer push’ ended at the old-grader?
We still don’t seem to have an answer on that one.
Do you remember Dr. Putnam saying anything about this when you were with him out there…or whether Dr. Putnam himself was able to point to a particular place and say… “That’s the spot… that’s where they were trying to ‘tie in’ that day”?
It’s amazing that we would still even have to be guessing about all this upwards of 2 years later… but no investigation ever produced any kind of actual MAP showing exactly what Granite Mountain’s real PLAN was that day… and how much they were able to accomplish before it was ‘tools up’ and they quit working circa 3:40 PM.
Replying about Ted–he hiked three times with us and yes he is sharp as a tack when it comes to drawing a map and picture on that one–We hope he starts chiming in sometime since his expertise weighs heavy on this matter. After we hiked with him and got to know him better I realized why certain entities did not want him looking at the situation. One can certainly appreciate his candid ways of doing things. He is one man who you can know will only give you the straight line and he is well aware of how certain parties can, have and will cover up their mistakes.
His history has been of actually saving lives and keeping men from dying that like the 19 would go down into a similar dire situation had he not stopped them, would have killed them. He says it took cursing and threats since those he saved were adamant to follow orders from other commanders. It seems too many firefighters are willing to take chances where it is a hopeless situation. or else they do not read a fire well enough and too many will to listen to bosses that would ;put them at risk since they do not have the expertise you find in former fighters like Dr. Ted Putnam.
I don’t know where he is in finishing his book on the Mann Gulch fire that killed 14. It will expose a cover up there. I do know he has spent lots of years, interviews with survivors and relatives of deceased, and many trips to the site to understand what really happened there. I will sure want a copy when he is done with that one and you can know what he prints will be 100% true. He won’t tell you he interviewed someone unless he really did and the investigation he did will be right on.
And I’ll add my own thank you, Sonny, here.
As I was reading WTKTT and Bob Powers back-and-forthing trying to figure this out, my first thought was, “I think I’ll wait til Sonny and/or Joy weighs in on this, because I remember they went out there to look at this line.”
Glad your surgery was “just” dental, although truly, I know how intimidating and painful that can be. I actually lost ALL my teeth by eight years ago, because of genetic stuff. It was not fun.
And, yeah, roosters. They used to be legal in my neighborhood. They used to serve as my alarm clock.
And after reading what WTKTT wrote. I agree with his questions.
AND I have some of my own. As in, why in the world wasn’t that OTHER 20-member Hotshot crew not building line also?????
Especially since an OTHER 20-member Hotshot crew that was dispatched to this fire (I’m assuming to eventually join in in this line-building enterprise) didn’t show up and nobody even made the slightest move to replace THEM, and, thus, this whole line-building operation was SERIOUSLY under-resourced.
That has ALWAYS mystified me, all things considered. I mean I can’t believe that the whole obfuscation of “where do we put the division line” could have seriously had much to do with that. As a matter of fact, that whole thing, was mostly, according to the interviews, about setting things up for the NEXT DAY.
So why, really, was that whole Blue Ridge crew just sitting around all day, while Granite Mountain was busily busting their already tired butts building a line that had, apparently, nothing to get connected to, built either by a dozer and/or that whole other Hotshot crew???
Oh and yeah, meant to mention, as I have before, my dad got one of those $150k settlements — for his exposure at the Nevada Test site — exactly five months before he died.
It bought the car I drove him to all the hospitals in.
My mom got another one two years later for his death. Which was nice. I guess.
I’m hearing yah on the retardant thing. I really am.
Bringing this to the top for Joy and Sonny—–
Sonny was trying to say that nether of them were interview in any way shape or form By Kyle Dickman
They sent a E-Mail This morning Also Sonny is headed to Hospital for a Operation Joy said he was in a lot of pain.
So who else did he really not interview this book seems to become more and more Fiction.
I was really hoping that, at the very least, this Dickman guy would have been able to track down the mysterious ‘dozer operator’ and get him to talk about what he ( or she ) saw, did and/or otherwise heard/witnessed/knew that day.
No such luck.
The mysterious dozer operator who, for a while, was assumed to have been another casualty and was being actively searched for by DPS Chopper Ranger 58 along with Granite Mountain, is still a PRIMARY WITNESS to all the crucial events of this day.
And now two full investigations and the first independent BOOK ( which i calling itself the ‘definiteve account of the incident’ ) still haven’t even been able to find out what this person’s NAME was.
Sometimes I actually wonder if WE are going to have to be the actual ones to (collectively) write the friggin book.
Not that we haven’t, in some way, already done that, unfortunately in a format that is almost impossible to read.
After seven months of documenting the intervention on the Deepwater Horizon/Macondo Well via the Remote Operating Vehicles (via their live camera streams — the public streaming of which was ordered by a judge) on an internet relay chat that included experts as well as concerned citizens and was consider THE place to go to gather the FACTS……..
Given all the insanity (including the conspiracy theories and the with-holding of evidence etc etc etc)……….surrounding that “operation” ………
Some of us had some conversations about how we really needed to pick our way through all those irc logs and pull out of them a readable, understandable narrative.
Because someone really needed to produce that. Because it was REALLY IMPORTANT.
The task was so daunting, and we were all so in need of getting back to our long-delayed “real lives,” that we never did.
Nobody has ever written that story, which is “sitting” on one of my external hard drives. Including the 170 GB worth of video also sitting on that hard drive.
I agree. I can’t believe KD wrote that book without interviewing Joy and Sonny.
Here’s looking atcha Kyle.
And my very best wishes to you Sonny.
Namaste
**
** THIRD TIME IS THE CHARM?
**
** BRENDAN MCDONOUGH SCHEDULED TO BE DEPOSED ON MAY 28, 2015
This showed up a few hours ago…
AZCENTRAL
Article Title: McDonough to be deposed on Yarnell Hill Fire deaths
Published: 9:06 p.m. MST May 13, 2015 by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2015/05/13/mcdonough-deposed-yarnell-hill-fire-deaths/27279953/?hootPostID=%5B%27903c957f6531d2f9d139b8d45dd886fb%27%5D
From the article…
—————————————————————————
Story Highlights
– Brendan McDonough, lone survivor of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, will give a May 28 deposition.
– It will be the first time McDonough has spoken under oath about events in the Yarnell Hill Fire.
– The rest of McDonough’s crew died in the fire, and his testimony could shed light on what happened.
Brendan McDonough, the sole surviving member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, is scheduled to undergo a sworn deposition later this month about the events of June 30, 2013, when 19 members of his crew died in the Yarnell Hill Fire.
Though McDonough has previously been interviewed by fire investigators and the media, he has never answered questions about the accident under oath. His testimony is of potential interest in litigation stemming from the catastrophe, particularly in light of recent claims that McDonough overheard a crucial radio transmission between hotshot crew bosses about the positioning of the firefighting team.
According to public records, McDonough is set to be deposed at 9 a.m. May 28 at a Phoenix law office. His attorney could not be reached for comment.
McDonough is expected to shed light on what he heard during a radio conversation between Granite Mountain Hotshots supervisor Eric Marsh and his deputy, Jesse Steed, shortly before the crew was overcome by the fire. According to one unofficial account, Marsh was purported to have ordered Steed to abandon a safe zone and join him with the crew at another location near where the crew died a short time later.
What was said during the radio conversation could change the legal dynamics in multimillion-dollar lawsuits stemming from the fire. Families of the fallen hotshots filed wrongful-death complaints against the Arizona Division of Forestry, which directed fire-suppression efforts. The Division of Forestry also is appealing citations and fines stemming from an investigation by the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
McDonough did not appear at two previously scheduled depositions related to the litigation.
—————————————————————————
NOTE: That next ‘mediation session’ between Arizona Forestry and the wrongful death lawsuit plaintiffs is still on for June 1, 2015… so looks like we ARE right back where we were at the beginning of the year.
That’s when Brendan was scheduled to be deposed on February 26, 2015, just before the first ‘global mediation’ session scheduled for March 2, 2015.
Arizona Forestry wanted to be sure and find out what Brendan really knows BEFORE they had to sit across the table from the ‘wrongful death’ plaintiffs.
That’s when the whole thing fell apart because of Brendan’s ( supposed ) PTSD.
Rinse and repeat now.
Brendan is (again) supposed to show up and be deposed just a few days before Arizona Forestry has to sit across the table from the plaintiffs again.
An important consideration to keep in mind though all of this, is that even if Brendan adequately answers all questions put to him, it is no guarantee that any or all of those facts will ever see the light of day.
Yes. There could still be a ‘deal’ on the table here.
As par of the ‘settlement’… Brendan agrees to testify… but that testimony remains SEALED and ONLY available to the plaintiffs and their lawyers.
It’s still “Let’s make a deal” time in the background here… and millions and millions of dollars are still very much ‘at stake’ here.
Arizona Forestry still does NOT want to have to actually admit that ANY of its employees did ANYTHING wrong that day… but they DO want to ‘settle’ all this.
Last thing in the world that Arizona Forestry wants to have happen here is for these ‘wrongful death’ suits to actually reach the ‘evidentiary’ phase and have all kinds of people having to be called to testify ‘under oath’.
They still just want it all to ‘go away’.
Followup… with regards to your statement “when Brendan answers all the questions put to him”…
…after all these time and all these shenanigans… I certainly hope this McDonough guy doesn’t walk into the room AGAIN with this snooty “ask the right questions and I might give you the right answers” attitude.
One would HOPE that he actually IS finally ready to tell “the truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing BUT the truth”.
This time he will have not only the usual potential ‘obstructing an official investigation’ climate… you also ( for the first time ) can add the possibility of PERJURY.
It has to be the ‘real deal’ this time. No more GAMES and or ‘private agendas’ on Brendan’s part.
**
** WHAT WAS GRANITE MOUNTAIN’S ACTUAL ‘LINE WORK’ PLAN THAT DAY?
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 12, 2015 at 8:57 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> OK first every thing you have said About Rory Collins I agree with.
>>
>> If you Id the location of the burn out and the crew being just above it no smokes its out.
I just wanted to let you know that even with the flood of Kyle Dickman book-related posts that have ( and will now continue ) to appear… I haven’t forgotten this discussion we were having the day before yesterday.
Matter of fact… now that even Kyle Dickman appears to be taking a stab at ‘guessing’ what in the hell Granite Mountain was really trying to accomplish with their ‘line buidlng’ ( but never was able to accomplish it )… I think it’s even more important to continue this thread as time permits.
Even if none of the ‘property damage’ lawsuits end up going forward and no one ever gives a crap about what was or wasn’t done to actually try and protect Yarnell… I still think it’s important to know what Granite Mountain was actually trying to accomplish that day… and exactly WHERE they were trying to accomplish it.
Thank you for sticking with this thread… but even your own replies have just reminded me you are still just ‘guessing’… and that to this day… NO ONE REALLY KNOWS exactly what Granite Mountain was doing… exactly WHERE they were doing it… and exactly WHY they were still a full HOUR away from finishing whatever the hell they were doing when Frisby checked with them at 3:30 PM.
It was only 1900 feet from the edge of the cold black all the way to the old-grader.
They were up there working as a full 20 person Type 1 hand crew for over FIVE and 1/2 HOURS.
So what’s wrong with THAT picture?
WHY would Steed still have been telling Brian Frisby at 3:30 PM they still needed another full HOUR ( to bring the total work time to SIX and 1/2 HOURS ) in order to complete whatever it was they were trying to do within just that 1900 feet?
These kinds of questions still deserve some answers even if the property damage suits really are all ‘dead in the water’ and no one’s ever going to be looking into any of this again.
So YES.. I WILL get around to identifying that ‘burnout’ photo sequence and EXACTLY where that was happening. It will at least help figure out what they THOUGHT they were doing before Rory Collins dumped all over their plans.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> You are comparing apples and oranges with the inmate crew and a Hot Shot crew
>> when I talk about not leaving any heat source next to a fire line that is where the
>> difference lies with the fire Saturday and Sunday.
Well.. there’s that ‘apples and oranges’ thing again.
Is it a sequential thing as written? Are the inmates ( or any Type 2 crew ) the ‘apples’ and the Type 1 guys the ‘oranges’?
I’m not going to re-enter that recurring conversation about how you (apparently) can’t ever really be sure what the hell kind of crew of you are getting when you order the Type 2 stuff.
More later.
WTKTT A couple of points—What was Granit Mountain doing.
Line construction in that fuel type they would have made 5 chains per hour based on the 1900 Ft. 66 Ft. per chain. That’s a fair amount of line per hour in brush in 5 hours.
Your talking a 6 to 8 ft. wide line wit to mineral soil about 3 to 4 ft. wide 50/50 green and black. Normal line construction next to the black edge. To what ever point they were to get to was only 5 more chains.
They were suppose to meet up with line coming from the North that was never going to get there Blue Ridge or Cat????
Back to standard fire suppression tactics—- The fire is never controlled or contained until there is a complete line around it hot or cold black must have a completed line. That was
Granit Mountains assignment— to put line in from the heel of the fire back to the north.
From the Anchor point which was probably from hand line from Saturday that was secure.
Build from there along the black. Bring the black line with you if you have to occasionally build line and burn out do so just make sure there is no unburned fuel between the line and the black. So they built line for 5 hours and had roughly 300 FT. left to build but they were tying into nothing and at 1530 the fire was out of control to the North of there line. Nothing they could do at that point but pull back to the rest area in the black. Their efforts were at that point futile the fire was going to burn under their line and there was nothing to stop it.
GM as far as every thing we have herd was a good line building crew A Type 1 HS Crew
from what we know the inmate crew was severely lacking in abilities and either did not complete the line where the escape occurred or did not put hot embers out close to their line
either of those two things caused the escape. Comparison of two different crews. Ill refrain from Apples and Oranges.
Please refrain from your little word games and ask questions I am willing to answer. We have never had a problem trying to come to a mutual agreement.
Am I some how assuming what Granit Mountain was doing??? My back ground tells me what they were doing the information we have tells me what they were doing. They were building direct line which I have explained severial times I do not believe they did that haphazard they were professional in line construction or they would not have stayed a Type 1 Crew.
Nothing from the past indicates they did not build good line according to line construction principals. If there is information otherwise I stand corrected.
Well… at the moment ( and even almost two years later ) there is no “information otherwise” to contradict your educated guessing.
That’s my point.
This whole conversation ties back to the debate that arose following the Judge Gama decision and the carte-blanche dismissal of tow of the property damage suits. That is what has reminded us that the EXACT plan and the EXACT locations of the line they were supposedly building for close to SIX HOURS has never really been fully ascertained.
I wish there was a MAP that is part of ANY investigation that could show the same thing you are assuming they were doing… but there isn’t.
Give me a day or two and I can probably do what you requested and ID the exact locations of those GM manual burning photos including the one showing Rory Collins dumping all over whatever it was they were trying to do at that point.
It shouldn’t be too hard to do that and at least we’ll solve that part of the mystery ( since no one else has even bothered to do after nearly two years )
Regarding apples/oranges, Sat versus Sun, Type 2 versus Type 1… it’s not a valid comparison at all, really.
On Sunday… there was a complete 20 man hand crew up there to build line all day long.
On Saturday… it was only SIX GUYS (max). One of them was a Moki Helitak who wasn’t even an inmate and Shumate didn’t manage to get ANY of the inmates up there until after NOON that day.
So not even ‘apples vs. oranges’, really.
I’m not even sure Saturday and Sunday firefighting efforts at that location are in the same food group.
All we know is that if the SIX guys on Saturday hadn’t FAILED… then the 20 guys working the same location the next day wouldn’t even have been necessary.
Fact.
Shumate, Willis, Olsen shunned after the interview with John Dougherty retired fire chief Pete Andersen; one stating what Pete did was wrong and all discussions on the fire should be done IN HOUSE…
This IN HOUSE mentality is not a healthy behavior nor is it a good religious based one…this fire deserves a proper assessment not IN HOUSE thinking…nineteen men deserve that…especially more detail on the radios and its misinterpretations.
When Donut speaks up many including us want to know his demeanor THAT morning and not WHO made him the look out but WHY and who was that other person who belonged there with him as he stated in ABC news long ago. Also when I read KD’s book this weekend—we were there on top watching all the activities and movements and some may be in blind view to us but we will be able to dissect this better than most because we watched it “live”…the topic on the danger sign; very old sign…mine cleaned out and closed up and filled long ago…yet a very serious official looking sign. That is where we saw the old grader tracks right next to that sign. We have time before Sonny’s surgery to sit and read and type…we went to Mayer for some free roosters and grabbed a nice oak thing for free…Sonny will be typing “live” with me right now—sitting next to me. We were made aware a comment was made by Sonny last night and we did not post it. Have to look into that some more but to answer that question. At no time since the fire until now did KD interview us at all in any possible way–not by email…not by phone or snail mail and not in person.
>> Joy A Collura wrote…
>>
>> At no time since the fire until now did KD interview
>> us at all in any possible way–not by email…not by
>> phone or snail mail and not in person.
That’s really, really unfortunate.
It’s hard to even understand why he would NOT.
Even if he had NO intentions of ‘getting to the truth’ about what happened that day… and KD was/is still ONLY interested in the ‘human interest’ part of this story… you and Sonny will always remain the last people ( other than Brian Frisby, Trueheart Brown and Brendan McDonough ) to talk to these men face-to-face that fateful day.
Why in the world would he neglect to talk to you BOTH?
It Just. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense.
It is still a simple process they were assigned to construct line in division A
tie in an anchor point and build line along the burn back to the north.
One statement we have from Marsh they had an hour to get the line they were assigned to where they were suppose to go. We also know that Frisby said they would not be able to tie in to that point where ever it is on the Map. So very little assumption here. The Division line agreed to between DIV A and DIV Z is the point on the map. Simple for a Fire Fighter that has put in hundreds of miles of line. I wish I could find that Picture showing the line. I am not assuming they did nothing all day. The 1 more hour 5 more Chains and we will be at the spot agreed to.
Based on the rest spot the last people arriving there were the saw crews they would have been in front cutting line and there for last in line falling back to the safe rest spot. A simple deduction if Steed decided the fire was getting to close to continue Line. That whole flaming front that was burning into Yarnell was creeping to the south with nothing to stop it time to hunt SAFE BLACK.
The fire overcame the Lookout Spot and was moving towards the Grader.
If you are correct and the 1900 Ft is correct then that fire was a whole hell of a lot closer to the crew than we thought when it hit the old grader. also creeping or not the fire would turn and run uphill to the line that was constructed. The crew did not want to be in that location and pulled back.
A simple Fire Fighting deduction based on fire activity.
Based on fact The Main fire front had burned into Yarnell the picture of that front was almost 2 miles long. That is what hit Glen Isla like a freight Train and ran across the flat no pictures show the line or the Burnout area having any thing to do with the main fire which burned both towns.
So I will still contend based on evidence that no escape occurred from the Line built by GM. Their burn out had nothing to do with the destruction of the Homes in either community. Your Time Laps dose not even show and flame coming from the west side of the fire in DIV-A. until the main front of flame moved across the flats and up the canyon.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 14, 2015 at 10:17 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> It is still a simple process they were assigned to
>> construct line in division A tie in an anchor point
>> and build line along the burn back to the north.
Agree. That pretty much MUST have been what they were doing up there for almost SIX HOURS. They weren’t just playing ‘lawn darts’, or something.
But once again… you use that phrase “tie in”.
“Tie in” to WHAT?… and exactly WHERE?
“Tie in” to the actual old-grader location where the dozer push ended?
“Tie in” back to some part of that south leg of the two-track?
“Tie in” to some OTHER point… like the top of that two-track that led north from the old-grader but never quite make sit up to the ridge?
You know…. the one that Frisby and Brown got ‘lost’ on when they were trying to get up there for that first face-to-face with Marsh and Steed?
I AGREE that there were ‘line building’ and trying to ‘tie in’ to SOMETHING.
I AGREE that after Rory Collins dumped retardant all over their manual burns in that explosive, dry fuel that they PROBABLY did some ‘cold mop’ on their own burns before totally forgetting about that tactic and going direct like Collins wanted them to.
We just don’t have all the full ANSWERS here to any of this.
Just still a lot of ‘educated guessing’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> One statement we have from Marsh they had an hour to
>> get the line they were assigned to where they were
>> suppose to go.
No. Not from Marsh. Those ‘statements’ about needing at least another full hour to finish whatever the hell it was they were actually trying to do were coming from Jesse Steed in response to direct questions over the radio from Bue Eidge SUP Brian Frisby.
It was during the conversation when Frisby was informing Steed that SPGS 1 Gary Cordes had just asked them to improve that ‘Cutover Trail’ between the Sesame Area and the Youth Camp.
Jesse Steed agreed that was probably the best use of BR’s time at that point and Eric Marsh only entered that conversation when he chimed in afterwards and said he had “Copied direct” and that he “Agreed with that plan”.
All of this is in an unredacted section of Brian Frisby’s handwritten Unit Log.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> We also know that Frisby said they would not be able to
>> tie in to that point where ever it is on the Map.
I can’t think of any statement from Frisby that matches that.
The truth is that Blue Ridge themselves were never actually ever even TRYING to “Tie in” with whatever it was Granite was doing.
The Blue Ridge Hotshots did basically nothing but stand around their Crew Carriers for most of the day.
The only actual “Tying in” that THEY even attempted that day was when Cordes asked them to improve that ‘Cutover Trail’ dozer push between the Sesame area and the Youth Camp. They didn’t even really get started doing that. As soon as they ‘lined out’ on the Cutover Trail it was time to RTO and evacuate back to the Youth Camp and out of the area.
>> So very little assumption here.
If what you mean is that there is “very little assuming to do” that Granite Mountain was NOT able to ever ‘finish’ whatever it was they were even trying to do… I totally agree.
There IS ‘unredacted’, valid testimony in the BR Unit Logs that that is exactly what Jesse Steed told Brian Frisby circa 3:30. That it ( whatever IT really was ) was ‘slow going’ and they would need another full HOUR ( as in… until at least 4:30 PM ) to actually “Tie in” with anything.
SIDENOTE: Frisby reports what Steed said as including the phrase “before we can tie into that two-track to the north”. So it’s hard to tell what that really might have meant because we don’t know where Steed was standing when he made that statement. Did ‘two-track to the north’ mean the one that ran to the northwest and away from the old-grader… or was he referring to the two-track that they ( GM ) hiked in on, at that point? It’s still hard to say.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The Division line agreed to between DIV A and DIV Z is
>> the point on the map. Simple for a Fire Fighter that has
>> put in hundreds of miles of line. I wish I could find that
>> Picture showing the line. I am not assuming they did
>> nothing all day.
Neither am I. They MUST have been doing SOMETHING… even after Rory Collins dumped retardant all over what they were doing at first.
>> The 1 more hour 5 more Chains and we
>> will be at the spot agreed to.
See above. According to Frisby… Jesse Steed ( not Marsh ) is the one who told him that and he also used the phrase “two-track to the NORTH”.
NORTH of what?
The old-grader was actually EAST of the ‘anchor point’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Based on the rest spot the last people arriving there
>> were the saw crews they would have been in front
>> cutting line and there for last in line falling back to the
>> safe rest spot. A simple deduction if Steed decided
>> the fire was getting to close to continue Line. That
>> whole flaming front that was burning into Yarnell was
>> creeping to the south with nothing to stop it time to
>> hunt SAFE BLACK.
It was actually just moments after Steed told Frisby on the radio that he would need another full HOUR to “Tie in” with anything that the “Tools Up” order came out on the ridge.
So even after telling Frisby he would need another hour… Steed didn’t even keep trying to finish what they were doing. It was time for “Tools Up” and to assemble in that rest area and “smoke ’em if ya got ’em”.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The fire overcame the Lookout Spot and was moving
>> towards the Grader.
If the SAIR is correct that they left the ‘rest spot’ circa 1604…then they did not actually SEE that happen before deciding to leave.
They would have had to look back over their shoulders while already hiking south to see the fireline actually burn over the Lookout Mound and then overtake the old-grader location.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If you are correct and the 1900 Ft is correct then that
>> fire was a whole hell of a lot closer to the crew than
>> we thought
I think you are mis-understanding that 1900 foot measurement.
That is simply the ‘as the bird flies’ distance down that slope
from where the BLACK stops in front of that ‘rest area’ to the
edge of the ‘clearing’ due east that contained the old-grader.
It has nothing to do with the proximity of any fireline.
It’s just the total ground distance between the edge of the cold
black and the old-grader, heading due east from that ‘cold black’.
I do NOT KNOW if that is the DIRECTION they were trying to build line in and I do NOT KNOW if their intentions were to just ‘connect’ that ‘cold black’ with the fully-dozed-out old-grader.
But if that WAS their intention… then they only needed 1900 feet of line to accomplish that.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> when it hit the old grader. also creeping or not the fire
>> would turn and run uphill to the line that was constructed.
>> The crew did not want to be in that location and pulled back.
>> A simple Fire Fighting deduction based on fire activity.
Yes. Frisby had just called Steed ( circa 3:30 ) and asked if
there was any chance of ‘burning the line’. Steed told him ‘no way’,
that it was still ‘slow going’ ( whatever IT means ) and that he would need another full HOUR before being “Tied in” with anything.
Frisby said they were gonna improve the Cutover Trail like Cordes had just asked him to in case they had to burn that out.
Steed agreed that would be good use of Frisby’s time at that point.
Marsh chimed in and said he “Copied direct’ on that conversation and he agreed with ‘the plan’ of BR focusing on that Cutover Trail.
At that moment… Steed decided to do what YOU just described.
Brendan is about to evacuate.
They are NOT going to ‘finish that line work’.
It was time for “Tools Up’ and to get out of harms way.
Everybody picks up their tools and walks up the slope to that
‘rest spot’ where we would see MacKenzie shoot his videos.
They were just in ‘shutdown mode’ at that point.
It is only THEN… after this “Tools Up” moment… that other “comfort level” conversations started to appear on the radio and some other PLAN started to ’emerge’.
That would be the PLAN that was going to get them killed.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Based on fact The Main fire front had burned into Yarnell
>> the picture of that front was almost 2 miles long. That is
>> what hit Glen Isla like a freight Train and ran across the flat
Yes.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> no pictures show the line or the Burnout area having
>> any thing to do with the main fire which burned both towns.
>> So I will still contend based on evidence that no escape
>> occurred from the Line built by GM. Their burn out had
>> nothing to do with the destruction of the Homes in either
>> community.
I agree. If any of those ‘manual burns’ that GM had lit had ended up becoming actual new ‘tail smokes’ that day and then ( later on ) new HEAD fires… I think it would be more obvious in some of the photos.
That’s good for Arizona Forestry… because if I understand your own original postings… that would be the ONLY time and the ONLY circumstances that would warrant any kind of ‘property damage’ suits being allowed to proceed.
Just ‘fighting the fire’ ( even doing it badly ) can’t be ‘negligence… but lighting your own manual fires and having them get away from you and become part of the conflagration CAN be considered ‘negligence’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Your Time Laps dose not even show and flame coming
>> from the west side of the fire in DIV-A. until the main
>> front of flame moved across the flats and up the canyon.
Not sure which ‘Time Lapse’ you mean… unless you are talking about those ‘Cross Fade’ videos of he ABC15 Helicopter footage.
If so… then yes… even if some of GM’s own burnouts had remained ‘smoldering’ that day and then ‘flared up’ later… they would NOT have been part of the firelines to the EAST that actually did the damage to Yarnell and Glen Ilah.
If ANYTHING like that happened ( their own manual burnouts flaring back up out there at some point )… then the total irony would be that those flare-ups would have just become part of that other ‘western’ fireline which became the one that killed them in the box canyon.
WTKTT I think you got most of it —-
My assumption is they were going to tie into the two tract above the grader that Frisby and brown used when the Tractor line quit how ever there was no line coming fro the north so the plan would have been to use the 2 tract and grader line which was fastley becoming a bad idea as well.
The old grader was to far into the green to tie into and a lot of back firing to do. Not a good place.
Once again… thanks for ‘hanging in there’ on this long-winded discussion… but it’s really never been talked about all that much.
It’s only the ‘dismissal’ of the two property damages suits ( which is being appealed as we speak ) that has suddenly made it more important to know what Granite Mountain was ACTUALLY doing all day out there ( for SIX HOURS ).
It’s also important to have a full understanding of all this because, in essence, it’s the reason they are all dead.
In other words… It has ALWAYS been important to fully understand what it is they thought they were actually accomplishing out there all day long… and even still seemed to be ‘committed to’ when OPS2 Paul Musser called Marsh at 3:42 PM asking if they were “still committed to the ridge?” and Marsh said “Yes… try Blue Ridge”.
Until it’s fully understood exactly WHAT Marsh had them all so committed to doing ‘out there’. for so long that day… it’s hard to fully understand why they ended up waiting so long before leaving… which ( we know now ) is the reason they died.
If they had abandoned what they were doing just 15 or 20 minutes earlier… and then made the same decisions about leaving… they would have most likely all made to to the BSR.
I actually just found some evidence in some unredacted parts of Blue Ridge Captain Trueheart Brown’s Unit Log that sort of changes the ‘understanding’ here about what Steed had the crew trying to accomplish out there.
First… Brown says their manual burnouts were intended to clear area from the existing BLACK back to the SOUTHEAST.
That’s the first I’ve heard of that compass direction for those ‘manual burnouts’… but it’s definitely not a TYPO. Brown says they were burning out ‘to the SOUTHEAST’.
Here is that unredacted part of Brown’s Unit Log…
———————————————————
At this time we contact ( Marsh? Steed? ) on TAC 1 and then we need
to switch to TAC 3 since there is an issue with the frequencies/tones,
we discuss what they are doing and an overall plan. They currently
have to burn out the upper 2 track from “The Saddle” to the southeast
to stay ahead of the main fire since they cannot go direct at this time.
———————————————————
In this SECOND one… we learn ( from Brown ) that the PLAN was to have the dozer improve BOTH of those two-tracks that led away from the old-grader and up towards the ridge.
The one that led away from the old-grader to the northwest, and was the one that never actually made it all the way up to the ridge and the two-track up on the high-ridge.
And the one that led away from the old-grader to the southwest and is the one that Granite Mountain actually used to hike up there in the morning.
——————————————————–
We tie in with ( Cordes? ) behind the dozer and he tells us what he has the Dozer doing. This involves improving access to the black via 2 tracks that run up the hill. He is first going to have him work the one to the north and then Granite Mountain ( xxxxxxxxxxxx ) the dozer could work up to the 2 track that they hiked in on that goes to “the Saddle”.
——————————————————–
Last but not least… we also hear from Captain Brown that the ‘dozer push’ that day did NOT actually STOP at the old-grader.
Here we see him following the plan outlined above and the moment when he, personally, is telling Ball to take the dozer SOUTH away from the old-grader location and ‘improve’ as much of that other two-track as possible.
So THIS additional ‘dozer push’ could have been where Granite Mountain was actually trying to ‘tie into’ that day, and not the old-grader location itself.
——————————————————–
We ( Frisby and I ) scouted ahead for ( Ball? ) until we hit black and then turn around and passed on the intel. He ( Ball ) continues until the black and I then have him improve on the way out until he hits an old piece of of equipment ( the old-grader ) and then I instruct him to push a bigger
parking/turnaround area there. At this time I also sent the crewmember back down in the supt. truck to the crew. ( xxxxx ) and take the 2 track that was further to the east and was the route that Granite took to access the Black. This is very rough in the ranger and is not accessible via trucks. We then had ( Ball ) try to improve as much of it as he can with the Dozer when the parking area ( around the old-grader ) is complete. We ( Frisby and I ) tie in ( with Eric Marsh and Jesse Steed ). I notice that they have about 100 yard of line secured. We talk to them about the situation and comments are made about how neither crew received a briefing. We also discuss the issue about the radios. We gave them all the extra water and Gatorade that we had in the Ranger and told them what we saw from below and we all noticed that activity to the north was picking up. I remember making a comment about a finger in the bottom that was beginning to heat up and make its way east in the flats below the ridge/saddle. I also talk on the radio to ( xxxxxxxxxx ) abou this and about the activity picking up to the north. ( Ball ) radios and says he can’t push anymore so send him back out to the main 2 track and have him improve that back to the Granite mountain trucks.
——————————————————–
So all this testimony from Blue Ridge Captain Brown still doesn’t tell us EXACTLY what it is that Granite Mountain was trying to accomplish… and EXACTLY where they were trying to accomplish it… but it certainly gives us a better picture of what they were telling Ball and the Dozer to do… and what might have been the valid ‘targets’ that GM was trying to “Tie in” to that day.
More later.
**
** KYLE DICKMAN (KD) SAYS BRIAN FRISBY WAS THE ONE WHO ORDERED
** PEEPLES VALLEY FFS TO ABANDON THEIR OWN CREWMATES
NOTE: Something tells me we’re going to be referring to this ‘Kyle Dickman’ guy a lot… so I’m shortening all my own references to just the initials KD.
>> On May 13, 2015 at 4:44 pm, Marti Reed said…
>>
>> He ( KD ) has an interesting take on what happened in Harper’s Canyon.
>> According to him it was Frisby who ordered the Peeples Valley guy (parked
>> at the Youth Camp) to leave, leaving the fire-fighters behind. They argued,
>> then the Peeples Valley guy started heading down the road, while Frisby
>> and Trew went up into the canyon to get the fire-fighters to leave.
>>
>> (Which, ahem, imho, they should have been doing a long time before that).
>>
>> I’m really curious if he based that on something someone (like Brendan) said
>> to him or what. He doesn’t list that Peeples Valley guy as a source for that
>> chapter, although he does quote what he said in an article somewhere.
>>
>> On May 13, 2015 at 5:49 pm, Bob Powers replied…
>>
>> If Frisby and Brown went up Harpers canyon we should be able
>> to track that as Brown was on GPS. I don’t remember WTKTT
>> showing that on his tracking Brown.
>>
>> On May 13, 2015 at 6:59 pm, Marti replied…
>>
>> Good catch.
There is NO EVIDENCE in the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data that Brian Frisby or Captain Trueheart Brown ( or the BR Polaris Ranger ) ever went WEST into Harper Canyon to ‘get’ anybody.
There ARE moments when Frisby and Brown were sort of ‘moving around’ in the Youth Camp area and trying to get their own Crew to evacuate… and these ‘moments’ match a few of the Blue Ridge photos showing Frisby and Brown at various spots there in the Youth Camp…
…but at NO time does the GPS data show them LEAVING that area to go racing WEST into Harper Canyon, or anything.
( See the complete GPS tracking data covering this timeframe posted as part of the LONG STORY below ).
That being said… that does NOT rule out the possibility that it really was Frisby ( or Brown ) telling Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to basically abandon their own crewmates that afternoon…
..but I doubt it.
Both Brandon and Keehner have said that this person was their own ‘Group Supervisor’… and that was definitely NOT anyone in Blue Ridge ( like Frisby or Brown ). Brandon and Keehner were assigned to Tyson Esquibel’s Task Force 1 under Gary Cordes’ Structure Protection Group 1.
Frisby does say in his own Unit Log that he ‘yelled across the Youth Camp’ at some FFs ( at some point ) but that doesn’t come anywhere near being the kind of close-up conversation as reported by Brandon and Keehner… and this left no time for the kind of close-up ‘argument’ that Bob Brandon says ensued with the person he said was their own ‘Group Supervisor’.
And in the most recent ‘Aaron Hulburd’ videos that were finally released ( after all being originally hidden from the ADOSH investigators )… we also hear Captain Brown tell KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell that they had just been back there and were (exact quote from Captain Brown)…
BR Captain Brown said: “Fuckin’ makin’ sure idiots aren’t burnin’ themselves up. God DAMN.”
I suppose the ‘idiots’ that Captain Brown is referrng to could have been either Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner… OR Brown could have been talking about the 6 other FFs who almost lost their lives that day in Harper Canyon.
Keep in mind the following things…
1) Both Brian Frisby’s and Trueheart Brown’s Unit Logs covering this timeframe are HEAVILY REDACTED and it’s hard to tell what they were acttually doing right around that time because of those BLACKOUTS.
2) Arizona Forestry’s SAIT team was allowed to interview four of the Blue Ridge Hotshots… but Arizona’s ADOSH agency was NOT allowed to talk to ANY Blue Ridge Hotshots whatsoever.
3) Even though Arizona Forestry was allowed to talk to Blue Ridge Hotshots, they still say there are no transcripts of those interviews… only some disjointed and jumbled up ‘notes’ from those interviews.
4) Even though the Peeples Valley Firefighters themselves ( who almost died in Harper Canyon ) have testified that they were extensively interviewed just 48 hours after that tragic Sunday… and that investigators from Arizona Forestry also received photos, videos, and copies of their cellphone records from Sunday… NONE of that collected evidence has ever seen the light of day.
Obviously getting Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown UN-GAGGED and/or finding that mysterious ‘missing’ testimony and evidence from the Peeples Valley Firefighters are still the keys to finding out what was really happening there at that Youth Camp.
** THE LONG STORY
Here is where we hear BR Captain Brown talk about “the idiots”…
Aaron Hulburd VIDEO M2U00264
————————————————————————————-
+3:06 ( 1636.29 / 4:36.29 )
(Foreground: BR Captain Trueheart Brown to Yowell): Hey there ( guy ).
+3:07 ( 1636.30 / 4:36.30 )
(Foreground: KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell): (Responding to Brown’s greeting)
What time is it? Is it dark, or what?
+3:08 ( 1636.31 / 4:36.31 )
(Foreground: BR Captain Trueheart Brown): It IS dark ( up here ).
+3:09 ( 1636.32 / 4:36.32 )
(Foreground: KC ‘Bucky’ Yowell): How ya doin’, guy?
+3:11 ( 1636.34 / 4:36.34 )
(Foreground: Unknown): Yea.
+3:12 ( 1636.35 / 4:36.35 )
(Foreground: BR Captain Trueheart Brown): Fuckin’ makin’ sure idiots aren’t burnin’ themselves up. God DAMN.
+3:14 ( 1636.37 / 4:36.37 )
(Foreground: Aaron Hulburd): We figured you guys were bringin’ up ( the rear ).
————————————————————————————-
Here again is exactly what Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner
told the Daily Courier on the actual day of the first anniversary of the tragedy…
Prescott Daily Courier
A Narrow escape: Peeples Valley firefighters recount that frightening day
Published: 6/30/2014 6:00:00 AM
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=133345
———————————————————-
Their group supervisor pulled up and told Brandon and Keehner they had to move their trucks out. Brandon refused, telling the commander that his crew was still in there. The supervisor repeated his order, saying the other guys couldn’t run that fast.
Brandon didn’t want to think about what the supervisor meant.
Brandon and Keehner followed the order, but tried to move as slowly as possible as they turned on the trucks and headlights.
They went about 100 feet to the shrine parking lot and waited at the end of the ravine, hoping their buddies would run straight to them through the sandy gulch. They decided they wouldn’t go any farther until they saw their buddies. Then they spotted them running down the road, followed by the Wickenburg and Sun City vehicles.
“It happened so fast,” Smith said. He credits fellow Peeples Valley Capt. Jake Moder with saving his life by keeping a close eye on their situation while they were digging and cutting the line.
While they were building the line, Moder saw the hill to the north catching fire. Smith knew it was time to run when he saw Moder’s face as he ran toward him about 4 p.m.
“We felt impending doom,” he recalled. “We were literally running and it was coming at us fast. You could feel it burning the hair on the back of your neck and sizzling your arms.
“I didn’t think we were going to make it.”
They ran down the ravine about 100 yards and were angry when they realized the trucks were gone. But when they cut over to the paved road, they felt like they were going to survive.
“We were probably two minutes from becoming a statistic,” Smith said. “You’d have a memorial here for us.”
They ran down the paved road toward their safety zone at the shrine parking lot. The Wickenburg and Sun City firefighters offered them a ride but they could see their own trucks by then.
———————————————————-
** ORIGINAL GPS TRACKING DATA
Here is the original Blue Ridge GPS tracking data covering the time from when Frisby and Brown were out on the Cutover Trail at 1601 and telling their own men to evacuate back to the Youth Camp… to the moment when Brown and Frisby arrived down at the Ranch House Restaurant ( in the UTV Ranger ).
At no time does this data show Frisby or Brown going down into Harper Canyon to ‘rescue’ anyone.
SA = Sesame ( clearing ) Area
CT = Cutover Trail
YCamp = Youth Camp at the west end of Shrine Road
————————————————————
1601 – 34.227101, -112.761027 – 1125.580 – 12.79 – Heading EAST on cutover trail ( quickly ).
1602 – 34.226977, -112.760587 – 0160.272 – 01.82 – ( NOTE: Slowest movement recorded in this sequence ) Only a slight movement east on cutover road from previous point.
1603 – 34.226977, -112.760587 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1604 – 34.227340, -112.758602 – 0703.909 – 08.00 – On the move EAST again on cutover road.
1605 – 34.229035, -112.756553 – 1187.240 – 13.49 – Fast push EAST the remainder of the way to just before the point where the cutover road meets Shrine road near the Youth Camp.
1606 – 34.228742, -112.754740 – 0695.706 – 07.91 – Right turn onto Shrine Road, then down to almost to the eastern entrance to the Youth Camp
1607 – 34.229851, -112.755491 – 0507.458 – 05.77 – Up the driveway of the Youth Camp to where all the BR Crew Carriers were parked in a field there at the Youth Camp.
1608 – 34.229851, -112.755491 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1609 – 34.229851, -112.755491 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1610 – 34.227183, -112.752758 – 1360.570 – 15.46 – NOTE: Second fastest rate for this sequence. On Shrine road. All the way EAST on Shrine road from the Youth Camp staging area to the parking lot of the St. Joseph Shrine They are now at the exact same spot that the Helmet-Cam video will be taken from just 29 minutes from now.
1611 – 34.227183, -112.752758 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary at SJS parklot
1612 – 34.228387, -112.754123 – 0607.333 – 06.90 – Back WEST just a bit to where Shrine Rd pavement ends
1613 – 34.230605, -112.756720 – 1182.110 – 13.43 – All the way back to Youth Camp BR vehicle staging area
1614 – 34.229682, -112.757910 – 0498.075 – 05.66 – A little SOUTH in Youth Camp but still on the property
1615 – 34.230392, -112.759573 – 0550.779 – 06.26 – A little WEST in Youth Camp but still on the property
1616 – 34.227784, -112.757031 – 1573.510 – 17.88 – Headed WEST on CT again.
1617 – 34.227048, -112.759756 – 1087.330 – 12.36 – Still heading WEST on CT
1618 – 34.226498, -112.762395 – 0932.676 – 10.60 – Still heading WEST on CT
1619 – 34.227021, -112.766011 – 1391.570 – 15.81 – Now headed NORTH in SA
1620 – 34.228440, -112.770420 – 1579.230 – 17.95 – ARRIVAL at what was the
GM Crew Carrier parking spot ( but GM Crew Carriers have already been moved to Youth Camp ).
NOTE: This is as far north as Frisby and Brown get on this trip of theirs that
Brown reported in his Unit Log as…
“Brian and I drive back up via the dozer line to the main two track we pass
(redacted – Ball? ) and then we head west towards the fire to see exactly what
the situation is”.
1621 – 34.227119, -112.767019 – 1241.040 – 14.10 – Immediately headed back SOUTH through SA
1622 – 34.226604, -112.761934 – 1864.230 – 21.18 – SOUTH in SA… then headed EAST on CT
1623 – 34.227349, -112.758651 – 1153.780 – 13.11 – Still heading EAST on CT
1624 – 34.229097, -112.756548 – 1280.420 – 14.55 – Arrival back where CT meets Shrine road
1625 – 34.229629, -112.754971 – 1320.340 – 15.00 – Arrival where BR vans parked at Youth Camp
NOTE: During the following time the GPS tracker stays at the Youth Camp (YC) and there are only small movements in/around the area where the BR Crew Carriers are parked. The tracker remains right around the staging area inside the Youth Camp compound during this time…
1626 – 34.229984, -112.755239 – 0130.596 – 01.48 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1627 – 34.230126, -112.755518 – 0102.908 – 01.17 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1628 – 34.230126, -112.755518 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary
1629 – 34.230232, -112.755486 – 0052.238 – 00.59 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1630 – 34.230436, -112.755765 – 0131.196 – 01.49 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1631 – 34.230206, -112.756130 – 0145.208 – 01.65 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1632 – 34.230206, -112.755346 – 0239.823 – 02.73 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1633 – 34.230108, -112.755175 – 0077.278 – 00.88 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
1634 – 34.229851, -112.754949 – 0125.806 – 01.43 – Still at BR vehicle staging area at YCamp
NOTE: Blue Ridge evacuates the Youth Camp (YCamp) and Shrine area now and BR convoy heads directly SOUTH to the Ranch House Restaurant. They only stop for 2 minutes on the way out at the parking lot of the St. Joseph Shrine to (apparently) speak to the firefighters who are already there and who, only minutes later, are going to be shooting the Helmet-Cam video that captures GM radio traffic. According to this GPS tracking… The BR GPS unit ( Brown ) was actually still there where the Helmet-Cam video was about to be shot just 60 seconds before GM Captain Steed transmits his first “We are in front of the flaming front” MAYDAY message at 1639.
1635 – 34.228414, -112.754134 – 0644.378 – 07.32 – Heading EAST out the driveway of the YCamp
1636 – 34.227183, -112.752758 – 0624.010 – 07.09 – At the St. Joseph Shrine (SJS) parking lot now
1637 – 34.227183, -112.752758 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary at the SJS parking lot
1638 – 34.227183, -112.752758 – 0000.000 – 00.00 – Stationary at the SJS parking lot
1639 – 34.224803, -112.749746 – 1342.030 – 15.25 – Suddenly all the way EAST on Shrine Rd, almost to Highway 89
1640 – 34.222603, -112.746935 – 1188.170 – 13.50 – At the intersection of Shrine road and Highway 89 now
1641 – 34.217985, -112.750025 – 1966.140 – 22.34 – Heading SOUTH on Highway 89 to the Ranch House Restaurant
1642 – 34.213532, -112.755497 – 2468.580 – 28.05 – Heading SOUTH on Highway 89 to the Ranch House Restaurant
1643 – 34.213279, -112.755239 – 0167.099 – 01.90 – Arrival at the Ranch House Restaurant
NOTE: 1643 is one of the estimated times of the burnover in the box canyon.
—————————————————————————————————
So that portion in the book is debunked———
Yep.
See what I wrote below.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 14, 2015 at 7:57 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> So that portion in the book is debunked———
Well… only with regards to whether or not Captain Brown ( who had the GPS unit physically on him ) and Brian Frisby went ‘bombing around’ down into Harper Canyon trying to ‘rescue’ anyone.
That didn’t happen… but they WERE sort of ‘bouncing around’ the Youth Camp area in the Polaris Ranger and they COULD have stopped to talked to Peeples Valley FFs Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner.
But even if they did… it is NOT LIKELY that either Brown or Frisby were the ones that were telling Brandon and Keehner to “get those vehicles out of here now” and also telling them to abandon their crewmates out in Harper Canyon.
Brandon and Keehner still say that was coming from their “Group Supervisor”… and that was NOT Brown or Frisby or anyone in Blue Ridge.
Thanks, WTKTT!
Once upon a time, during the five months of fruit-basket-upset that was my life, I was going to make a list of the order in which we see the vehicles coming out and “kinda sorta going in and mostly turning around” via Aaron’s videos.
Didn’t get a round tuit.
Do you have one? Can you tell me (cuz I don’t have time to go find out for myself right now) where Tyson’s vehicle was in that lineup? Especially in relationship to the Peeples Valley crew and Brian and Trew on the UTV?
Thanks in advance.
Given all the confusion in the various narratives of this whole thing, I do find it “stunning” here that KD is making this claim and writing this narrative. It’s really a SERIOUS CHARGE about a SERIOUS THING. Even we’ve acknowledged that our best guess as to who this was (Tyson Esquibel) is not based on anything final, just our most likely judgement based on what evidence there IS.
And I remember when you were claiming it was Tony Sciacca, how extremely uncomfortable I felt about that, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
And it wasn’t until Aaron’s videos came out that we were finally able to confirm that that person in those photos at the Youth Camp was not Tony.
Given all of the above, THIS is what I WOULD characterize as “stupid and unprofessional” on KD’s part.
This is not a narrative to be thrown out there lightly.
As a matter of fact, now that I think about it further.
This is such a SERIOUS claim about such a SERIOUS thing, I could even foresee KD possibly being sued over it.
Unless, for some reason, he DOES have some kind of EVIDENCE to confirm it that we don’t have/see/know about.
Like an interview with someone like Bob Brandon, who is NOT listed as someone he interviewed for these chapters. NONE of the people actually involved in this incident are listed as people he interviewed.
MAYBE Brendan saw something of this “altercation.” Who knows? But the fact that KD tacked that narrative about Brian and Trew going up into the canyon to chase the fire-fighters up there out, which the UTV track is evidence AGAINST being true, taints the whole narrative.
KD wrote this about us:
“Independent journalist John Dougherty dedicated most of a year to examining the enduring mystery. He pressed both investigation teams to make public all of their raw research material. Eventually, officials from both teams agreed to release interview transcripts, videos, photos, and maps to the public. The archives, though redacted, are incredibly comprehensive.
A message board on Dougherty’s website became the de facto forum for Yarnell Hill buffs; it swelled to hundreds of thousands of comments, mostly from anonymous citizens and firefighters obsessed with the mystery surrounding the tragedy.
Dougherty and many others turned up an astonishing number of clues the investigative team had missed, left out, or possibly just ignored in their rush to release a report. Included were a few video records that contradicted the investigations’ claims that there was a thirty-minutes communication gap between Marsh and the incident commanders. There wasn’t. Marsh had talked to Burfiend fifteen minutes before the burnover. Burfiend, fielding countless radio transmissions during what’s been described as the fire’s complete audio chaos, had simply forgotten the conversation and didn’t remember it until days later, when he was shaving.
This discovery, and others like it, provided more fodder for conspiracy theorists. Most people combing through the raw materials— or at least most of those posting on the message boards— seemed to be doing so in the belief that both investigation teams had willfully ignored the truth in an attempt to cover up somebody’s mistakes. Whom they accused of making the mistakes depended on the commenter’s perspective or agenda, and many of the most popular theories evolved with the research.”
I guess KD really needs to include himself in that Collection of People making claims based on personal “perspective or agenda”
…which apparently has emerged, based, at least significantly, on what WE have been writing HERE.
Which writings of OURS, apparently (via HIS “perspective and agenda”) has been a CAUSE of the generation of (OH NOES!!!) …. “conspiracy theories”!!!
It’s like he’s writing as if he is somehow transcendent to the workings of that “club,” when he’s actually doing exactly the same thing, and then PUBLISHING it.
As I used to remind my mother over and over and over again, when I was trying to get her to do things that are hard to do for us ahem “Elders,” I would always remind her, also, that I was “the pot calling the kettle black.”
I wish KD had written this book with this warning/reminder up front and center. Like in his prologue.
He would have generated a LOT more credibility with me had he done so. He didn’t.
If I find the time, I may write a review about this on Amazon. I’m glad he wrote the book. I’m not at all glad how he wrote it.
REPLY TO THIS:
This discovery, and others like it, provided more fodder for conspiracy theorists. Most people combing through the raw materials— or at least most of those posting on the message boards— seemed to be doing so in the belief that both investigation teams had willfully ignored the truth in an attempt to cover up somebody’s mistakes. Whom they accused of making the mistakes depended on the commenter’s perspective or agenda, and many of the most popular theories evolved with the research.
FOR THE HIKERS- WE ARE NOT A PART OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES BUT WE HAVE OFFERED FREELY WHAT COMES TO US NOT THINKING WHO WHAT WHERE AND HOW IT WOULD BE TAKEN JUST SHARED EVEN WHEN AT TIMES WE DID NOT SUPPORT WHAT WAS SHARED BUT WE SHARED…THE BOTTOM LINE IS THERE IS MORE DETAILS JUST BY THE PEOPLE GOD SHARED TO US IN 2015.
I have developed my “theories” and my “interpretations” of things.
They have been based on what the data has indicated at the time. I have NEVER said they represent the FINAL TRUTH.
I have ALWAYS said I am willing to be CORRECTED. Because I am more interested in ACCURATELY understanding this fire and this catastrophe (I still have difficulty finding the right NOUN for it) than I am in being RIGHT about my current pet theories.
And sometimes, quite frankly, the picture that seems to be being painted by the evidence, does indicate that someone did something that had seriously negative consequences. Or didn’t do something that MIGHT have changed the outcome.
And sometimes, because I look at those photographs of those young fire-fighters and just cry, I express that pain and frustration in a RANT.
Is that a “conspiracy theory?”
Once upon a time, at the start of this, I was very suspicious of Darrell Willis. Because I “saw him” diverting the path of Chris’s camera and covering that up. The evidence supported that.
And I wondered WHY????????
So when the conversations turned to — Did somebody, including maybe Darrell Willis — order/pressure/hint/deal/whatever Eric/Steed/Granite Mountain to do the otherwise unthinkable, I thought, well, that might be a good reason for Darrell/PFD/whoever to divert that camera and, oh yes, quite a few other things, like cellphones, GPS units, all of which are STILL missing from “the chain of evidence.”
So what’s a normal person supposed to think? I still don’t know. Truly.
Is that “conspiracy theorizing?” I don’t know.
Or is it the scientific method, in which you look at something, develop a theory about it, and then put it out there and experiment and see if your theory holds or can get knocked over by one or more “bowling balls.”
I mean, I was raised by a scientist, and that’s what he did all the time. That’s “science.”
That’s pretty much what I’ve seen this forum as a place to do.
Is what I’m doing any different from what Kyle Dickman is doing in HIS own “special” way???? I don’t think so.
Unless HE’S not willing to have HIS theories (which much of his book seems to include, although he doesn’t indicate that anywhere) TESTED, for better or worse.
THAT would be the difference.
And, yes, anybody can call ANYTHING a “conspiracy theory.” It happens all the time. The difference for me is in how the THEORY holds up against the EVIDENCE.
Which is why the SCIENCE needs to be unblocked from going FORWARD.
Bad theory based on the with-holding of evidence is ALWAYS the source of true “conspiracy theorizing.”
It happened ALL THE TIME after the Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe. In spades. Like clockwork.
And, to a certain extent, it’s happening “here.” Is that OUR fault?
I don’t think so. It’s, in my opinion, more the consequence of the with-holding of EVIDENCE, which HAS been happening and STILL IS.
Prove me wrong. That’s science.
And, on a side-note, I just had to go all the way out to Rio Rancho to do ten minutes of Social Security stuff. When I walked into the building and sat down, I started conversing with a women who, by some kind of what I consider “miracle.” turned out to be the wife of Tom Swetnam, who is to the world of southwest wildfire what my dad was to the world of “the behavior of shock waves in the atmosphere.” Like seriously. What Gary Olson would call a “God.” For better or worse.
She had just happened to have been dropped off by her husband, like I had just happened to have been dropped off by my daughter, both of who had wandered off to do something more useful.
It was like BOOM!!!
They just happen to be living (at least right now) in Jemez Springs. Where my daughter had gone yesterday, for the ceremony of the new baby that Suzanne Swetnam said, “Oh Yes, that baby was born last week!”
So we talked about fire, this fire, forests, defensible space, and the photography of all that, at which point she said to me, “Tom really needs photography. Do you have it? Can you do it?”
We quickly exchanged emails, and then got called out to go do our Social Security business.
I call that a “miracle.” Even though I was raised by a scientist. I have a science-based definition of “miracle.”
It was the third time a “miracle” like that has happened in my life.
Namaste!
PS. I meant to write
EXACTLY!
at the beginning of that.
I think we agree, even though we might use different language to describe it.
One thing I adore so much about WWTKTT—
“+3:12 ( 1636.35 / 4:36.35 )
(Foreground: BR Captain Trueheart Brown): Fuckin’ makin’ sure idiots aren’t burnin’ themselves up. God DAMN.”
Not that actual quote but this WWTKTT actually gives views or thoughts backed with source or core to where you can look into it yourself if you choose to do so or not.
That was what we became from day one. We jotted all stuff on here and on google + and my zazzle page so people world wide could see who was led to us in the aftermath of this all.
We are noone. We do not even claim any part but we were on that mountain that weekend something NORMALLY done alerting some of a fire because certain boulderous ridges HID that fire. We became two individuals labelled hikers yet many times narrowing just Joy A Collura out excluding Tex Harold Eldon Gilligan (Sonny) and certain YCSO folks understands me there because I have led a very clean life and what I am seeing done is not even right but it is being done. My old retired now school teachers that know me and some I still keep in touch with think its a bureaucracy thing this whole fire and what has been done with the hikers behind the scenes. Retired CIA man told us before this is all over STAY STRONG because before it is all over who we are will be twisted in its due time and one retired chief said the ones that don’t want the truth will walk all over us acting like our pal just because stepping on us gives them a heightened view to create a lesser view on us. I am blunt and I am straight up. You give a crap to know—I tell you. If you are coming to me with these theory or narrative and or opinion and I do not go along with it BECAUSE you do not have the PROPER source to publicly discuss it than it means zip—
THANK YOU WWTKTT for always doing your posts as you do-
And I will keep listening/reading and I will keep looking for the proper assessment…
And I will keep remembering, long after the days are gone.
6-30-13.
You can make your memorials but my God I will not accept that nineteen men perished—end of story when there is too many that came to the hikers since the start NOT EVEN KNOWING we were the hikers IN EVACUATION and soon after and for that we know THERE IS MORE…they need to be interviewed too.
We did not ask for this—but we do know it takes ALL OF US to speak up open and honestly to get this fire properly assessed.
I WANT TO SAY SOMETHING…said it before…many can preach a pretty sermon but they do not say nothing..sing your songs…but they do not say anything.
Nineteen. THAT SAYS SOMETHING TO ME!
Ashcraft, Andrew – Age: 29; he is gone.
Caldwell, Robert – Age: 23 he is gone.
Carter, Travis – Age: 31 he is gone.
Deford, Dustin – Age: 24 he is gone.
MacKenzie, Christopher – Age: 30 he is gone.
Marsh, Eric – Age: 43 he is gone.
McKee, Grant – Age: 21 he is gone.
Misner, Sean – Age: 26 he is gone.
Norris, Scott – Age: 28 he is gone.
Parker, Wade – Age: 22 he is gone.
Percin, John – Age: 24 he is gone.
Rose, Anthony – Age: 23 he is gone.
Steed, Jesse – Age: 36 he is gone.
Thurston, Joe – Age: 32 he is gone.
Turbyfill, Travis – Age: 27 he is gone.
Warneke, William – Age: 25 he is gone.
Whitted, Clayton – Age: 28 he is gone.
Woyjeck, Kevin – Age: 21 he is gone.
Zuppiger, Garret – Age: 27 he is gone.
They are gone. Gone. Does anyone ON THAT FIRE “get” the pain of what their IN HOUSE mentality is doing? Don’t YOU care enough? No one is saying enough and I know that…well I am here and I will keep the hope alive…
You want to stop our pain…speak up…leave us alone too. We are good people. My entire life I have been a giver and this is sad…I cannot understand this…I try but I cannot get this-
Like Marti suggested below… it’s hard to be reading this new Kyle Dickman book and not
want to stop for every WTF moment ( because there are a LOT of them, I’m afraid )… and the best thing for anyone to do right now is just read the whole thing and THEN start ‘analyzing’…
…but I DO have to stop reading for a moment just to say that the following single paragraph is the the kind of stuff that is just really pissing me off.
From the Kyle Dickman book published yesterday…
—————————————————————————————–
Steed and Marsh wanted a lookout to warn the crew about any spot fires so the men had time to step safely into the black. As superintendent, it was Steed’s job to pick lookouts, but Marsh, likely unfamiliar with Steed running the crew, did it for him. Marsh picked Donut. After his sickness, a slow shift might help him recuperate. Steed didn’t argue.
—————————————————————————————–
Anyone who is unfamiliar with the investigations and the existing transcripts would just think… “Oh… good… now I finally know EXACTLY who selected Brendan as a lookout, and EXACTLY why”.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is NOTHING but Kyle Dickman doing his expected ‘imagineering’ and willy-nilly reporting what he BELIEVES people were doing and thinking as if it was absolute fact *AND* also making it sound like it is coming from valid testimony ( even eerily beyond-the-grave testimony, or something ).
Brendan McDonough himself told ADOSH that even after they put him down there that lookout mound that he never got a chance to tell either Marsh or Steed anything they didn’t already know… because for the rest of the afternoon… BOTH of them could see the fire and what it was it doing even BETTER than he could.
It was actually nice to see Dickman use the word ‘likely’ at least once here… but there is also still no evidence that Marsh would have been ( in his words ) “unfamiliar with Steed running the Crew”.
Dickman then DOES make the suggestion that McDonough having been sick jus the day before *might* have had something to do with him being selected as a ‘lookout’… but Dickman phrases it as more of a ‘recuperation’ think than any suggestion that by NOON-ish that day… McDonough was FINISHED and basically HAD to ‘sit down’ somewhere.
But it’s the WAY that Dickman is now ‘summarizing’ what is actually still a very important ( and still not fully vetted ) part of the ‘story’ of June 30, 2013.
Dickman is reporting his ‘assumptions’ as FACT… and making us believe this was all coming from Brendan’, or something, who is suddenly having perfect recall about all this when he was clueless during investigation interviews.
Oh well. Rant over. Back to reading. Salt shaker is still close by.
I agree. Especially after what I wrote above.
I now have my salt-shaker much closer at hand.
Sorry, Kyle. I was willing to give you more of my benefit of doubt.
I thought, OK, he probably got this narrative/interpretation from Brendan. Because I appreciated how he described for me/us who are not fire-fighters, why it would have been important to have a down-hill lookout.
And it made sense that it could have been kind of a “heightened awareness” about the downhill line-building rules, given that they had recently visited the South Canyon Memorial Walk.
But I agree he’s throwing too much of himself into this narrative, given the whole situation of who said/wrote what to whom. And the existing “hole in the swiss cheese” that still exist in this permutation of this particular fire — which is STILL BURNING.
And so now, I truly don’t know what to believe when he’s writing about things I don’t know anything about, given how he’s handling things I DO know something about — including the ones that are still too murky to say anything DEFINITIVE about.
REPLY TO THIS:
Dickman then DOES make the suggestion that McDonough having been sick jus the day before *might* have had something to do with him being selected as a ‘lookout’… but Dickman phrases it as more of a ‘recuperation’ think than any suggestion that by NOON-ish that day… McDonough was FINISHED and basically HAD to ‘sit down’ somewhere.
Donut showed to be ill and we affirm that even early morning 6-30-13 & Norbert of STERN magazine in his interview with Donut answered some of our questions on Donut but many would like to know his verbal demeanor amongst the men THAT very morning. Was he opted as look out because some of the men had enough listening to the prior day/night of Donut?
What can Donut offer in sharing on the crew buggy when the men were all gearing up…we are very interested in that because we were curving the base of a mountain when I could hear voices not too far off and Sonny said probably firefighters. Donut maybe can elaborate about the start of that day when gearing up between the Helms and Sesame where the crew buggies were parked. That interests many we have spoke with…
Joy~
You wrote:
“Norbert of STERN magazine in his interview with Donut answered some of our questions on Donut”
What do you mean by this? Do you have a link or something to that?
Joy has posted a new comment up above clarifying that this Norbert fellow she is referring to ( and who she hiked with ) is actually ‘Norbert Hoefler’…
On May 16, 2015 at 7:35 pm, Joy A. Collura said…
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/norbert-hoefler/7b/234/63b
I thought ( at first ) that it might have been another ‘Norbert’ associated with STERN magazine ( the famous photographer Norbert Becke ).. but I was WRONG. That is NOT the case.
All Joy seems to be saying here is that she and Sonny seemed to notice that one of the GM Crew was looking/feeling ILL that day… even when they FIRST saw them hiking out to even START their workday… and even BEFORE Joy and Sonny had any idea that would turn out to be Brendan McDonough.
It seems to have been Norbert Hoefler and the hike he did with Joy and Sonny on November 25, 2013 that ended up helping to CONFIRM that that person who appeared to be SICK that Sunday morning was, in fact, Brendan McDonough.
So if Brendan really did LOOK visibly ‘ill’ to even Joy and Sonny early in the morning… imagine what he probably looked like 2 or 3 hours later after having been cutting line in 100+ degree temps.
It really probably obvious to both Marsh and Steed that they had BETTER pull Brendan off line duty and give him an ‘easy assignment’… or he was going to push himself too far and collapse from heat stroke, or something.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 13, 2015 at 7:03 pm
>> Marti Reed wrote…
>>
>> WTKTT wrote:
>> “Example: There is NO evidence that any kind of COMS repeater
>> was EVER set up at the ICP on Sunday, June 30, 2013.”
>>
>> Somewhere in my head I have a recurring echo thingy that someone
>> said somewhere that there WAS a repeater on Sunday that wasn’t
>> working reliably.
>>
>> But I don’t know where the source of that echo is.
That ‘echo’ in your head *might* be statement that Planning OPS2 Paul Musser made in his ADOSH interview.
He seemed to be saying that HE believed there were ‘communications issues’ down there near the Ranch House Restaurant itself because when you got ‘down there’ you were now within 1/4 mile of some ‘repeater’ that Musser was imagining was installed up on one of those radio towers… and that close proximity to this (supposed) ‘repeater’ was causing radio problems.
Here’s exactly what Musser told ADOSH…
————————————————————————————–
1769 At that point we realized there was a problem.
1770 When you got to Highway 89 on the south side you were
1771 in the shadow from the repeater and at that – and then you were unable to
1772 transmit on the command channel from that – from that location. We hadn’t
1773 had any problem the rest of the fire.
1774
1775 Q2: Prior – prior to that point.
1776
1777 A: It’s just when you get the quarter mile UNDERNEATH the repeater
1778 that we had the problem.
————————————————————————————–
The ADOSH investigators never followed up on this so it’s still pretty hard to know what Musser was either thinking or trying to say there.
Maybe he thought one of the permanent Arizona Forestry repeaters was actually permanently installed on one of those ‘radio towers’ sitting on that hill there just to the southeast of the Ranch House Restaurant.
Maybe he was actually right.
But that still doesn’t match what Kyle Dickman was just saying in his book about someone ( who? when? ) having installed a ‘temporary’ BLINKY repeater somewhere there in Yarnell at some time early on Sunday morning ( before GM or BR would have even met for their face-to-face and criticized that installation ).
There is still no evidence that THAT ever happened.
None that I’m aware of, anyway.
My knowledge here Repeaters come with and are installed by a radio tech. For the fire and fire camp they are shipped by the ware house. Where ever the State ordered it from.
They are for the Fire frequency’s and installed in a location to see the entire fire. The Fire camp was arriving most of the day and I would doubt the Repeater was installed Sunday as the team was not taking over till the next shift.
Permanent repeaters are used by local, state, and federal agencies and the towers above Yarnell were likely filled with a variety of those. It is also likely that they could interfere with any radios in close proximity, just like when you drive past a radio station and the signal overpowers the channel you are listening to.
Thanks for the clarification, both of you!!
**
** BRENDAN WAS ASSIGNED THE OLD-GRADER AS HIS SAFETY ZONE
NOTE: I’m bringing this up from the thread below that has started the inevitable ball rolling here about this new Kyle Dickman book and the places where there seems to either be a fair amount of ‘imagineering’ taking place… OR outright discprepancies with the evidence record.
I guess all we can do here is what we’re starting to do, now that the book is out.
That is… just take each possible WTF moment ( from the book ) one at a time.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 13, 2015 at 7:44 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> And I totally agree that this:
>>
>> “Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded
>> the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an
>> ample safety zone.”“Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small
>> clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough
>> to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.”
>>
>> is definitely stunning. I was stunned by it.
>>
>> I’m thinking that’s coming from Brendan.
>> All things considered. Whose Superiors could, no matter what, Do No Wrong.
There’s actually no reason to be ‘stunned’ by this particular passage in the Dickman book.
This was actually discussed here before a number of times.
Brendan himself told the ADOSH investigators in his very FIRST interview that the old-grader location was CHOSEN FOR him ( by Steed, Marsh or both ) to be his SAFETY-ZONE before he ever even went down there with Frisby and Brown.
Here is Brendan flat-out saying it had bee (quote) “established FOR me”…
From Brendan’s first ADOSH interview on August 20, 2013
——————————————————————————————–
Q2 = Dave Larsen, ADOSH / WFA investigator ( Rest in Peace )
A = Brendan McDonough
——————————————————————————————–
551 Q2: Sure. Right. So you were on your own. You – what was your, um plan?
552
553 A: My safety zone what they had established for me was that grader. That was
554 that dozer – had pushed that out.
———————————————————————————————
From Brendan’s second ADOSH interview on October 10, 2013
———————————————————————————————
Q = Brett Steurer
Q2 = Marshall Krotenberg, ADOSH lead investigator
A = Brendan McDonough
———————————————————————————————
187 Q2: Um, in, uh, when – when you were, uh, down on the, uh, on – in your lookout
188 spot on that little knoll, um, and the fire reached your trigger point and you
189 decided it was time to bug out…
190
191 A: Mm-hm.
192
193 Q2: …um, what was your – what was your escape route, and where was your
194 safety zone?
195
196 A: My safety zone was that dozer push. It was a pretty big enough area. Um,
197 there’s quite a few rocks. And, uh, there’s a wash kinda close by it. So, um, I
198 mean, it would a took some heat. But I don’t – I don’t – that was my safety
199 zone. And then my escape routes were either back into the black or back out
200 to the vehicles. Mm, both were pretty feasible. I mean, if I moved – if I made
201 correct decisions like I did, they were both feasible ( choices ).
229 Q: And the dozer push, was that near the old grader?
230
231 A: Yeah.
232
233 Q: Is there an area that was…
234
235 A: Mm-hm.
236
237 Q: …cleared out there?
238
239 A: Mm-hm.
———————————————————————————————-
There are a lot of places in that part of the story being told by Kyle Dickman that DO seem to be ‘imagineering’ going on ( especially where Dickman seems to have mental telepathy and knew what people who are expired were all THINKING )…
…but the bit about Steed and Marsh actually believing the old-grader was a good ‘safety zone’, and ASSIGNING it to Brendan as such… seems to be backed up by Brendan’s own ADOSH testimony.
Kyle Dickman was doing the same kind of ‘thought projection’ all the way back in his original ‘Outsider Online’ article that came out about a week before the original SAIR report was released.
He gets ‘pretty sure’ ( in his own mind ) what Marsh and/or Steed must have been ‘thinking’ and then he just goes with that… and reports it ‘as if’ it seems to be coming from some actual hard evidence or testimony ( when it’s really not ).
That is actually no different from what the SAIT investigators ended up doing in their own final SAIT report. They just got ‘on a roll’ and started putting ‘thoughts’ into people’s heads that matched their own pre-determined narrative.
Example… the following controversial line from page 24 of the original SAIT report…
———————————————————————-
DIVS A then mentions a road in the bottom and “going out toward the ranch.” BR Supt thinks DIVS A is talking about heading northeast, through the black, to one of the ranches in that direction.
———————————————————————-
There is NO EVIDENCE that Brian Frisby ever had any such ‘thought’.
The SAIT was ‘inserting that thought’ into Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby’s head because it fit their own purposes and their own pre-determined narrative.
This then went on to become one of the most widely reported ‘facts’ from the SAIR document by the mainstream media… that the Blue Ridge guy ( Frisby ) ‘thought’ Marsh and the others were headed towards a RANCH in the complete opposite direction, and that THAT is why no one was sure where they were when it became critical to know.
Typo up above above.
I actually meant to say ‘non-facts’… as in…
“This then went on to become one of the most widely reported NON-FACTS from the SAIR document by the mainstream media…”
**
** PHOTO ON THE COVER OF KYLE DICKMAN’S YARNELL FIRE BOOK
** IS ACTUALLY A PHOTO OF THE 2011 WALLOW FIRE
Reply to Sitta post on May 12, 2015 at 1:39 pm
>> Sitta said…
>>
>> I’ve never seen the photo before.
>> I agree with you on the fuels, though. It looks more like Idaho, maybe (big subalpine
>> trees, with photo taken from a big safety zone). It also looks to me like it’s been
>> edited quite a bit (photoshopped color, texture, and perhaps extra smoke/clouds
>> in the upper half of the image). I use a lot of photoshop, but I’m no expert. Marti
>> might pick up on some good insights. I wonder if the original photo was from
>> Random House stock, or taken by Dickman or one of the GMIHC crew members?
>> I’m guessing stock photo, but I’d be curious to know for sure.
** THE SHORT STORY
The photo that is being used on the cover of Kyle Dickman’s new book about the Yarnell Fire that was released today is ‘cropped’ from the center of another photo taken at the Wallow fire near Eagar, Arizona, on June 9, 2011.
It is, indeed, simply a STOCK photograph available from Getty Images and originally taken by photographer Kevork Djansezian.
** THE LONG STORY
A number of online PREVIEWS of Kyle Dickman’s book became available online today since today was the first day it was being sold to the public.
ONE of those online preview sites lets you see the EXACT photocopied pages of the book ( the first 59 pages or so ).
I’ll post some links to these ‘full preview’ sites as ‘Replies’ to this message but I wanted to save the ‘one link per posting’ in this message for a link to the actual original photo used for the cover of Dickman’s book.
NOTE: The PRINTED copy of the book does NOT have a ‘Cover photograph’ credit… but this online eBook preview of the same book DOES.
The fourth page of the book looks like this…
——————————————————————
Copyright (C) 2015 by Kyle Dickman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of
Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of
Penguin Random House LLC.
ISBN 9780553392128
eBook ISBN 9780553392135
www (dot) ballantinebooks (dot) com
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman.
Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover photograph: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images News
v4.1 – a
——————————————————————
So here we see Ballantine Books giving credit for the photo on the cover to Kevork Djansezian and that the current license holder for the image is Getty Images News.
A quick search of the online ‘Getty Images’ ‘rentable’ images galleries comes up with a match for this photo almost right away.
Here is a link to what appears to be the first ‘rental’ of this Kevork Djansezian. ‘Getty’ image in a June 12, 2011 article about the Wallow fire…
https://llwproductions.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/smoke-rises-around-the-lee-valley-recreational-area-on-june-12-2011-as-the-wallow-fire-continues-to-burn-in-big-lake-az-kevork-djansezian-getty-images.jpg
Notice that the actual photo being used for the cover of Dickman’s book is just a CROP taken out of about the CENTER of this Kevork Djansezian photo at the link above.
And YES.. this ‘cropout’ appearing as the cover of Dickman’s book has also been heavily ‘photoshopped’ to highlight the smoke column and change the base colors of the image.
I will repeat what I said below about there actually being nothing ‘funny’ about this.
I think it’s highly unprofessional and makes you wonder how much attention was even paid to what is BETWEEN the covers of this book.
This isn’t some ‘bodice ripper’ piece of fiction where just about anything would do as a cover.
This book is being sold as NON-FICTION and Ballantine is also billing it as ( actual quote from Amazon retail page ) “The definitive account of the Yarnell Hill Fire”… but they haven’t even bothered to use a photo of the same damn fire it’s supposed to be about.
That’s right up there with saying you are publishing a “definitive account of the sinking of the Lusitania” and then just putting a picture of the Titanic on the Cover.
Not good.
Some would say: TOTAL FAIL
Followup…
Here is just ONE of the online PREVIEWS of the new Kyle Dickman book that was released today. It’s an eBook Preview that has full photo-copies of the pages of the book.
Actually… MOST of the book is here at this site. Only SOME of the pages have been ‘omitted’ from this preview.
https://books.google.com/books?id=DXl5BAAAQBAJ&pg=PT40&lpg=PT40&dq=%22Renan+Packer%22&source=bl&ots=wbreNz5umY&sig=Xey_sol3ripYcGZKNFIy7bUljpM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=F8FSVY3yLcPSsAWI3YD4CQ&ved=0CFEQ6AEwDQ#v=onepage&q=%22Renan%20Packer%22&f=false
Here is ANOTHER online ‘preview’ of the new Kyle Dickman book.
It has photo-copies of the first 59 pages of the book…
http://insight.randomhouse.com/widget/v4/?width=600&height=860 isbn=9780553392128&shortCode=&author=Kyle%20Dickman&title=On%20the%20Burning%20Edge&refererURL=www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Whoops… the FULL URL didn’t ‘paste’ correctly into the message above.
That link ( above ) won’t work.
Let me try that again…
http://insight.randomhouse.com/widget/v4/?width=600&height=860&isbn=9780553392128&shortCode=&author=Kyle%20Dickman&title=On%20the%20Burning%20Edge&refererURL=www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Okay… that one works.
That last link is actually a full-blown eReader version of the book.
You could access it from a Kindle or a Smartphone and read the first 59 pages of the new Dickman book free of charge.
Just used the ‘eReader’ style ‘arrows’ at the left and right sides of the pages to move forward or back in the book.
So, just started reading the book on my ipad. Starting with the chapter that is about the fire.
I couldn’t get the kindle edition until today, since the Amazon Kindle page kept freezing. But via a tweet, I was able to open the Amazon page on my ipad and order it. I have no idea what that’s all about.
I had actually mistakenly pre-ordered the hard cover book. It arrived yesterday. but I didn’t want to keep it, because reading books is really hard on my not-very-good eyes. But I did look and the photo IS credited on the jacket cover.
I don’t really have a problem with how Kyle used the image. I’ve had local restaurants steal my images to use without credit, and that REALLY burns me. Which is why when you said the credit was not on the book, I wanted to look. It’s a pretty cool generic fire photo.
And to be honest, the book is mostly even not about the Yarnell Fire. It’s vastly more just about the Granite Mountain Hotshots and fighting fires.
He does have extensive notes at the back, and it looks like he did a LOT of interviewing.
So, i’ll let you know what I think.
And this is NOT what I’m supposed to be doing today.
Oh, well. Shiny things syndrome.
Detailed account of the meeting of Frisby, Trew, Marsh and Steed. Interesting.
“As he often did during slow moments on a fire, Marsh pulled out the fingernail clipper he carried in the front pocket of his yellow and started trimming his nails. He told Blue Ridge about the hikers and repeated the miscommunications he’d had with Air Attack around 9 A.M., shortly after first meeting with the hikers. When the crew first arrived at the black edge, Marsh had ordered Granite Mountain to burn off a corner of the two-track road they’d hiked in on, but the SEATs kept dropping retardant on his burnout. Air Attack had effectively disregarded Marsh’s tactical choices. It wasn’t a big deal— it meant that the hotshots had to cut direct line around the fire’s heel— but Marsh was frustrated.
Another trouble was the radio frequency, a common issue on fires. Both crews were missing communiqués because of dead spots in radio coverage. To make contact with Abel, Musser, or Cordes, the captains and superintendents often had to switch between a line-of-sight tactical frequency and a command network that used a repeater set up in Yarnell to broadcast the radio signal over a wider area. Sometimes the repeater worked, sometimes it didn’t. As a workaround, they’d started using firefighters in the valley as a human relay system.
Trew and Frisby noticed odd things, too. As Blue Ridge’s overhead understood it, their assignment was to improve the dozer line that Cordes, Yarnell’s structure-protection specialist, wanted built that morning. But the dozer operator now working in the valley wasn’t fire-line qualified. Even his presence on the fire line was a breach of protocol. Trew, Blue Ridge’s captain, gave the dozer operator an extra radio and assigned one of Blue Ridge’s squad bosses the responsibility of keeping him safe. Then the dozer had tried to open up a safety zone around the old road grader that sat at the base of the ridge but stopped when he saw an alarming sign: DANGER! EXPLOSIVES. KEEP OUT!”
Dickman, Kyle (2015-05-12). On the Burning Edge: A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It (Kindle Locations 3238-3253). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Finally wrestled it onto my imac so I can copy and paste.
From Notes Chapters 17-23:
“Details of Granite Mountain and other firefighters’ experience on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30 came from conversations with Todd Abel, Conrad Jackson, Steve Emery, the Ferrells, and McDonough, as well as interview transcripts and notes from, among others, Abel, Russ Shumate, Byron Kimball, Gary Cordes, Paul Musser, Darrell Willis, Rance Marquez, Rory Collins, Brian Frisby, Rogers Trueheart Brown, three other Blue Ridge Hotshots, and the hikers Joy Collura and Tex Gilligan.”
Weren’t a lot of these people (named above) under those alleged gag orders that many of us have heard so much about? Since I am not familiar with these kinds of matters, is there anyone who can explain some of this … because, at the present time, it is not making a whole lot of sense to me about when it is okay for them to talk — and when it’s not.
None of the people he interviewed were/are under gag orders.
The people who ARE under gag orders, i.e. Blue Ridge, he’s using their log notes that were released under the FOIA. They were HEAVILY redacted.
Thanks for clarifying that for me, Marti. Apparently I’ve been mistaken about a vague recollection of having read long ago (in the media somewhere) that Musser, Abel, and others, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had quickly lawyer’d up and were given gag orders.
So … technically, all this time, they and a lot of others have been quite free to talk about this fire?
I would guess the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I’m sure they’ve “lawyered up.” You’d have to be crazy not to.’
I’m sure LOTSA media have tried to get interviews, but there aren’t much of any.
So there’s not a lot of “talking freely.”
Which is not surprising.
However, Roy Hall did a long interview. So there’s that.
And earlier this year, there was a fairly big “Prescribed Fire” symposium in Albuquerque, that I posted somewhere downstream.
Roy Hall talked, I guess you could say, “freely,” about the justifiable FEAR (based on his personal experience) of having something go terribly wrong on a fire, and it was pretty clear everybody in the room knew exactly what he was talking about.
That being said, I’m currently thinking, given what Kyle is writing, that his interview(s) with Todd Abel may have been relatively extensive and detailed and that’s how he’s anchoring some of this narrative.
The only people “under” REAL gag-orders are the federal fire-fighters.
Both the USFS and BLM people.
Which is, all things considered, a SERIOUS drag, at this point.
Kylennneneveriintervinterviewethehhikhikers.MMaybehhettookiinformationooffiinvesinvestigativemmediassoccrwditdduettoJJph
Hello?
Not sure what happened there with Sonny’s post… but if you look at it carefully… I believe that even though Kyle Dickman says THIS in his own book ‘notes’…
————————————————-
“Details of Granite Mountain and other firefighters’ experience on the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30 came from conversations with Todd Abel, Conrad Jackson, Steve Emery, the Ferrells, and McDonough, as well as interview transcripts and notes from, among others, Abel, Russ Shumate, Byron Kimball, Gary Cordes, Paul Musser, Darrell Willis, Rance Marquez, Rory Collins, Brian Frisby, Rogers Trueheart Brown, three other Blue Ridge Hotshots, and the hikers Joy Collura and Tex Gilligan.”
————————————————–
…that Sonny is saying ( above ) that Dickman’s statement is ( at best ) misleading, or ( at the worst ) an actual LIE.
Sonny seems to be saying this Kyle Dickman guy never talked to them at all and anything Dickman is claiming to have gotten ‘from them’ must just be references to other 3rd party notes.
we do not know KD nor ever spoke or met him nor been interviewed by this man
Whoa. This narrative is actually eye-opening. The description of the conflict between Marsh and Marquez. It now finally makes sense.
I think he got it from Todd Abel.
I think Dickson knows stuff we don’t.
I think eleven bucks for the Kindle edition is a worth-while investment.
OK. This is the last post I make (cuz it’s a huge time-consuming pita) and then I’m just gonna KEEP READING.
But this is why I think we should be reading this:
“Donut finished connecting the line to the cold black and met up with Marsh and Steed for his subsequent orders. Granite Mountain’s next step was to go direct by building line on the side of the blaze nearest Yarnell.
The flank sat about halfway between the ridgetop and the valley floor, and in such steep terrain, Granite Mountain would be taking a risk by cutting line across the middle of the slope. If a burning ember rolled downhill and ignited a spot fire below the hotshots, the flames could surprise the men by running uphill at them. That was one factor in the deaths of fourteen firefighters on 1994’ s Storm King Fire.
Steed and Marsh wanted a lookout to warn the crew about any spot fires so the men had time to step safely into the black. As superintendent, it was Steed’s job to pick lookouts, but Marsh, likely unfamiliar with Steed running the crew, did it for him. Marsh picked Donut. After his sickness, a slow shift might help him recuperate. Steed didn’t argue.
While the saw team tied back into the crew, Donut hiked the ridge, looking for a perch that allowed him to see past a pair of spur ridges that blocked his view of the slopes beneath the fire’s flank. He couldn’t find a spot he liked on the ridgeline. The place Donut liked was a half-mile from the saddle, on a knoll in the midst of the unburned fuel in the valley. The knoll was just to the north of the old road grader with the EXPLOSIVES sign behind it. If it put him in a of green and unburned chaparral, it also offered an unbroken view of the slopes beneath the crew. As long as the winds remained favorable, Marsh agreed that it was a good place for his lookout.
“Watch out for that finger,” Steed warned Donut before he left. “It’s got potential.”
As the fire’s head ripped toward Double Bar A Ranch, a strap of flame had broken off and run up a ridgeline on the opposite side of the valley from Granite Mountain. That strap was now backing slowly south toward Yarnell. It wasn’t much of a threat to the scrape and sawyers cutting line on the long ridgeline where the overhead now sat, but the finger could prove dangerous to Donut. If the winds did shift and the fire turned to the south, his lookout would sit right in the path of the flames. Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.
Donut nodded his acknowledgment to Steed’s warning, then pulled the extra water out of his pack and gave it to Steed. As a lookout, he wouldn’t need it. He’d be monitoring the fire’s progress, which meant sitting. Then Donut climbed into Blue Ridge’s Razor with Trew and Frisby and rolled away from Granite Mountain.”
I get the fact that some of this writing is Dickman’s interpretation of what some people may have been thinking, saying, or doing at the time, and in some cases we know he is just guessing at the truth, because the only people who do know weren’t alive to tell him for inclusion in his book.
That being said, the following passage, if true, is a bit stunning:
“Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.”
In hindsight, we know that the grader site was not of sufficient size to be a safety zone, or even a survivable deployment area for that matter. NOW we learn that that very space that was being relied upon as being Donut’s “safety zone” had a sign hanging next to it that said, DANGER – EXPLOSIVES!.
Along with all of the baggage that comes with knowing that little tidbit, comes the obvious question of why wasn’t THAT information relayed to EVERYONE working on the south side of the fire, from the top of the ridge all the way to Hwy 89?
Maybe that would have caused a safer location to be picked for the lookout spot, and perhaps, lead to one less person running for their life that day.
Great catch!
I didn’t even finish the copy/paste on that paragraph.
“…stopped when he saw an alarming sign: DANGER! EXPLOSIVES. KEEP OUT! Maybe the explosives had been left there during an old gold-mining operation? Nobody knew, but the dozer operator, along with the firefighters he was working with, refused to use his tractor as a minesweeper.”
We all know Brendan wasn’t the world’s most astute Lookout.
And, of course, as far as I know, given Kyle’s “sources,” this deliberate-sounding decision-making process may have never happened.
Unless I’ve missed something.
It’s really quite unbelievable that Mr. Kyle Dickman seems to have also been totally unable to find out what this mysterious bulldozer operator’s NAME was… or get an interview with him ( her? ).
The mysterious bulldozer operator might be one of THE most CRUCIAL witnesses to the events of that day that NO ONE seems to have been able to talk to… and who we can ASSUME is still ALIVE ( somewhere ).
There is a LOT this dozer operator might know.
And as far as we know.. he was/is a ‘civilian’ and not even part of this whole mafia-like ‘brotherhood’ thing.
Gary Cordes says in his ADOSH interview:
“I was later told that they had pushed around to make that clearing around the grater and found a no
trespassing sign with an explosive label and, and decided not to, to open that up anymore in that area so I don’t know how big that ever wound up getting and I had no purpose to go farther.”
And I totally agree that this:
“Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.”“Donut, Marsh, and Steed took comfort from the small clearing that surrounded the old grader. From the ridge, it looked big enough to provide Donut with an ample safety zone.”
is definitely stunning. I was stunned by it.
I’m thinking that’s coming from Brendan. All things considered. Whose Superiors could, no matter what, Do No Wrong.
No need to be ‘stunned’ by that, really.
It’s been discussed here a few times.
Brendan TOLD ADOSH that the old-grader had been CHOSEN FOR HIM as his ‘Safety Zone’ before he ever went down the hill with Frisby/Brown.
See a new parent comment above with more horizontal column space and the actual quote when Brendan told ADOSH that.
The more interesting ( confusing? ) part of this Kyle Dickman section is the apparent ‘mind-reading’ that is going on.
This is Dickman’s style going back to that original ‘Outsider Online’ article.
Sometimes he takes his OWN thinking ( as a former Hotshot ) and is just ‘projecting’ it into either Steed or Marsh’s head and presenting it as what they MUST have been thinking because that’s simply what HE ( Dickman ) would have been thinking.
Helps get a book written… but doesn’t help get any nearer the truth.
Reply to TTWARE post on May 13, 2015 at 4:24 pm
.>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> I get the fact that some of this writing is
>> Dickman’s interpretation of what some
>> people may have been thinking, saying, or
>> doing at the time, and in some cases we
>> know he is just guessing at the truth,
Yes… and it brings to mind that age-old idiom from the advertising business..
“We know that people know half of what we say isn’t true. The secret is making sure they can never be sure which half.”
Dickman is doing the same thing he did in his original article that came out a week before the SAIR report.
He was a former Hotshot himself.
He is ‘projecting’ HIMSELF into some of these situations and then just asking himself… “What would I have done”… and then he’s putting those thoughts into some of his characters heads as if he is absolutely SURE that is what happened.
The problem is that we KNOW he did some pretty extensive interviews… and we KNOW sometimes he really is trying to relay what real people actual seem to know ( for sure ) and seemed to have told him…
…but ( as with his original article ) it’s hard to know when that is actually happening and when he is just ‘imagineering’ and projecting his own ‘assumptions’ into the narrative.
Actually, what I think we will learn the MOST from, is his many chapters about the crew. And its culture. And its overhead.
All stuff we have discussed at length, all the while bemoaning the lack of first-hand accounts. Quickly perusing the book leads me to believe there is a wealth of that kind of content between the covers of this book.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 13, 2015 at 2:12 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> Actually, what I think we will learn the MOST from, is his
>> many chapters about the crew. And its culture. And its overhead.
Agree.
Obviously no big revelations here and it appears Brendan McDonough sill was maintaining his own agenda throughout all of these interviews with Kyle Dickman ( and not revealing everything he knows ).
But already ( from what I’ve read ) some CONFIRMATION of a lot of things about what it was like to even BE on this crew… including a reference to someone who had worked with Marsh calling him a “bad decisions with good outcomes” style manager.
Also confirmation that Jesse Steed wasn’t just a ‘fitness first’ sort of guy. He was a absolute FANATIC. Maybe even a little nuts about it.
A lot of the ‘stories’ seem to be coming from Renan Packer… the Granite Mountain Hotshot from the 2013 season who did NOT die on June 30.
Keep the salt shaker nearby, though.
Even in what you just quoted above about what was discussed during the face-to-face… you have to wonder how much of it is ‘imagineering’ and how much is coming from either McDonough or Frisby or Brown.
Example: There is NO evidence that any kind of COMS repeater was EVER set up at the ICP on Sunday, June 30, 2013.
The Communications Unit Leader ( COML ) named Clarence McMillan didn’t even ARRIVE in Yarnell until long AFTER this face-to-face meeting… and even then there’s no evidence that McMillan did anything but stand around his pickup truck up at the ICP as we see him doing in those AZF photographs.
So maybe Marsh/Steed/Frisby/Brown did talk about the radio issues… but probably not in the way Dickman is trying to say it happened.
Still reading the book. More later.
You’re way ahead of me.
He has an interesting take on what happened in Harper’s Canyon. According to him it was Frisby who ordered the Peeples Valley guy (parked at the Youth Camp) to leave, leaving the fire-fighters behind. They argued, then the Peeples Valley guy started heading down the road, while Frisby and Trew went up into the canyon to get the fire-fighters to leave.
(Which, ahem, imho, they should have been doing a long time before that).
I’m really curious if he based that on something someone (like Brendan) said to him or what. He doesn’t list that Peeples Valley guy as a source for that chapter, although he does quote what he said in an article somewhere.
OK. Another thing.
Arizona 16, the confusing callout Steed made on the “Mayday” radio call is the “other moniker” for Bravo 33.
Didn’t know that!
If Frisby and Brown went up Harpers canyon we should be able to track that as Brown was on GPS. I don’t remember WTKTT showing that on his tracking Brown.
Good catch.
See a new parent comment up above.
There is absolutely NO evidence in the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data that Frisby or Brown went into Harper Canyon to ‘get’ anyone.
But that actually doesn’t mean it’s not possible they could have been the ones telling Bob Brandon and Matt Keehner to abandon their own crewmates.
I do doubt it, though.
Both Brandon and Keehner said that person was their own ‘Group Supervisor’…. and there’s no way that meant Frisby or Brown or any other Blue Ridge Hotshot.
The person who ordered them to abandon their own crewmates still looks like it was Task Force Leader TRAINEE Tyson Esquibel.
WTKTT wrote:
“Example: There is NO evidence that any kind of COMS repeater was EVER set up at the ICP on Sunday, June 30, 2013.”
Somewhere in my head I have a recurring echo thingy that someone said somewhere that there WAS a repeater on Sunday that wasn’t working reliably.
But I don’t know where the source of that echo is.
In the section dedicated to ‘Communications’ in the actual final SAIR report… they are basically saying there WAS evidence of ‘tone guard’ problems that day… but the only mention of anything to do with ‘repeaters’ is just the following blurb that is just saying handheld radios weren’t powerful enough to reach the AZF repeaters in Deer Valley or Phoenix…
——————————————————
There were problems on the Yarnell Hill Fire with tone guards and “dead spots,” or areas where handheld radios could not reach repeaters to transmit messages to other ground resources. To overcome these issues, individuals and crews used time to troubleshoot problems, to reset or reconfigure radios, or to travel to face-to-face meetings. Physical workarounds included lending or sharing radios among crews and using cell phones (text messages and voice calls) as alternatives to radios.
—————————————————
That’s it.
Not even one iota of a suggestion that the actual LACK of having a good local ‘repeater’ set up and installed there in Yarnell might be a good ‘lesson learned’ from this fire.
Nope. Even in this regard… “No one did anything wrong that day… these aren’t the droids you’re looking for… move along… move along.”
I wrote:
“I don’t really have a problem with how Kyle used the image.”
Actually, I DO have a problem with the image.
It’s absolutely NOT the one he should have used.
The photo Chris took of the two sawyers standing on that big rock looking out over the fire and the desperately laid-in-vain VLAT retardant line absolutely IS the one he should have used.
IMHO THAT is the ICONIC image of the Yarnell Hill Wildfire and the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
Almost every time I look at that image, I just want to cry.
There are any number of images from the ACTUAL Yarnell Hill Fire that would have been both poignant and appropriate.
But to write a book about one fire and use a photo from some other fire that happened TWO YEARS before the one you are writing about is just… well… I don’t know what to call that. How about just stupid and unprofessional.
I actually don’t consider Kyle to be, as a writer, “stupid and unprofessional.”
I don’t consider this choice to be “stupid and unprofessional.”
Even remotely.
I’m guessing he had his reasons.
Or the PUBLISHER did, as Sitta reminded us downstream.
OK. Now I’m reading what Kyle wrote about the “investigations.”
Including about us.
Plot thickens.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 13, 2015 at 6:59 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I’m guessing he had his reasons.
>> Or the PUBLISHER did, as Sitta reminded us downstream.
Well… I suppose so. It’s pretty inconceivable to believe that no thought whatsoever even went into the decision.
But I just can’t get that analogy of writing a (supposedly) non-fiction “definitive account of the sinking of the Lusitania” but then just putting a picture of the Titanic on the cover instead… out of my head.
It Just. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense. ( to me, anyway ).
Impressive detective work, as always, WTKTT! This reminds me a bit of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s critique of James Cameron’s Titanic. Cameron did all sorts of research on the ship, but got the night sky all wrong. Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m just an obnoxious INTP type, because I see publishers are so often choosing covers, titles, and headlines that make me crazy (especially in this clickbait phase of the internet). Then again, I wonder if Dickman could have refused that cover? I do find it extremely disappointing, and puts into question how much “dramatic” was chosen over “factually accurate” in the text, as well (though not as big a red flag as the mindreading of people no longer with us, as WTKTT has pointed out).
Marti has already pointed out that if the whole point was just to be ‘dramatic’… then there are TONS of photos from the ACTUAL Yarnell Fire that would have been as poignant ( and dramatic ) as you could possibly ever want.
Even just that one amazing ( and often-reprinted photo ) taken by Joy Collura of those men hiking up there that morning ( with their backs turned as they slowly march AWAY from us )… would have been the way to go.
There is just something so poignant about that photo Joy took.
There they went… never to return to their own beds or their loved ones ever again.
Also… if it was PLUMES you’re looking for ( for a cover )… it’s also pretty hard to beat the ACTUAL Yarnell Hill Fire.
Some ‘still frames’ from even just those Panebaker Air Study videos are just as ominous as they are poignant.
I would have gone with the stillframe of that monster plume from exactly 1643.
What they did ( using a photo of the Titanic when the story is about the Lusitania ) Just. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense….
… and ( to me ) is just more of the ongoing ( historic ) ‘botch-job’ that is the Yarnell Hill Fire and it’s ‘aftermath’.
I am reposting this from below since many of you just MAY have missed it what with all your quibbling:
.
Robert the Second says
May 11, 2015 at 5:55 pm
I came across this required reading for the upcoming 1994 South Canyon (Storm King Mountain) Fire Staff Ride.
It’s by Vail Daily Editor Don Rogers, a former Los Prietos Hot Shot. It was written in January 2000, and it’s titled ‘LESSONS REPEATED BY THE HARSHEST OF TEACHERS.’
It is applicable to EVERY wildland fire fatality but in particular to the YH Fire.
http://www.fireleadership.gov/toolbox/staffride/downloads/lsr9/lsr9_lessons_repeated.pdf
The American Meteorological Society 11th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology went well enough. The BWS gave her presentation and veered off from her original Abstract posted in Chapter VIII(?). She attempted to exploit their emotions, focused on ‘uber’ fire behavior versus extreme fire behavior, and the ‘uncertainty’ of weather forecasting, once again making the GMHS out to be victims of faulty weather forecasting She dwelt on one of her slides repreatedly – Grand Junction, CO NWS forecaster Chris Cuoco in tears, allegedly when he learned that the WFF never received his weather forecast about the incoming cold front. Due to the one link rule, I’ll post this ’20 Years After the South Canyon Fire’ article and photo on the reply post to this one.
Reply
Robert the Second says
May 11, 2015 at 5:56 pm
Here is the link for the ’20 Years After the South Canyon Fire’ article referenced above with the NWS forecaster photo.
http://magicvalley.com/news/local/years-after-the-south-canyon-fire/article_ecc3b9be-642e-11e3-8a2f-001a4bcf887a.html
Bothe very good article’s liked the first as it is in my beliefs and the way I looked at Safety.
Reply to Bob Powers post May 12, 2015 at 7:34 am
Thanks for coming back with the detail below and clarifying exactly WHERE you believe the GM ‘burnouts’ were… and for what purpose.
But let’s see if we can break this down some more since it remains something that has really never been talked about much.
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT
>> Lets go back to hand line construction.——As you build line you do not have a
>> striate ( straight) line and some times it is easer to cut from point to point and
>> burn out the fuel between the line and the burned black area.
Of course. Saves time.
>> That is what GM was doing
Apparently so… but we still don’t have the full scoop on WHAT they were trying to accomplish.
Brendan told ADOSH he didn’t actually SEE them doing any of this and was not privy to any of the discussion as to WHY they were doing it or what they REALLY expected to accomplish if Rory Collins had not dumped retardant over everything they were doing.
Brendan just said they appeared to be trying to take care of something that Brendan described as a “sliver”… but the investigators didn’t ask him to explain what he meant by that… NOR did they even once ask him to point to a MAP and show them where any of these ‘burnouts’ were actually taking place.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> they did not first accomplish much of that do (due) to Roy Collins.
Correct. We are still supposed to assume that the SOLE reason they changed tactics was just because Air Attack Rory Collins dumped retardant all over those ‘intial burns’.
There has never been any testimony about why Division ‘A’ Supervisor Marsh didn’t instruct Granite to continue with the plan that HE thought was best ( indirect attack ) and then make SURE that Air Attack Rory Collins was to BACK OFF and STOP getting in the way of the valid ground decisions coming from a valid fire command Division Supervisor. ( DIVSA ).
It is still not know if Brendan knows anything about THAT part of the decision making that day… but no one has ever really even asked Brendan if he does, or not.
>> Bob Powers also wrote…
>>
>> Once the burn out is done you put a squad to mop up the burn out — Mop Up—
>> Completely remove all fire embers from the area between the Drops
Sorry… you just lost me for a moment.
WHICH ‘Drops’ are you now referring to there?
Are you saying there that even after Rory Collins had dropped retardant all over their indirect burnouts ( of his own accord and against DIVSA Marsh’s wishes )… that Granite Mountain MUST have then ‘cleanup up’ their own aborted burnouts?
I think that’s one of the things we actually do NOT know.
Did they really ( truly ) DO that?… or were Air Attack Rory Collins’ retardant drops complete enough to fully extinguish everything and there was no need for even that kind of ‘followup’ after Collins’ (apparently) FORCED them to ‘give up their plan’?
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> and the mop up you secure the line unless you are total Idiots you
>> do not leave any thing that could be a reigniting point that would
>> jump your line.
Yes… just like what happened on Saturday, right?
Which is exactly how the whole thing turned into a conflagration that no one could control.
Shumate’s Intial Attack failed to do that one very important thing.
They were up there doing ‘cold mop up’ for more than FIVE HOURS without doing the one thing you yourself just said only ‘total idiots’ would forget to do… and that is how the fire jumped their line’ and got away from them.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I refer to the hand line they built from the Anchor point back to the
>> north that got some where close to a point above the old grader
>> near the division boundary.
I’m not sure they ever got anywhere NEAR that much work done.
As far as I know… there is no actual evidence that any line work they were doing actually DID ever get anywhere ‘near the old grader’ or ‘near the division boundary’ as you are claiming.
The only MAP I know of that came out of ANY of the investigations that shows where the investigators might have determined their ‘line work’ started or stopped is that background topographic map that accompanied the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data.
That background topographic map actually DID have a number of LABELS on it that appear to be indicating where someone ( SAIT investigators? Whoever did those labels on that Blue Ridge Topo map? ) had determined Granite Mountain’s ‘line work’ had been taking place.
Just call up that GPS tracking data ‘video’ again and ‘freeze frame’ it… and then look at the LABELS on the map out there by the Anchor point.
Some of those LABELS ( and accompanying location DOTS ) say…
– Backpack Pump Cache
– Backpack Pump Single
– Line to North
– End of Black & Yellow ( Saw? ) Line
– Saw Work
– Retardant drop, anchor
– Mystery panel
Etc…
There is no ‘dotted line’, or anything, that would indicate where the GM ‘line work’ really was on the ground up there… but none of the marked locations are anywhere near where YOU say they were ‘cutting line’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> After the burnout plan was dumped on they went back to direct
>> line construction which is along the black burned area. Putting
>> out any burning embers close to the line as they went.
I believe you. That is PROBABLY what they did… but your explanation tends to sound like what I will call a ‘Kyle Dickman’. It has the ring of being based on actual evidence when I believe it’s still simply your best logical ‘assumption’ about what they PROBABLY did.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The SEAT drops on the burn out were evidently uncoordinated with
>> the Division Marsh.
Yes. I think that can be safely said. There is ALL KINDS of testimony from others who are still alive that Marsh was NOT HAPPY with what Air Attack Rory Collins did to his indirect burns. It was (quote) “NOT what Marsh wanted”.
>> My only conclusion is Marsh and Roy did not talk to each other
>> until after he dropped on them
You obviously meant ‘Rory’ ( Collins ) there and not ‘Roy’ ( Hall ), right?
IC Roy Hall was pretty much CLUELESS about what was going on down there on the south end of the fire.
>> a flare up on the line would have been a primary target for the AA
>> to keep the fire from escaping
Well… that is what is confusing and has never been fully established.
We are talking about BEFORE NOON here… and the PRIMARY focus of the entire Air Support at THAT time was up to the NORTH.
THAT is the direction the fire was burning and THAT is where everyone was actually ASKING for retardant drops.
It’s still a bit of a ‘mystery’ how and why Air Attack Rory Collins would have even cared about this obviously inconsequential 60 foot burnout that was just taking care of a ‘sliver of green’ next to hard black ( according to Brendan ).
I don’t even have any guesses about that other than the ones others have already postulated about the fly-boys from Oregon just having a ‘thing’ about indirect attack and its something they don’t even believe in.
ONLY the elusive Rory Collins can probably shed any more light on how and why he was dumping all over DIVSA Marsh’s actual ground strategy… but the elusive Rory Collins had never been properly interviewed by ANYONE.
>> Bob Powers also wrote…
>>
>> No coordination here it seems.
Well… it sounds like even after Collins dumped on Marsh’s burns the FIRST time… and Marsh was (supposedly) bitching at him over the A2G channel that that was (quote) “not what he wanted”… Collins still actually did it AGAIN and took away ‘all the heat’.
So that sounds like yes… there was a ‘lack of coordination/communication’ at FIRST… but even after Marsh DID speak directly to Collins about what was going on there on the ground… Collins still decided he didn’t give a shit what Marsh’s plans were and he dumped on that ‘heat’ a SECOND time.
That is what the evidence records tells us, anyway.
Only the elusive Mr. Rory Collins can VERIFY if that’s the way it went down, or not.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> After that Marsh had the crew build direct line. This failed burnout was
>> probably not to far from where the crew started that morning if they
>> were building line from the anchor point along the black burned
>> area back to the North so that actual burn out was not far from
>> there rest spot at 1530 probably gest to the NE of them or may
>> be just under them..
Unlike something you were saying above… what you are saying NOW actually seems to match those LABELS that have always been there on the background topographic map used in the Blue Ridge GPS Tracking data video.
SAW CUTS have been found right in that general area ( and some are labelled on the Blue Ridge GPS background map )… but no one has ever bothered to find out if this ‘saw work’ was BEFORE the ‘indirect burns’ that morning… or whether they only pulled ropes on the saws AFTER Air Attack Rory Collins dumped all over their manual burnouts up there and FORCED them to ‘go direct’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The line that was not tied into their line was to the north of where
>> Brendan was stationed and back towards the grader. That portion
>> continued to burn and moved south to the tractor line that had been
>> put in to the dozer.
Yes. There is still no testimony as to whether that ‘line’ was doing any kind of ‘backing’ to the south during the morning, even though the winds were out of the south/southwest… but there is doubt those were the TAIL smolders that became an actual HEAD fire after the 180 degree wind shift reversal took place later that afternoon.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> A one blade line that was not sufficient to stop the fire front and
>> just north of the slurry line that did not stop the fire either.
Just to be clear… the ‘slurry line’ that was laid from west to east across that valley circa 1:30 PM by Warbis and Lenmark because they were VERY SURE the fire was going to go into Yarnell during THAT burn cycle… was laid to the NORTH of the dozer-improved Sesame trail two-track.
That slurry line was actually even a few hundreds yards NORTH of Brendan’s lookout mound.
It was basically out there in the ‘middle of nowhere’ ( as seen even in MacKenzie’s photos )… and even Warbis and Lenmark knew that was not the best use of retardant… but that’s how important they felt that SOMEONE do SOMETHING to try and protect Yarnell that day.
It was a ‘desperation move’… and they ADMIT that it was… but after they saw ( even as early as 1:30 PM ) that Granite Mountain was already ‘out of the game’ and the Blue Ridge Hotshots were doing NOTHING but standing around their Crew Carriers… Warbis and Lenmark felt this ‘desperation slurry line’ was at least better than doing nothing at all to protect Yarnell.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The 4×4 tract that Frisby and brown used to meet with Marsh was
>> the Tractor line and the 4×4 trail that went above the old Grader
>> and into the burn to Marsh meeting spot.
Yes… but tractor improvements STOPPED at the old-grader.
According to testimony… things got too ‘steep’ for that 12 foot fixed-blade dozer after that… so the dozer operator ( whose name is still totally unknown ) was told to just clear AROUND the old grader and then head back east again.
What we still really don’t know is if THAT ( the ‘ringed’ old-grader ) was really the TARGET SPOT for all the ground-scraping that Steed was having GM do.
Did they really intend to just ‘build line’ all the way from the anchor point area over to that ‘ringed old-grader’ because that’s as far as the dozer got in the morning?
Brendan seems clueless about whether that was even the PLAN, or not, even though that is exactly where he was spending the entire afternoon.. down there on a mound near the old-grader.
Not one single investigator ever even ASKED Brendan…
“So… the dozer stopped clearing ground at that old-grader there by your lookout mound. Did Steed/crew really intend to ‘tie in’ to THAT cleared area from up there by the anchor point?… but could never finish that job? Was THAT actually the PLAN?”
Continued next Reply…
…Continued from above…
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The pictures at the rest spot show the hand line back to the North
>> that Mackenzie took. Ill go back and reference them and the specific
>> one or you can look at the Mackenzie photos.
>>
>> My final point No Crew leaves any fire along their line
Well… apparently that’s what happened the day before… on Saturday. A ‘Crew’ had been doing ‘cold mopup’ in that EXACT same ‘anchor point’ location for over FIVE HOURS… and they DID leave ‘fire along their line’.. and it bit them in the ass and jumped OVER their ‘line’… and the rest is now history.
We do NOT fully know what Granite Mountain then did ( or didn’t ) do in that same location the next day.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> and burnouts as you said are small this one 60 Ft. long and probably
>> no more than 15 ft. from the Black fire line maybe not even a 10th Ac
>> in Size. there was not much time for the fire to have left any deep heat
>> in the fuel probably burned the fines and was dumped on by the
>> SEAT, easy mop up and move on with the line construction.
I can’t disagree ( because we really don’t know what happened )… but your last line is also still ( I believe ) an ‘assumption’.
You say the ‘mopped up’ their own burnouts ( however small or big ) after Rory Collins dumped all over them.
I’m saying ( and have been saying for any number of posts now ) that I don’t believe we have any definite PROOF they actually did what you are claiming they *probably* did.
>> On May 12, 2015 at 8:14 am.. Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> WTKTT
>>
>> First the picture I cant find is from the lunch spot not the break
>> spot– shows a picture of the hand line from next to it looking
>> back with no crew on the line. It was some of the original photos
>> released.
I think I recall the photo you are ‘remembering’ that would support what you are saying. I will go see if I can find it.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Mackenzie Photos of the burn out and dump by the SEAT. IMG_0876 thru 0882.
IMG_0880 is probably the one in that sequence that puts the best “Where is that?” perspective on this sequence of ‘burnout’ photos.
Look carefully to the CENTER LEFT in that photo. That is the same large NOTCHED ROCK that would show up in all the later photos where we see the sawyers ‘slinging their saws’ on their shoulders and appearing to ‘move out’ from that location.
That NOTCHED ROCK is just about 50 yards in front of the spot that we would later be calling the “last resting spot” circa 3:55 PM where MacKenzie would shoot his videos recording Marsh asking Steed about his ‘comfort level’.
In the RIGHT-SIDE BOTTOM edge of that same IMG_0880 is Brendan’s lookout mound and ( on the VERY edge of the photo ) the old-grader itself.
So it’s easy to see that this is one of the locations where they lit at least one of their own manual burns with their own drip-torches…but it’s still hard to say where they were then building any ‘line’ after Collins dumped all over their burns.
IMG_0882 actually shows one of these ‘dumps’ on one of their manually initiated burnouts… but it’s also ( to me, anyway ) been one of those photos from that day that raises more questions than it answers.
Look in the DISTANCE in IMG_0882.
You can clearly see all KINDS of ‘smokes’ and ‘fires’ off there in the distance that comprised the actual active HEAD of the fire… and they are moving along and starting to threaten Peeples Valley and residences there.
But in IMG_0882 we see a valuable SEAT resource being used to dump on an insignificant little smoke at the complete opposite ( SOUTH ) end of the fire that was just an indirect burn near already-cold-black?
That still has never made much sense to me… and seems to raise other questions like WHY Air Attack Rory Collins would have been devoting any resources at all to this… at that crucial time… in that place.
You can SEE ( in the distance ) the OTHER ‘smokes’ be probably would have been better off working on at that moment in time.
Remember… this photo was taken just minutes before the first VLAT would show up over Yarnell and then, as Collins left to refuel and Warbis and Lenmark took over the AA duties… the entire focus of Air Support would suddenly become the Double-Bar-A ranch and trying to SAVE it.
Darrell Willis was about to be ‘calling the shots’ with Air Attack and spending thousands of dollars to try and save a Ranch that even he had said the night before was “not defensible”.
So there still just seems to be something we don’t know about this ‘interaction’ between DIVSA Marsh and Air Attack Collins that day… right around this time… and concerning these burnouts and Collins (successful) attempt to force a Division Supervisor on the ground to do what HE wanted him to do.
Air Attack Rory Collins has never been fully interviewed about all this.
OK first every thing you have said About Rory Collins I agree with.
If you Id the location of the burn out and the crew being just above it no smokes its out.
You are comparing apples and oranges with the inmate crew and a Hot Shot crew
when I talk about not leaving any heat source next to a fire line that is where the difference lies with the fire Saturday and Sunday.
You are still talking back fire not burn out. It is much faster to cut across a wedge of fuel from the black to the black and burn it out than to build direct line.
That again is burning out small areas to speed up your line construction.
My belief is once the crew quit doing that they went back for the rest of the day to direct line. They just did not quit building line. I have no idea where they got to but they were headed back to the North if they stayed on the burn edge they would not have ended up at the old grader but above it.
OK back to the Mop up of their burn out if the Drops put the fire out then they would still take the time to check for any hot spots which is the same thing as mop up. or making sure the fire is cold and safe. Easy mop up move on with line construction. There is a give and take here the drops were late enough to allow the fire to increase the line area and the drops put most of it out so it was not all bad.
The picture I am talking about that you may remember was I believe in the SAIT report that the news media released that the lead investigator discussed in the news conference I am sure it was from the Lunch spot but I can not find it.
The main reason for this discussion was to show that there was no smokes or fire along the burn edge where GM Division was located and the main fire burned into the area below them and back up to the line they had put in. There burn out was cold and was not able to escape there containment line. Much of the line they built was cold black.
Again the burn out were the first thing in the late morning they did by noon they were back to direct line on the fire edge. When they moved back to the resting spot at 2530 they were directly over the burn out area as you identified no smokes visible from the pictures taken by Mackenzie.
If you are trying to say there burn outs escaped and was a cause of burning the homes, that is a very long reach and pure assumption based on actual fire activity.
That’s what I am getting from your discussion if not I will move on.
The Tractor stopped at the grader —TRUE —the 2 tract continued up and then across the burn to I believe the Helispot on the cleared knob used by paragliders.
I may have missed something if important let me know. I am talking fire fighter language and you are not so I am try to explain and be patient with our thought process..
Resting spot was 1530 not 2530 hit the wrong key.
WantsToKnowTheTruth says
May 10, 2015 at 11:17 pm
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 9, 2015 at 5:03 am
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Oh…and one more thing. Since I know the Arizona State
>> Forestry Division is a sand lot baseball team…they don’t
>> disappoint me when they can’t sweep the World Series,
>> and that shouldn’t disappoint you either. Get over it!
You’re great with the analogies, Gary… but this wasn’t/isn’t a baseball game.
19 good men are DEAD… for no damn good reason.
Forgive me if I don’t make any sharp moves to “Get over it” until I’m sure I know exactly what the fuck actually happened.
Gary Olson says
May 11, 2015 at 11:44 pm
Well…I couldn’t agree with you more and I believe you are mischaracterizing my analogy, I was not making any reference in any of my ramblings last Friday night, I think everything I said (and intended to say) was in reference to the residents of Yarnell et al, and their lawsuits against the state for their incompetence and the fire team calling the evacuation late. I am going to make every effort from now on to stay out of the argument because I don’t actually care what happens to their lawsuits one way or the other. I just didn’t like the residents blaming everything on the state, I think we all should take responsibility for our own safety in critical situations.
Gary Olson says
May 11, 2015 at 11:48 pm
and for sure the “get over” it comment was directed at the Yarnell residents for their complaints against the fire team. You know that I like to say a true wildfire is always managed by Chaos for the first 36 to 48 hours until a fire team or succession of fire teams finally wrest control from Chaos.
I would never tell anyone to get over the deaths of the GMIHS. I think you owe me an apology.
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 12, 2015 at 10:29 am
Instead of me responding to this down below ( where you said ‘own’ and and then corrected to ‘owe’ )… let me cancel that typing down below and just answer it up here instead.
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> I would never tell anyone to get over the deaths of the GMIHS.
Then watch your typing and your use of ‘you’ and ‘them’ and make sure you are saying what you mean to say and WHO you want us to know you are saying it TO.
Your “nobody should expect something for nothing” postings down below SEEMED to become a carte-blanche write-off that anyone should have been expecting ANYTHING from that ‘sand lot baseball team’… including their ability to keep 19 of their own employees alive.
Your “get over it” ( whoever that really was directed to/at ) just became all-inclusive the way you were typing your posts.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> I think you owe me an apology.
The only thing I’m sorry about is that you didn’t make yourself clear… but I am NOT asking for any kind of reciprocal apology. There are a LOT of people out there who think it’s time everyone “got over” all this… including the guy who just posted that editorial in the lasted issue of “Two More Chains” at the official Wildland Lessons Learned site.
Typo up above…
Should have been…
“…Including the guy who just posted that editorial in the LATEST issue of “Two More Chains” at the official Wildland Lessons Learned site.”
WTKTT like it or not you misunderstood what Gary said and took it to the next level of inserting the Granit Mountain Hotshots which was not what Gary was talking about.
So yes you should apologize———–
Thank you Bob, it was pretty clear to me to, and if I would have said that about the GMIHC, I would have been a low down dirty shit bag instead of just a run of the mill Grade A Asshole.
One thing has been evident to me since I started writing on this thread last year WTKTT, and that is you are a Grade A Asshole…yes, and I think it takes one to know one. Something you are not however, is quite as good at playing word games as you think you are, nor are you as clever as you think you are, although I must admit, you are very clever about many things.
There is nothing in anything I said in the posts last Friday night anywhere that indicates I was ever talking about the GMIHS or including them in any of the issues I was writing about. There were however, several issues I wrote about that specifically did refer to the residents of Yarnell et al.
Now at the risk of being accused of comparing the GMIHS to oranges in another analogy that doesn’t meet your standards, if I write several paragraphs specifically talking about apples, there is no reason for your brain to read “oranges” anywhere in anything I wrote.
In addition, for anyone, especially you, since you are neither a current or former wildand firefighter nor someone who loved the GMIHC, to accuse me of what you accused me of after everything I have written and contributed to this thread after almost two years, well….let’s just say your words have taken my anger to a place my therapist would consider unhealthy for me…if I had a therapist.
This is because although I will take a beating from a current or former wildland firefighter who has been there and done that, and as a result has standing with me, or from someone who loved the GMIHC because I know some the things I have said, and some of the things I am planning on saying in the future will hurt them even more.
I have been willing to say these things, even though I knew it would hurt them, and will continue to hurt them in their time of grief, because that is what I get paid the big bucks for. But…I won’t take a tongue lashing from you, or anyone else who does not fit into one of the two previously identified categories…period.
Now…I am going to say this one more time because you don’t know me well enough to know that I normally ask a person to do something only one time. You owe me an apology for saying the worst thing anybody has said to me since I stopped getting paid to deal with bad people saying bad things to me.
Have I made myself clear enough this time for you?
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 12, 2015 at 1:33 pm
Normally I would just let something like the following go… but I actually have too MUCH respect for you to do that this time.
I don’t know if you just got bored the other night, or what, when you came out of nowhere with all that “Get it?, Got it? And another thing… Get it?, Got it, Get over it” multiple-posting crap… but if you’re looking for fight just for mere entertainment’s sake… you came to the right person.
You posted some many “and another thing… and oh by the way…. and ‘Get it?’ ‘Got it’? stuff I honestly lost complete track of who the hell you even THOUGHT you were ‘speaking to’. with your usual “I’m the bad guy in the room and I can go off at any moment so you better listen to me” stuff.
I am NOT going to apologize to you just because YOU don’t know how to explain yourself.
You can whistle for that.
You’ve had your chance to fully explain ( and second time seems to be the charm ) what you were REALLY trying to say somewhere down below… so that’s GOOD. I’m glad you got it right the second time.
YOU are the one that was rapid-firing all the unsolicited ‘Get it?, Got it? Get over its” like some preacher on a pulpit.
My response was a “No thank you. I will chose ( myself ) what I feel like ‘getting over’ and what I do not… but thanks for the input”.
Now you are saying I totally mis-understood what your ‘sandlot baseball team’ was even supposed to be “totally incapable of doing”… and you want ME to apololgize?
You’ve made your point ( on the second try ).
What we were SUPPOSED to ‘takeaway’ from your rant was that you consider Arizona Forestry to be a sandlot baseball team and that NO ONE should have possibly, conceivably expected those morons to be able to successfully handle a fire they had taken responsibility for… and that anyone who thinks an agency that is supposed to know had to handle Wildfires should/must ‘get over thinking that way’….
…but at the same time NO ONE should ‘get over’ the fact that these same morons couldn’t even keep 19 of their employees alive on June 30, 2013.
Sorry… but I chose to not ‘get over’ EITHER of those things.
And certainly not because YOU think I should.
I still think it ALL ties together… and it ALL still needs to be properly investigated and documented.
I really do still hope the property owners win their appeal over Judge Gama’s decision and they are allowed to have their own ‘day in court’.
And I have said WHY I think they SHOULD ( and might ) win that appeal.
And I am asking for no ‘apologies’ from anyone about anything.
I’m good.
One thing has been evident to me since I started writing on this thread last year WTKTT, and that is you are a Grade A Asshole…yes, and I think it takes one to know one. Something you are not however, is quite as good at playing word games as you think you are, nor are you as clever as you think you are, although I must admit, you are very clever about many things.
There is nothing in anything I said in the posts last Friday night anywhere that indicates I was ever talking about the GMIHS or including them in any of the issues I was writing about. There were however, several issues I wrote about that specifically did refer to the residents of Yarnell et al.
Now at the risk of being accused of comparing the GMIHS to oranges in another analogy that doesn’t meet your standards, if I write several paragraphs specifically talking about apples, there is no reason for your brain to read “oranges” anywhere in anything I wrote.
In addition, for anyone, especially you, since you are neither a current or former wildand firefighter nor someone who loved the GMIHC, to accuse me of what you accused me of after everything I have written and contributed to this thread after almost two years, well….let’s just say your words have taken my anger to a place my therapist would consider unhealthy for me…if I had a therapist.
This is because although I will take a beating from a current or former wildland firefighter who has been there and done that, and as a result has standing with me, or from someone who loved the GMIHC because I know some the things I have said, and some of the things I am planning on saying in the future will hurt them even more.
I have been willing to say these things, even though I knew it would hurt them, and will continue to hurt them in their time of grief, because that is what I get paid the big bucks for. But…I won’t take a tongue lashing from you, or anyone else who does not fit into one of the two previously identified categories…period.
Now…I am going to say this one more time because you don’t know me well enough to know that I normally ask a person to do something only one time. You owe me an apology for saying the worst thing anybody has said to me since I stopped getting paid to deal with bad people saying bad things to me.
Have I made myself clear enough this time for you?
Not sure what happened with the post above but my own ‘response’ ends with the line “I’m good”.
The rest was some kind of ‘echo’ of the original Gary Olson post that was responding to that wasn’t even showing in the input box.
And please, no matter what happens over this snafu… do NOT come back with one of your… “Oh.. okay… yea… well… I guess I went off again… oops… sorry… that’s just me… I really would like to actually KILL you… ooops… I did it again… sorry… that’s just me… you know me… I say things like that… I’m just the bad guy in the room” deals.
It’s not necessary this time.
I ( me, personally ) am NOT offended.
As I said up above.
I ( me, personally ) am NOT offended and I’m not a Quixotic pistols-at-dawn type when it comes to these online forums.
As I also said up above… “I’m good”.
It’s not possible to have these kinds of discussions with strong personalities involved and not have the shit hit the fan from time to time.
As I have also said before… as compared to some other discussions like this that I participate in… this one still qualifies as a polite tea party.
Testing, testing… Having issues posting…
Go to the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Centre, read the latest issue of 2 more chains, specifically page 2 editorial by Dotson..
Here is a link to the WFLL “Two More Chains” page…
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/resources/twomorechains
And here’s a link to the drill-down page that has the latest article…
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/viewdocument?DocumentKey=720e56d5-8c14-4b84-b985-a8326bee62d6
And here is a direct download link for just the PDF article itself.
NOTE: This may or may not work in some browsers.
If it doesn’t… use the link above and click on the article manually.
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=e4ac651e-6022-476d-918f-e89a90e94e1f
>> rocksteady
>>
>> Go to the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Centre, read the latest
>> issue of 2 more chains, specifically page 2 editorial by Dotson..
I get what this Dotson guy was TRYING to say… but he simply comes up pretty short on the writing skills and his ability to express himself.
It came off just sounding like a bunch of sanctimonious, didactic CRAP.
First he puts his own WORDS in peoples’ mouths… THEN he wants to criticize ‘mysterious people’ for saying those words.
Saying that someone lost their situational awareness does NOT automatically mean you are calling them nincompoops and screw-ups.
Well… I guess it does to HIM… but he wouldn’t have had an article unless he could frame things in ‘black and white’ like that.
As for not being able to truly be “Brothers and Sisters” by being critical…
…Horseshit.
The only person who would ever say something like that would be someone who has never actually HAD a REAL Brother or a REAL Sister.
If you back to the 2 more chains issue dedicated to the GMIHS, his article on there basically states that no stone has to go unturned, in order for others to learn from it, but in this issue, he criticizes people for coming to the conclusion that someone screwed up.
Which is it? Do you want the truth or not?
SOMEONE (probably a lot more than one) screwed up this fire from day 1…
We need to dissect this down to the finest detail in order to learn from it. What went wrong? Where? Why? when? and yes,….. WHO!!!
What he seems to be most afraid of is some kind of ‘threat to the brother/sisterhood’ if people are too critical or use the ‘wrong words’.
I think he’s ‘projecting’. ( Putting his own fears onto others ).
So we have 2 more chains which is totally opposite of another Hot shots article that RTS posted below. From Don Rogers——
——— two exact opposites.
I totally did not get the Article 2 more chains it was directly opposite
to my work training and safety. Sorry I don’t by it.
What’s odd about this latest ‘Two More Chains” article is that the author ( Travis Dotson ) seems to be ‘freaking out’ about some (perceived) body of opinion among the ‘brothers and sisters’ that Granite Mountain ‘screwed up’…
…but he doesn’t make it in any way CLEAR where he’s getting that from or even WHO he thinks he’s talking to.
He thinks the ‘brothers and sisters’ are all using ‘code speak’ when what HE thinks they all really mean is that “Granite Mountain screwed up”.
Then he talks about ‘ownership’ of opinions and whatnot.
It’s really quite a strange ramble… and rocksteady is right… this is the SAME GUY who has also said that the WFF industry needs to learn everything it possibly can from this incident.
There are few ‘brothers and sisters’ that would disagree with that… so I don’t really now what this Dotson fella was trying to accomplish with this latest Editorial.
It’s not even clear ( as his editorial ends ) what he is even ASKING the ‘brothers and sisters’ to DO ( as in.. ‘action items’ ).
It just ends with “Let’s still be a family”… or something like that.
NOTE: This Dotson guy apparently WORKS for the actual
WFLLC. His actual JOB title is…
Fire Management Specialist
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center
Not sure what a Fire Management Specialist is????
if he is working for Wildland Fire Lessons Learned that is the group that was formed after the Yarnell Hill Fire.
Not a Government Agency. The Training session he was giving is fairly high on the list of training and would be to IC’s Ops Basically Type 1 team Training at least that is what I remember of the s- 500 courses.
It’s just really, really hard to understand what this Travis Dotson guy realistically thinks the ‘takeaway’ should be from this piece of creative writing he just did.
He basically ENDS on a note that says…
If you really believe we are all ‘brothers and sisters’ then you will never, ever, ever, never, ever let the words “They screwed up” escape your lips when describing what might have happened to any of our “brothers and sisters”.
He simply seems to believe ( himself ) that admitting coworkers might have actually just plain ‘screwed up’… and remaining some kind of ‘special family’ are two complete incompatible things.
It’s just weird ( what he seems to be trying to say ).
WTKTT this concerns the Statement you made down below concerning the GM Back Fires or actually
Firing out line they built close to the main fire edge.
All of that firing out was from the Anchor point back north along the burn towards the point above the old grader there was no smokes along their line and the fire moved from the north and across the Look Out spot and burned thru the retardant line and the Tractor line that the crew walked in on.
the same 4×4 trail that Frisby and brown were on. There is no proof what so ever from all the photos that GM’s hand line was to blame for the fire escape that came from peoples valley and Yarnell.
the crew never connected the line above the grader There are a few pictures of the hand line and the fire below it. The crews firing out had no burning areas or smoke after the Drops earlier in the day they continued to build line to the north and never attached it to any other line.
There was no escaped fire from that area of the firing out of line. it just is not possible and the pictures taken by the crew show that.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 11, 2015 at 8:14 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT this concerns the Statement you made down below
>> concerning the GM Back Fires or actually Firing out line they
>> built close to the main fire edge.
Thanks for picking up on that reference. It’s actually something that hasn’t been talked about much with regards to EXACTLY what these ‘burnouts’ entailed.
It’s also something that no set of investigators ever bothered to ‘nail down’.
It wasn’t even until Brendan McDonough’s SECOND ADOSH interview On October 10, 2013, before they ever even asked him any questions about these BURNOUTS that we KNOW Granite Mountain ignited themselves out there on that ridge that day.
Even then… Brendan didn’t have much to say about them.
He says it all happened while he was doing that ‘mop up’ on the western side of the anchor point area and that he never even actually saw where they used the drip torches to light those ‘indirect’ burnouts.
You actually seem to have a better VISUAL on exactly what they were doing ( and when, and why ) than I do… so I’m going to trust what you are saying…
But I’m still having a little bit of trouble understanding EXACTLY what you are describing and EXACTLY where you are trying to say these GM ‘burnouts’ took place.
So let me take what you are saying line by line and see if I am understanding you.
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> All of that firing out was from the Anchor point back north along
>> the burn towards the point above the old grader
Which ‘point above the old grader’ are you talking about?
Do you mean ‘above the old-grader’ as in ‘to the NORTH of the old-grader? OR
Do you mean ‘above the old-grader’ as in up on high-ridge two-track parallell to grader?
Brendan’s impression ( even though he didn’t see them start the burns ) was the intention was the latter… and the were ONLY trying to ‘clean up’ some green areas along the high-ridge two-track and never got anything started headed down to the EAST and towards the old-grader.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> there was no smokes along their line
I’m really not sure what you mean by that.
You mean the line THEY were building or the fireline as they found it when they first
arrived up there to start doing anything at all?
Joy Collura’s own photos of that are from both the morning and the early afternoon show that there were plenty of ‘smokes’ up there even before the main GM contingent arrived.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> and the fire moved from the north and across the Look Out spot
>> and burned thru the retardant line and the Tractor line that the
>> crew walked in on.
Yes. That is after the wind reversal and what had been the TAIL fire(s) in that
area turned into HEAD fires heading due south.
But even the Blue Ridge Unit logs say that it was the actual uncoordinated Helicopter activilty in that area from earlier that had “split the fireline” and now there were TWO HEADS moving south.
The investigators never bothered to find out what Blue Ridge really meant by this and they also never even asked Brendan about this.
Until he evacuated… Brendan had the BEST view of how those TAIL fires were turning into HEAD fires of anyone on the fire ( except for Steed and Marsh who would never live to talk about it ).
But the investigators still never even asked Brendan a single question about these ‘TAIL’ fires, where they came from. and how they configured themselves into the HEAD fires that would drive Brendan off his lookout mound.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> the same 4×4 trail that Frisby and brown were on.
Did you actually mean to say “the same 4×4 trail that Frisby and Brown had used to go up and see Marsh and Steed for the face-to-face”?
I’m just trying to be sure.
Reason for the possible confusion is that at the moment that Brendan was starting to evacuate his lookout mound because the TAIL fires had now become HEAD fires… Frisby and Brown were actually ON the OTHER 4×4 trail that was farther EAST and is the one we’ve been calling the ‘Cutover Traile’ that connected the Sesame clearing area and the Shrine area.
That one wouldn’t burn over until much later, after all the FFs had evacuated from the Shrine area.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> There is no proof what so ever from all the photos that GM’s hand line was
>> to blame for the fire escape that came from peoples valley and Yarnell.
I’m pretty sure I totally agree with what you are saying… but I’m also not sure I am totally ‘parsing’ that correctly.
Of course their ‘hand line’ wasn’t to blame for anything.
‘Hand line’ is just a bunch of scraped ground.
I also don’t think that even if Rory Collins never fully extinguished whatever BURNOUTS they had started earlier in the day that these could be considered ‘escaped fires’ in any way.
My original comment was just pointing out that when it comes to PROOF… there also doesn’t seem to be much in the way of real PROOF that these Granite Mountain BURNOUTS ( that they lit with their own torches ) ever WERE completely and totally extinguished and that they didn’t just sort of ‘smolder around’ up there until later in the day when the winds reversed and everything that was TAIL heat became HEAD fire.
It’s the ‘P’ word again. ( PROOF ).
The Granite Mountain guys who actually lit all those backfires ( ?? how many ?? ) are all DEAD… Brendan seems clueless… and no one has ever been able to fully interview this mysterious Rory Collins guy.
That still leaves ( I believe ) some unanswered questions about these ‘burnouts’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The crew never connected the line above the grader
It’s not any of the ‘hand line’ I was actually wondering about.
It was the actual ‘burnouts’ that we know were ‘lit’ that day at various times.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> There are a few pictures of the hand line and the fire below it.
I think I know which ones you mean ( in addition to the Joy Collura photos )… but just to be sure… can you tell me exactly which photos you are referencing?
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The crews firing out had no burning areas or smoke after the Drops
>> earlier in the day
I’m not sure the Joy Collura photos support that assumption at all.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> they continued to build line to the north and never attached it to any other line.
Yes… but did the Rory Collins dumps completely extinguish their own ignitions… or were they just left ‘smoldering’?
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> There was no escaped fire from that area of the firing out of line.
>> it just is not possible and the pictures taken by the crew show that.
Again… I think I know which ‘pictures taken by the crew’ you are referring to, but
just to be sure, can you describe which ones you are using for reference?
BOTTOM LINE: I am most probably AGREEING with everything you are saying… but I’m just trying to make sure I am PARSING ( Understanding ) what you are actually saying.
Even if any of their own INDIRECT BURNOUTS really HAD been left ‘smoldering’ out there because Rory Collins never fully put them out… and even if these ‘smolders’ HAD then also
become part of the HEAD fires that would end up heading SOUTH through that middle bowl later that afternoon…
…I don’t think a case could be made that these Granite Mountain burnouts were then so ‘negligent’ that they would constitute the REASON why all those structures were lost in Yarnell and Glen Ilah.
The actual TRUTH would be that if any of their own intial burnouts weren’t completely extinguished out there neat that anchor point and the smolders eventually did become part of the western fireline heading SOUTH across the bowl…
…then that really just means those smolders became a contributing factor for the fireline that would eventually kill THEM in the box canyon… and not be part of the firelines that headed into Yarnell and Glen Ilah.
I am NOT saying ANY of this happened.
But I AM saying that we have always been lacking the ‘real story’ on these GM burnouts.
Here is one of the only times the ADOSH investigators even asked Brendan anything about the Granite Mountain BURNOUTS… and one of the only times Brendan had anything say about them.
He basically says they were of ‘little consequence’ and that they probably only went about 20 yards with them.
From Brendan’s second ADOSH interview on October 10, 2013…
Q3 = ADOSH / WFA Investigator Dave Larsen ( Rest in Peace )
A = Brendan McDonough
—————————————————————————
726 Q3: Was that, uh, about how many – how many minutes or – or portions of an hour
727 were they doing that about…burning up?
728
729 A: It couldn’t have lasted too long ‘cause, I mean, it felt like they only went
730 maybe 20 yards with it. So it wasn’t that big of a burn at all. It was just to
731 kinda even it up with the road ‘cause there’s just a little sliver that went up
732 and – ( a phone rings ) is someone calling me or am I calling someone?
———————————————————————
So what you have to wonder here ( and one of the questions that has never been answered ) is that if these ‘manual burnouts’ that Granite Mountain ignited with their own drip-torches were ‘inconsequential’ and only ( according to Brendan ) about 60 feet in length…
…then WHY would the ‘Air Attack’ over the fire ( Rory Collins ) get ‘bent out of shape’ about them in any way… or even actually NOTICE they were happening given all the other fire and ‘smokes’ that were all over the place at the same time.
WHY would that Air Attack even spend a moment’s time worrying about a 60 foot indirect burn along a two-track and then even go on to waste more TIME, more RETARDANT, and tie up ( supposedly ) TWO different SEAT resources just to put out an ‘inconsequential’ 60 foot long controlled burn?
Something just isn’t quite right there… and there are ‘questions’ that have never been answered about these Granite Mountain burnouts and the way Air Attack Rory Collins was reacting to them.
WTKTT
Lets go back to hand line construction.——As you build line you do not have a striate line and some times it is easer to cut from point to point and burn out the fuel between the line and the burned black area. That is what GM was doing
they did not first accomplish much of that do to Roy Collins.
Once the burn out is done you put a squad to mop up the burn out —
Mop Up— Completely remove all fire embers from the area.
between the Drops and the mop up you secure the line unless you are total Idiots you do not leave any thing that could be a reigniting point that would jump your line.
I refer to the hand line they built from the Anchor point back to the north that got some where close to a point above the old grader near the division boundary. After the burnout plan was dumped on they went back to direct line construction which is along the black burned area. Putting out any burning embers close to the line as they went.
The SEAT drops on the burn out were evidently uncoordinated with the Division Marsh. My only conclusion is Marsh and Roy did not talk to each other until after he dropped on them a flare up on the line would have been a primary target for the AA to keep the fire from escaping No coordination here it seems. After that Marsh had the crew build direct line. This failed burnout was probably not to far from where the crew started that morning if they were building line from the anchor point along the black burned area back to the North so that actual burn out was not far from there rest spot at 1530 probably gest to the NE of them or may be just under them..
The line that was not tied into their line was to the north of where Brendan was stationed and back towards the grader. That portion continued to burn and moved south to the tractor line that had been put in to the dozer. A one blade line that was not sufficient to stop the fire front and just north of the slurry line that did not stop the fire either.
The 4×4 tract that Frisby and brown used to meet with Marsh was the Tractor line and the 4×4 trail that went above the old Grader and into the burn to Marsh meeting spot.
The pictures at the rest spot show the hand line back to the North that Mackenzie took Ill go back and reference them and the specific one or you can look at the Mackenzie photos.
My final point No Crew leaves any fire along their line and burn outs as you said are small this one 60 Ft. long and probably no more than 15 ft. from the Black fire line maybe not even a 10th Ac in Size. there was not much time for the fire to have left any deep heat in the fuel probably burned the fines and was dumped on by the SEAT, easy mop up and move on with the line construction.
WTKTT
First the picture I cant find is from the lunch spot not the break spot– shows a picture of the hand line from next to it looking back with no crew on the line. It was some of the original photos released.
Mackenzie Photos of the burn out and dump by the SEAT.
IMG_0876 thru 0882.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 12, 2015 at 7:34 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Lets go back to hand line construction.——
Thank you for responding with more detail about exactly WHERE ( and WHY ) you think GM was doing this ‘line construction’.
See above for a longer response posted as a new parent comment.
I came across this required reading for the upcoming 1994 South Canyon (Storm King Mountain) Fire Staff Ride.
It’s by Vail Daily Editor Don Rogers, a former Los Prietos Hot Shot. It was written in January 2000, and it’s titled ‘LESSONS REPEATED BY THE HARSHEST OF TEACHERS.’
It is applicable to EVERY wildland fire fatality but in particular to the YH Fire.
http://www.fireleadership.gov/toolbox/staffride/downloads/lsr9/lsr9_lessons_repeated.pdf
The American Meteorological Society 11th Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology went well enough. The BWS gave her presentation and veered off from her original Abstract posted in Chapter VIII(?). She attempted to exploit their emotions, focused on ‘uber’ fire behavior versus extreme fire behavior, and the ‘uncertainty’ of weather forecasting, once again making the GMHS out to be victims of faulty weather forecasting She dwelt on one of her slides repreatedly – Grand Junction, CO NWS forecaster Chris Cuoco in tears, allegedly when he learned that the WFF never received his weather forecast about the incoming cold front. Due to the one link rule, I’ll post this ’20 Years After the South Canyon Fire’ article and photo on the reply post to this one.
Here is the link for the ’20 Years After the South Canyon Fire’ article referenced above with the NWS forecaster photo.
http://magicvalley.com/news/local/years-after-the-south-canyon-fire/article_ecc3b9be-642e-11e3-8a2f-001a4bcf887a.html
Thank you for the report back from the AMS Meeting. I REALLY appreciate it.
BTW, what do you mean by “the BWS”?
I’ve been scratching my head and can’t manage to come up with a thing. I have my own related acronyms but BWS isn’t one of them.
Just curious.
Did anybody challenge her? Is there any way for that to happen?
As I wrote way way downstream somewhere, my dad used to toss out some of his crazier theories at those meetings, but he did it for the argument, and he stayed for the argument and continued the argument for as long as it took.
He owned his stuff and had the creds to do so. He was never a dump and run kind of presenter.
Kyle Dickman’s book about Yarnell comes out tomorrow… but as of this morning what appears to be either the complete Forward or Prefix to the book has been published online at Outside Online magazine site…
http://www.outsideonline.com/1974236/burning-edge
Even just this excerpt completely contradicts Arizona Forestry’s recent claim to Judge Moses so that Brendan was never in any real danger that day and so the ADOSH citation regarding his near-entrapment should be dismissed.
According to what was just published this morning… Kyle Dickman is reporting that Brendan himself ALWAYS knew what deep shit he was in circa 3:40 PM… and Dickman also says Brendan was basically ‘freaking out’ about it just before Brian Frisby accidentally appeared and basically saved Brendan’s life.
It’s hard to tell just from this ‘Forward’ to the book whether there are going to be any ‘revelations’ or ‘new’ information published in Dickman’s book that’s coming out tomorrow… but Dickman is saying that he HAS been meeting with Brendan McDonough for regular ‘interviews’ for more than a YEAR now.
So. The report is that Brendan ALWAYS knew what deep shit he was in? Makes that last known radio contact of his with his supervisor — where he got the “We know … we can see it … do what you have to do” — even more profoundly gut-wrenching.
Reply to J. Stout post on May 11, 2015 at 11:50 am
>> J. Stout said…
>>
>> So. The report is that Brendan ALWAYS knew what deep shit he was in?
Well… the text that was published this morning by Outside Online magazine says that it is “Reprinted’ from Dickman’s book.
What it actually says at the bottom is…
——————————————————————————
From the book On The Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman. Copyright © 2015 by Kyle Dickman. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
——————————————————————————
It doesn’t say from what PART of Dickman’s book this is ‘Reprinted with permission’.
Could be the ‘Foreword’… could be the inside book cover slip text… could be from the actual first chapter. It’s hard to say.
But Dickman is (apparently) characterizing Brendan’s evacuation as some actual MAD DASH down from the mound with Brendan actually SPRINTING ( Dickman’s word ) down towards the old-grader location and just frantically ‘swatting’ the vegetation out of his way because he was already sort of ‘freaking out’… or something… and that by the time he arrived where Frisby was about to pick him up… he ( Brendan ) KNEW his chances of either out-running the fire OR surviving a deployment by that old-grader were (quote) “NOT POSSIBLE” and “GRIM”.
From what was published this morning…
—————————————————————-
Donut dropped off the back side of the granite knoll and started sprinting through brush so dry it cracked as he swatted it aside. Embers and ash drifted over his head. He plowed through the bushes toward a small clearing around the metal skeleton of a long-abandoned road grader.
As he stumbled into the clearing, Donut suddenly realized it wasn’t possible to outrun the blaze—a nightmare scenario for every wildland firefighter, made worse by the fact that the clearing, his only chance for survival, was barely the size of a tennis court. He couldn’t outrun the fire. Flames had halved the distance between the drainage and the clearing in minutes. The wind thrashed the walls of scrub oaks and manzanita bushes surrounding the grader. Even if Donut deployed his fire shelter, an aluminum shield designed to deflect heat, his chances of surviving a burnover were grim. Marsh knew as much, too.
——————————————————————
That totally contradicts everything Arizona Forestry was recently trying to establish in their ‘motion to dismiss’ that McDonough-related ADOSH citation.
Arizona Forestry’s total ‘grounds’ for asking for dismissal was to tell Judge Mosesso that since there is no testimony from Brendan in either of his ADOSH interviews that HE was ever concerned about HIS situation at all that day… that that means there were no grounds for ADOSH to issue a citation relating to his possible entrapment that day.
Looks like the Arizona Forestry lawyers forgot to actually check with Brendan before they submitted that bullshit to Judge Mosesso.
>> J. Stout also said…
>>
>> Makes that last known radio contact of his with his supervisor — where
>> he got the “We know … we can see it … do what you have to do” —
>> even more profoundly gut-wrenching.
Here is where Dickman is saying how much TIME he then continued to spend with Brendan over the last YEAR and while he was working on this ‘book’…
———————————————————-
We spoke for two and a half hours that first day. Over the next year, I talked to Donut often as he battled the worst of his post-traumatic stress and came to terms with survivor’s guilt. He took me to the locations of fires Granite Mountain fought during the 2013 season, told me stories of the crew, and related what it’s like to be a hotshot in an age when fires are burning more intensely than at any time in modern history.
———————————————————–
What remains to be seen is whether Brendan was also ‘coming clean’ with this Dickman author during this whole time… or whether Brendan was also playing THIS guy “like a violin” like he’s been doing with others over the past (almost) TWO years.
Also… it DOES, in fact, appear as if even the photo that Kyle Dickman has chosen for the COVER of this book about the Yarnell Hill Fire isn’t even a photo from the Yarnell Hill Fire.
It looks like just some generic photo from some OTHER Widlfire with a different fuel type.
That doesn’t bode well ( as far as accuracy goes ) for the rest of the book.
If the guy didn’t even feel the need to use a photo from the actual fire he’s trying to write about for the actual cover… then how much attention was being paid to accuracy on what’s between the covers of the book?
It doesn’t bode well, but most of the time the author has little to no control over the look of the jacket. That’s all done by the publisher. (A lot of children’s book authors don’t even get to choose their illustrators.)
Copy that.
Do you have any idea WHICH fire that is a photo of?
I’m looking at the TALL TREES being engulfed at the bottom of the photo and that really doesn’t look like like anything you’d find in the Yarnell / Peeples Valley / Weaver Mountain area.
I’ve never seen the photo before. I agree with you on the fuels, though. It looks more like Idaho, maybe (big subalpine trees, with photo taken from a big safety zone). It also looks to me like it’s been edited quite a bit (photoshopped color, texture, and perhaps extra smoke/clouds in the upper half of the image). I use a lot of photoshop, but I’m no expert. Marti might pick up on some good insights. I wonder if the original photo was from Random House stock, or taken by Dickman or one of the GMIHC crew members? I’m guessing stock photo, but I’d be curious to know for sure.
Maybe there’s some kind of actual ‘photo credit’ being given somewhere on one of the actual printed copies.
There’s nothing like that on the actual image of the cover used at Amazon… but maybe ‘credit’ is given on the inside of the jacket, or something.
I hear ya about authors not having ‘control’ over the jackets… but it’s not like this is some generic bodice-ripper book.
It’s supposed to be a NON-FICTION book about a REAL event.
Having a picture of some fire OTHER than the one the book is about on the front cover is right up there with writing a book about the Lusitania disaster and putting a picture of the Titanic on the cover.
It’s actually ‘beyond mistake’. It’s ‘laughable’.
Reply to Sitta post on May 12, 2015 at 1:39 pm
>> Sitta said…
>>
>> I’m guessing stock photo, but I’d be curious
>> to know for sure.
You are exactly right.
They just used a STOCK ‘Getty Images’ photo of the June, 2011 Wallow Fire near Eagar, Arizona.
Online ‘eCopy’ preview of the Dickman book has THIS photo credit on the fourth page of the book…
————————————————
eBook design adapted from printed book design by Barbara M. Bachman.
Cover design: Daniel Rembert
Cover photograph: Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images News
————————————————–
Here is a link to what appears to be the first ‘rental’ of this Kevork Djansezian. ‘Getty’ image in a June 12, 2011 article about the Wallow fire…
https://llwproductions.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/smoke-rises-around-the-lee-valley-recreational-area-on-june-12-2011-as-the-wallow-fire-continues-to-burn-in-big-lake-az-kevork-djansezian-getty-images.jpg
Notice that the actual photo being used for the cover of Dickman’s book is just a CROP taken out of about the CENTER of this Kevork Djansezian photo at the link above.
Also… see a new ‘parent comment’ up above.
It has some of the same information AND some links to the newly posted online ‘previews’ of the book itself.
Yes, in light of the fact that Brendan was certainly never under oath or subject to cross examination during any of his “talks” with Kyle Dickman … an author whose writing style you, WTKTT, have described rather accurately … it does seem to me that some healthy skepticism here is not inappropriate.
The book is being released as NON-FICTION.
I hope it lives up to that and isn’t just a lot of ‘imagineering’ on Dickman’s part.
To his credit, however… another ‘pre-release’ review has just popped up on Amazon and as much as this might just be a book written BY a Hotshot, ABOUT Hotshots, and FOR Hotshots…
…apparently it’s not pulling too many punches about how ‘over the top’ this particular group was with regards to the ‘military stuff’ and the ‘training’ and how Jesse Steed used to actually TRY and design workouts that would make them all THROW UP.
Comment by jd103 on Amazon…
——————————————————-
I mean no disrespect to the dead (so I won’t describe specific moments in the book which helped lead to my negative impression), and their fate and the grief of those who knew them are certainly moving at the end of the book, but macho young men living a militaristic life of hazing and competition have never been the kind of people I choose to spend time with, and reading a book about them wasn’t that enjoyable for me. To be fair, there were some members of the crew who weren’t very comfortable with it either.
————————————————
From another ‘excerpt’ from Chapter ONE of Dickman’s book…
Being PROUD TO PUKE…
———————————————————
The news thrilled Steed. He talked openly and often about his plan to someday take over as Granite Mountain’s superintendent, and even the temporary position gave him a chance to shape the crew.
Among the first things Steed did was make the physical training punishingly INTENSE.
The veterans expected him to do as much. During slow shifts on the line, Steed would often pound out a few dozen squats with a chainsaw on each shoulder or do lat pulls with forty-gallon buckets of foam—the soapy substance, mixed with water, that’s used to slow a fire’s spread. He designed the hardest workouts himself. One day he led the men to a three-hundred-foot hill and made them run up in their fire boots. Then they’d sprint back down, grab a chainsaw, and repeat the “Circle” six times. The hike up Thumb Butte, an aptly named chunk of black basalt that rises above Prescott, was even harder. Steed paired the hotshots up and made the teams race the two miles and six hundred vertical feet to the top, one man carrying the other on his back.
Most days, the intensity of Steed’s workouts made two or three guys PUKE from overexertion. Grant McKee pushed himself so hard he VOMITED EVERY DAY.
.—————————————————————
Of the three reviews on Amazon by people who (somehow) have already read the book, the comments that stand out and may be of interest for people on this IM forum are:
“There is lots of descriptions of the problems of the Hotshots but for some reason there does not seem to be a lot of the actual fire itself.”
“…..there is a lot of information about the Hotshots that is of interest. It just seems the actual fire and its aftermath is somehow lacking.”
“…..and even analysis of this particular fire, is very limited; most of the book involves the lives of some of those who died in this fire.”
******************
Reading these reviews leads me to believe that the book contains a lot of information on the men and their families, but the nuts and bolts of the fire suppression efforts and the events of that afternoon, not so much.
From my own perspective Mr. Dickman, don’t tell me what Eric Marsh was seeing and thinking when there is no possible way you could have gotten that information from him or from anyone else for that matter.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive (TTWARE)
post on May 11, 2015 at 12:36 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> Reading these reviews leads me to believe that the book contains
>> a lot of information on the men and their families, but the nuts and
>> bolts of the fire suppression efforts and the events of that afternoon,
>> not so much.
I have not read the book… but it now DOES sound like it’s what I suspected it might be. Just sort of a BIGGER ‘article’ just like the one he published in ‘Outside Online’ magazine just before the SAIR report was released.
It was obvious that he HAD talked ( at length ) with Brendan and a lot of the family members and they all DID ‘trust him’ ( because of his former Hotshot status ) and they told him a lot of small ‘details’ that they hadn’t yet shared with anyone else…
…but Dickman then was like one of those ‘wind up toys’ that you set down and it goes ‘scooting around’ all over the floor.
Dickman (apparently) has a knack for taking this ( most likely true ) little personal details and then “running away with them” and expanding them with his own imagination.
To the point where it’s hard to tell where actual real details from actual real witnesses end and Dickman’s own ‘imagineering’ begins.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> From my own perspective Mr. Dickman, don’t tell me what Eric Marsh
>> was seeing and thinking when there is no possible way you could
>> have gotten that information from him or from anyone else for
>> that matter.
Yes. See above. Dickman is good at ‘imagineering’.
That’s his writing style. Take SOME facts… but then ‘run with them’ as an author.
If this just ends up a tome full of ‘personal details’ about the men and their families and their reactions to the deaths of their loved ones…
…nothing wrong with that.
That IS, in fact, a ‘story’ that needs to be told.
But if that is ALL it is… then I hope people don’t think this is some kind of result of any kind of actual ‘investigation’ of the Yarnell Fire.
Maybe Dickman just knew where his ‘target audience’ lies.
He is a Hotshot, writing ABOUT Hotshots… and FOR other Hotshots.
‘Hotshots’ will probably eat this with a spoon ( and BUY the book ).
WTKTT
As an old Fire Fighter and hot Shot I would not buy the book there have been many out there the only one I ever Bought was the one on the Rattle Snake fire
that was to get all of the info I did not already know and it was not very personal
but more fact info. But John Maclean like other writers adlib at times or as you put it Imagineering to fill in the blanks real or not????
If there is no lesions to be learned and only Hot Shots talking about Hot Shots
and the Families reliving there Husbands, Sons, brothers lives and loss most do not want to face that possibility and how their families would react at least I would not. As a Fire fighter you live and breath the same thing in your mind
and hope you are never in that final hour or minuet before hell on earth consumes you.
If this author has decided to “go to press” even before there’s been a decision in either the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” Citation contention hearing OR the ‘wrongful death’ proceedings…
…then it’s pretty obvious the author is NOT interested in actually telling the REAL ( and complete as possible ) story of the Yarnell Hill Fire.
I think he really is just doing what he knows how to do.
Just write ABOUT the Hotshots… mostly for OTHER Hotshots.
I don’t think he’s actually going to be blowing sunshine in any particular direction… but I also don’t think he was all that interested in ‘what happened’, either.
But don’t get me wrong.
The world lost 19 amazing people that tragic afternoon… and ANY book that helps us know those people better is AOK with me.
I hope it sells a million copies… and everyone realizes ( if they didn’t already ) how tragic that day really was and how important it is we who are left do everything humanly possible to make sure something like that never happens again.
Gary Olson has never been wrong about this.
WTKTT said,
For Arizona Forestry… it’s all about the money.
And I say, thank you for that validation, I guess I can stop beating on that drum as loud and as much.
WTKTT said.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I really think this evacuation thing is a Very Big Deal.
>> In spite of the fact that I also believe, as I said below, that
>> the Yarnell residents generally hold at least some significant
>> fraction of responsibility for their properties burning down.
I agree.
Sounds like we are ‘in the same place’ there and I hope Gary Olson realizes it’s not incompatible to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time.
That YES… some people DO retain a degree of responsibility for what happened to them… but that doesn’t mean they are TOTALLY responsible for what happened to them. If that makes any sense.
In other words… just because some of those people didn’t do what THEY probably should have done prior to the events of that weekend… that doesn’t automatically mean that Arizona Forestry did not, themselves, ROYALLY SCREW UP that (entire) weekend.
There is still all the evidence in the world that they DID ( screw up ).
And I say, yes, I certainly do agree it is a shared respsonsibility. It’s just that it has been so long that I have forgotten if anyone had written about the fact that the residents share in the blame.
And thank for really nailing it down that the responsibility for putting out the fire is also a shared responsibility. I like to kick the Arizona State Forestry Division around as much as anybody and more than most, but there is plenty of blame to go around.
I think the Yarnell Hill was the perfect storm of incompetence, passing the buck, hidden agendas and motivations, and just plain really bad luck that all came together on a really bad day and stole so much from so many and destroyed so many lives that it shocked all of us in wanting to why in the hope it can be prevented from every happening again.
As the desert walker when hiking. I use county assessor to see who and location I need written permission from so when on gis mappings of whatever county I am hiking in I place layers on map of police and where they cover as well as fire and i place state and blm layer on and flood plains and mines and etc so i first off get a feel for area i explore
but.
**
** THE ACTUAL YARNELL AND PEEPLES VALLEY CITY LIMITS
This post is basically just a ‘followup’ to the discussion that was going on down below regarding the ‘Initial Attack’ on the Yarnell Hill Fire ( on the afternoon of Friday, June 28, 2013 ).
That discussion, itself, was just an offshoot of another discussion about the recent Judge’s decision(s) to outright DISMISS two of the Yarnell property damage lawsuits and never even let the plaintiffs have their “day in court” or to ever have even the CHANCE to try an prove their claims.
It’s not possible to have a discussion about lawsuits like this actually getting outright ‘dismissed’ by a Judge without things getting little ‘gnarly’.
People definitely are going to have some pretty strong opinions about that sort of thing.
This update doesn’t ‘push the ball down the field’ in any particular direction. It’s just some CLARIFICATION for some of the assumptions going on with regards to what was ( or wasn’t ) happening the afternoon of Friday, June 28, 2013.
It contains some information and some LINKS that I meant to post yesterday, but still might be helpful with regards to showing how CLOSE the original lightning strike really was to the actual City Limits of both the incorportated areas of ‘Peeples Valley’ and ‘Yarnell”.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 9, 2015 at 7:07 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT I am still confused
>> First the Coop plans are not for fires 3 miles from a incorporated City
>> They are for close proximity threats.
Correct… but hang on to your hat for a second.
The following hasn’t been discussed much, and may or may not come as a ‘surprise’ to some… but the Yarnell Hill Fire as being reported on Friday afternoon, June 28, 2013, was, in fact, almost WITHIN the actual ‘City Limits’ of BOTH incorporated Towns named ‘Peeples Vallley’ and ‘Yarnell’.
It WAS a ‘close proximity threat’ for BOTH of those ‘incorporated Cities’ from purely a “How close was it to the City Limits?” viewpoint… and most certainly could have qualified as what the ‘Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Response’ documets call a “Border Fire”… which poses an immediate threat to MORE than just one jurisdiction.
The following is the actual WildCAD database entry created by Arizona Forestry Dispatch Center at exactly 1736 ( 5:36 PM ) on Friday, June 28, 2013.
** From Filename: “I-Dispatch Records.pdf”
On page 16 ( of 97 pages )
——————————————————————————————
WildCAD Incident Card – Arizona Dispatch Center: AZ-A1S 2013-688
“YARNELL HILL” Wildfire 06/28/2013 17:36:00
Area AD223 (ADC-223)
Reporting Party: CONGRESS FIRE DEPT.
Initial Report On Conditions:
ACTUAL VISUAL OF LIGHTNING STRIKE ON YARNELL HILL WITH
3 CONFIRMED CALLS. BEST ACCESS WILL BE THE TOWN OF YARNELL
TOWNSHIP AND RANGE IS 10N 5W – SECTION 20
Initial Location: YARNELL
Lat: 34°, 11.67″, Lon: 112°, 47.808″, T10N, R5W, SWNE Sec 20
Actual Location (07/02/2013 15:35):
Lat: 34°, 13.698″, Lon: 112°, 47.49″, T10N, R5W, NENE Sec 8
—————————————————————————————
The INITIAL Location reported for the ‘Yarnell Fire’ was WRONG.
This INITIAL report put the ‘smoke’ about a mile south of where it really was and on the south side of the Weaver Mountains, towards Congress. It also put the ‘smoke’ very near BLM land, which is why there was confusion that afternoon about who should be responding to the fire ( BLM or Arizona Forestry ).
The ACTUAL location turned out to be that point just some hundreds of FEET ( not YARDS ) west of the actual Yarnell and Peeples Valley City Limits.
The ACTUAL Decimal Latitude/Longitude values of the original Lightning strike are…
34.2283, -112.7915
NOTE: If you cut-and-paste the line above ( including the comma ) into the SEARCH field for Google Maps and then just press ENTER… you will see a RED Balloon Marker on the resulting Google map at the exact point where the lightning strike took place. The Township, Range and Section values in the ‘Actual Location’ field of the ‘WildCAD’ document are also correct. The Lightning strike took place in the Northeast Quarter of the Northeast Quarter of Section 8 in Township 10 North, Range 5 West.
That point is just 314 feet Northwest of the point where GM Hotshot Christopher MacKenzie would be standing on Sunday, June 30, 2013, when he took his two 9 second videos. ( Basically just literally a ‘stone’s throw’ away ).
The Yarnell Fire also started just 769 feet west of the edge of Township 10N, Range 05W, Top half of Section 9… which is NOT Arizona State Land.
That is REX MAUGHAN’S land, which is mostly within the City limits of Yarnell.
The old-grader is just 257 feet west of the Yarnell City Limit. Brendan’s lookout spot was just 460 feet outside the Yarnell City Limit.
The ‘lookout spot’ where Brendan was standing on his lookout mound was only 466 feet due northwest of the western edge of the Yarnell City Limit, and only 2,208 feet due southwest of the south edge of the Peeples Valley City Limit.
** YARNELL CITY LIMITS ( MAPS )…
If you simply use the Google Maps SEARCH bar and ask for ‘Yarnell, Arizona’, the resulting map will be showing you the actual Yarnell and Peeples Valley City Limits as a sort of ‘gray shading’ in the background.
You can also click the following link for a much better visual of the actual Yarnell City Limits…
http://maps.hometownlocator.com/map_V5.html?mode=place&state=AZ&place=0484980
The ‘Red boundary’ with the maroon shaded interior indicates Yarnell City Limits The GREY shaded area to the north is the south half of the City Limits of Peeples Valley.
Click the “Satellite” label button in the upper right corner of the map to switch from map to satellite view.
The Yarnell City Boundaries will REMAIN overlaid on the Satellite Map as a semi-transparent area.
You can ZOOM in on the Weaver Ridge and see that the fire started just a few hundred feet outside the Yarnell City Limits.
All of the following were totally WITHIN the actual ‘City Limits’ of Yarnell…
——————————————————————————————
– The ENTIRE two-track road that GM hiked out on Sunday morning.
– The ENTIRE two-track road that led from the old-grader up to that ‘T’ intersection and is the same two-track that Brian Frisby and Captain Trueheart Brown used when they went up in their Polaris Ranger for that first face-to-face with Marsh and Steed ( From 11:55 AM To 12:25 PM ).
– The ‘T’ intersection where that two-track met the high-ridge two-track and the point that the Blue Ridge GPS Tracking Data has always had a label on it that said “Mystery Panel Found Here”. It has NEVER been explained what that label meant in the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data.
– The ‘Descent Point’ up on the high-ridge two track road.
– The ENTIRE fuel-filled box canyon and deployment site area.
– The ENTIRE Boulder Springs Ranch compound.
—————————————————————————————-
So the fact that the original lightning strike really was VERY CLOSE to the actual ‘City Limits’ of both ‘Peeples Valley’ and ‘Yarnell’ simply introduces the possibility that this fire SHOULD have been originally classified as a “Border Fire”, according to the actual Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreements’… and there SHOULD have been MULTIPLE ‘Agencies’ responding for “Initial Attack’, and NOT just Arizona Forestry.
To make this point a little clearer… it’s time to print some actual ‘excerpts’ from this Master Arizona Cooperative Fire Agreement.
That requires a LINK and there already is one in this message so I’ll pick up this part of ‘the story’ in the next ‘Reply’ message so I can post another LINK.
**
** “CLOSEST FORCES” CONCEPT, “BOUNDARY FIRE” and “INDEPENDENT ACTION”
**
** AS PER ARIZONA’S OWN….
**
** MASTER COOPERATIVE WILDLAND FIRE MANAGEMENT CONTRACT…
The State of Arizona
Master Cooperative Wildland Fire Management and
Stafford Act Response Agreement
http://gacc.nifc.gov/swcc/management_admin/incident_business/states/az/AZ_JPA.pdf
NOTE: The Yarnell lightning strike was so close to the actual City of Yarnell boundary line that it could actually be considered what the cooperative fire agreement document(s) refer to as a “Boundary Line” ( E.g. BORDER ) Fire.
ALSO NOTE: The term ‘Agency’, as defined in these ‘Cooperative Fire Agreements’, simply means ANY ‘Organization’ that has any kind of responsibilities for Wildland Fire Suppression on the lands which they are legally responsible for protecting. In Arizona Forestry’s case… that is Arizona State Trust Lands and Private lands outside of incorporated areas. For ‘Agencies’ like Peeples Valley Fire Department and the Yarnell Fire Department… that means the ‘lands’ that falls within the actual CITY LIMITS for those ‘Agencies’.
Any ‘Agency’ can ask for HELP form the other ‘Agencies’ at any time… and any Agency can perform suppression actions on the other Agency’s property if they feel the fire represents a threat to land that THEY are responsible for.
That is the ‘essence’ of the ‘cooperative’ part of the ‘cooperative fire agreement’.
From the document…
————————————————
25. Closest Forces Concept: The guiding principle for dispatch of initial attack suppression resources is to use the CLOSEST AVALIABLE RESOURCES regardless of which AGENCY the resources belong, and regardless of which Agency has protection responsibility.
26. Fire Notifications: Each Agency will promptly notify the appropriate Protecting Agency of fires burning on or THREATENING lands for which that Agency has protection responsibility. Likewise, protecting Agencies will promptly inform jurisdictional agencies whenever they take action on fires for which the Protecting Agency is responsible, and fire reports sent will be sent to jurisdictional agencies within 30 days after a fire is declared out.
27. Boundary Line Fires: A boundary line fire, as defined in Exhibit A, Glossary of Terms, will be the initial attack responsibility of the protecting Agencies on EITHER side of the boundary.
Neither Agency will assume the other Agency is aware of the fire or that the other Agency will take action.
Each Agency will make every reasonable effort to communicate with the other Agency concerning the fire.
The Protecting Agency arriving FIRST on the fire will identify an individual ( based on qualifications ) to act as Incident Commander.
When BOTH protection agencies have arrived, the agencies will mutually agree to the designation of an Incident Commander and incident organization, and take reasonable actions to determine the agency lands involved in the fire.
28. Independent Action: Except as other wise limited in annual operating plans, NOTHING herein shall PROHIBIT any Agency, on its own initiative, from going upon lands known to be protected by another Agency to this Agreement to engage in suppressions of wildfires, when such fires are a threat to lands that are that Agency’s protection responsibility.
In such instances, the Agency taking action will promptly notify the Protecting Agency.
These Independent Actions will be commensurate with the jurisdictional agencies land management considerations, and subject to the laws and regulations of the Jurisdictional Agency. Independent Actions taken prior to notification to and request for assistance by the Jurisdictional or Protection Agency are Non-Reimbursable Wildland Fire Management Services.
————————————————
Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCrady and Yarnell Fire Chief Jim Koile ( or the on-duty Yarnell Fire Captain Ryan Gardner ) could have decided that since this fire was essentially on the ‘boundary’ of the intersection of the City Limits for BOTH Peeples Valley AND Yarnell… that it automatically represented a THREAT to lands that were the ‘protection responsibility’ for BOTH of those Fire Departments.
That also means that under either the ‘Boundary Fire’ or the ‘Independent Action’ clauses of the Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreement… they could have combined their resources and BOTH gone up there on the ridge to extinguish that lightning strike fire right then and there… on Friday afternoon/evening… and it didn’t matter a damn what Arizona Forestry AFMO and on-call Duty Officer Russ Shumate had to say about it.
They ( Both Peeples Valley FD and Yarnell FD ) would have been within their ‘rights’ as outlined in the Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreement.
The Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreement does also point out that if the actions taken fell within the “Indepenent Action” clause of the agreement.. that no ‘compensation’ can be requested by the responding ‘agencies’ for those “Independent suppression efforts”… but it still make it clear that those agencies can undertake those suppression efforts immediately and WITHOUT the ‘permission’ of the other Agencies.
That’s another ‘cooperative’ part of any ‘cooperative’ agreement.
BOTH sides are free to take on ‘initial attack’ or ‘suppression’ efforts without needing the other side’s ‘permission’ to do so.
Just for reference… when Arizona’s Master Cooperative Wildland Fire Management Response Agreement says THIS…
——————————————————————————
27. Boundary Line Fires: A boundary line fire, as defined in Exhibit A, Glossary of Terms, will be the initial attack responsibility of the protecting Agencies on EITHER side of the boundary.
——————————————————————————-
Here is the actual ‘Exhibit A, Glossary of Terms’ definition of a ‘Boundary Fire’ that they are referring to.
It says pretty much what you would expect…
——————————————————————————-
Exhibit A
Glossary of Terms
Boundary Fire: A wildfire burning ON or THREATENING lands under the
responsibility of MORE THAN ONE AGENCY.
——————————————————————————-
‘Agency’ can mean ‘Arizona Forestry’… or any County or City Fire Department.
City Fire Departments ARE responsible for wildfire suppression when the fire is burning on ( or simply THREATENING ) land that is within their own CITY LIMITS.
There is a fly in the ointment regarding these boundary lines.
Just so you know, I have checked numerous sources and they ALL show the boundary lines as being in basically the same locations,
BUT,
municipal boundary lines CANNOT encroach into or onto federal or state lands, PERIOD.
With that being said, NONE of these boundary lines reference the state land piece that encompasses the deployment site, which is under consideration for the memorial.
We all know this is currently under state land ownership, thereby, it CANNOT be within the Yarnell municipal boundary.
With those particular boundary lines being suspect, I don’t think one could accurately rely on the other boundary lines without some hardcore verification.
TTWARE… thanks for that clarification.
I believe, however, that talking about land OWNERSHIP and whether or not that lands happens to fall within certain ‘jurisdictional lines’ are two different things.
YES… that SOUTH HALF of Section 9, Township 10, Range 05 North is undoubtedly ‘Arizona State Trust Land’ and subject to ‘auction’ if it is to ever be ‘sold’ to anyone.
However… the NORTH HALF of that same ‘Section 9’ belongs to Arizona Rancher Rex Maughan.
The Yarnell fire started just 769 feet ( that’s FEET, not YARDS ), west of the edge of HIS ‘private’ property.. which is within the City Limits of Yarnell ( HIS property, that is ).
So the Yarnell Hill fire very much meets the definition of what Arizona’s own Master Cooperative Fire Agreement defines as a “Boundary Fire”… whereby the fire is so close to the “Boundaries” between two different ‘Agencies’ that BOTH ‘Agencies’ are required to RESPOND to the incident.
Any wildfire in those extreme fire conditions there in the Yarnell area could ( and eventually DID ) move 700 or 800 feet VERY quickly and could ( and eventually DID ) start burning directly on land that the ‘other agency’ is responsible for.
So it’s an interesting concept… and an interesting point that you raise.
Which comes FIRST ( when it comes to fire suppression responsibilities as per the Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreements ).
The chicken or the egg?
If a piece of land that is simply OWNED by a non-private person or agency is within ‘City Limits’… is it automatically EXCLUDED from the the land that the City Fire Department is supposed to be responsible for?
Does that mean City Fire Departments aren’t even responsible for handling fires on the property of the Federal and/or State owned buildings in their own downtown areas?
I am not sure that we are not getting confused by boundary lines and Incorporated city boundary’s there is a difference The boundary outside the city is called unincorporated but the city has drawn and added boundaries that are not part of the city until the private property is subdivided and the ranchers do not pay city Taxes on those large ranch areas. They still are paying county Taxes.
Dose that make any since?
The reality here is the suppression cost who Pays a little city Fire department is not going to pay a dozen fire fighters out of its budget when the State can pay or take the fire since it was not with in the city fire area agreement or no agreement the fire at that time was not a threat to the City Proper.
Again its the Politicks I could go on and on here but will leave it there.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 10, 2015 at 9:46 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> I am not sure that we are not getting confused by boundary
>> lines and Incorporated city boundary’s there is a difference.
Yes. You are RIGHT. There IS a difference.
There is also something called “City Planning Boundaries” which can be ‘extended’ outside of ACTUAL ‘City Limits’ pretty easily.
All I know at this moment is that when I ask either Google Maps or Google Earth to show ‘City Boundaries’ on a map… I am getting these ‘red outlines’ exactly as shown in some of those links below.
They APPEAR to be tied to the 2010 census data… but whether they actually include obscure things like “City Planning Boundaries” versus pure “City Limits”… I don’t know.
I doubt it… but there isn’t even anything in the Census Data itself to make absolutely sure what these ‘boundaries’ that Google Maps is showing actually represent.
Even Google CALLS them ‘City Boundaries’.
Followup…
Before this ‘offshoot’ from the discussion about the dismissal of two of the Yarnell Property damage lawsuits gets ‘too far afield’… I think it’s important to remember that while it’s all very interesting that many people still don’t realize that the Yarnell Fire started JUST outside of the actual ‘City Limits’ for both Yarnell and Peeples Valley ( and only 769 feet away from the western edge of Rancher Rex Maughan’s private property )… the real question is…
“So what? Will 2 cents and that get anyone to China?”
The bottom line is that regardless of whether or not this lightning strike qualfied as a “Boundary Fire” according to Arizona Cooperative Fire Agreements… the principals involved on Friday afternoon ( Congress Fire Department, Yarnell Fire Department and Peeples Valley Fire Department ) all reacted the same way to being told to “Stand Down” by Arizona Forestry.
They didn’t question the ‘orders’ coming at them from Arizona Forestry.
They ‘Stood Down’.
They did NOTHING… even though the lightning strike could have been construed to be an ‘immediate threat’ to lands that 2 of these agencies were legally responsible for protecting ( PVFD and YFD ).
In other words… they were TRUSTING ‘Arizona Forestry’ that they would, in fact, be doing what they SAID they would do.
Take responsibility for the fire, take ‘care of it’ and not ‘screw up’ the initial attack.
The intricacies of what happened then ( and continued to happen for the entire weekend ) are NOT going to ever be fully ( or legally ) resolved of the plaintiffs are never even going to be allowed to “have their day in court” and even try and prove the levels of negligence that ADOSH itself seems to have already asserted existed that weekend due to the very fact that they have levied their own historic fines against Arizona Forestry for the ‘screw ups’ that were going on that entire weekend.
There will also never be a chance to even try and prove whether certain things DID or did NOT happen that weekend which may have contributed to the disaster.
Example… ( think about this one )…
We absolutely KNOW that one of the only legal precedents for successfully proving ‘negligence’ against a State ( or Federal ) sponsored Fire Agency is if/when you can prove that their own ‘actions’ ( like backburning or botched indirect attacks ) actually CONTRIBUTED to the damages.
We also absolutely KNOW that at some point on Sunday morning… Granite Mountain was very busy setting their own ‘backfires’ out there near the anchor point. There is even a picture of Robert Caldwell with his lit drip-torch in his hands ( and his sleeves rolled up ) doing exactly that.
That’s the Christopher MacKenzie picture that also shows that Oregon 450 handheld GPS unit strapped to his pack strap which has never been accounted for and has seemed to just ‘disappear’ from the deployment site and the evidence chain.
Well… we ALSO know that these ‘backburns’ and ‘indirect burnouts’ that GM had initiated that day also got ‘dumped on’ by Air Attack Rory Collins.
But to this day… NO ONE has been able to fully interview the elusive Mr. Rory Collins.
Do we know whether he really put out ALL of the ‘backburns’ that Granite Mountain was doing that day?
And I mean… COMPLETELY put them out?
Or did he just ‘screw them up’ enough to abandon the tactic… but left some of those backfires burning out there?
Well… given the fact that any fires burning on the ‘tail’ end of the Yarnell fire would soon become the HEAD fires… it’s important to know whether those ‘backburns’ that Granite Mountain were doing might have actually become ‘part of the problem’ later that day… and might have been CONTRIBUTING FACTORS to the conflagration that eventually destroyed of lot of Yarnell of Glen Ilah.
My point is… THESE are the kinds of things that will NEVER really be known if none of these lawsuits are allowed to “have their day in court”.
The investigations were so piss-poor that these are now questions that can ONLY be answered with continued testimony and depositions from the people involved… and given in the context of a court proceeding where perjury could be applied to any false testimony given.
So everything that did ( or didn’t ) happen with regards to the Friday ‘Initial Attack’ and the continued failure of Arizona Forestry to successfully control this fire through both Saturday and Sunday…
…is STILL relevant.
It is ALL relevant.
That’s what I believe, anyway.
WTKTT
Government building within City Limits?????
Almost all FS and BLM Offices are not owned but on lease agreements
within City’s.
I understand the Co-op Agreements and also closes Forces concept.
The Problem in small communities/City’s—-They do not have the funds to go out and suppress fires on State and Federal lands. If they take action they pay for it out of tight budgets.
These communities want the State or Feds to pay them so they prefer being dispatched by them.
While this fire may have been 789 ft. from there boundary it was 2 miles from Yarnell and Glen Isla city’s. We also have the YCFD unable to respond Fire Fighters on Friday evening as stated by the Chief.
TTWARE stated a fact in his information that may have been very real.
The boundary lines out in the bush are not actual City Limits but a
Unincorporated portion of the city boundary. It is not laid out or plotted for development and there for private ranch land not assets under City Taxes but rural County land with in the boundaries of the city as Single family development is established the city includes the new development under city ordinance and increases the boundary of the incorporated City. .
Closest Forces Concept—–This is a Dispatch thing The State or Feds
Dispatch under Co-op agreements and pay the other suppression forces. The city’s as well can request assistance but also pay for State or Federal resources. City’s under Co-op agreements prefer that the State Take action on Wild Land Fires then they are not responsible for the cost. A couple of $10,000 Dollar MAFS drops is a lot of money for a small city to take out of their fire budget thus let the State have the Fire and they can pay us if they need our help. It is a Political game.
WTKTT,
My point being that if the south half of the section has incorrect boundary lines, then potentially the north half and other places could be incorrect as well, no matter what the ownership status.
Due to what I have stated above, THAT portion of the Maughn ranch, may or may not be within the municipal boundary.
ALMOST ALL of the ranchers I know are EXTREMELY AVERSE to the thought of any of their land being included within municipal boundaries or being annexed into same.
I bring this up not because it is a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but simply to point out that if neither the state-owned land or that portion of the Maughn ranch were ACTUALLY within the municipal boundary, the local ‘duty to act’ may not have been as apparent because the fire started on the other side of the ridgeline, possibly a much greater distance from the Yarnell boundary than we are led to believe by looking at the ‘boundary lines’ on a map.
I know you are a stickler for accuracy, and I just think some caution should be used when referencing boundary lines, some of which we know to be incorrect.
WTKTT,
In response to your other question as to whether or not a city is responsible for fire protection for say, a state or federal building located ‘downtown’, the answer is there is no responsibility for that protection..
The city can’t even perform a fire inspection on those properties unless requested, and has no jurisdiction to enforce fire codes for anything they might find wrong during those inspections.
However, fire and EMS protection IS provided for those government buildings as a courtesy since there are no other options.
For larger complexes including Indian reservations, a municipality might enter into a contractual relationship where the government entity would pay for fire and EMS services.
As I also stated earlier mot Federal buildings within city’s are not owned by the Feds but Private Individuals who Long Term lease the buildings to the Government which would afford them all of the city protection. As Forests and Parks and BLM have grown it has been more beneficial to lease offices in city’s than to buy and build them self’s. which is more common today than 40 years ago.
Copy that.. but make no mistake… this is a COMPLICATED issue, and even the ‘Cooperative Fire Management Agreements’ acknowledge that any give ‘ignition’ COULD actually be considered a ‘Boundary Fire’ and there could be MORE THAN ONE Agency who is tasked with protecting the same real-estate.
Take a look at the following City Map of a place called ‘Hot Springs, Arkansas’.
Pretty much the ENTIRE ( Federal ) ‘Hot Springs National Park’ is actually WITHIN the ‘City Limits’ of the City of Hot Springs itself…
http://www.maptechnica.com/us-city-boundary-map/city/Hot%20Springs/state/AR/cityid/0533400
Here’s an example even ‘closer to home’ ( in Arizona ).
The following link shows that PART of the Prescott National Forest is actually INSIDE the ‘City Limits’ of the City of Prescott itself…
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Prescott,+AZ/@34.596166,-112.4538705,9z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x872d28d400717ceb:0x9a43de752eefedd
So if any kind of fire actually breaks out on any part of that land which is considered to be part of the Prescott National Forest AND ‘within the City Limits of Prescott’… then it would also be considered ( according to Arizona’s own Cooperative Fire Agreements ) a ‘Boundary Fire’ whereby MULTIPLE ‘agencies’ have a ‘vested interest’ in responding to the fire.
All I am saying above is that because of the close proximity of the original Yarnell lightning strike to the ‘City Limits’ of BOTH ‘Peeples Valley’ and ‘Yarnell’… it *might* have been a case whereby the Fire Chiefs of BOTH Peeples Valley and Yarnell had every right to ‘respond’ to the fire themselves ( because it was a threat to lands they were responsible for )… and they were actually NOT ‘required’ to obey any kind of “Stand Down” order from the (unconcerned) AZF Duty Officer Russ Shumate.
It’s pretty safe to say, however, that ONLY if any of these ‘property damage’ cases actually ever go to ‘trial’ will any of this nitty-gritty legal stuff get any further debate.
As a clarification to the map link you have referenced with this comment, there is NO overlap of city and federal lands. The green is the Forest and the white is either City or County. I repeat, no overlap.
The boundaries are so close though, that generally ANY fire within a reasonably close proximity will cause both, city and federal resources to be dispatched simultaneously (automatic aid).
Reply to TTWARE post
on May 11, 2015 at 7:47 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> As a clarification to the map link
>> you have referenced with this
>> comment, there is NO overlap of
>> city and federal lands. The green
>> is the Forest and the white is either
>> City or County. I repeat, no overlap.
I think you forgot to ZOOM in.
If you click that link up above and you do not automatically see the ‘red’ Prescott City Limit lines overlapping with the Prescott National Forest in the southwestern part of the Prescott City Limits…
…then you need to keep pressing the ZOOM button ( the PLUS sign ) until you do.
If that still doesn’t work for you… and you still can’t see the obvious overlap between the Prescott National Forest and the City Boundaries of Prescott itself…
…let me know and I’ll see if I can find a map link that WILL work for you so you can see what I am talking about.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> The boundaries are so close though,
>> that generally ANY fire within a
>> reasonably close proximity will cause
>> both, city and federal resources to be
>> dispatched simultaneously
>> (automatic aid).
Exactly. Even the Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Agreements say that the criteria for MULTIPLE responses on the part of MULTIPLE agencies is simply whether or not an ‘ignition’ even represents a POTENTIAL THREAT to the lands that any particular Agency is legally responsible for protecting.
The boundaries don’t even HAVE to OVERLAP ( though sometimes they actually do ).
The “Independent Action” Clause of the Cooperative Agreement just says that if ANY Agency feels an ‘ignition’ represents a real THREAT to the lands that it is responsible for… then it is ALLOWED to ‘respond’.
You are, in fact, supposed to simply TELL the other Agencies that you ARE responding… but there is nothing to stop you from taking whatever action you feel is necessary to protect the lands that are within your jurisdiction and you are responsible for.
As someone who is familiar with the areas in question, I can state the following as fact:
As further clarification, the green overlay on the google map is INCORRECT. The red boundary lines ARE correct for the city limits, BUT, in some areas there are small county islands between the city and forest properties.
Again, for the record, there is not, and CANNOT BE, an overlap of city and federal boundaries (even though the incorrect overlay on the google map makes it appear so).
The green overlay appears to simply be someone’s laziness or lack of desire to try and follow the hodgepodge matrix of city, county, and federal boundaries.
Reply to TTWARE post
on May 12, 2015 at 9:22 am
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> As someone who is familiar with
>> the areas in question,
I believe you… but I think this means you should publish your phone number so a lot of ‘agencies’ can call you the next time there’s a fire and they have to determine whose responsibility it is to respond to the damn thing.
If they are using ‘maps’ generated from the same NAVSAT and 2010 census data that Google ( and US Geo Topo? ) uses… then they are going to be pretty damn confused themselves, eh?
I think the whole point here, as it relates to Yarnell, is that there is no question that the multiple ‘agencies’ involved on Friday could have all had their own ‘response’ and it would have been perfectly ‘legal’ and ‘jusitifable’ under both the ‘Boundary Fire’ and “Independent Action” clauses of Arizona’s own Master Cooperative Fire Agreement(s).
I wish that had happened.
If the Peeples Valley fellas were ready to go up there and just “take care of it” ( because it was a threat to lands THEY were responsible for ) I wish they would have just ignored this Russ Shumate guy and done what their instincts were telling them to do.
If they had… we would NOT be here having this conversation.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 10, 2015 at 7:18 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT… My fault on city limits did not realize the extent of them on
>> Private land out side of the Home developed areas.
No fault present. This simply hasn’t been talked about much and MOST people still think
that lightning strike was WAAAY outside the City Limits of both Yarnell and Peeples Valley.
It wasn’t.
It can ‘technically’ be said it was on the very ‘outskirts’ of BOTH of those ‘jurisdictions’ and
SHOULD have been subject to suppression efforts and/or initial attack by BOTH the
Peeples Valley Fire Department AND the Yarnell Fire Department ( combined resources
and effort ).
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Was the Helms Ranch within the City Limits?
Absolutely. ( Yarnell City Limits ).
So were all of the following…
– The ENTIRE ‘two-track’ road that GM hiked out on that morning.
– The ENTIRE part of that two-track that led from the old-grader up to the ridge two-track
and the same two-track that Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown used to get up there to
for that face-to-face with Marsh from 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM.
– The ‘T’ intersection where that two-track road met the upper rider two-track and where we have always seen that label that says “Mystery Panel Found Here” on the Blue Ridge GPS tracking data… but there’s never been any explanation what that means.
– The actual ‘Descent Point’ up on the Saddle.
– The ENTIRE fuel-filled box canyon.
– The ENTIRE deployment site.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Still some specific who’s property the fire started on?
The official WildCAD database record for the “Yarnell Hill Fire” indicates that the
ACTUAL location of the original ignition wasn’t confirmed until July 2, 2013, and
some investigators got up there with photos they already had and a GPS unit.
They determined the original ignition point was…
34.2283, -112.7915
SIDENOTE: If you cut-and-paste the line above ( including the comma ) into the SEARCH field for Google Maps and then just press ENTER… you will see a RED Balloon Marker on the resulting Google map at the exact point where the lightning strike took place.
Indeed… the original lightning strike was just 769 feet ( that’s FEET, not YARDS ) to the west of the western edge of Rex Maughn’s private property, which is that entire top half of Township 10 North, Range 5 West, Section 9.
Almost that entire ‘top half’ of Section 9 is WITHIN the ‘Yarnell City Limits’ and is NOT ‘State Trust Land’.
So for the sake of a some hundreds of FEET ( not yards )… the original lightning strike was, in fact, on Arizona State Trust Land… but no one actually went up there to verify that on Friday afternoon.
It really must have been ‘hard to tell’ if it was actually right on the City Limits, or not, just using a pair of binoculars that afternoon.
Besides… a fire can cover just 700 or 800 feet pretty damn quick in those dry conditions, so for all intents and purposes that ignition WAS representing an ‘immediate threat’ to land that was inside BOTH the Peeples Valley City Limits AND the Yarnell City Limits.
.>> Bob Powers also wrote…
>>
>> The BLM and State both responded
That is because of the confusion about where the ignition was as it was being intially reported.
It was FIRST reported to be in Section 20 of Township 10 North, Range 05 West. That’s about a mile SOUTH of where it really was and very close to BLM land.
It was then re-reported as being where it actually was… up there on on that ridge just 769 feet to the west of the edge of Rex Maughn private land ( but they weren’t sure about that, either, until July 2 when ignition point was confirmed ).
For a while… Dean Fernandez ( BLM on-call Duty Officer that day ) and Russ Shumate ( Arizona Forestry on-call Duty Officer ) weren’t sure how MANY ‘ignitions’ there actually were out there… and whose land they might be on in that ‘checkerboard’ ownership mess around there… so that is why they BOTH responded to Yarnell on Friday evening.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> It was on state land and they took the fire
That was only after it was determined there were NOT ‘multiple ignitions’ in that area and the only ‘smoke’ showing was, in fact, right out there a few hundred feet west of the Yarnell City Limits.
They still weren’t able to actually pinpoint the location that evening.
No one even went out there with a GPS to CONFIRM the ACTUAL ( exact ) location on Friday.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> again while you may not understand the responsibility issues here the State
>> was responsible for the fire and who was assigned to it. The Original mistake
>> was not utilizing the BLM crew there who could have hiked to the fire that
>> night. and under Co-op Agreement with the State.
Russ Shumate had any number of ‘options’ on Friday… including access to full Helitack
Crew back up in Prescott.
The point is that he just didn’t care enough to do ANYTHING on Friday, even though many people thought he should and were offering to “go up there and take care of it”.
If Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray and/or Yarnell Fire Chief Jim Koile had had any ‘sand’… and a greater understanding of their reponsibilities… the fact that the fire was burning just hundreds of feet away from BOTH of their ‘City Limits’ gave them the automatic authority to take what the Cooperative Agreements call “Independent Action” regardless of Arizona Forestry Russ Shumate’s lack of concern on Friday.
If either McCray or Koile ( or both ) had DECIDED to send people up there… Shumate had no legal authority to stop them since the fire WAS just hundreds of feet away from the land they are responsible for protecting… and the actual Cooperative Agreements say that is what is called a “Border Fire” and multiple agencies SHOULD be ‘responding’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> For several reasons I have already stated and maybe some others the State
>> to control of the fire and decided to suppress it them self’s.
Well… the ‘State’ ( Arizona ) may have ‘pretended’ to take control of the fire on Friday
afternoon… but they certainly did not ‘decide’ to do any SUPPRESSION.
Not on Friday, anway.
All AZF AFMO and ICT4 Shumate did was confer with BLM Rep Dean Fernandez about what they were going to do on Saturday.
Shumate didn’t give a shit about doing ANYTHING on Friday. It was all about ‘tomorrow’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Happens all the time with different agencies on IA remember this was a
>> simple Lighting fire the first night and stayed at 2 Acers in the Rocks till
>> 1600 on Saturday. The fire burned for 24 hours and was at the same 2 Acers.
>>
>> Nine out of ten times the fire would have been easily controlled thus the
>> lack of energetic suppression.
>>
>> How a agency responds and suppresses the fire is not accountable to any
>> one on there suppression plan.
>>
>> I agree they should have been more aggressive.
I would add that the failure was not JUST on the part of Russ Shumate and AZF.
Both Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray and Yarnell Fire Chief Jim Koile really did have more of a ‘stake’ in this than has always been believed… given that even the initial lightning strike was only hundreds of FEET ( not YARDS ) away from the very land they are paid to protect ( Land that is within the City Limits of Peeples Valley and Yarnell ).
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Not knowing all the Political ins and outs between the State and City Fire Dept. and there
>> could have been many as to why the volunteers and city fire fighters were not used.
Gary Olson has never been wrong about this.
For Arizona Forestry… it’s all about the money.
If Russ Shumate, as acting ICT4, had actually REQUESTED that FFs from either Peeples Valley or Yarnell FDs go up there ( since they knew how to get there ) and “take care of it”… then that really would have created a “billable hour” situation for those resources, according to the actual Cooperative Fire Agreements.
On the other hand… according to the same Cooperative Agreement(s)… if the other two involved ‘agencies’ ( Peeples Valley FD and Yarnell FD ) had decided it really was what the agreements call a “Border Fire” and it really was (already) a threat to their jurisdictions ( City Limits )… then they could have taken “Independent Action” outside of anything Shumate was doing…
…but guess what? The same Cooperative Fire Agreement then says that this kind of “Independent Action” is NOT a “billable situation”. If you decide to take “Independent Action”… you are now eating the cost(s) yourself.
So Shumate could not have STOPPED McCray or Koile from taking “Independent Action”… but he wasn’t going to ASK them to because that would have constituted an official ‘request for resources’ and would have created a BILLABLE situation on Friday afternoon/evening.
Shumate just didn’t consider what COULD happen with that fire.
As rocksteady has maintained all along… all these ‘experts’ just thought it was a piece-a-shit grass fire and they were being negligent in evaluating the POTENTIAL for disaster there in that terrain, with those extreme fire conditions.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> While we all have a gut check over the way this fire and the evacuation was
>> handled their are a lot of factors involve which I still believe in the end the
>> Property owners will not win Law suits against the State.
>>
>> It just dose not happen in almost all cases like this.
>>
>> But you never know with a Judge and a possible Jury.
But first the plaintiffs have to be ALLOWED to “make their case”.
That is what is unfortunate here.
There is most CERTAINLY already evidence that these property owners will very likely be able to PROVE there was “gross neglicence” taking place that weekend in Yarnell.
They SHOULD be allowed “present their case” and then let the “embers fall where they may”.
I will still disagree with you on Negligence and especially Gross Negligence.
You are right if the Fire is on State land and the Fire department responds the State can refuse to pay. The State took charge and had the City FD stand down which they had the authority to do. The State also had the Authority to not send hand crews in that night for safety reasons. I also understand that the YHFD did not have the resources to send to the fire.
that night.
Pure and simple that is not negligence and the state can and will use that premises in there argument. Some of us old Fire Fighters would not agree with not hiking to the fire at night we have all done it safely. The new fire suppression guides allow IC’s to not commit crews at night for safety reasons. The same holds for the Saturday late morning almost noon IA with
the helicopter and crew. Never have figured why they went so late but again that is not Negligence just the way fire suppression works out with Helicopters and crews.
As I said the property owners have a large piece of responsibility here. If you looked at each house burned on Google Earth prior to fire then most if not all would fall into the cant save do to no clearance or difensiable space. So that will not float no matter how late the home owners were told to evacuate.
We will just have to agree to disagree until all is settled.
Neither Yarnell nor Peeples Valley are incorporated cities, but both are official Arizona Fire Districts and receive tax levies collected by Yavapai County through property taxes. Each fire district has borders, and yes, the lightening strike was so dangerously close to the border of the Yarnell Fire District and the populated neighborhoods in west Yarnell (Glen Ilah) that it was a horrible mistake for those local firefighters to have not made a response. Both departments have undergone wildland fire training and amassed plenty of PPE and firefighting equipment. Unfortunately, neither fire chief was in their area; coincidently, neither of them are still fire chiefs for the districts.
There is hope and redemption still. and always when it comes to the yarnell fire. Many inaccuracies read this week on this chapter. and I am weak and too weak to get into it. To affirm if you count the comments. made on I’M. it has been Sonny who has commented much on the quads n implents of that Friday afternoon more than I. I do not lay “claims” but since day one until I got marked character -wise in a
court of law I had openly shared transparency of all information. shared to or with the hikers. even physically led Dr Ted Putnam and Jerry Pfingston to the door step of the man named Bruce who lives very near to the Helms and it is Bruce’s account that stated such and the hikers told the world they NEED to meet the people especially to confirm Bob Powers is very wrong on those last hours on topic “evacuation “…I helped for free so many hundreds directly and looking back there is a concern not because I spent time n labor freely but because up until that ended I see many of the people do not get what defensible space means…too sick to get into it…may take six or seven chapters if I began to ramble…there is too many topics I will try when stronger.
Joy,
I am sorry if I upset you. The people of Yarnell and the surrounding communities are your dear friends and I am sure many of them are like family to you. I believe you are emotionally attached to them…and that is a good thing for you and them.
But they are not my friends and family and I am not emotionally attached to them. I am emotionally attached to the GMIHC, even though I didn’t personally know any of them because well…I guess I never stopped being a hotshot even though I no longer worked as one.
And yes, I believe the people of the Yarnell and the surrounding communities share some of the blame and the responsibility for the deaths of the GMIHC, however irrational and unfair that is on my part because so few of them had defensible space around their homes and property. And then they expected wildland firefighters to save them and their property, and now they are suing because everything went so wrong for so many of them. I also blame these communities because as WTKTT has pointed out, their own fire leaders could have put the Yarnell Hill Fire out themselves when it was small…but they didn’t.
Yes, the Arizona State Forestry Division could have done a lot of things better, and at the risk of repeating myself, too many tax payers and political leaders in Arizona have not provided them with all of the things they need to meet everyone’s expectations. And even though I am not their apologist, I think some of the criticism directed towards them is unfair and needs to be countered.
And now I am completely disgusted with Yarnell and the surrounding communities because all of the land owners have denied access across their little slices of heaven on a bun wildland urban interface for us to have access to the deployment site so that we can stand beside those wildland firefighters who died there trying to protect that same land, however misguided their efforts were.
I hope Yarnell and the surrounding communities are cursed forever by our fire gods.
Joy Did the Sheriff’s department or the Fire Department go to the homes in the morning and advise them to be ready to evacuate?
Also under Co-op Agreements the Fire Chiefs of the City’s had the right to be at any planning sessions and in direct contact with the IC did they do that?
The Sheriff’s department should have also had a Deputy with the IC at Fire Head Quarters to keep current on the Situation and respond for Evacuation?
By 2 PM there should have been a full scale Evacuation of Yarnell and Glen Isla.
That was the Police and Fire Departments responsibility.
The decision was late Granted but every one survived and got out.
Their Homes and property burned because of difensiable space and pre Prevention that was not done by them. It was their responsibility to have a fire safe
area around their homes and out buildings when you live in the Urban Interface if you want to have a safe home then you need to work or hire someone to do the work to make it Fire safe. The State can not protect homes that are not difensiable
and they had no time to do so. But the city’s have not learned the lesson of Yarnell and Glen Isla they would not vote on new laws that require safer homes. It is back on the home owner to protect their homes or take a chance it wont happen again.
So…..again it’s really too late and I’m mostly too brain-dead after today, in which the battery on my Subaru died in a parking lot (this is JUST not my week) — so I’m currently re-charging it overnight and I have no clue if that is even working. since it’s on a ANCIENT recharger….(let’s hear it for the day before Mother’s Day)……..
BUT.
I was kinda sorta hoping that, by now, WTKTT would have weighed in on this, since he has (I suspect) better timelines and links than I do, but since he hasn’t…….I’m gonna write what I have in my head.
I really think this evacuation thing is a Very Big Deal. In spite of the fact that I also believe, as I said below, that the Yarnell residents generally hold at least some significant fraction of responsibility for their properties burning down.
Bob, you wrote:
“Joy Did the Sheriff’s department or the Fire Department go to the homes in the morning and advise them to be ready to evacuate?”
I see absolutely nothing in the “public record” that says that they did. From the get-go in the morning, the focus was always on the north side of the fire. Thus Peeples Valley DID get a morning evacuation notice. Whether they decided to evacuate or not. They had considerable notice/warning. Yarnell and Glen Isla DIDN’T, as least as far as I am aware.
Should they have? Obviously YES, in hindsight.
But they DIDN’T.
Remember, even ADOF FIRE managed to remain OBLIVIOUS to the significant probability that the fire was going to reverse direction, until, OMG, the fire REVERSED DIRECTION, in spite of the warnings they got from the National Weather Service in Flagstaff and from Bravo 3 (see my RANT about this downstream).
The risk of this fire to Yarnell and Glen Isla that day was, imho, COMPLETELY ignored, until OMG the fire has reversed and “COMPLETELY outperformed our EXPECTATIONS, OMG OMG” !!!!!!
I mean that’s REALLY what is in the interviews. (And also, I might add, in Elizabeth’s “report” to the Meteorologists this week It’s a HUGE part of the whole mythology of this fire. But that doesn’t make it TRUE.
It just makes it convenient.
Bob also wrote:
“Also under Co-op Agreements the Fire Chiefs of the City’s had the right to be at any planning sessions and in direct contact with the IC did they do that?
The Sheriff’s department should have also had a Deputy with the IC at Fire Head Quarters to keep current on the Situation and respond for Evacuation?”
It is my understanding that Yarnell Fire Dept Chief Kolbe was, indeed, stationed Sunday at the Incident Command Post.
For whatever THAT may have been worth, all things considered.
I have no clue whether or not anybody from the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department had anyone stationed there. But they had vans busily buzzing around everywhere, as is seen in the Air Support Air2Air videos.
But it seems to me that, since the IC and the IMT were all hyper-focused on the northern part of the fire, and, subsequently, not paying attention to the warnings they were being given that the fire was HIGHLY likely to reverse direction, ………
How could either Chief Koile or the YCSD could have known that they needed to call for an evacuation of Yarnell/Glenn Isla before Gary Cordes FINALLY got around to calling for that at 3:50 PM?????
And, given that their own “reverse 911 system” was not even working all that well that day, and all kinds of glitches were happening even in Peeples Valley all that day, is it no surprise that the various “elderly people” were frantically having to escape at the last minute, while, MIRACULOUSLY, nobody else GOT KILLED????
Bob, you wrote:
“By 2 PM there should have been a full scale Evacuation of Yarnell and Glen Isla.
That was the Police and Fire Departments responsibility.”
Regardless of what SHOULD HAVE BEEN at 2 PM (which I totally agree with), nothing even REMOTELY was even in the planning stage at that time, give all the things I’ve written above and down below. And I just don’t blame the Police and Fire Departments for that. I DO blame the Arizona Department of Forestry Incident Management Team for that, for all the reasons I’ve written above and downstream.
So given what you have said, that this SHOULD have happened, and given that it DIDN’T (even REMOTELY) happen, are you possibly even maybe, at this point, even remotely willing to entertain the notion that a combination of Arizona Department of Forestry’s Type 2 Short Team (which, all things considered, IMHO, should have NOT BEEN assigned to this fire — given the fact that there was a Type 2 Regular Team conveniently stationed in Prescott and available), and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department (which is also a defendant in this lawsuit) ……….
….might actually be, to be fair, considered to be justifiably considered two agencies that should be held accountable to the citizens of Yarnell who, as WTKTT has written, deserve their day in court?
I have all along believed that to be the case.
NOTHING I have read here has caused me to change my opinion about that.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 9, 2015 at 11:43 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I was kinda sorta hoping that, by now, WTKTT would
>> have weighed in on this, since he has (I suspect) better
>> timelines and links than I do, but since he hasn’t…….
>> I’m gonna write what I have in my head.
If you are talking about simply “who said what to whose dog and when” regarding the evacuations.. I believe I did ‘weigh in on this’ down below where I posted some links to the primary MSM articles that ‘investigated’ this.
Those MSM articles are where most of the known DETAIL emerged regarding the whole ‘evacuation situation’.
There is still a lot that is NOT KNOWN, however, because no one has ever really done a COMPLETE job of investigating this.
Example: Who actually even organized the all-important ‘Jeep Squads’ at the last minute that were supposedly YFD volunteer FFs running around literally SCREAMING at poor residents to “GET THE HELL OUT… RIGHT NOW!”
Supposedly…. YFD Fire Chief Jim Koile was still up at the ICP in Model Creek playing ‘Medical Officer’, or something like that, while these YFD ‘Jeep Squads’ were trying to keep people from burning to death down in Yarnell.
If that’s the case… then WHO ‘organized’ these YFD ‘Jeep Squads’… and WHO was actually participating in all that?
We still don’t know.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I really think this evacuation thing is a Very Big Deal.
>> In spite of the fact that I also believe, as I said below, that
>> the Yarnell residents generally hold at least some significant
>> fraction of responsibility for their properties burning down.
I agree.
Sounds like we are ‘in the same place’ there and I hope Gary Olson realizes it’s not incompatible to hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time.
That YES… some people DO retain a degree of responsibility for what happened to them… but that doesn’t mean they are TOTALLY responsible for what happened to them. If that makes any sense.
In other words… just because some of those people didn’t do what THEY probably should have done prior to the events of that weekend… that doesn’t automatically mean that Arizona Forestry did not, themselves, ROYALLY SCREW UP that (entire) weekend.
There is still all the evidence in the world that they DID ( screw up ).
More on this later… but I’ve actually spent most of today answering some of the OTHER ‘Friday related’ questions that appeared below.
Bob Powers is under the mistaken impression that the original lightning strike was ‘3 miles from the City Limits’.
That is NOT the case.
The ‘City Limits’ of both Yarnell and Peeples Valley came within just HUNDREDS OF FEET of this initial lightning strike.
Indeed… the original lightning strike was just 769 feet ( that’s FEET, not YARDS ) to the west of the western edge of Rex Maughn’s private property, which is that entire top half of Township 10 North, Range 5 West, Section 9.
Almost that entire ‘top half’ of Section 9 is WITHIN the ‘Yarnell City Limits’ and is NOT ‘State Trust Land’.
So for all intents and purposes… this ‘lightning strike’ qualified ( as per the Arizona Master Cooperative agreements ) as what is called a “Border Fire”… and both Peeples Valley FD and Yarnell FD were fully justified in doing their own ‘intial attack’ regardless of anything Arizona Forestry or Russ Shumate had to say about it.
More about his tomorrow… inclding links to maps showing the actual Yarnell and Peeples Valley ‘City Limits’ and how close they really were to that initial lightning strike.
Correction…
I said ( above )…
“More on this later… but I’ve actually spent most of today answering some of the OTHER ‘Friday related’ questions that appeared below.”
I haven’t actually POSTED the ‘LONG ANSWERS’ to these questions from below yet.
What I meant was… I’ve spent most of the day just WRITING those ‘answers’ and including all the rights information and links.
I will actually POST them sometime tomorrow.
It’s complicated… and requires reprinting a few sections from the actual Arizona Master Cooperative Fire Management Agreement(s) to show that the close proximity of the Yarnell lightning strike to the ‘City Limits’ for both Peeples Valley AND Yarnell mean that it really did qualify as an ‘immediate threat’ to those municipal boundaries and jurisdictions and it qualified as a “Border Fire” and eligible for “Independent Action” and that PVFD Fire Chief Pat McCray and YFD Fire Chief Jim Koile really were under NO obligation to give one flying crap what Russ Shumate had to say about anything that afternoon/evening.
WTKTT
My fault on city limits did not realize the extent of them on Private land out side of the Home developed areas.
Was the Helms Ranch within the City Limits?
Still some specific who’s property the fire started on?
The BLM and State both responded It was on state land and they took the fire again while you may not understand the responsibility issues here the State was responsible for the fire and who was assigned to it. The Original mistake was not utilizing the BLM crew there who could have hiked to the fire that night. and under Co-op Agreement with the State.
For severial reasons I have already stated and maybe some others the State to control of the fire and decided to suppress it them self’s. Happens all the time with different agencies on IA remember this was a simple Lighting fire the first night and stayed at 2 Acers in the Rocks till 1600 on Saturday. The fire burned for 24 hours and was at the same 2 Acers.
Nine out of ten times the fire would have been easily controlled thus the lack of energetic suppression.
How a agency responds and suppresses the fire is not accountable to any one on there suppression plan.
I agree they should have been more aggressive.
Not knowing all the Political ins and outs between the State and City Fire Dept. and there could have been many as to why the volunteers and city fire fighters were not used.
While we all have a gut check over the way this fire and the evacuation was handled their are a lot of factors involve which I still believe in the end the Property owners will not win Law suits against the State.
It just dose not happen in almost all cases like this.
But you never know with a Judge and a possible Jury.
Many structures burned because there was no effort by the Yarnell Fire Department (which is primarily staffed by paid personnel) to extinguish ANYTHING after the fire-storm passed. Witnesses who did not evacuate watched as the flames spread from exposure to exposure. And yes, many residents neglected making any attempts at abatement of dangerous fuels around their homes, but many properties that were treated burned while many that weren’t didn’t.
Well…here is a comment for you and once again I have to ask…CAN YOU HANLDLE THE TRUTH!
It had been portrayed on this thread that the interaction between the state and the Yarnell volunteer fire department went something like this, “By the power granted to me by the Arizona Davison of Forestry, I hereby order you men to STAND DOWN!”
But in reality it probably went more like this, “I really appreciate the offer Harv, but I know you have to open the fillin’ station later on this mornin’ and Larry and his brother Daryl and his other brother Daryl are supposed to be out at the job site today and I have already ordered up a con crew from Lewis.
Now…if I can whip their asses up that mountain, they should be able to handle this little smoke, and damn it Harv, you remember what happened last time, I am still catching heat from Phoenix over how much that medivac helicopter cost, that hike would have been a bear when you and the boys were in your twenties and you know how long ago that was!”
I mean…God Bless volunteer firemen and the service they provide to their communities and they can throw one hell of a fund raising pancake breakfast or barbeque, but 99 out of every 100 of them do not have any business hiking to the top of the Weaver Mountains to fight wildfires. And after that issue, you get into the problems of whether or not they are ICS red-carded are wildland firefighters and or firefighter supervisors this year, have they been step or pack tested, do they have access to the proper tools and other equipment and have they had all of the required training and refresher training?
And if something goes wrong with that plan, talk about liability, I would think there is even more liability going down that road. What would the conversation have been if any of them would have been injured or if they would have failed to suppress the fire and the same thing would have happened but with different players.
The Con crew from Lewis should have been able to put that fire out if they would have been motivated to do so. And by the way, the Battlement Creek Fire was a re-burn from a lighting strike in an apple orchard the local volunteer fire department had taken suppression action on a few days earlier and it escaped from them when they went back out to put the same fire out…again.
You can go back and read my comments to John Dougherty way back when this all started and it is commonly known that this is the same way the Arizona State Forestry Division always fights fire, as I keep saying, the Arizona State Legislature and the tax payers in Arizona who vote are not funding them to do anything different. If you want to change the system, change how you fund wildland fire fighting agencies, especially the state and local agencies.
I have to agree with Bob, the judge who dismissed the lawsuits got it right. If you people want a wildfire protection on your little slice of heaven on a bun wildland/urban interface land, you are going to have to pay for it. AND you need to do it well in advance of when Mr. Bad Ass Wildfire comes knocking at your door. No wildland firefighting agency out there is funded, equipped or staffed to protect all of the private property at all times from wildfires.
Except for Joy C’s claim, I think she should have been given whatever she asked for because well…she’s Joy C.
Now…there are private companies out there who contract out with land owners to provide that service. I have seen their trucks and personnel out working on fire breaks and on standby during high threat periods for wildland fire around some high dollar homes outside of Williams, Arizona. But those really were some high dollar homes and I know that service does not come cheap, but you will have a private wildland firefighting service at your beck and call, who will make your property their first priority. The Arizona State Forestry Division makes trust lands their first priority and all of the other agencies make the land they are responsible for their first priority.
If you go back and read many of my posts last year, you will be reminded how much I was ranting and raving about the fact that Darrell Willis did not have any idea what he was talking about when he was going on and on how important it is for wildland firefighters to protect private property and homes, no…it is not, nor has it ever been, nor should it ever be…period
I am going to take a wild guess, and venture forth the opinion that the vast majority of the residents of Yarnell, Glen Isla, Yavapai County…hell bells, the entire population of the Great State Of Arizona wants a government small enough to drown in a bathtub…but big enough to come and personally tell them when it is time to save themselves, their loved ones and their family heirlooms from a fast approaching out of control wildfire because they are too stupid to take responsibility for their own lives. Do I have that right?
OK…just in case your personal government representative is too damn busy fighting the wildfire to personally show and save YOU…you might want to ask yourself these questions next time.
1. Is there a large volume of dark grey and black smoke laying over with the wind towards where I am located and has the sun been blocked out by this smoke? Yes or no?
2. Can I see visible flames burning towards my actual location? Yes or no?
3. Is there a large pyrocumulus convection column of smoke, fire and debris billowing hundreds if not thousands of feet into the sky and is it looming over my position? Yes or no?
4. Is there hot ash and other burning debris raining down on where you are and is the source of that material burning towards where I am standing? Yes or no?
5. Is a fire storm of biblical proportions bearing down on me? Yes or no?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” you had better didi mau most ricki tick with the things that are most important to you and will not delay your departure. OK? And if your answer to two or more of these questions is “yes”, you probably should already be gone.
But then again, I am prejudiced against all of the property owners in Yarnell et al, except for Joy C and a few others, especially all of those who would not grant access across their property for people to get to the deployment site.
Oh…and one more thing for YOU (what do you mean you people) people. Just in case that comment was too oblique for you, please allow me to tighten it up a bit for your benefit. Because you see….in the past, this would have been less of a problem because most of you people would already be dead and would not have lived long enough to pass on your “stupid” genes to the next generation.
It was called the law of natural selection and it worked pretty well, most of the time. Now however…with more and more of you people surviving each and every year who are procreating and diluting the gene pool, well…it becomes more and more of a problem with every passing year because some of you people are just too stupid to be alive. Right? I mean, I’m just sayin’.
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 8, 2015 at 6:02 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> It had been portrayed on this thread that the interaction between the
>> state and the Yarnell volunteer fire department went something like
>> this, “By the power granted to me by the Arizona Davison of Forestry,
>> I hereby order you men to STAND DOWN!”
This seems like a perfect time for a little ’roundup’ of what is actually KNOWN and still NOT KNOWN about what went down on Friday afternoon and evening, June 28, 2013.
The bottom line here is that this has all still NOT been properly ‘investigated’ and there really are still conflicting reports about who said “Stand down” to who, and when.
In a nutshell…
There is evidence that ALL THREE of the closest ‘Fire Departments’ to where the first ‘smoke’; was spotted on Friday afternoon ( Congress FD, Yarnell FD and Peeples Valley FD ) made both separate and combined ‘offers’ to just “go up there and taken care of it” even before dark that day… but that ALL THREE of these separate Fire Departments were told ( by one person or another ) to “Stand Down”.
There is also that still un-investigated and un-verified report that one of the BLM engines said it HAD found a way to get men up there Friday evening and that it WAS actively doing that… but then radio contact was lost and the only other dispatch entry for this BLM engine was when Shumate released it back to quarters later Friday night.
This could STILL be the so-far unverified report from Joy Collura of there being photographs of FFs on UTVs / ATVs actually being ‘up there’ at the scene of the ‘smoke’ on Friday night before it got dark.
The TIMING on all of this also remains sort of mystery and is really something that NEEDS a ‘court case’ and ‘more testimony’ to ‘figure out’ since the investigators seemed unable to do so.
The way I understand it… things went like this…
Lightning struck at that now-infamous spot up on that ridge to the west of Yarnell at right around 5:30 p.m. Friday, June 28, 2013
Glen Ilah residents Jim and Shelley Kuempel saw it from their front porch and ended up being one of first folks to “call it in” to the Yarnell Hill Fire Department.
Yarnell Fire Captain Ryan Gardner and 73-year-old volunteer Bob Burkhardt were the only ones on duty at that time.
Any number of people were seeing that ‘first smoke’ at the SAME TIME after the lightning strike on Friday afternoon and were ‘calling it in’ to various phone numbers.
At about the same time it was being “called in” to YFD… Congress Fire Department Chief Virgil Suitor was also getting “calls” since the same ‘smoke’ was clearly visible from the Congress side of the Weaver mountains.
At this point… YFD Captain Ryan Gardner knew they ( he and 73 year old volunteer Bob Burkhardt ) were going to need HELP… So HE ( Gardner ) called Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor to talk about this ‘smoke’ they were both seeing.
They pretty much knew THEN that it was up there on State Trust Land.
So Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor was then the one who called the Arizona Forestry Dispatch Center to report this fire on State Trust Lands and to tell them that his Department, in conjunction with Yarnell Fire Department, were talking about going up there that afternoon to (quote) “just take care of it”.
Someone ( still unidentified ) at the Arizona Dispatch Center was then ( apparently ) the first one to use this “Stand Down” directive that afternoon.
This person at Arizona Dispatch told Congress Fire Chief Suitor that they would be sending someone out to check on it. That would ( eventually ) turn out to be Arizona Forestry AFMO and on-call Duty Officer Russ Shumate.
This person at Arizona Dispatch also apparently told Chief Suitor right on that first call that they would be using “State Crews” to take care of things.
So Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor then ( apparently ) relayed this “Stand Down” directive he got from this mystery person at Arizona Dispatch back to YFD Captain Ryan Gardner.
Probably only minutes after that… the Peeples Valley Fire Department got involved as well.
They were ALSO seeing the ‘smoke’ and had been getting their own phone calls.
Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray told AZCENTRAL reporters that he called the Yarnell Fire Department himself right around this same time and offered THEM assistance to just go up there while it was still daylight and take care of the thing… but McCray says HE was told by YFD Chief Jim Koile to “Stand Down”.
So in the case of Peeples Valley Fire Department… they got a “Stand Down” directive from YFD Cheif Jim Koile… but only because YFD had been relayed this “Stand Down” directive from Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor, who is the one who actuall spoke to Arizona Forestry Dispatch before Russ Shumate ever even got involved.
As the afternoon / evening wore on… and Russ Shumate DID get involved, then ( apparently ) even MORE offers were made by all THREE local Fire Departments to go up and “take care of the fire”… but now it was ICT4 Russ Shumate giving out the “Thanks, but no thanks” directives.
So it WASN’T just “Harv’ and ‘Daryl’ and his other brother ‘Daryl’ volunteering to just go up there and “take care of it”.
By the time Arizona Forestry AFMO Russ Shumate had even gotten involved…. THREE different Fire Departments were ‘awake’ and offering to coordinate efforts to just put the fire out while there was still daylight.
Congress Fire Department had 9 full times it could call and at least that same number of volunteers if it needed them.
YFD only had 2 volunteers on-duty at first… but by the time Chief Suitor was calling Arizona Forestry and by the time Peeples Valley FD was calling YFD… YFD had also ‘woken up’ and Chief Koile was involved and other YFD volunteers were being activated.
No word on how many FFs were ‘on duty’ up in Peeples Valley but same situation there… by the time the calls were being made and the ‘offers to help’ were being exchanged… the department had ‘woken up’ and was notifying available fireman they might be needed.
And while these WERE mostly ‘volunteers’ we are NOT talking just Harv and Daryl and Daryl and Beevis and Butthead, either.
MOST of these FFs in the Congress, YFD and Peeples Valley Fire Departments had FAR more Wildland experience than most of the members of the State DOC Crews that were going to show up Saturday ( and not even be capable of hiking out there )… AND it’s safe to say they had more WFF experience than even a LOT of the guys who would be showing up on Sunday as members of these ( supposedly ) ‘elite’ Type 1 Hotshot crews.
It was also ( literally ) “their own backyard”.
Yes… someone still might have gotten hurt. It was steep, rocky terrain and they
MIGHT not have been able to put it all out before it got dark…
But even a ‘slight injury’ in the course of attacking it on Friday would have been preferable to waiting until Sunday for 19 of the ( supposed ) ‘best of the best’ and ‘experts’ to go out there and actually get themselves KILLED.
As long as I’m inserting this kind of “roundup” of this “follow the bouncing STAND DOWN” ball…. I’m going to also add some of the LINKS and the QUOTES that support the SUMMARY up above.
Might as well have them all in one place.
This story has really still NOT been fully told and will MOST likely change if the people involved start to all be called to the witness stand or are required to give further depositions.
I’ll try to actually get these in roughly chronological / sequential order…
** InvestigativeMEDIA Article
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-investigation-ignored-major-mistakes-by-the-state/
From the article…
—————————————————————
There still was more than two hours of daylight after the fire first was reported at 5:41 p.m. on Friday, June 28 — more than enough time for a quick strike by firefighters before nightfall, wildfire experts say.
Former Yarnell Fire Chief Andersen is convinced that the fire could’ve been extinguished the evening it started if the Yarnell Hill Fire Department and the state had quickly responded.
“There’s a jeep road that goes up there to it,” he says. “There’s no reason for that [fire] not to have been put out.”
But Yarnell had only two firefighters, including a volunteer more than 70 years old, on duty that evening.
Yarnell’s fire chief at the time, Jim Koile, isn’t a Yarnell resident and wasn’t in town the night the fire started. Koile resigned October 8 under mounting pressure from outraged residents who believe the department could’ve done far more to protect their community.
Firefighters from the nearby community of Congress were poised to at least attempt to engage the fire with Yarnell’s department but were directed by state officials not to respond.
“They basically told us they were working on it,” Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor says of state Forestry Division representatives. “They told us to stand down because it was up on the rock pile.”
—————————————————————
**** AZCENTRAL Article about YFD Fire Chief Jim Koile
This is that article that AZCENTRAL did about YFD Fire Chief Jim Koile resigning just days after Prescott threw their own fire chief Dan Fraijo ‘under the bus’ over the whole Yarnell thing.
Koile was actually resigning because the news had broken that he was basically a convicted child murderer who spent less time in jail for burying his girlfriend’s daughter in the desert than most people spend for a DUI conviction.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20131008arizona-yarnell-fire-chief-resigns.html
Among other things in that article is where we first heard Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray testify that even the Peeples Valley Fire Department had offered their assistance on Friday afternoon, June 28, 2013…
…but were also told to “Stand Down” and do NOTHING.
From the AZCENTRAL article…
—————————————————————————
Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray says he offered assistance
on Friday night… but was told by YFD Chief Jim Koile to “Stand Down”.
—————————————————————————-
Yes, YFD Chief Jim Koile was a bad man. I think I even remember it was suspected the child was still alive when he buried her. But here is a question for you, why was Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray listening to anything Jim Koile had to say about whether he should or should not send his fire fighters to fight fire on state trust lands? What am I missing?
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 8, 2015 at 11:23 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Yes, YFD Chief Jim Koile was a bad man. I think
>> I even remember it was suspected the child was
>> still alive when he buried her.
No ‘suspected’ about it. When Koile finally confessed hours after first being picked up… he took them to where he buried the girl and she was still alive when they dug her up. He had apparently buried her wrapped in a tent and there was just enough airspace that she was able to survive underground for a while, I guess.
The little girl actually died in the hospital after they dug her up.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> But here is a question for you, why was Peeples
>> Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray listening to anything
>> Jim Koile had to say about whether he should or
>> should not send his fire fighters to fight fire on
>> state trust lands?
I don’t know.
He did NOT have to ( listen to anyone ).
Even the cooperative fire agreements say that IF you spot a fire on State Land and IF you feel it represents a danger to your Non-State County or City land that you are responsible for… you don’t even have to WAIT for Arizona Forestry to do anything.
The ‘cooperative agreements’ say you are allowed to just go ahead and ‘take care of it’.
If any of the Fire Chiefs in that area ( Suitor, McCray or Koile ) had had any ‘stones’… they they WOULD have all just helped each other out, pooled resources, and sent their best people up there on various ATVs ( they knew the roads were navigable by 4 wheelers ) and taken care of the ‘problem’ before it became a REAL ‘problem’ that NO ONE seemed able to deal with.
That’s why this all needs to have more ‘witnesses’ brought back to the ‘stand’ or supplying under-oath depositions.
The real TRUTH on just what went down on Friday has never really come out… and it SHOULD.
The story of the tragedy of Yarnell began right then and there… on Friday afternoon.
Followup…
If there was actually ANYONE in that area that should have been the most concerned about that ‘smoke’ up there on the ridge on Friday afternoon… it should have been Peeples Valley Fire Chief Pat McCray.
If that ‘ridge’ and that ‘valley’ were a bowling lane… then Peeples Valley represented the PINS stacked at the end.
The WINDS had been predominantly out of the south/southwest for days… and it didn’t take an FBAN to know that if that fire came down off the ridge it could easily now be the bowling ball headed NORTH through all that unburned fuel and straight at Peeples Valley.
That is exactly what DID happen once it ‘escaped’, and it is generally acknowledged now that if it hadn’t been for the sustained outflow winds and direction reversal on Sunday, then that fire would have marched right into Peeples Valley and it would have looked a lot like Glen Ilah ended up looking come Monday, July 1.
So yea… PVFD Fire Chief McCrary had a ‘huge stake’ in that ‘smoke’, even on Friday afternoon.
Why he didn’t take matters into his own hands remains a mystery. He could have. He just didn’t.
We also get some of the information about “WHO said Stand Down to WHO… and WHEN” from the various testimony that started appearing in the media from the firefighters involved about how many of them felt they COULD have just “put it out” on Friday if they had been allowed to do so…
Here is just one of those accounts coming from one of the other Yarnell Hill Fire Department volunteers who WAS ‘ready and able’ to go up there on Friday…
Firefighter Close Calls ( eZine )
Article Title: FORMER YARNELL FIREFIGHTER – WE COULD
HAVE PUT IT OUT THE FIRST DAY
Published: Thursday, February 27, 2014
http://www.firefighterclosecalls.com/news/fullstory/newsid/204020
From the article…
————————————————————–
A former Yarnell volunteer firefighter said it was possible to put out the deadliest wildfire in more than three decades, when it was still just a wisp of smoke.
Meantime, CBS 5 Investigates found state dispatchers failed to call in some of the closest firefighters and equipment.
“We could have driven up part of the way and walked the rest of the way with shovels and a bucket of water in our hands,” said LeRoy Anderson, who was a volunteer firefighter with the Yarnell Fire Department on June 28.
That was the day a lightning strike started the Yarnell Hill Fire.
“The fire, for basically the whole night, was the size of a Buick. It wasn’t very big at all,” said Anderson.
Anderson told CBS 5 Investigates he did not see an urgency to put out the flames, on the part of the Yarnell Fire Department.
“There were convenient reasons not to go. Let’s put it that way,” said Anderson.
Yarnell Fire Chief Ben Palm told CBS 5 News his department called the state Forestry Division to take care of the fire because it was on state land, located two miles outside the town of Yarnell and his department simply did not have the resources to handle a the job at that time.
————————————————————–
NOTE: That last paragraph contradicts some other testimony about how it was Congress Fire Chief Virgil Suitor who had actually called Arizona Forestry Dispatch and gotten that first “Stand Down” order.
The article also doesn’t mention that the two volunteers on duty that afternoon for YFD ( Yarnell Fire Captain Ryan Gardner and 73-year-old volunteer Bob Burkhardt ) apparently knew very well that they ‘needed help’… and that was why THEY were calling Chief Suitor with the Congress Fire Department to see if he would come help them get that small fire out.
WTKTT where are you getting the information that the City Crews and Volunteers were Qualified or highly qualified Wild Land Fire Fighters?
There are a lot of city Fire Fighters that train for city fires but have no or very little training for wild land Fires. Were they red carded by the State ( Certified Wild Land FF ) were they current and step tested as Physically fit. The Co-op agreement would have those requirements to use them. Those specific things create Liability if the State had previous problems with the Departments that may have been a factor in sending there own resources. Just the City’s saying they had fire fighters dose not make them Certified.
This Stand down order was it just a statement by the State Fire that they had resources in rout and would handle the fire?
If You read your article above YFD Chief called the state and said they did not have the resources to handle the fire??????
The State never calls Federal contractors to use on there fires.
until there resources are fully deployed. Most contractors are called in after the first 24Hr. not for IA. That’s Nation Wide to my knowledge. The only time they are sent on IA fires is if they have been pre positioned for fires when other resources have been depleted. The complaints in the above article are not justified by the Contractor all would like to make money and go to every fire it just don’t happen like that.
All three departments have mutual-aid agreements with each other, and poor old 73-year old Bob Burkhardt is in better shape than a lot of 30-year olds (his son Glen is some sort of big-shot with BLM Fire) and has trekked that area many time hunting out suspected lightening strikes. The official call-log from the AZ Fire Center Dispatch shows no “Stand-Down” order. But Ryan Gardner doesn’t live in Yarnell, and Burkhardt was going on vacation the next day, so… Oh, and Gary – Burkhardt’s place was a showplace of firewise preparedness, and it burnt to the ground.
Well…as you know I am no fan of Prescott, but I am no fan of Chief Fraijo either. A man should always know his limitations and Chief Fraijo had what…one fifth of his department he was clueless about who they were or what they did. That was a case of, and I am being very generous here, a clueless Wildlands Division Chief reporting to an even more clueless fire chief about what 20 employees were doing on a daily basis, much less when they went to fight wildfire. And yes, the GMIHC did not meet national standards, because the Prescott Fire Department falsified documents and lied about it. Of course they are now paying the price with full time benefits for temporary employees…so maybe there is a little justice in this world after all.
How about you and me getting together, getting some special police power, subpoena power, the power to give oaths and take formal statements along with something similar to federal Garrity power from the Governor of Arizona and the Arizona State Legislature and then we will go do what the SAIT and the Yavapai County Sheriffs Office failed to do and we will crawl up the assholes of all of these assholes and figure out what the hell happened on the Yarnell Hill Fire. What do you say? You in?
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 8, 2015 at 11:40 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> That was a case of, and I am being very generous here,
>> a clueless Wildlands Division Chief reporting to an even
>> more clueless fire chief about what 20 employees were
>> doing on a daily basis, much less when they went to
>> fight wildfire. And yes, the GMIHC did not meet national
>> standards, because the Prescott Fire Department falsified
>> documents and lied about it.
That actually MATCHES some of the comments written by Eric Marsh himself in his ‘evaluations’ from his personnel file.
He expressed his ‘frustration’ in any number of entries about ‘having the answers’ with regards to what it takes to run a program like that which has minimum Nationally-set standards… but the PROBLEM was that no one above him would sit still long enough to even LISTEN to him.
Not only did Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis get up in front of the world and the media on July 23 and admit he had no frickin’ idea what the upper temperature limit was for a fire shelter… Darrell Willis also totally mis-pronounced Brendan McDonough’s NAME.
He was mispronouncing it that day like a lot of other STILL do.
He was saying “MAC-DUN-A-HUE’ instead of ‘MAC-DUN-UH’.
It was like he had had never heard of the kid or had to pronounce his name before then.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> How about you and me getting together, getting some
>> special police power, subpoena power, the power to
>> give oaths and take formal statements along with
>> something similar to federal Garrity power from the
>> Governor of Arizona and the Arizona State Legislature
>> and then we will go do what the SAIT and the Yavapai
>> County Sheriffs Office failed to do and we will crawl up
>> the assholes of all of these assholes and figure out
>> what the hell happened on the Yarnell Hill Fire.
>>
>> What do you say? You in?
I’m not sure the BAD-COP / BAD-COP approach will work.
What happens when we BOTH start throwing chairs across the room during the ‘interviews’?
Sounds like we need a ‘third in there so we can at least do…
BAD-COP / GOOD-COP / BAD-COP.
LMAO.
Well…I am willing to try anything that gets some answers. LOL And I am planning on summarizing a few things I have learned in side emails, I don’t want to sit on information everyone who participates in this thread should have, just as soon as I get through with my questions I have. Probably in about 2 weeks, because I am gone next week plus,.
V interested in what you may have heard about past bushwhacks, footraces with fire, and secrecy as to crew locations and movements. And what the cultural pattern was in terms of normalizing any of these for the crew.
I am very interested in learning more about those subjects as well, which I haven’t yet, but I hope I will learn more in the future and when I do, you won’t have to wait for my book to come out.
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 9, 2015 at 12:49 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> I am planning on summarizing a few things I
>> have learned in side emails, I don’t want to sit
>> on information everyone who participates in this
>> thread should have
Thank you, Gary… but rest assured… it isn’t JUST this ‘thread’ that is interested in knowing ‘the TRUTH’.
Just about every tIme I go check the established Wildland fire blogs… the same sentiments are being expressed even amongst the ‘hardest of the bretheren’ in the WFF arena.
They are still torn between not being able to admit that any mistakes were made that weekend… but also knowing they have been ( and are still ) being totally bullshitted about what happened that weekend.
It’s almost like watching the Mafia try to deal with an ‘internal problem’, or something.
Everyone afraid to talk… but everyone still wants to know what really happened.
So anything you can share is welcome… not just here… but in the ‘general brotherhood’ as well.
They are just as confused as anyone… and they are the ones who are supposed to have ‘learned something’ from all this.
Well…at the risk of sounding like a tease, I doubt anybody is going to be happy with my summary, including me.
Well…I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. There is an awful lot of smoke in your reply and you explained to me that some of the guys on the GMIHS were not the best of the best, but you also failed to mention a good count, much less the names or the qualifications who were willing, ready and able to hike up to the top of the Weaver Mountains and fight wildfire.
Now…another little thing neither one of us knows if whether or not all three of these departments would have been sending a bill to the Arizona State Forestry Division for their service.
And you made some really big assumptions that only a ‘slight injury’ for any of these go to guys was on the table. How do you know that? Neither you nor I knows who assumes the liability for any of these departments to climb that mountain to fight that wildfire and you are assuming they would have been successful when that has not been my experience.
Neither one of us really knows very much about what went on that day, in spite of my speculating and your smoke and mirrors. But I can tell you this much for sure…the Arizona State Legislature and the Voting Citizens Who Pay Taxes in the Great State of Arizona got what they paid for on the Yarnell Hill Fire. If they want more, they need to pay for more.
You don’t get somethin’ for nothin’ in this life, that much I have learned.
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 8, 2015 at 11:16 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Well…I guess we are just going to have to agree to
>> disagree on this one.
Huh? I wasn’t even TRYING to ‘debunk’ what you were fundamentally saying in your post above.
I was ONLY trying to point out that your simple assumption that it was ONLY the YFD that had offered to go up there and “take care of the fire” on Friday doesn’t match the facts.
It’s more complicated than that… and it WASN’T a case of just letting Harv, Daryl and his other brother Daryl go do something.
But that doesn’t ‘debunk’ the point you were trying to make ( which is still valid ).
Things just weren’t as simple as you are trying to make it. That’s all.
At least… AFAWK ( As Far As We Know ), anyway.
Even this ‘Friday afternoon’ part of the Yarnell story still hasn’t been fully told.
>> Gary also said…
>>
>> There is an awful lot of smoke in your reply and you explained
>> to me that some of the guys on the GMIHS were not the best
>> of the best,
Of course they weren’t.
Some of them were just ‘fill ins’ and Yarnell was one of their first fires.
At least one other one was (apparently) SICK and unable to even work in the heat and probably should have never even shown up for work that day.
You know… the one that they just let sit on a mound all afternoon and PRETEND like he was being a ‘lookout’ because they didn’t want him to get heatstroke and have to fill out all that paperwork.
>> Gary also said…
>>
>> but you also failed to mention a good count, much less
>> the names or the qualifications who were willing, ready
>> and able to hike up to the top of the Weaver Mountains
>> and fight wildfire.
I actually COULD do that.
The information is there in the FOIA releases.
But I am going to let you go look that up yourself.
Suffice to say… it really wasn’t ONLY Harv and Daryl and any of his other brothers named Daryl that were available to hike up there and take care of the fire on Friday afternoon.
Even THEY actually KNEW how to get up there… unlike the 40 ( FORTY ) Arizona Type 2 Crew guys who would end up standing around in the Yarnell Fire Station parking lot the next day and UNABLE to even hike out there.
See even just YFD FF Leroy Andersen’s testimony above.
He was fully aware of WHERE it was… and what was going to be required to put it out… but he still says it was easily do-able if Arizona Forestry had simply not been actively PREVENTING the work from taking place.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> Now…another little thing neither one of us knows if whether
>> or not all three of these departments would have been
>> sending a bill to the Arizona State Forestry Division for
>> their service.
There WERE cooperative fire agreements in place. No question.
Those agreements all say that none of these Fire Departments actually even NEEDED Arizona Forestry’s PERMISSION to go up there and put the fire out.
The cooperative fire agreements specifically say that if a jurisdictional fire department ( City or County ) feels like a fire on State Lands poses a threat to THEIR response area… they are free to ‘take action’ with or without Arizona Forestry’s consent.
It also works both ways.
If Arizona Forestry thinks a fire in some County or City jurisdiction is an immediate threat to any State Land… they can just start dumping retardant all over it without even asking or telling anyone it’s gonna happen.
That’s the ‘cooperative’ part of a ‘cooperative fire agreement’.
It means both sides get to do some things without needing the other side’s approval or permission.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> And you made some really big assumptions that only
>> a ‘slight injury’ for any of these go to guys was on the table.
>> How do you know that?
I don’t.
I was just saying that when push comes to shove ‘injury’ is always preferable to ‘death’.
We KNOW that 19 guys (eventually) DIED working out there.
What we do NOT KNOW is whether anyone who might have been sent out there on Friday night would have had ended up injured in any way.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> Neither you nor I knows who assumes the liability for any of these
>> departments to climb that mountain to fight that wildfire and you
>> are assuming they would have been successful when that has
>> not been my experience.
Yea. I get it.
You are saying that Volunteer Fire Departments are for shit.
I heard ya.
And you may be right.
But my only point to you is that it wasn’t JUST the YFD involved, and it WASN’T only Harv and Daryl twins available that afternoon.
It was THREE different Fire Departments that you are carte-blanche ‘writing off’ in one swell foop because of “YOUR prior experiences”.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> Neither one of us really knows very much about what went
>> on that day, in spite of my speculating and your smoke
>> and mirrors. But I can tell you this much for sure…the
>> Arizona State Legislature and the Voting Citizens Who
>> Pay Taxes in the Great State of Arizona got what they
>> paid for on the Yarnell Hill Fire. If they want more, they
>> need to pay for more.
>>
>> You don’t get somethin’ for nothin’ in this life, that
>> much I have learned.
The essence of TORT law is that while you most certainly are never entitled to ‘something for nothing’… you ARE entitled to ‘compensation’ ( which may or may not even involve money ) when someone has not behaved in a reasonable or responsible ( or REQUIRED ) way.
I think that is what we are still talking about, yes?
Whether or not some of these people should be allowed to even have their day in court and TRY to prove to their cases?
Just as there is never “something for nothing”… there is also never any assurance of actually ‘winning’ a court case…
…but that doesn’t mean you should be denied your right to TRY the case.
Well OK then, please accept my apologies..
WTKTT I am still confused first the Coop plans are not for fires 3 miles from a incorporated City the are for close proximity threats. If it is just outside city limits take action until we get there.
The State and any Dispatch center is responsible for the dispatch of resources to State fires, As is BLM and FS. they initiate the dispatch not the city agency. If this would have been a BLM fire on BLM land then the State would have stood down unless requested by the BLM.
Most Co-op agreements with City Fire Departments is for perimeter protection City Limits and Structure protection. NOT Wild Land FF
In order to meet WLFF status a department must meet State and Federal requirements. on a yearly basis.
Many Times in this new age Fire organizations stand down at night
because of steep terrain and hazards. To protect against injuries.
This is now a common practice do to injuries and Fatalities. Do I agree with it NO. Back in the day we did it all the time and with little or no problems. But it has become another bug-a-boo to deal with
even if the injuries were less than 1% of all fires at night.
A threat to there jurisdiction is next to there city boundary.
I did not see any statements from County FD’s or if there were any? I have worked with a lot of Co-op agreements Cities do not respond outside City Limits unless called. City’s train in wild land fire but are not normally citified in suppression action. Other than there job and training as structure protection and suppression units. They just do not build fire line.
There are rural fire departments that do train and are certified
in Wild Land Fire They protect unincorporated communities in rural settings and are paid thru tax assessments.
Trained and supported by FS and BLM. at least here in Idaho.
Screw the agreements, contracts, and SOP’s – these were people’s lives and property that were being threatened, and YFD should have called PVFD (they carry each other’s frequency on their radios) and Congress and requested radio monitoring and possible back-up coverage while Gardner and Burkhardt went up with shovels, Pulaskis, and piss-packs and put the bloody fire out. I am so glad to be out of the game now that everything is so, “liability-conscious and “your-safety-first” SOP garbage. How many more people would have died in the WTC if FDNY had obeyed their SOP’s and issued orders? Firefighting is dangerous work – heck, that’s the reason so many of us got into it in the first place – and risks are inherent in the job. Anyone every read the, “Fireman’s Prayer?” I guess it would have to be completely rewritten now, or stricken from the world as politically incorrect. Okay, yarnchief out.
well actually…I was referring to something for nothing – meaning that nobody wants to pay for wildland fire protection until the wildfire is bearing down on their house and then they want everything ASAP.
I guess it’s kind of like those rural fire departments I have read about in the Midwest or maybe it was Oklahoma well anyway…you have to pay for a yearly fee for fire protection and if you don’t pay your fee, the fire department will respond if your house catches on fire but only to watch it burn to make sure it doesn’t catch houses on fire who have paid their fee. There have been cases where desperate people have tried to pay their $137.00 yearly fee in their driveway as their house was burning down.
All I am trying to get you to understand…is that the Arizona State Forestry Division fights fire the same way on thousands of fires each year just like they did on the Yarnell Hill Fire…it almost always works…they save money the Arizona State Legislature doesn’t give them to operate on and they generally accomplish their twin objectives…save money and avoid catastrophic losses on state trust lands.
Of course the Yarnell Hill Fire could have been put out very easily when it was very small…all fires can very easily be put out when they are very small BUT if the Arizona State Forestry Division put out ALL fires on state trust lands when they are all very small they will need more resources, more funding, more personnel, more equipment, more of everything and neither Arizona State Lawmakers nor Arizona tax payers want to pay for that, but in 20/20 hindsight…everybody wishes the Yarnell Hill Fire would have been put out when it was really small. But except for hindsight, how would we know that was the ONE fire out of thousands each year that needed special attention and to be put out when it was really small rather than letting it burn itself out after creeping around in the boulders for a few days. That is wanting something for nothing. I was not referring to people wanting something for nothing in a lawsuit.
And guess what. I have wanted to sue the beejesus out of the government and Wells Fargo Bank and a lot other big institutions with all of the money, all of the lawyers, all of the laws, all of the influence and well…it just doesn’t work out very well very often.
Now…in the case of the wrongful death suits it sounds like that might work out because some Judge had decided that the Arizona State Forestry Division might have violated the most basic right of 19 citizens, the right to live their lives without being killed due to incompetence, and that is a good thing. Or at least the Judge thinks they should be able to give it a shot.
But is you really want to change the system, change how wildland firefighters agencies are funder, especially at the local and state levels, OK?
I think volunteer fire departments are pretty good at what they do. Put on all of their turn out gear, man the big fire truck and drive it out to where your house is, and squirt and lot of water on your burning house.
They are after all Citizen Firefighters and I am sure God loves them for what they do. But no…99 out of 100 of them are not capable of climbing to the top of the Weaver Mountains and fighting wildfire.
And it was probably better that they didn’t go up. Now in hindsight, it would have been better for you and me to go up there and put that fire out they way things turned out, however improbable that would have been.
But once again, I will ask the question, except for hindsight, how would we have known that ONE was the ONE that needed special attention out of the thousands of widlfires each and every year that are fought the same way, all of them successfully for decades now, meaning ten of thousands of fires have been successfully put out the Arizona State Forestry way…don’t worry about it…it will take care of itself, which I will say again, almost always works which keeps the Arizona State Legislature and the taxpayers really happy except for this year because they don’t ask for more money and they avoid catastrophic losses on state trust lands, just not in 2013. Get it? I’m not a fan of Arizona State Forestry Division, I started off by bitching my head off about them, I just have to accept they are a sand lot baseball team because their general manager and team owners won’t fund them to be any more. And so do the rest of you until you make changes in how they are funded. OK?
Oh…and one more thing. Since I know the Arizona State Forestry Division is a sand lot baseball team…they don’t disappoint me when they can’t sweep the World Series, and that shouldn’t disappoint you either. Get over it!
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 9, 2015 at 5:03 am
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Oh…and one more thing. Since I know the Arizona State
>> Forestry Division is a sand lot baseball team…they don’t
>> disappoint me when they can’t sweep the World Series,
>> and that shouldn’t disappoint you either. Get over it!
You’re great with the analogies, Gary… but this wasn’t/isn’t a baseball game.
19 good men are DEAD… for no damn good reason.
Forgive me if I don’t make any sharp moves to “Get over it” until I’m sure I know exactly what the fuck actually happened.
Well…I couldn’t agree with you more and I believe you are mischaracterizing my anology, I was not making any reference in any of my ramblings last Friday night, I think everything I said (and intended to say) was in reference to the residents of Yarnell et al, and their lawsuits against the state for their incompetence and the fire team calling the evacuation late. I am going to make every effort from now on to stay out of the argument because I don’t actually care what happens to their lawsuits one way or the other. I just didn’t like the residents blaming everything on the state, I think we all should take responsibility for our own safety in critical situations.
and for sure the “get over” it comment was directed at the Yarnell residents for their complaints against the fire team. You know that I like to say a true wildfire is always managed by Chaos for the first 36 to 48 hours until a fire team or succession of fire teams finally wrest control from Chaos.
I would never tell anyone to get over the deaths of the GMIHS. I think you own me an apology.
“owe” not own
Gary
We never know if this fire will be the ONE – that’s why we fight EVERY fire like it IS the ONE! And just an FYI – all of my people were Red Carded, pack-tested, and fully outfitted. And under our Co-op with State Land, I would send my people out on their fires when I could spare them.
Up until at least February of 2011, Yarnell FD staff (Paid, volunteer, and even our CERT Team members) were covered by Workman’s Comp via SCF of Arizona and had a supplemental accidental death or dismemberment policy for each through VFIS. And that infamous “two-track jeep trail” everyone mentions went to within fifty yards of the lightening strike. Of course, that didn’t do Yarnell FD any good as far as an apparatus response, since their chief had dismantled their brush truck (1986 Dodge 2500 with a high-pressure skid unit carrying a 200-gallon tank with Class A foam added directly to the water) so that he could use it for a utility vehicle on EMS calls on Highway 89 on the hill. Last I saw the skid unit was still sitting out behind the fire station with the hoses rotting in the sun.
I probably shouldn’t do this, because it’s late, and I’ve been in tech-hell all week, and still am, sort of.
But I’m going to respond, since I DO take this stuff seriously, both in regards to the Yarnell Fire and the current circumstances of people living in my neck of the woods, including both the Jemez area and the East Sandia Mountains area.
I really totally agree that people living in the WUI need to take WAY more responsibility for their own protection of their own homes/properties than they do. Especially in Arizona and New Mexico.
And I also agree that the whole “drown the baby in the bathtub” attitude towards “the government,” while also, somehow expecting that “government” to “risk their lives” saving “us and our stuff” is a complete cognitive dissonance for me and has always been.
On the other hand, to be fair, I just want to say.
We’re talking about a community of mostly people in their 60’s 70’s 80’s 90’s. Most of whom without a heck of a lot of money. Just kind of “hanging on by their fingernails.” Not all of them. But a lot of them, by what I’ve read.
I’m in my 60’s, and even I am having a hard time staying on top of the maintenance of my properties. Seriously. It’s not like someone like me can always just magically create either the dollars or the physical capabilities to make that happen.
Especially in this economy. Which neither Arizona nor New Mexico has recovered from. Including their erstwhile-called “middle classes.”
So we’ve got a bunch of mostly elderly people who know zero-nada-nothing about the danger they are in. Whose fault is that???
Heck, it took me a frustratingly two years to teach my then 87-year-old mother how her friggin checking account worked after my dad died.
And I would say to her, over and over and over again, “Mom, you REALLY need to QUIT watching CNN because, even though they LOOK “respectable,” they’re just FAUX NEWS in “more respectable” clothing.
Did she heed my advice? NO.
These are the kinds of people who you are expecting to go outside and watch the smoke (from a fire that’s been burning away from them all day,) and NOTICE when it shifts, and realize it’s time to evacuate, when the Professional Firefighters on the fire, like Gary Cordes, are at least a day late and a dollar short on realizing their QWN “trigger points” are getting “TURNT” way faster than THEY friggin “anticipated”???????
And these folks in Glen Ilah aren’t even the Professional Firefighters — responsible for managing the fire — who have been notified by the friggin National Weather Service in Flagstaff by both 2 and 3;30 PM that a thunderstorm cell is going to bearing down onto the fire that they are managing.
(And I’m not even including that observation that Bravo 3 made at around 12:30 friggin pm that the fire was going to, all things considered, reverse its direction and head towards Yarnell that afternoon, which observation they didn’t bother to notify anybody but a wandering-around Division Supervisor, who then wandered off and notified NOBODY about).
These people had no warning WHATSOEVER about that!
But a BUNCH of Professional Firefighters DID!!
I have never had much hope that these people would, all things considered, get much relief for the loss of their homes, all things considered. That’s been my brutal estimation, all things considered.
But I agree with WTKTT that, to be FAIR, they really deserve some kind of compensation for the aftermath of their EXTREMELY LATE evacuation notification. Both on the part of the Arizona Department of Forestry and the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office.
Whether they will get that, all things considered, at this point, I have no idea.
But I think they deserve it.
Also, if I remember it correctly. Yarnell was granted a bunch of money by the BLM to do mitigation. That didn’t happen, if I remember it correctly, because, as their Fire Department Chief said later, he couldn’t (didn’t bother to try to???) get enough volunteers to do the job. That’s the guy who didn’t even live there and who flew the coop after the fire, especially since it became public that he was implicated in what was possibly the murder of a child.
So just another clusterf**k in this whole sordid story.
I agree with what you are trying to say.
But I don’t agree totally.
Unfortunately, as I always say,
“Reality is a whole lot messier than theory.”
I REALLY appreciate your participation here. Even when I don’t always agree with what you say.
Namaste
OK I see WTKTT has been responding even as I have been writing.
You could have added that the City Governments discussed making regulations for clean up around structures and Fire safe construction. which even after this fire was abandoned due to people not wanting laws that forced them to do any thing. That is the cry of the home owners no regulations until they want all the fire forces to save there home and when they don’t we’ll sue them. that’s what is keeping Wild land Urban Interface the problem it is nation wide.
Actually, I think it is the hero of the far right, which most people in Arizona are, Grover Norquist (yes, it is I just looked it up) who likes to say, “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
OK, here is a personal story for you to iistruate what I am trying to say. My recently departed father-in-law, who was your typical right wing nut (yes, the older I get the more progressive I get) Arizona who lives in Arizona who thought he needed to store guns and ammo for when the Iranians invaded us and that NOBAMA was going to take all of our guns away…anyway, he since I spent many years working for the USFS he used to spend most of his time whenever we visited him talking at me alternating between bitching his head off about the federal government how big it was and how much money they stole from him in taxes ad nauseam and bitching his head off because whenever he went out onto National Forests there weren’t signs at every intersection or fork in a dirt road telling him which was to go.
It never seemed to occur to the man (who was an electrical engineer and worked on submarine launched missile systems among other things and always thought he was the smartest guy in the room) that those two goals were mutually exclusive, you can’t have smaller cheaper government AND have signs at the fork of every dirt road in the forest telling you which way to go. Because well…all of those signs cost a lot of money, then you have to have people install them and then you have to have people maintain them and replace those that hunters have mistaken for lawful game and shot to hell…in other words it costs a lot of money…so the point is, you get to pick one or the other, you can have smaller government and fewer signs in the forest, or bigger more expensive government and more signs in the forest that used to be quite common. You don’t get both at the same time.
Now, knowing how most old people who live in Arizona think, they want a government small enough to drown in the bathtub AND they want a personal representative to come and tell them when it is time to didi mau most ricki tic. But those two goals are mutually exclusive.
You see…I am a little bitter because I had to spend more than 30 years listening to people bitch about the federal government and everything that is wrong with federal government and how lazy we are, how stupid we are, how much money we cost and how we are really not needed at all, but at the same time whenever anything goes wrong in those people’s lives, they want somebody from the government to step in and fix it for them, pay for it for them and kiss it and make it feel better. And well, those things are usually mutually exclusive…you get to shit on government employees to your hearts content but you have to take that into consideration when you cry for them to come and save you and make your world better just because you are too stupid to take care of yourself and take responsibility for your own lives. Get it?
Now…this is a pretty complex concept I am trying to explain late at night while watching Ancient Aliens at the same time, and well those two things are mutually exclusive things to do well at the same time.
The point is, if you want more bigger, costlier government to take better care of you and all of your problems…you need to be willing to pay for it otherwise you are “EXPECTING TO GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING!”
None of that has anything to do with landowners lawsuits or old people who cant program their smart phones. I mean…I am now an old person who can’t program a smart phone…so I have a dumb phone but I don’t expect it to do the things a smart phone can do, because it is a dumb phone and that is all I want to pay for…a Jitterbug with big buttons. Get it?
OK, how about this one. You get to choose between smaller government and fewer services or larger government and more services. You don’t get to pick smaller government and more services.
Marti – you make a very compelling case for old people, I’m glad you are in my corner. Unfortunately, there is no uber agency anywhere who maintains a special response team to respond to emergency situatjions and help old people jst because they are old, have limited incomes and need more help. I wish there was, but there isn’t. So…print these questions out and post them on your refrigerators…especially if you are an old person and you need more time to get out of Dodge City…get a head start. And I don’t care if the State Fire Marshall or the Chief of the Yarnell Hill Fire Department for a heavenly body floating in the air tells you not to worry and stay in place, we’ll get back to you, don’t worry, I want you to ignore that person (s) and if you are on a cruise ship and it is listing on it’s side and the captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells you everything is going to be fine and to remain in your cabin…I hope you will already be where I would be, on the deck in a life jacket trying to lower a life boat when that announcement is made. Take responsibility for your own life…don’t depend on others to save you.
Back to the list,
OK…just in case your personal government representative is too damn busy fighting the wildfire to personally show up and save YOU…you might want to ask yourself these questions next time.
1. Is there a large volume of dark grey and black smoke laying over with the wind towards where I am located and has the sun been blocked out by this smoke? Yes or no?
2. Can I see visible flames burning towards my actual location? Yes or no?
3. Is there a large pyrocumulus convection column of smoke, fire and debris billowing hundreds if not thousands of feet into the sky and is it looming over my position? Yes or no?
4. Is there hot ash and other burning debris raining down on where you are and is the source of that material burning towards where I am standing? Yes or no?
5. Is a fire storm of biblical proportions bearing down on me? Yes or no?
If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” you had better didi mau most ricki tick with the things that are most important to you and will not delay your departure. OK? And if your answer to two or more of these questions is “yes”, you probably should already be gone.
There is hope and redemption still. and always when it comes to the yarnell fire. Many inaccuracies read this week on this chapter. and I am weak and too weak to get into it. To affirm if you count the comments. made on I’M. it has been Sonny who has commented much on the quads n implents of that Friday afternoon more than I. I do not lay “claims” but since day one until I got marked character -wise in a
court of law I had openly shared transparency of all information. shared to or with the hikers. even physically led Dr Ted Putnam and Jerry Pfingston to the door step of the man named Bruce who lives very near to the Helms and it is Bruce’s account that stated such and the hikers told the world they NEED to meet the people especially to confirm Bob Powers is very wrong on those last hours on topic “evacuation “…I helped for free so many hundreds directly and looking back there is a concern not because I spent time n labor freely but because up until that ended I see many of the people do not get what defensible space means…too sick to get into it…may take six or seven chapters if I began to ramble…there is too many topics I will try when stronger.
Well…I am sorry if I upset you Joy.
**
** A COPY OF THE ACTUAL JUDGE’S RULING DISMISSING
** 2 OF THE YARNELL PROPERTY DAMAGE LAWSUITS
It’s taken over a week for there to be any real online commentary or analysis of that April 29, 2015 decision to dismiss 2 of the Yarnell Property Damage lawsuits.
Even over at Wildfire Today… the decision was reported there almost immediately but there are still absolutely NO COMMENTS about it.
The people over there that always seem to have something to say about Yarnell still have absolutely NOTHING to say about this decision to dismiss 2 of the Yarnell lawsuits.
Very strange, really.
But finally, a few hours ago, some ‘analysis’ showed up along with an actual PUBLIC copy of the Judge’s written decision(s) supporting Arizona Forestry’s ‘dismissal’ request.
The analysis has shown up on a BLOG called “Fire Law”…
FIRE LAW
Aricle Title: Arizona Not Liable to Homeowners for Property Lost in the Yarnell Fire
Posted by: Curt Varone – 5 hours ago
http://www.firelawblog.com/2015/05/07/arizona-not-liable-to-homeowners-for-property-lost-in-the-yarnell-fire/
NOTE: Author Curt Varone is both a FIREMAN ( for 41 years ) and a LAWYER ( for 29 years ).
Author Curt Varone does a good job of SUMMARIZING what is actually in the Judge’s (written) ruling… but he offers no real opinions himself about what parts of the ruling may or may not be overturned on appeal. He is basically just ‘walking through’ the actual court document and doing a good job of just explaining what it actually contains.
One of the most interesting things in the article relates to that discussion that Mr. Bob Powers and I were having just the other day with regards to the ‘evacuations’ part of the ‘damage’ claim(s).
As it turns out… Judge Richard Gama really DID make a specific ruling about the claim that the ‘evacuation notices’ themselves were ‘botched’ to the point where the plaintiffs suffered a lot of LOSS simply because they were not give adequate TIME to collect a lot of their most precious personal items before having to just RUN FOR THEIR LIVES to escape death.
Here is exactly what Judge Richard Gama has to say about THAT…
From Judge Gama’s Dismissal Ruling…
———————————————————————————
“Plaintiffs also allege that they suffered harm because they relied on the State to provide a timely and adequate evacuation notice. But, although Plaintiffs allege that an evacuation of Yarnell “was requested” on June 30,11 they do not allege that the State undertook to provide one. Nor do they offer any law that would impose a pre-existing duty on the State to provide an evacuation notice.”
———————————————————————————
In other words… Judge Gama is lumping this into the same “No responsibility” category as his decision that Arizona Forestry and the State of Arizona had NO duty or responsibility to protect anything.
Judge Gama is saying that Arizona Forestry ( and the State of Arizona ) also had NO ‘duty’ or ‘responsibility’ to inform ANYONE about jack shit… including the need to get out of the way of the fire they could not contain.
Zero. Zip. Nada.
Unbelievable.
All the ‘legalese’ is there in black and white now that we can see the actual document… but there is still no public copy of the ‘Request for Dismissal’ that was filed by Arizona Forestry themselves.
Next Reply will be a link to the actual Judge Richard Gama written dismissal RULING.
Here is a direct link to an actual copy of Judge Richard Gama’s written RULING allowing 2 of the Yarnell Property Damage suits to be ‘dismissed’…
http://41af3k34gprx4f6bg12df75i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2015/05/Acri-v-Arizona.pdf
For the first time… we can now also see how ‘thin’ the ‘evidence’ was that Judge Gama gave for his decision that Arizona Forestry could not be sued.
Judge Gama is narrowly basing that on a the concept that unless a governmental agency explicitly gives ITSELF permission to “sue or be sued”.. then it can’t be done.
This totally ignores the opposite concept of DEFAULT liability.
Arizona is not a state that has automatic soverign immunity for government agencies or government employees.
So just because the charter of one particular Arizona agency is NOT specifically saying “we can be sued” doesn’t mean the DEFAULT in the State of Arizona is that they CAN ( be sued ).
This entire Judge Gama decision ( on every level ) is going to get interesting as it goes through the appeal process.
One Little note—
A Evacuation of Yarnell was requested—–
The Sheriff and City Fire notified Residents to Evacuate that Morning of the 30th
Residents stayed and waited to see what the fire was going to do and expected a Evacuation notice. The request to the citizens is slightly different than an order
but was ignored by many of the residents. They had that notice that they should have at least loaded there belongings and been ready on short notice to evacuate.
There are a lot of other factures at play here.
How many of the 160 Residents were not Home?
How many were winter Residences?
How many had any kind of clearance to protect there homes?
Again how many did not heed the request to Evacuate and packed there belongings in preparation.
The Final evacuation was given very late it is not a Requirement of the state but the County and City Fire and Law enforcement. As fast as the fire moved into Yarnell and Glen Isla many had to have been already gone or there would have been some injuries or fatalities. The real problem with Urban interface is many private citizens won’t heed the evacuations and cause more problems.
Who ever fed Bob that information , fed him way wrong.
Well…if you go back and read the comments I have been making for months now, you will see that is EXACTLY what I have been saying, although I can certainly understand why you wouldn’t believe me.
And now for the really bad news…I will be shocked…yes shocked…if the wrongful death lawsuits by the GMIHC families don’t end up the same way. It is VERY hard to sue the government and win, the only times I have been aware of is yes…when the government wants to teach itself a lesson and the actions by its employees are so outrageous that they rise to the level of violating someone’s constitutional rights.
Welcome to the world I lived in for my entire adult life, aware my employer would have cut me off at the knees without warning to benefit itself and never be liable for anything they ever did to me.
The main strength of the GMIHC family lawsuits is in using public opinion to get a settlement rather than hoping for an outright court victory. Of course the state is not as powerful as the federal government, as I have repeatedly said, a fight against the federal government would have been over a LONG time ago, but I still think the outcome will still be the same if they push it too far.
Reply to Gary Olson post on May 8, 2015 at 10:13 am
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> I will be shocked…yes shocked…if the wrongful death lawsuits
>> by the GMIHC families don’t end up the same way.
If you mean that the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits might also end up ‘dismissed’ outright by a Judge… I believe that is already a “been there, didn’t do that” situation for Arizona Forestry.
Way back in October of 2014, Arizona Forestry DID file a motion asking a Federal Judge to DISMISS the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits for pretty much all the same reasons the Judge Gama just found for dismissing the property damage suits.
AZF can’t be sued, no responsibility, no duty, no one did anything wrong, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for, move along, move along, yada, yada, yada.
That motion ( asking for dismissal ) was DENIED.
The Judge apparently agrees that there IS evidence to support the ‘wronful death’ claims and that the issue should proceed in the courts.
Ever since then ( October of 2014 ), it’s been all about this ‘global settlement’ stuff and they keep asking for ‘extensions’ there as they continually fight to get this McDonough guy to just tell the frickin’ truth.
AZCENTRAL
Article Title: State seeks dismissal of suit in Yarnell fire
Published: 10:47 p.m. MST October 24, 2014, by Dennis Wagner
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2014/10/25/yarnell-fire-lawsuit-hotshots-survivors/17894343/
From the article…
——————————————————————
Attorneys for the state of Arizona are asking a federal judge to throw out the wrongful-death complaint filed by survivors of hotshots killed in last year’s Yarnell Hill Fire, claiming command decisions at the time were not “shocking” and the litigation is blocked by law.
A motion filed Friday by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office says the Division of Forestry and its fire commanders are immune, and state laws prohibit civil complaints for damages under the circumstances.
The lawsuit initially was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court by survivors of 12 of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who died in June 2013 when they were trapped and overcome by flames. The complaint, which was moved to the U.S. District Court in Phoenix a week ago, alleges that fire supervisors were so negligent they violated the hotshots’ rights.
——————————————————————
Followup…
What IS interesting here ( legally speaking ) is that way back in October of 2014, when Arizona Forestry filed that motion asking a Judge to dismiss the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits…
…Arizona Forestry pretty much DID make all the exact same arguments to that Judge about why those suits should be ‘dismissed’ outright that they have also made in their request(s) to have the ‘property damage’ suits dismissed.
So here we have ONE Judge deciding that AZF didn’t do anything wrong that day, and even if they did, they can’t be sued ( and he then proceeded to agree with all of Arizona Forestry’s arguments and he dismissed 2 of the property suits ).
But we also have ANOTHER Judge ( back in October of 2014 ) looking at the SAME ARGUMENTS for ‘dismissal’ and deciding they were basically BULLSHIT and that the ‘wrongful death’ cases need to go forward.
It really is interesting, legally speaking, that the same set of arguments would seem to ‘hold water’ with one Judge… but NOT another one.
That actually makes the chances of the plaintiffs ‘winning’ their appeal of Judge Gama’s decision to ‘dismiss’ 2 of the property suits pretty likely.
They can actually ‘point’ over to the OTHER ‘wrongful death’ cases that Arizona Forestry tried to get dismissed for the same reasons and show that THOSE cases ARE being allowed to ‘go to trial’.
There is never any guarantee that you will WIN in court.
But if one Judge has decided that at least the ‘wrongful death’ cases deserve to proceed and “have their day in court”… then the appeal of the ‘property damage’ cases could go the same route.
Some other Judge could overturn Gama’s rulings(s) and decide that, just like the ‘wrongful death’ suits deserver their “day in court”… the residents also deserve at least the CHANCE to have “their day in court” as well.
That’s good news. I really like it when anybody can win against the system anytime for any reason, since it happens so rarely.
**
** NEW InvestigativeMEDIA article
Posted just a few hours ago…
InvestigativeMEDIA
Article Title: Forestry division seeks subpoena to compel McDonough’s testimony
Published: May 7, 2015 By John Dougherty
http://www.investigativemedia.com/forestry-division-seeks-subpoena-to-compel-mcdonoughs-testimony/
**
** THE NOT-FOR-PROFIT ‘100 CLUB’ ACTUALLY PAID TO HAVE THE FAITH-BASED
** PTSD FIRST RESPONDER HEALING MANUAL WRITTEN IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 4, 2015 at 8:07 pm
>> Marti Reed said…
>>
>> For that church ( GM Hotshot Youth Minister Clayton Whitted’s ‘Heights’
>> Church in Prescott ) to host that PTSD support group for First Responders,
>> even though it is “faith-based,” is totally justifiable and honorable.
>>
>> For the 100 Club to be funding it. all things considered, isn’t.
>>
>> It seems to me to be a serious violation of the “Separation of Church
>> and State” rules as they are supposed to be applied by the IRS.
>>
>> Something’s more than a little bit shady here, in my humble opinion.
Digging a little deeper into this… it actually gets even ‘stranger’.
Yes… the not-for-profit ( but not ‘religious’ ) group called the ‘100 Club’ of Phoenix Arizona is PAYING for all the copies of the FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing Manual being used by this PTSD support group that Darrell Willis is running over at Clatyton Whitted’s old ‘Heights’ church in Prescott…
…but as it turns out… the equivalent not-for-profit ( but not ‘religious’ ) ‘100 Club’ registered in HOUSTON is the outfit that actually PAID for this FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘Healing’ Manual to be written in the first place.
Back in January of this year… one of the first ‘announcements’ about this FAITH-BASED PTSD treatment book called “The First Responder Healing Manual” appeared on the ‘Facebook’ page of another ‘First Responder’ support site called “Branches of Valor International”.
That Facebook posting has a full photogrpah of the actual BOOK COVER for this “First Responder’s Healing Manual”.
Right there in the bottom left corner of the cover of this new ‘book’ is the National ‘100 Club’ ICON and a blurb which says…
“FUNDING and Preface by the 100 Club of Houston”
The ‘100 Club of Houston’ has the same charter and 501-3c status as the Phonenix, Arizona branch. It is specifically a generic ‘charitable’ 501-3c and NOT declaring itself as a ‘religious’ organization in any way.
But here ( on this Facebook page ) is proof that this ‘100 Club’ firefighter support organization has specifically used tax-free Donor contributions to ‘produce’ a FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘Healing’ manual ( that sells for $17.95 ).
At the very top of this Facebook post where this FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing manual was being announced… one of the first ‘Branches of Valor’ Facebook page visitors to ‘Like’ this announcement about a FAITH-BASED PTSD treatment program was…
Darrell Willis.
Willis would then ( a few weeks later ) become the listed ‘contact’ person for a specific chruch group offering PTSD Healing to Firefighters ( and using this ‘100 Club’ FAITH-BASED manual ) over at the “Heights” Church near the Prescott Airport… and advertising themselves on the Local Yavapai County Firefighter’s Union webpage.
Here is the Facebook page where this ‘announcment’ about this FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing Manual first appeared…
Facebook
Branches of Valor International’s Page
Branches of Valor International’s Photos
https://www.facebook.com/BranchesOfValor/photos/a.472721409469339.1073741828.312931938781621/750757521665725/
( PHOTO OF BOOK COVER )
——————————————————————
Bridges to Healing Series
When Duty Wounds You
The First Responder Healing Manual
BIBLICAL Solutions for Line of Duty Stress & Trauma
Chris & Rahnella Adsit
Branches of Valor, International
At the bottom of the Book Cover…
( 100 Club Logo )
Funding and Preface by the 100 Club of Houston
( PTSD Foundation of America Logo )
Prepared for PTSD Foundation of America – www (dot) ptsdUSA (dot) org
——————————————————————
The following is the complete Facebook POST that sits underneath this Book Cover Photo…
NOTE: One of ’11’ people that first ‘liked’ this Facebook post was ‘Darrell Willis’.
——————————————————————
Branches of Valor International
SOON TO BE RELEASED!
“The First Responder Healing Manual” by Chris & Rahnella Adsit
Every day, first responders immerse themselves in the chaos and confusion of other people’s very bad days. If not dealt with proactively, this cumulative load of stress, plus occasional life-threatening, traumatic experiences, takes a permanent toll. Line of duty stress and trauma can lead to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, which can freeze advancement, cause demotions and reassignments, end careers, end marriages, end lives.
The First Responder Healing Manual combines best practices from the medical and mental health communities with the timeless principles from the BIBLE that have successfully addressed the effects of stress and trauma for centuries.
It presents step-by-step principles that will help members of the first responder family (law enforcement, fire, emergency medical) to:
– Understand how line of duty stress and trauma affects them physically,
psychologically and SPIRITUALLY.
– Become intentional about creating a healing environment for themselves.
– Adopt THERAPUTIC SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES.
– Process loss and grief.
– Experience the freeing influence of giving and receiving forgiveness from GOD, from others, and to others.
– Rebuild their identity based on what GOD says about them.
– Strengthen themselves SPIRITUALLY against future debilitating conditions and events.
– Connect with those who will support them in positive ways.
– Learn how to deal with Secondary Traumatic Stress, Burnout and Compassion Fatigue.
– Understand how to continue to lead and help their family affected by their stress and trauma.
– Make plans for the future as a strengthened and stable man or woman in a constructive relationship with GOD.
SHARE THE NEWS!!!
January 5
Likes…
Darrell Willis, Nancy Chrzan Picha and 11 others like this.
——————————————————————————————–
There is still a *possibility* that this FAITH-BASED PTSD support group being run/led by Darrell Willis over there at the ‘Heights’ Church in Prescott ( and which uses this FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing approach funded by the 501-3c tax-exempt ‘100 Club’ ) *might* be the PTSD support group that Brendan McDonough belongs to.
**
** BRENDAN MCDONOUGH WAS ON A PRIVATE TALK CIRCUIT
** TELLING HIS STORY OVER AND OVER TO CHURCH GROUPS
I just stumbled across this while searching for something else.
I thought it was relevant because the whole issue now ( more than a year after the tragedy ) is that some mysterious ‘therapist’ is saying that Brendan McDonough has PTSD so bad that simply having to sit through an under-oath deposition and ‘tell the full story’ would be too ‘traumatic’ for him.
As it turns out… even before the original SAIR report came out… Brendan McDonough was actually on a ‘private talk circuit’ and was going around to churches and having these kleenex-filled teary-eyed sessions as a ‘guest speaker’ at some churches in/around the Central Arizona area.
The following is just one of the ‘eye-witness’ accounts sitting online from one of these ‘kleenex-talks’ Brendan was having in front of church groups.
This one happened way back on September 26, 2013, just TWO days BEFORE even the original SAIR report was released the morning of September 28, 2013.
This one was when Brendan was the “guest speaker” at the Parkside Community Church in Camp Verde, Arizona.
He broke down several times as he talked to the congregation and one of the ushers had to hand-deliver a box of Kleenex to him as he continued talking.
Afterwards… the pastor of the church sat onstage with Brendan McDonough and conducted some kind of public ‘dealing with the pain’ session with Brendan, in front of the parishoners.
I will call this an ‘article’ but it’s actually just a BLOG entry from one of the church parishioners who was there when Brendan was ‘giving his talk’ to the congregation.
The ‘article’ says this was by no means the FIRST time Brendan had made one of these tearful presentations.
From the article itself…
——————————————————————————-
He wasn’t what you’d call a wholly eloquent speaker, just a young kid trying to speak about a dreadfully difficult experience, in essence, trying to tell us how he came to be spared death while the rest of his beloved crew was not.
The pastor accompanied Brendan onto the stage where they both sat and spoke of the events of June 30th. Pastor Martin gently guiding Brendan through the pain. It was acknowledged that Brendan had given this talk a number of times already, it was obviously still painful to go through.
——————————————————————————-
Actually… it’s not a very long ‘article’ ( BLOG post ) so here is the whole thing…
The CobbleStone Muse
http://thecobblestonemuse.blogspot.com/2013/09/granite-mountain-hotshot-crew-honored.html
The CobbleStone Muse – About me
Name: Marie Jarreau
Gender: Female
Occupation: ARTIST: Vocalist/Guitarist/Writer/Photographer/Illustrator
Location: Arizona, United States
Introduction: Welcome to my world of words, images, memories and music:o)
Interests: Too many to list!!
————————————————————————————
HotShot Crew Honored by Brendan McDonough’s Resilience
Posted: Thursday, September 26, 2013
————————————————————————————
Brendan McDonough is the young Granite Mountain HotShot firefighter who was assigned to be the ‘lookout’ and so was not in the same location with the rest of his crew – all 19 of whom perished on Granite Mtn. in Northern Arizona earlier this summer.
Brendan was the guest speaker at Parkside Community Church in Camp Verde, Arizona recently. I attended the church service with a need to hear his story (yes – ‘history’). He sat just seats away from me and I could feel his pain and agony as he was introduced while video images of his crew in earlier days moved across the large screen and a recording played of Vince Gill singing Go Rest High On That Mountain.
I had prepared myself that, in attending this event, it would be painful. I also recognized that ‘my’ emotional pain could not compare to Brendan’s. As we sat listening to the mournful song and watching images fade in and out on the screen of his crew in earlier times, moving about the wild lands landscape working and or smiling and joking glad to be where they were, I thought, “why are they playing this?” It’s so painful for him! But quickly I realized too – grieving IS painful, but must be done.
Brendan was in tears, as were most of us in the audience.
With my own emotions welling up, I wanted to give him a comforting hug and to hand him my own Kleenex tissue, as he tried continually to wipe away his tears – bare handed, but I thought better of offering my own tears on the used tissue to mix with his own.
About that time one of the ushers appeared at his side with a box of tissues.
I was relieved.
He wasn’t what you’d call a wholly eloquent speaker, just a young kid trying to speak about a dreadfully difficult experience, in essence, trying to tell us how he came to be spared death while the rest of his beloved crew was not.
The pastor accompanied Brendan onto the stage where they both sat and spoke of the events of June 30th.
Pastor Martin gently guiding Brendan through the pain. It was acknowledged that Brendan had given this talk a number of times already, it was obviously still painful to go through.
He didn’t tell us much that we had not already heard though the media, but hearing in his own voice about what happened that day somehow helped me in thinking that I was ‘helping him in his grief’ if that makes any sense.
He seemed to be in somewhat ‘good spirits’ as he told a funny story or two surrounding the camaraderie of his crew in earlier times. Brendan, through no design of his own, will spend his life dealing with an incredible burden – no matter how well he handles it, or seems to handle it.
After the service he was available for those who might speak to him. Of course I had to. After waiting my turn in line, I gave him a hug, and simply said that I would be thinking positive thoughts for his future. I mentioned to Brendan, my son-in-law Jonathan (who IS) and his wife, my daughter Beth (who used to be a firefighter) and my personal connection to that world. Jonathan and his own Camp Verde crew had been sent to fires in New Mexico just days prior to the Granite Mountain incident. It was another group of wildlands firefighters, (who on occasion had worked alongside Jonathan’s crew) who discovered the remains of the ’19’ on Granite Mountain.
I gave Brendan a copy of Listen To The Noise with a hope that the music there, with no connection to ‘fire,’ might give him a opportunity to escape in the melodies. I hoped that it might at times ease his mind.
His look, his demeanor, his speech patterns, Brendan’s apparent sense of integrity and personal dignity, his love of life are so reminiscent of my perception of the young, optimistic, energetic wildlands firefighters I’ve encountered over the years in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Arizona.
The day after the tragedy as a way of dealing with my own sense of grief over that event, I’d written a lament for the loss of the 19 firefighters. I may revisit that ‘ode’ in years to come but right now it seems too sad to listen to again.
Anyway, I think it’s good that he is sharing, not his ‘experience’ (we can’t be THERE with him) but his story. I think it’s good for him to talk about it so it isn’t ‘shut up within him to fester and eat away at his soul, and good for us to have hope about life and the delicate twists and turns that come with living life to the fullest. His very presence offers ‘hope’ and a sense that even in the harshest events – all is not lost.
————————————————————————————
Here’s what I still can’t find out quite yet.
1) WHO got Brendan involved with even going though these ‘painful’ talks to CHURCH groups even BEFORE the damn SAIR report ever came out?
2) Was Brendan being PAID to be the “guest speaker” and “spill his guts” at these things?
3) Who did the SLIDE SHOW that is being talked about? Was it being used at ALL of the ‘events’ that Brendan was the “guest speaker” at? Who was WITH him and OPERATING the slideshow?
4) These were obviously PAINFUL speeches for Brendan to be making essentially IN PUBLIC… but he was able to get through them and keep REPEATING them for a while. So in what way would just sitting in a room and finally telling his WHOLE story to investigators be any MORE painful than what he was apparently (willingly) allowing himself to be subjected to even BEFORE the SAIR report came out?
5) How MANY times did Brendan do this “show”… and in front of how many different church congregations and/or other ‘audiences’?
Given the whole “Church Circuit” connection and the HELP that Brendan must have had just to even get these ‘gigs’… something tells me even THIS smacks of “Darrell Willis” involvement somehow, in some way.
Again… I think this is totally relevant given where we are now and Brendan apparently refusing to give a deposition because some mysterious therapist is saying it would “not be good for Brendan to talk about all this”.
Then, suddenly, here is even more proof that beyond all the media interviews… and EARLY ON… Brendan was actively choosing to be talking/crying his brains out about his experiences that day in PUBLIC settings, in front of select groups of sympathizers.
Maybe Brendan would feel more ‘comfortable’ during the deposition if he could simply have that same SLIDE SHOW running in the background like he had when he was on the ‘Church Talk Circuit’ back in 2013 and giving all these ‘tear-jerker’ presentations.
**
** BRENDAN MCDONOUGH’S THERAPIST ORIGINALLY SENT A
** WRITTEN LETTER TO GET BRENDAN OUT OF HIS DEPOSITION
** THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO TAKE PLACE BACK ON FEBRUARY 26.
From the document named “2015_05 Updated 05.04.15.pdf” that appeared
just a few hours ago on the public ALJ Hearing File page…
———————————————————————————————
* May 1, 2015 – 10:12 AM
RESPONDENT’S ( ARIZONA FORETRY’S ) AMENDED REQUEST FOR THE TRIBUNAL ( THE JUDGE ) TO ISSUE A SUBPOENA FOR THE DEPOSITION OF BRENDAN MCDONOUGH
Respondent, Arizona State Forestry Division (“ASFD”), hereby requests that the Tribunal issue a Subpoena for the Deposition of Brendan McDonough. As the Tribunal is aware, there have been several previous efforts to take the deposition of Mr. McDonough. In November 2014, his deposition was postponed due to the schedule of his attorney, Mr. David Shapiro. His deposition was then set for February 26, 2015. Just a few days before the February 26, 2015 deposition, Mr. McDonough’s attorney sent to ASFD’s counsel a letter from a therapist for Mr. McDonough stating that a deposition would be detrimental to the treatment of Mr. Mcdonough for post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ).
———————————————————————————————-
This last sentence provides some ‘new’ information…
“Mr. McDonough’s attorney sent to ASFD’s counsel a letter from a therapist for Mr. McDonough stating that a deposition would be detrimental to the treatment of Mr. Mcdonough for post-traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD )”.
That is the first we have heard that this was a WRITTEN request from Brendan McDonough’s therapist, instead of lawyer Shapiro just ‘relaying’ a ‘verbal message’ from the therapist to Arizona Forestry back in February.
Unlike other times when Arizona Forestry has ‘referenced’ something like this in a letter to Judge Mosesso… a copy of the actual letter has NOT been attached to their submission to him as ‘EXHIBIT A’.
So we still can’t ‘see’ what this letter says ( or who it was from ) which caused the cancellation of Brendan’s previously scheduled deposition.
But the PTSD issue is definitely ‘still on the table’ here and it remains to be seen if Brendan’s lawyer will try to say that the same letter from the same therapist is still ‘in effect’… and for the same reasons as before… he ‘respectfully’ refuses to bring his client to the newly scheduled May 17, 2015 deposition.
It will be interesting to see what Judge Mosesso’s response is to this request.
Even though we know now that Arizona Forestry got some kind of letter from McDonough’s therapist back in February… it appears that Judge Mosesso still hasn’t SEEN that letter, since it hasn’t been attached to any correspondence or filing yet.
So before Judge Mosesso even RULES on this ‘subpoena request’ we might see his office come back and ask to see the actual letter from the therapist OR arrange an actual ‘conference’ with this mysterious therapist.
** PTSD, DARRELL WILLIS, IAFF UNION LOCAL 3066, THE HEIGHTS CHURCH,
** THE ARIZONA ‘100’ CLUB, AND THE “FIRST RESPONDER’S HEALING MANUAL”
Speaking of this ongoing PTSD issue… I found something interesting that does, in fact, involved all of the items ( and people ) listed above.
As it turns out… the online public webpage for the United Yavapai Fire Fighters Union ( IAFF LOCAL 3066 ) is actively advertising a PTSD related ‘Healing’ Group which meets every Tuesday evening at 6:30 PM at the “Heights Church” there in Prescott, near the Prescott Airport.
Yes… that is the same “Heights Church” where Clayton Whitted was a Youth Minister. Clayton Whitted is the Granite Mountain Squad Leader that, together with Wade Parker, performed that ‘conversion’ with/on Brendan McDonough and got Brendan to ‘accept Jesus as his Savior’ while GM was working on a fire in Nevada just 2 weeks before the Yarnell tragedy.
In addition to Whitted’s funeral… this ‘Heights Church’ is also the same place where Granite Mountain Hothshot Travis Turbyfill’s funeral was held ( on July 10, 2013 ) and, the next day, Granite Mountain Captain Jesse Steed’s funeral was held ( on July 11, 2013 ).
Other than the fact that this ‘PTSD’ group session is being held there at that “Heights” church ( and is being advertised by the the local Yavapai County Fireman’s Union )… there are a few other interesting facts about this PTSD ‘Group Session’…
1) The CONTACT for this group is Darrell Willis.
2) It is a FAITH BASED ‘Healing’ program.
3) It specifically uses the FAITH BASED PTSD HEALING program as outlined in the book called “The First Responder Healing Manual”.
4) The Arizona “100” Club ( which is a tax-exempt 501-3c that helps fallen first responders ) is PAYING for all copies of this FAITH-BASED Healing manual and they are being given out ‘for free’ to anyone attending this PTSD group at the “Heights” church.
SIDENOTE: It is NOT known if Brendan McDonough himself is either a member of this “Heights Chruch” now ( since Clayton Whitted is the one who ‘brought him to Jesus’ and that was HIS Church ) or whether Brendan is attending ( or ever attended ) these FAITH-BASED PTSD healing sessions that Darrell Willis also has something to do with and/or might be attending himself.
Here is the ADVERTISEMENT for this FAITH-BASED PTSD group currently sitting on the ‘United Yavapa Fire Fighters Union’ website showing it taking place at “The Heights Church” and listing Darrell Willis as the CONTACT PERSON…
IAFF LOCAL 3066
United Yavapai Fire Fighters Union – L3066
http://iafflocal3066.org/index.cfm?section=1
——————————————————————————–
YOU ARE INVITED TO THE FOLLOWING GROUP MEETING….
WHEN DUTY WOUNDS YOU
The First Responder Healing Manual
WHEN: Every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: The Heights Church at 2121 Larry Caldwell Drive Prescott, AZ 86301
* The healing Manuals are provided to you FREE OF CHARGE by:
100 Club of Arizona
“Standing Behind The Men And Women Who Stand Behind The Badge”
For more information Contact: Darrell Willis (928) 925-7311
————————————————————————————
** THE 501-3C SCOOP…
The “100 Club of Arizona” is a duly registered 501-3c not-for-profit organization in the State of Arizona. It specifically lists its 501-3c status as ‘charitable’ and NOT ‘religious’… but the way the IRS allows 501-3c entities to operate… it is NOT ‘illegal’ for a 501-3c with a sole status of just ‘charitable’ to make ‘donations’ or provide financial assistance to other 501-3c groups that DO have a status of ‘religions’ ( like churches ).
It CAN get a little sticky… especially if it starts to look like a 501-3c that is only listing a generic status of ‘charitable’ is actually acting as what appears to be a non-denomination, non-religious FRONT for another 501-3c that really is claiming ‘religions’ exemption status.
It’s been known to happen, and there have been some these FRONT organizations exposed lately and then put of of business by the IRS. SOME Churches used the ‘charitable’ status to raise money for themselves without having to actually let the donators know that the money is eventually going to end up in a ‘church’. It happens all the time and the IRS is constantly on the watch for these kind of FRONT operations.
But that certainly doesn’t look like what is going on here just because the “100 Club of Arizona” is picking up the tab for all these FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing manuals being used over at the ‘Heights’ Church.
It’s a LITTLE ‘squeaky’… especially since there is absolutely NO MENTION of either this FAITH-BASED PTSD group ( OR the fact that they are paying for the FAITH-BASED ‘Healing’ manuals ) anywhere on the “100 Club” website…
…but supporting groups that support first responders IS the ‘charter mission’ of the ‘100 Club’ of Arizona… and it IS a valid 501-3c corporation… so paying for those manuals for these PTSD sessions ( FAITH-BASED or not ) would probably still be within acceptable guidelines as far as the IRS is concerned.
This FAITH-BASED “First Responder’s Healing Manual” that is being used as the basis for this PTSD ‘therapy’ session going on at that ‘Heights’ church… and the book that is being paid for by the ‘100 Club of Arizona’… actually comes from the following organization that says it is specifically a FAITH-BASED PTSD organization…
It says its focus is actually on military related PTSD, but it sells the FAITH-BASED book to anyone.
The PTSD Foundation of America
Home page…
http://ptsdusa.org/
‘About Us’ – ‘Our Mission’
——————————————————————–
To combat Post Traumatic Stress
Bring healing to our military community (Active duty, Reserves and National Guard, veterans, and their families) through PASTORAL counseling, and peer mentoring, both on an individual basis, and in group settings.
Raise awareness of the increasing needs of the military community through public events, media outlets, social media, service organizations, and churches.
Networking government agencies, service organizations, churches and private sector businesses into a united “Corps of Compassion”, to bring their combined resources together to meet the needs of the military community on a personal and individual/family level.
PTSD Foundation of America is a non-profit organization dedicated to mentoring to our combat veterans and their families with post traumatic stress. Many warriors are coming home with visible wounds; countless others are coming home with scars we cannot see, wounded souls from witnessing the horrors of war over and over again – PTSD. We feel it is our duty as Americans to help these mighty warriors and their families adjust and find their new normal.
It is our turn to step up with other excellent existing community organizations and help those that have fought and sacrificed so much for us.
We are FAITH-BASED in our approach and have a great history of providing hope and healing to those experiencing the unseen wounds of war.
——————————————————————–
And here is a Direct Link to their page where you can purchase this
“First Responder’s Healing Manual” that is being used by “The Heights” church in their PTSD sessions and is being ‘paid for’ by the ‘Arizona 100 Firefighter Support’ organization…
http://ptsdusa.org/new-first-responders-healing-manual/
Here is how they describe this PTSD ‘Healing’ book of theirs…
————————————————————————–
We are proud to announce the first manual of its kind,
The First Responder’s Healing Manual
Every day, first responders immerse themselves in the chaos and confusion of other people’s very bad days. Eventually, it takes a toll. How do you handle it? Suck it up and drive on, baby – right?
But which is best: to stuff it, employ temporary coping mechanisms and self-medicate in harmful ways, or to experience actual healing and resilience from GOD?
This manual combines best practices from the medical and mental health communities with the timeless principles from the BIBLE that have addressed the effects of stress and trauma for centuries.
In these pages you’ll find step-by-step principles that will help you:
Understand how the stress and trauma you experience affects you physically, psychologically and spiritually.
Become intentional about creating a healing environment for yourself.
Adopt therapeutic spiritual disciplines.
Experience the freeing influence of giving and receiving forgiveness – from GOD and others.
Rebuild your identity based on what GOD says about you.
Strengthen yourself spiritually against future attacks.
Make plans for the future as a strengthened man or woman of GOD.
To order your copy of the First Responder Healing Manual, please fill out the order form below and email to Katherin Dickerson at kat.dickerson (at) ptsdusa.org or fax to 281-664-7981. For suggestions on how to use any of the Bridges to Healing Manuals, please contact David Maulsby at david.maulsby (at) ptsdusa.org. ( ORDER TODAY !)
————————————————————————–
NOTE: If you actually click the ( ORDER TODAY! ) link on the page above you get a PDF order form in your Browser.
It says that this FAITH-BASED PTSD Healing manual runs about $17.95 ( plus shipping ) per copy… but if you can prove you are a First-Responder it apparently drops to just $10.00 ( plus shipping ) per copy.
This is the ONLY way you can order this ‘book’… through THEM.
Not a King’s Ransom… but still it’s an ‘expense’ that someone who runs this PTSD program at the Heights Church has decided the participants shouldn’t have to shell out for so that’s when they ( Darrell Willis himself? ) approached the “100 Club of Arizona” for help and asked THEM to ‘foot the bill” for all copies of this FAITH-BASED ‘Healing’ book.
Here is a link to the HOME page for the “Arizona 100 Club”…
http://www.100club.org/
This is the 501-3c not-for-profit firefighter support organization that is PAYING for all the copies of the FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘Healing’ book being used by that group that Darrell Willis is involved with over at “The Heights” church by the Prescott Airport.
And here is a direct link to the official COPORATE INFORMATION for
this firefighter support organizations called the “100 Club of Arizona”.
It is ‘declaring’ itself as a simple non-religious CHARITABLE 501-3c like this…
Business Type: CHARITABLE
** ARIZONA CORPORATE INFORMATION – “100 CLUB OF ARIZONA”
http://starpas.azcc.gov/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=wsbroker1/names-detail.p?name-id=00820944&type=CORPORATION
————————————————————————
File Number: -0082094-4
Corp. Name: 100 CLUB OF ARIZONA
Statutory Agent Information Agent Name: MICHAEL R KING
Agent Mailing/Physical Address: 2 N CENTRAL AVE 18TH FL
PHOENIX, AZ 85004
Agent Status: APPOINTED 07/12/2004
Agent Last Updated: 07/21/2004
Additional Corporate Information Corporation
Type: NON-PROFIT
Business Type: CHARITABLE
Incorporation Date: 03/02/1971
Corporate Life Period: PERPETUAL
Domicile: ARIZONA
County: MARICOPA
Approval Date: 03/02/1971
Original Publish Date: 02/22/1972
——————————————————————————-
NOTE: The online pages for this “100 Club of Arizona” do a pretty extensive job of listing everything they have done ( and ARE doing ) for the families of first responders… but there is NO mention anywhere on their own public website of them ‘sponsoring’ this FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘Group’ that Darrell Willis himself has something to do with over there at that “Heights Church”.
That, itself, is a little odd.
If there really was a PTSD therapy group being officially ‘sponsored’ by this ‘Club’ whose mission in life is to help firefighters… you would think they would at least MENTION it on their own website(s).
They do NOT.
Thanks for catching and posting this, WTKTT!
As a former “liberal” UCC Minister and former “liberal” Unitarian “active layperson” ………….
We ALWAYS had to VERY CAREFULLY and SPECIFICALLY navigate a VERY fine line that represents that FIRST AMENDMENT separation of Church and State, in order to meet the “rules” imposed on us by the IRS (but, increasingly NOT imposed on “conservative” religious activities/organizations).
That has, FOR YEARS, been really AGGRAVATING to us.
And WE have complied, understanding and respecting, the FIRST AMENDMENT reasons for it.
What’s been AGGRAVATING to us is how “the other side” has been getting away with violating that.
While, all along, observing that “the other side” hasn’t, and has, for the most part, gotten away with it. (See all the controversy the “right-wing” has put up regarding IRS stuff over the past four or so years.)
For that church to host that PSTD support group for First Responders, even though it is “faith-based,” is totally justifiable and honorable.
For the 100 Club to be funding it. all things considered, isn’t. It seems to me to be a serious violation of the “Separation of Church and State” rules as they are supposed to be applied by the IRS.
Something’s more than a little bit shady here, in my humble opinion.
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 4, 2015 at 8:07 pm
>> Marti Reed said…
>>
>> For that church to host that PSTD support group for First Responders,
>> even though it is “faith-based,” is totally justifiable and honorable.
Correct. That “PTSD Foundation of America’ organization at http://ptsdusa.org organization makes absolutely NO bones about the fact that they think GOD is the answer to your PTSD issues… and they are actively in search of organizations just like “The Heights Church” to do exactly what they are doing… hosting a ‘Group’ session that uses their own published ‘manual’.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> For the 100 Club to be funding it. all things considered, isn’t.
>>
>> It seems to me to be a serious violation of the “Separation of Church
>> and State” rules as they are supposed to be applied by the IRS.
Well… it DOES actually ‘ring alarm bells’… but if you look at the letter of the law and IRS code for 501-3c non-profit organizations the ‘lines’ between declaring your 501-3c status as simply “charitable” versus “religious” are, in fact, pretty blurry.
It is absolutely a fact that 501-3c organizations are ALLOWED to provide assistance, services and even make donations to EACH OTHER… regardless of whether they are for pure charitable, religious, educational, scientific… of any of the other allowable profiles for a tax-exempt 501-3c.
It all comes down to what the IRS calls ‘mission statements’, really.
And it also comes down to transparency.
If the donations ( or gifts ) being exchanged still seem to be accomplishing the ‘mission’ of the donor organization… the IRS seems to be ok with it.
It’s when it starts to get ‘over the top’ and it becomes obvious that the one ( purely charitable ) organization is really just acting as a FRONT for the other ( purely religious ) one that the IRS can step in and take away someone’s 501-3c status.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> Something’s more than a little bit shady here, in my humble opinion.
If there is anything ‘shady’ ( as-in, lacking in direct sunshine ) about any of this… it’s the fact that NEITHER “The Heights Church” NOR the “100 Club of Arizona” seem to want to acknowledge that this group meets every Tuesday night at 6:30 PM. You won’t find it anywhere on the “Heights Church” calendar or listed as an official ‘group’… and you won’t find it mentioned anywhere on the “100 Club” public pages, even though they love to talk about what they do for firefighters.
The ONLY place it seems to even be ‘acknowledged’ that it even exists is there on that ‘Yavapai County Firefighters Union Local 3066’.
And that is also the only place where you will see that Former Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis is either fully IN CHARGE of this FAITH-BASED PTSD treatment program… or he is otherwise highly involved since he is the only listed CONTACT person for this group.
So here is what I wonder ( and can’t NOT help wondering given that we don’t have anything else to go on ).
Since this “Heights” Church was the ‘home base’ for Youth Minister Clayton Whitted ( who converted Brendan to Jesus in a double-team along with Wade Parker )… is it even remotely possible that Brendan himself is now ‘enrolled’ in this FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘treatment’ program there at that Church?
Does Brendan actually have a REAL ( licensed ) ‘therapist’… or is the pastor of this Church himself who is ‘running’ this FAITH-BASED PTSD group the one who is communicating with lawyer David Shapiro about what Brendan is or isn’t ‘ready to do’?
That’s a long-shot… I suppose… but given the ‘mystery’ surrounding all this it wouldn’t surprise me if the ‘therapy’ that Brendan is ( and has been ) undergoing isn’t this FAITH-BASED stuff just as ( apparently ) Darrell Willis has been doing for some time now.
Bottom line is that if someone’s DIAGNOSIS of PTSD is what is now controlling the calendars and the proceedings of valid Arizona Court cases… I think it’s time the COURTS ( not necessarily the public ) knew a little bit more about WHO is ‘running the show’ there in the background.
Credentials. Training. Affiliations ( Forestry? Private? ). Stuff like that.
By the way… you can ONLY buy this FAITH-BASED “First Responder’s
Healing Manual” direct from this “PTSD Foundation for America”
organization.
It’s not on ‘Amazon’, or anything like that.
Appears to be normally $17.99 + shipping per copy but
possibly $10.00 + shipping if you can prove you are a First Responder.
Here is the page at this “PTSD Foundation for America” where you can actually order copies of the book…
http://ptsdusa.org/new-first-responders-healing-manual/
From the PDF file that appears if you click ‘( ORDER TODAY! )”
———————————————————————-
To order your copy of the First Responder Healing Manual,
please fill out the order form below and email to Katherin
Dickerson at kat.dickerson (at) ptsdusa.org or fax to 281-664-7981.
For suggestions on how to use any of the Bridges to Healing
Manuals, please contact David Maulsby at david.maulsby (at)
ptsdusa.org.
Quantity: _______
Price: $17.99 Retail + S&H
$10.00 First Responder + S&H
Email for bulk pricing
————————————————————————–
Reply to WantsToKnowTheTruth ( WTKTT ) post
on May 4, 2015 at 8:40 pm
>> WTKTT said…
>>
>> So here is what I wonder ( and can’t NOT help wondering given
>> that we don’t have anything else to go on ).
>>
>> Since this “Heights” Church was the ‘home base’ for Youth Minister
>> Clayton Whitted ( who converted Brendan to Jesus in a double-team
>> along with Wade Parker )… is it even remotely possible that Brendan
>> himself is now ‘enrolled’ in this FAITH-BASED PTSD ‘treatment’
>> program there at that Church?
>>
>> Does Brendan actually have a REAL ( licensed ) ‘therapist’… or
>> is the pastor of this Church himself who is ‘running’ this
>> FAITH-BASED PTSD group the one who is communicating with
>> lawyer David Shapiro about what Brendan is or isn’t ‘ready to do’?
>>
>> That’s a long-shot… I suppose… but given the ‘mystery’
>> surrounding all this it wouldn’t surprise me if the ‘therapy’
>> that Brendan is ( and has been ) undergoing isn’t this
>> FAITH-BASED stuff just as ( apparently ) Darrell Willis has
>> been doing for some time now.
Sort of ‘answering my own question’ here about this but as it turns out… it might not be such a ‘long shot’ at all to believe that Brendan McDonough is actually receiving some kind of direct ‘counseling’ for his PTSD from this FAITH-BASED “PTSD Foundation of America” organization.
That is actually EXACTLY what they can do for you… if you ASK them to.
Here is their OWN online page that explains the “One-on-One Mentoring” services that they offer…
It explains ( up-front and in no uncertain terms ) how they are going to use “CHRIST/JESUS-centered Solutions” to try and cure your PTSD…
http://ptsdusa.org/get-help/one-one-mentoring/
From that online page…
———————————————————————
One-on-One Mentoring
While peer and small group support opportunities encompass much of our program, they are augmented by necessary one-on-one time with trained mentors. We utilize a FAITH-BASED, step program as the foundation of the Camp Hope recovery program, individual mentor sessions, the Combat Trauma Support Groups and in working with veterans and families nationwide committed to healing via multiple media avenues.
Our reference materials include workbooks developed for the Military Ministry “Bridges to Healing” Series entitled, The Combat Trauma Healing Manual: Christ-centered Solutions for Combat Trauma, by Chris Adsit and When War Comes Home: Christ-centered Healing for Wives of Combat Veterans by Chris Adist, Rahnella Adsit, and Marshele Carter Waddell.
“The Combat Trauma Healing Manual is a labor of love that I have seen touch many military families…I have seen this book open the eyes of so many that have been hurting for so long and have not known how to deal with their post-traumatic stress. With God as our cornerstone and The Combat Trauma Healing Manual as our instrument, God has given us the tools we need so that others may find His love and heal their wounded souls.” – Gene Birdwell, Founder, The PTSD Foundation of America
Materials are free of charge to residents of Camp Hope and participants in the Combat Trauma Support Groups (Veterans and Families).
Want Mentoring?
Contact us to connect with a peer mentor to work through the Combat Trauma Healing Manual locally or remotely.
———————————————————————
I’ve spent most of today having HUGE Internet issues. Including trouble-shooting with my awesome ISP provider. Looks like it may be a line problem. Which, via my awesome Internet Provider setting up a conference call with Century Link, will be checked into tomorrow.
Which Line Problem may have to do with the fact that we have had, here in Albuquerque and New Mexico, a WHOLE lot of RAIN over the past three days..
Which has, basically, hopefully, DOUSED the wildfire risk in New Mexico for this year.
Which, all things considered, climate-wise, is pretty remarkable.
This is really interesting to me because what has been debated this year is whether or not a switch to ‘La Nina” from “El Nino” has been very much in discussion this year.
Looks like we are, given this current weather, switching to “La Nina.”
Anyway,
Thanks for writing what you are writing. I will, hopefully, look at this more tomorrow.
I don’t know which category this should go into.
How a long-time contributor to this “citizen’s investigation” can be negatively impacted by both the climate/weather dynamics which screw up her ability to read/post to this “citizen’s investigation” and positively impact her understanding/prognosticating actual wildland fire possibilities in the state where she lives.
So, to summarize, I’m saying that the same thing that is screwing up my ability to read/post here, is also mitigating the risk of wildfire in my state this year.
McDonough has been re-scheduled for a deposition to occur on May 26th. ADOF has asked the judge for a subpoena to ensure his participation. The document filed on May 1st references the AZ Republic article regarding the book deal.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6N47Z5CNR-CR09TQUIzQUQ0TGs/edit
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE ) post
on May 4, 2015 at 11:23 am
>> TTWARE wrote…
>>
>> McDonough has been re-scheduled for a deposition to occur on May 26th.
Yes. Thanks for spotting this so quick.
This and the other documents also uploaded to the Public ALJ Hearing folder ( about an hour ago ) show that it’s time to “get down to business” in this “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” proceeding.
ADOSH is now starting to ‘dump’ documents into the ‘evidence record’ like the actual ‘Cooperative Fire Agreements’ between Prescott and AZF and first actual IPA ( Incident Action Plan ) that was ever generated for the Yarnell Incident ( on July 1, 2013 ).
ADOSH says flat-out that it is now ‘dumping’ these documents for reference during the hearing itself… so obviously no sign of a settlement in this proceeding.
Also NOTE that even this first official IAP for Yarnell specifically states that one of Arizona Forestry’s PRIMARY objectives for that day ( July 1, 2013 ) was to (quote) “PROTECT STRUCTURES”.
From the document “2015_04 Part I Updated 05.04.15.pdf”…
———————————————————————
– INCIDENT OBJECTIVES
– OPERATIONAL PERIOD (DATE/TIME) Monday July 1, 2013 – 0600 to 2000
– PROTECT and minimize loss/damage to STRUCTURES in
Yarnell, Peoples Valley and surrounding communities.
———————————————————————
It’s also perfectly obvious from all ADOSH interviews that this was also one of Arizona Forestry’s PRIMARY OBJECTIVES the entire weekend even though no one was stopping to actually write up an ‘Incident Action Plan’ until well into the evening of June 30, 2013.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> ADOF has asked the judge for a subpoena to ensure his participation.
Yes… and they ARE ‘acknowledging’ that they heard Judge Mosesso’s opinion on this before when he said he is not normally in the habit of issuing subpoenas for depositions.
But Arizona Forestry is now pointing out that things are obviously “not normal” here and it is highly likely this Brendan McDonough character is just ‘playing his own games’ and following his own ‘agendas’ here.
We also now learn that there was an actual LETTER from Brendan’s therapist ( that was submitted by Bredan’s attorney Shapiro ) which stated flat-out that this therapist thought giving a deposition would be “detrimental to his client’s condition and treatement”.
So it wasn’t just Shapiro ‘telling’ the AZF attorneys what some therapist thought and it wasn’t just some chit-chat on a conference call. There was an actual LETTER from this ‘therapist’.
I don’t know if that letter would actually constitute valid TESTIMONY ( from this therapist ) as to the truth of Brendan’s diagnosis. It depends what the letter actually SAYS, I think.
Bottom line is that if this therapist and/or Brendan’ lawyer tries to ‘stick to their story’ even now with regards to the new May 26 scheduled deposition… then even if Judge Mosesso still doesn’t thing a subpoena is warranted… it’s really time there was some PROOF supplied regarding Brendan’s actual PTSD diagnosis.
The whole ‘court calendar’ and ‘global mediation’ can’t continue to hing on just what some one mysterious therapist THINKS Brendan is or isn’t suffering from. There is going to have to be more PROOF supplied if this therapist thinks he/she can continue to control a valid COURT CASE.
.>> TTWARE also wrote…
>>
>> The document filed on May 1st references the AZ Republic article
>> regarding the book deal.
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6N47Z5CNR-CR09TQUIzQUQ0TGs/edit
Judge Mosesso is really ‘on stage’ now, at this point.
He is already ‘behind the ball’ on issuing any number of ‘rulings’ in this proceeding and now he obviously has to turn THIS one around pretty quick.
We are back to the same scenario we were in back in February of 2015.
Arizona Forestry has another meeting coming up ( on June 1 ) with the plaintiffs in the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits… and THIS time they want to make damn sure they know what Brendan knows before having to sit across the table from those ‘plaintiffs’ again.
Doing a deposition could impact his stability, after suffering from PTSD?????
What about 19 families with PTSD cause they are still looking for the truth?
Wonder if he will actually show?
Reply to rocksteady post on May 4, 2015 at 3:24 pm
>> rocksteady said…
>>
>> Wonder if he will actually show?
It’s hard to say WHAT is going to happen at this point.
If Brendan’s attorney tries to say that ‘nothing is different’ since February and that the letter from Brendan’s therapist is ‘still in effect’…
…then I imagine it’s going to be “PROVE IT” time.
I imagine there is going to be some attempt to make Brendan’s attorney and/or this mysterious therapist PROVE what they have, so far, apparently just expected a lot of attorneys ( and a Judge ) to “take their word” on.
ESPECIALLY if this now means what I suspected about this additional 45 day ‘pause’ in the court calendar is really all about.
If it is simply ALL about this damn deposition and somehow ( FINALLY ) getting the TRUTH out of this person…
…then I can’t imagine the Judge just continuing to grant ‘stay’ after ‘stay’ after ‘stay’ and ‘extension’ after ‘extension’ after ‘extension’ just until some mysterious moment when Brendan McDonough is finally ‘healthy’ enough to say under-oath what he is (apparently) already saying to a book author.
What… is Brendan also going to just wait until the MOVIE comes out before he finally feels ‘well enough to talk about it all’?
SIDENOTE: On June 25, 2014… there were MASSIVE press releases from Variety and IMDB and other legitimate Hollywood eZine outlets about the MOVIE that is (supposedly) being made. Director is supposed to be Scott Cooper ( He directed “Crazy Heart” ) and the screenplay was supposed to be coming from none other than Ken Nolan of “Blackhawk Down” fame.
It also was all over the MSM ( Mainstream Media )…
Here’s just ONE of the MSM articles back on June 24, 2014…
ABC15
Article: Yarnell Hill wildfire movie being directed by Scott Cooper
Published: 9:39 PM, Jun 24, 2014 by Anastasia Reynolds
http://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/water-cooler/yarnell-hill-wildfire-movie-being-directed-by-scott-cooper
From the article…
————————————————————
According to Variety, the director of “Crazy Heart” and “Out of the Furnace” will be directing a film about the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots who perished battling the Yarnell Hill Fire last year.
Scott Cooper is teaming up with other big names like the screenwriter for “Black Hawk Down,” Ken Nolan to make the film.
Producers are consulting the firefighters’ families, the sole hotshot survivor Brendan McDonough and Amanda Marsh, the widow of the crew leader Eric Marsh.
Cooper says he is looking forward to telling the firefighters; story with respect, sensitivity and authenticity.
He did not say when the movie will be released.
————————————————————
Haven’t heard much about it since… but notice this blurb in
just about ALL of the articles that appeared…
“Producers are consulting the firefighters’ families, the sole hotshot survivor Brendan McDonough and Amanda Marsh, the widow of the crew leader Eric Marsh.”
Notice it doesn’t say WILL BE consulting with ( Brendan McDonough and Amanda Marsh )
It says they were ( as of June 24, 2014 ) ALREADY doing that.
So, I’m sitting here, and it’s late, and I’m tired.
BUT.
What I’m reading here is that ASDF, after having first applied lots of pressure on Judge Mosesso to SUBPOENA Brendan (at a time when neither ADOSH nor Mosesso felt a need to do so – all things considered – but ASDF needed that info heading into their lawsuit negotiations), THEN put a bunch of pressure on Mosesso to NOT depose Brendan because OMG that could further add to Brendan’s PTSD and, therefore Mosesso would be “responsible” for additional stress to Brendan,…
……and now they are back to pushing for another subpoenaed deposition from Brendan.
Am I interpreting this correctly?
And, all things considered, at this point I do believe that it’s WAY BEYOND TIME for Brendan McDonough (PTSD, “PTSD,” whatever, or not,) to be seated (satten? sat? I don’t know the right term) down and interrogated UNDER OATH.
There are people hurting WAY MORE than he is.
Sorry, Brendan. Grow Up.
See the new post above with evidence that even before the SAIR report was released… Brendan was on the ‘church circuit’ and going around to Church’s and being the “guest speaker” and talking ALL about how terrible it was that he lost all his brothers and stuff.
He even had a SLIDE SHOW to go with “the speech” that he kept giving over and over… and bringing everyone to tears.
And NOW we are supposed to believe that just sitting through a controlled, private deposition is supposed to be ‘traumatic’ for him?
Would he feel more comfortable if he could have that same SLIDE SHOW running during the deposition like he had going when he was on the ‘Church Talk Circuit” back in 2013?
Reply to Marti Reed post on May 4, 2015 at 8:29 pm
>> Marti said…
>>
>> ……and now they are back to pushing for another
>> subpoenaed deposition from Brendan.
>>
>> Am I interpreting this correctly?
Yes… but it’s that ‘middle part’ where I think you are forgetting something.
That ‘middle part’, where they seemed to be DISCOURAGING any ‘more than necessary’ interviewing of Brendan… was NOT, in any way, about finding out the TRUTH that Brendan has always been withholding.
THAT ‘middle part’ was all about trying to get Item 1(b) of ADOSH Citation 1 dismissed BEFORE things even reach the evidentiary phase.
The THREAT that Arizona Forestry actually aimed at Judge Mosesso was that if he doesn’t give them what that are asking for and he doesn’t DISMISS that whole Citation regarding Brendan’s own potential entrapment…
…then THAT is when they are going to call poor, poor Brendan to the stand and grill the shit out of him and make him go over all of THAT part of the day again in detail and under cross-examination.
You have to try and remember how many “balls in the air” Arizona is “juggling” right now.
They have to try and get as much of the ADOSH Citation shit as possible mitigated or dismissed, including the charge that Brendan could have easily burned to death that day all by himself.
But that has NOTHING to do with the ‘wrongful death’ suits over in the other courtroom except for the fact that the inattention to Brendan’s situation and the lack attitude about him possibly having to ‘deploy’ was just more indication of “ongoing bad decisions with good outcomes”.
Then there are the ‘property damage’ lawsuits which, themselves, have TWO distinct and separate ‘parts’.
Part 1 – Is AZF Forestry negligent for letting the fire escape IA?
Part 2 – Is AZF negligent for totally botching evacuation notices?
SOME of these ‘points’ are inter-connected between all the lawsuits… but some are not.
Some are ‘stand-alone’ issues, legally speaking.
So when Arizona Forestry was trying to say that it would be bad for poor, poor Brendan to have to be called to the stand and be grilled about the whole ‘possible entrapment’ on his part… they were ONLY using that argument to try and put pressure on Mosesso to drop that particular Citation.
When it comes to actually knowing what Brendan knows about why Eric Marsh, Jesse Steed and the other 17 Granite Mountain Hotshots burned to death that day… Arizona Forestry STILL NEEDS TO KNOW what Brendan KNOWS to have a ‘better poker hand’ in the ‘wrongful death’ negotiations.
Think about it.
If not for this ‘missing deposition’ from Brendan about what he knows but has never testified to… there has never been ANYTHING stopping Arizona Forestry from just ‘settling’ the ‘wrongful death’ suits.
The ONLY reason they seem to keep asking for these ‘extensions’ has to be that they live in hope they can get this under-oath deposition from Brendan BEFORE they have to report to the Judge that the settlement negotiations were a total failure and so it is time to just proceed to ( jury ) trial.
Confusing?
You damn betcha.
But millions and millions and millions of dollars are still at stake here.
If those wrongful death suits really do go to “a jury”.,.. the actual amounts awarded to the plaintiffs could be historically HUGE.
And I mean… ‘take your breath away’ HUGE.
I Know I will here about what I am about to say but here goes——
The State as well as the Federal Government have no responsibility for damage or loss of structures do to wild fire.
Having said that there are some exceptions—–
If a set Back Fire destroys any structures—-
If a wild fire is caused by the agency and destroys structures—
Escapes of wild land fires from containment lines or uncontained areas is not the responsibilities of the Agency involved suppression is only a battle against mother nature. A structure crew may be assigned to pre prep areas but property that dose not have defensible space is not the responsibility of the Agency.
City and Counties have a responsibility to pass regulations to protect property owners clearance around structures and building with fire retardant materials. Wild land fire units are only there to suppress the wild fire not structures.
If the agency was negligent because of the fire its self then maybe the home owners would be in a better position. Wild fires are directed by mother nature if homes are in the way there is not much that wild land fire agencies can do, Once the head of the fire hits the homes.
Well… this was always destined to be a complicated legal battle and, sure enough, Arizona Forestry is trying to block it right at the front door.
Even though every single ( ADOSH ) interview with every single one of their command employees working the Yarnell fire mentions one of the primary objectives being the “Protection of the surrounding communities”… Arizona Forestry is NOW trying to say those were ‘mis-guided’ goals and that none of their employees should have ever even been concerned about ANY of that.
There is, however, still this vlaid legal concept called “Assumption of Responsibility”.
Once you ‘go there’… then you DO have ‘obiligations’ and ‘responsibilities’.
See a Reply below to TTWARE for more about this “Assumption of Responsibility” legal concept and how it is very much still “on the table’ for what happened that entire weekend in Yarnell.
One of the primary things being mentioned in most of the 160+ ‘property damage and loss’ lawsuits is about the fact that regardless of how Arizona Forestry botched the initial attack and then continued to display incompetence all day Saturday… what happened on Sunday alone was enough incompetence and negligence to cause significant ‘personal property loss’ for which valid Arizona taxpayers probably deserve some compensation.
If Arizona Forestry had not displayed total incompetence with regards to the ‘trigger points’ and ‘evacuation notifications’ on Sunday… a lot of people would have had more TIME to salvage more personal property ( and priceless memorabilia ) instead of having to just RUN FOR THEIR LIVES that afternoon.
So it is very likely that even this Judge Tuchi could allow some of the 160+ platintiffs to proceed and some of the final rulings could be that even though no compensation is deserved for the loss of any houses… some of these valid Arizona taxpayers ARE deserving of some compensation for other personal property losses just because of the way Arizona Forestry botched the the evacuation notifications on Sunday.
That being said… I have a question for you ( Mr. Bob Powers ).
Your own opinion seems to match Arizona Forestry’s claim and Judge Tuchi’s ruling.
I get the perspective… but what do you think this perspective and this actual RULING now does for the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits and the whole Granite Mountain situation?
If it is a fact that Arizona Forestry NEVER had ANY DUTY and/or RESPONSIBILITY to lift one finger to protect the communities of Peeples Valley, Yarnell and Glen Illah…
…then doesn’t that automatically increase the TRAGEDY of that day?
Doesn’t it mean that not only was there absolutely NO REASON at all for Granite Mountain to even THINK they were needed to help protect anything at all that day… that if anyone ( like Arizona Forestry DIVSA Eric Marsh ) actually ORDERED them to do anything of the kind… that would be the very definition of “totally unnecessary” and “wrongful death”?
The following is a quote from today’s Prescott Daily Courier article saying that the appeals of Judge Tuchi’s decision were already filed on April 29, 2014.
This is the part where even the plaintiff’s attorney ( Craig Knapp ) says that a key part of all this is still the legal concept of “Assumption of Responsibility”.
That’s the legal concept that says once you “go there” and “assume responsibility” for something… you DO have a legal responsibility to do it skillfully and competently and without gross negligence.
And, in this case, that includes issuing proper and timely ‘evacuation notices’ when you know that mother nature is ‘winning’.
There are now people who are DEPENDING on you to at least do that in a competent fashion… and if you don’t… they are probably deserving of compensation for losses incurred because of the negligence involved.
From the PDC article…
—————————————————————————–
( Attorney Craig ) Knapp maintains that once the Arizona Forestry Division began its efforts to protect Yarnell, it had a duty to competently carry out the job. “We believe they did not do that,” Knapp added.
—————————————————————————–
Whoops. Typo up above. I typed 2014 instead of 2015.
First paragraph above should have obviously read like this…
“The following is a quote from today’s Prescott Daily Courier article saying that the appeals of Judge Tuchi’s decision were already filed on April 29, 2015.”
The Wrongful death law suits are still valid based both on ADOSH Rulings and the fact that Arizona Forestry was in charge of the fire. If the crew actually was moving to reengage or to protect structures and some one of the overhead was responsible for that move including the Division Supervisor who was part of the Arizona assigned overhead team.
Wild land fires that burn thru private land and structures that come from public lands the Government and State Fire are not responsible for the loss it has been that way for ever.
Attempting to protect Private property dose not make you liable for it.
Failing IA dose not make you Liable if the Fire takes off and burns Private property including structures.
The Laws protecting The Feds and the States have been on the books for years. They both try to protect private property but have no responsibility to do so. They are heroes if they win and sued if they lose
but it is the hardest lawsuit to win as I said you have to prove negligence.
Escaped prescribed burn, Back fir that got away, Vehicle fire, Air craft crash fire fighting. All others are Nature caused burns Escapes Etc.
Many fires escape IA, Jump Fire lines, or escape thru lines that are not tied in. Weather, Wind, Fuels and not enough resources are not things you can sue over. Until a Fire is declared controlled It is a threat to any thing in its path and Fire Fighters can not be held responsible for that.
You also still have the fact that the Majority of the homes were not defensible Flammable construction and no defensible area.
In other words no Fire prevention or regulations in place to protect against what happened the Property owner is liable for there lack of fire safe measures.
Severial of us fire fighters have said over and over that no home or homes are more important than the Safety our crews.
Building fire line around homes dose not Guarantee they wont catch fire and there for there is no liability to the Government agency if they catch fire. It is just a pure and simple fact.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 2, 2015 at 1:49 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> I Know I will here about what I am about to say but here goes——
And I just wanted to be sure and say “Thank You”, once again, for your responses on these complicated issue(s)
It continues to astound me how much respect I have for the way you can clearly and succinctly “say what you mean and mean what you say”.
It IS appreciated…and always has been… no matter how some other ‘detractors’ may have tried to step in an criticize your participation here.
That being said… let me RESPECTFULLY say that neither you or I are going to be the ultimate arbiters of these complicated issues.
I think you are being a little myopic of the actual CLAIMS that have been made in these ‘property damage’ suits and with regards of the chances that some/all of the ‘claims’ could survivie on appeal.
What I mean is…
MOST of the 160+ ‘property damage’ claims ALSO mention the fact that regardless of anyone’s ‘responsibility’ or ‘ability’ to do anything at all about that fire once it had escaped intial attack… there is STILL a valid claim involved that is fully permissible under Arizona TORT law that says the residents are entitled to claim ‘damages’ for that TOTAL FUCK-UP with regards to the actual EVACUATION notices and the timing on all of that.
MOST of the 160+ claims include SPECIFIC claims for ‘damages’ and ‘losses’ that are related to this total screw-up of the EVACUATION notices on Sunday… and have nothing to do with Arizona Forestry’s other massive demonstration of incompetence with regards to containing the fire on ‘Initial Attack’.
The fact that Judge Joh Tuchi himself seemed to not realize that these claims have TWO very distinct and separate PARTS is what makes it very likely they will surivive on appeal.
Yes…. it’s possible that even though everyone associated with the response on this fire was totally mis-guided and mis-taken about having ANY responsibility to PROTECT anything at all… what happened on Sunday regarding the inevitable EVACUATION notices is still such a display of total incompetence that the plaintiffs DO have a right to at least try and prove that in court.
So THAT is why these cases might survive appeal.
It doesn’t mean the plaintiffs will WIN… but the evidence of negligence on Sunday is so obvious they at least have the right to “have their day in court”… which Judge Tuchi is trying to deny them from having.
That’s what an appeals Judge is going to look at.
Did Judge Tuchi’s ruling ‘overstep’ and eliminate even the chance for the plaintiffs to prove ( in court ) that the negligence surrounding the evacuation notices was so bad that they really do deserve just compensation.
First and foremost I feel bad for the property owners and their losses. First and foremost it is their responsibility to provide protection for their property with clearance and non flammable construction.
Fighting wild fires and protecting structures in the Urban Interface has its own rules and regulations.
First many fires escape IA for many reasons, some escape after Containment from creeping embers in roots or trees with a smoldering limb that spots across the line.
or not reaching containment before the critical burn period starts.
All of those and other reasons are why fires escape. In a wildfire setting in most states that have Wild Fires annually there are laws that protect the state as well as the Federal Government from lawsuits of private property owners where wild fires
burn private property and structures as well as live stock.
The suppression plan always includes in urban interface the goal of protecting structures. That dose not mean if the fire escapes that protection that the State or Federal Fire organization that they are liable for the losses. There is always an attempt to protect private property some times you are successful some times your not.
Factors that keep Wild land fire fighters from successful protection are many.
First the weather, Defensible space, clearance around structures, access roads big enough for large Engines, fire resistance roofs and siding, fuel brakes all the responsibility of the land owner and the regulations of the Municipality.
Most Insurance companies will not insure against wild fire losses.
There is one company I know of that dose insure but they also require severial preventive things and will provide a Engine and crew to protect there investment
which isn’t cheep.
Proving incompetence is a really difficult thing with all the other factors involved on The Yarnell Fire. Were their suppression tactics sufficient to suppress the Fire before mother nature took over with the winds? The fire was burning in Peoples valley where they were attempting to protect structures. The assessments of Structure protection was not good due to lack of difensiable space in Yarnell , Peoples Valley, and Glen Isla. When the fire turned on the other 2 communities there was nothing that could be done with out putting Fire personnel in harms way in front of the fire front. Engine crews have been lost and trapped by doing that.
The fire jumped roads and Spotted in many areas reducing access to suppression and increased Safety to Fire fighters.
Even in California where Prevention rules are in place Wild land fire takes out structures every year. Extreme burning conditions and Drought have a significant affect on Fire.
While it is confusing the Federal Government and the State wild land fire have no responsibility for Structure protection. They are not funded for that.
They suppress wild land fire and attempt to keep the fire out of communities by getting fire lines put in to stop the fire, that happens all the time but there is no implied responsibility to protect structures. That is the City and County’s responsibility if it is safe to do so.
It will be an up hill battle to prove negligence in the suppression effort That’s purity much what I have been saying, There is always the possibility that a judge or jury will award a clam its just not a common occurrence.
This isn’t the Federal Government or the U.S. Forestry Service.
It’s an ‘agency’ in a state that is one of a few in the nation that does NOT have ‘automatic sovereign immunity’ for State agencies and/or State employees.
I don’t care what has happened before. This case is ‘unique’.. ADOSH has already investigated and discovered basically so much negligence going on that they have issued HISTORIC fines of their own.
The full range of negligence can only be exposed/proven if the case is allowed to go to trial.
The appeal might accomplish that fundamental step, might not.
But I still think you missed the point I was trying to make up above.
Regardless of how they may or may not have totally botched he ‘Initial Attack’ and/or even the ‘Extended Attack’… the SECOND part of MOST of those 160+ lawsuits is all about how they botched the actual evacuation notifications.
MOST of the 160+ lawsuits are ALSO asking for compensation because of THAT specific display of total incompetence and negligence… and this has nothing to do with whether Arizona Forestry was able to control the fire or not.
A LOT of people lost a LOT of personal property ( not just STRUCTURES ) because they simply weren’t given TIME to evacuate properly.
Arizona TORT law says they are entitled to be compensated for THESE losses, as well.
It has nothing to do with “structures”.
Correction for above.
I said… “It has nothing to do with ‘structures’ “.
PART ONE of the 160+ lawsuits filed certainly DOES have to do with ‘structures’ and whether or not Arizona Forestry met the legal requirements of “Assumption of Responsibility” that weekend.
It is the SECOND PART of all these 160+ lawsuits filed that has “nothing to do with structures’.
The personal property losses being claimed for THOSE parts of the 160+ lawsuits have nothing to do with whose fault it was or wasn’t that a HOUSE was lost.
Those claims are simply ALL about how badly Arizona Forestry screwed up the evacuation notifications on Sunday and most of these residents ended up having to literally RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.
If the appeals Judge sees that these valid TORT claims are part-and-parcel separate and different from any claims about actual structure losses… then these valid Arizona TORT claims can/will be ‘broken out’ of the lawsuit framework as-is and will be allowed to proceed.
WTKTT You are wrong on this one won’t argue with you but this is as stated not an easy clam to win in a court of law..
Property loss is Property Loss. proving negligence is not going to be easy in a wild land fire case. Again Fire preparedness is primary and key to the ability to protect property and Structures 99% of the structures in Yarnell and Glen Isla were not defensible you can’t win that in a court of law.
Many states follow the same legal laws as the Federal Government and adopt those laws. Your saying Arizona dose not have that law then what did the Judge use for his denial of the suit?
The evacuation notifications should have been handled by the City and County Fire and Law enforcement not the State fire organization. That is in the Co-op plans you are stretching responsibility a little far here.
If I remember most of the community were being told they should evacuate that morning most ignored that first warning.
If I am correct the Sheriffs Department did the notifications that afternoon getting those out who had not left.
Reply to Bob Powers post on May 5, 2015 at 2:43 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> WTKTT You are wrong on this one
>> won’t argue with you
Copy that.
I actually don’t *think* I am wrong about the fact that the Judge’s dismissal of the ENTIRE lawsuit(s) *might* be overturned on appeal because he ( Judge Tuchi ) failed to take into consideration ALL of the claims in the suits ( and not just the claims for failing to protect structures )…
…but you are *right* that it’s not worth arguing ( here ) about it.
No one is asking US to ‘decide the case’.
The Appellate Judge will do just fine with this on his/her own without OUR ‘input’… I’m sure.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> this is as stated not an easy clam to
>> win in a court of law..
No. It’s not.
Even for the plaintiffs to win on appeal by EITHER proving that Arizona Forestry did meet the “Assumption of Responsibility” tripwire for valid TORT claims… OR by convincing the appeal Judge ( whoever that ends up being ) that Judge Tuchi did not fully consider ALL of the individual ‘breakout claims’ in the suit when he carte-blance ‘dismissed’ ALL of them…
…it’s going to be a tough road to go for them.
Arizona Forestry is still going to be fighting tooth and nail to stop ANY of the claims in ANY of these suits from EVER reaching the ‘evidentiary’ phase where people might have to be called back to the witness stand and ( finally ) tell the TRUTH ( under OATH ) about what happened.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Property loss is Property Loss. proving negligence
>> is not going to be easy in a wild land fire case.
>> Again Fire preparedness is primary and key to
>> the ability to protect property and Structures 99%
>> of the structures in Yarnell and Glen Isla were not
>> defensible you can’t win that in a court of law.
Again… we are just going to have to agree to disagree about the ‘possibilities’ there.
I am NOT disagreeing with what you are THINKING.
Yes… Arizona Forestry will use BOTH its claim that they never really had any responsibility to protect anything at all… as well as the additional claim that the very properties they even *might* have been supposed to be defending were ‘not defensible’ at all.
I am ONLY ‘disagreeing’ with your failure to see the legal distinction with regards to this “Assumption of Responsibility” argument and how that might actually specifically apply to the botched evacuations that day.
It IS already being ‘claimed’ in these lawsuits… and it IS a valid legal concept that Judge Tuchi seems to have ignored as he ( for lack of a better phrase ) “threw the baby out with the bathwater”.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Many states follow the same legal laws as the
>> Federal Government and adopt those laws.
>> Your saying Arizona dose not have that law then
>> what did the Judge use for his denial of the suit?
Again… not worth an ‘argument’… but there actually ARE two simple ANSWERS to the TWO things you are wondering about in that paragraph.
1) Arizona does not have that law
What Arizona does NOT have ( that the Federal Government and SOME other States have ) is built-in and AUTOMATIC ‘sovereign immunity’ for Government agencies AND the ’employees’ that work for those agencies.
It is simply not AUTOMATIC that you ‘cannot sue the Government’ in Arizona.
You CAN.
Arizona TORT law ALLOWS it.
If you have enough evidence that some Arizona State Agency ( such as the Arizona Forestry Division ) and/or any of its ’employees’ have screwed up badly enough that you have suffered personal lossess and/or damages… the Arizona TORT law says you are SUPPOSED to (theoretically) have your “day in court” to try and PROVE it.
It doesn’t mean you will WIN. It just means that you are supposed to be able to try and prove your case.
2) Then what did the Judge use for his denial of the suit?
I still don’t have a PACER account ( Public Access to Court Electronic Records ) like the media people do… so I haven’t seen the ACTUAL ‘arguments’ made by Arizona Forestry OR the actual ‘findings’ of Judge Tuchi…
…but from what these media people HAVE reported it appears that Tuchi is basing his entire ‘dismissal’ ruling on just the following line from the Arizona State Law 37-623…
http://www.azleg.gov/ArizonaRevisedStatutes.asp?Title=37
Arizona Statues – Title 37 – Public Lands
Chapter 2.1 – FORESTS
Article 1- State Forester
37-621 – State forester; qualifications
37-622 – Duties of state forester; acceptance of federal law
37-623 – Suppression of wildfires; powers and duties of state
forester; entry on private lands
From 37-623…
—————————————————-
37-623. Suppression of wildfires; powers and duties of state forester; entry on private lands
A. The state forester shall have AUTHORITY to prevent and suppress any wildfires on state and private lands located outside incorporated municipalities and, if subject to cooperative agreements, on other lands located in this state or in other states, Mexico or Canada. If there is no cooperative agreement, the state forester MAY furnish wildfire suppression services on any lands in this state if the state forester determines that suppression services are in the best interests of this state and are immediately necessary to protect state lands.
———————————————
Two KEY words here in this statute…
‘AUTHORITY’ ( versus ‘responsibility’ or ‘duty’ )
‘MAY’ ( versus ‘must’ ).
There WAS one of these ‘cooperative agreements’ in place with Yavapai County which covered the Peeples Valley, Yarnell and Glen Ilah areas… so the second half of Statute 37-623 really doesn’t apply.
But even with that ‘cooperative agreement’ in place.. the Arizona Statute only says the State Forester ( E.g. Arizona Forestry ) has the AUTHORITY to ‘suppress any wildfire’.
The actual word RESPONSIBILITY is never used.
So that’s pretty much it.
That is pretty much the only thing Judge John Tuchi is using as the entire basis for his ruling that Arizona Forestry never had any ‘responsibility’ whatsoever to be ‘protecting’ the communities of Peeples Valley, Yarnell and Glen Ilah… even though a valid ‘cooperative agreement’ was fully in place covering those communities.
Judge Tuchi is basing his entire ruling not on something that is actually IN the Arizona Statutes. He is basing his entire ruling on just one single word ( RESPONSIBILITY ) that is NOT in the actual Arizona Statues.
And he is also saying ( by default ) that it ( the responsibility ) isn’t even IMPLIED in the Arizona Statute(s).
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The evacuation notifications should have been
>> handled by the City and County Fire and Law
>> enforcement not the State fire organization.
When the evacuations were finally ‘called for’ ( by Arizona Forestry, who had assumed management of the incident )… then the YCSO deputies did ‘kick in’ and start actually ‘doing’ the evacuations ( together with one or two ‘Jeep Squads’ from the Yarnell Fire Department ).
The key LEGAL point is who was RESPONSIBLE for actually DECIDING when it was time to execute the evacuations.
That still appears to have been totally the ‘responsibility’ of Arizona Forestry, legally speaking.
Yes… YCSO could have just gone ahead and issued the actual ‘evacuation notices’ anytime they wanted. They always had/have that ‘authority’.
But that’s not what happened.
YCSO was completey dependent ( and was WAITING ) for Arizona Forestry offcials to TELL THEM when it was time to start the actual ‘evacuations’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> That is in the Co-op plans
Yes. It also states in the actual NWCS Wildfire Incident Management Guide ( which Arizona Forestry was legally bound to follow ) that the actual ‘evacuations’ can/should be handled by local law enforcement… but neither document says it is solely law enforcement job to also DECIDE when to start doing that.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> you are stretching responsibility a little far here.
Perhaps… but what ACTUALLY happened at the Yarnell Hill Fire on Sunday, June 30, 2013 is that ‘law enforcement’ ( YCSO ) was ASSUMING that when it was time to actually start evacuating people… that they would be NOTIFIED about that by Arizona Forestry, who was running and managing the fire.
Arizona Forestry waited WAAAAY too long before actually notifying YCSO that the full evacuation of Yarnell and Glen Ilah was not absolutely imperative, and so YCSO was already ‘behind the ball’ when they jumped into action to begin carrying out Arizona Forestry’s wishes that the towns
now be ‘evacuated’.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If I remember most of the community were
>> being told they should evacuate that morning
>> most ignored that first warning.
I don’t believe that’s the case.
Neither investigation did a complete job investigating this and the mainstream media articles differ about what actually happened… but I believe the ‘story’ was that while there was a ‘pre-evacuation’ notice posted on the Yarnell Fire Department website sometime around NOON… it also specifically said it was NOT the actual ‘evacuation notice’ and that if and when that came… people would have at least 1 hour to gather up their portable property and evacuate.
That 1 hour notice is what never came.
By the time the actual ‘evacuation notices’ were being sent out… they were for IMMEDIATE evacuation and most of the residents of both Yarnell and Glen Ilah had to literally RUN FOR THEIR LIVES.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If I am correct the Sheriffs Department did the
>> notifications that afternoon getting those out
>> who had not left.
Again… your understanding doesn’t match most of the evidence or most of the mainstream media articles about what actually happened.
But regardless… your POINT is still well taken.
It will be a HARD ROAD TO GO for the ‘plaintiffs’ in the lawsuits to prove absoute total ‘negligence’ with regards to the evacuation notices and/or the actual evacuations.
The SAD part here ( and the part that the appellate Judge might find disturbing and/or improper about Tuchi’s carte blanche dismissal ruling ) is that the plaintiffs aren’t even going to be afforded the chance to even TRY and prove what has already been reported in both of the investigations and in the mainstream media.
We shall see what happens here.
Followup…
Again… not trying to be argumentative… just adding some links to some pertinent info.
The best ’roundup’ I think the MSM did of how the actual ‘evacuations’ went ( or didn’t, as the case may be ) on June 30, 2013 was that extensively researched USAToday article.
According to this article… it was a frickin’ MESS and it’s pretty much a miracle other lives weren’t lost because of these ‘botched’ evacuation notices.
USAToday
Article Title: Yarnell Evacuation was FLAWED
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/17/yarnell-hill-fire-evacuation-flawed/3619999/
And this MSM article covered the ‘story’ about how even though Arizona Forestry was WAAAY ‘late’ in notifying YCSO that total evacuations were now needed… even then the ‘swiss cheese’ effect kicked in and the notification system itself that YCSO was trying to use was “full of holes”…
AZCENTRAL
Article Title: Yarnell Hill Fire: System FAILED
to alert hundreds to evacuate
Published: 12:58 a.m. MST May 11, 2014
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/investigations/2014/05/11/yarnell-hill-fire-system-failed-evacuation/8963719/
Whoops. Bad typo up above that actually changed the intended meaning of a paragraph.
I typed ‘not’ instead of ‘now’.
Paragraph above SHOULD have read like this…
‘Arizona Forestry waited WAAAAY too long before actually notifying YCSO that the full evacuation of Yarnell and Glen Ilah was NOW absolutely imperative, and so YCSO was already ‘behind the ball’ when they jumped into action to begin carrying out Arizona Forestry’s wishes that the towns now be ‘evacuated’.”
I do agree with the mess the total change in the wind and the Fire was something the overhead did not prepare for, but that happens a lot.
In Idaho on Fires there is an immediate 24 hour Evacuation notice to home and property owners.
Depending on the Fire it could happen in the first 3 or 4 hrs of the fire. Our sage Brush country with a little wind can and dose explode to thousands of Acers very fast.
**
** YARNELL HOMEOWNERS OFFICIALLY FILE APPEAL AGAINST TUCHI DECISION
It’s official. The plaintiffs in the 2 property damage lawsuits have filed an ‘appeal’ against
Judge John Tuchi’s decision that Arizona Forestry never had one iota of responsibility
for doing anything at all to protect their properties… even though they are all taxpaying
citizens of the State of Arizona.
The following article also goes into much more detail that the original article about this.
There’s now more detail about what Arizona Forestry was actually claiming, and what Judge John Tuchi AGREED with with regards to them having NO DUTY to ‘protect’ anything at all.
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Yarnell property owners give notice of appeal of judge’s lawsuit dismissal
Published: 5/2/2015 6:01:00 AM by Cindy Barks
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=144797
————————————————————————————–
Yarnell property owners who sued in June 2014 over the State of Arizona’s management of the 2013 Yarnell Hill wildfire will continue their litigation, despite a Maricopa County Superior Court judge’s ruling this week dismissing the suits.
Attorneys for more than 160 Yarnell property owners filed a notice of appeal on April 29, disputing Judge Richard Gama’s dismissal of the lawsuits.
On Friday, May 1, attorney Craig Knapp said, “We believe the judge erred in his decision that the Forestry Division did not have a duty to protect Yarnell and its residents.”
Gama’s ruling rejected the lawsuit’s claims, however, stating that the state of Arizona “did not owe a duty” to the property owners when the Forestry Division took on management and suppression of the wildfire.
“First, the court finds that the state’s undertaking was not a service rendered to plaintiffs,” Gama’s ruling stated. Rather, he said, the Forestry Division’s wildfire authority is consistent with “the best interest of the state, not persons who own property near State Trust Land.”
Gama also rejected the plaintiffs’ claim that a duty was owed to the private property owners “in the context of firefighting efforts on State Trust Land.”
Knapp said the appeal would dispute the ruling on a number of points.
For instance, he said, the Forestry Division instructed other safety personnel in the area to “stand down” in their own firefighting efforts, leaving Yarnell to rely on the state to contain the fire.
In addition, he said, protecting communities located near State Trust Land, “is why the Forestry Division has a multi-million budget.”
Under Gama’s ruling, Knapp maintains, the Forestry Division could opt to let a fire burn, and “just walk away.” In that case, he said, nearby property owners are “out of luck; there’s no legal remedy for them.”
Gama’s ruling defines “duty” as an “obligation, recognized by law, which requires the defendant to conform to a particular standard of conduct in order to protect others against unreasonable risks of harm.”
The judge added, “Whether a duty exists is a matter of law for the court.”
————————————————————————————–
Something that is not in the article but worth mentioning.
Judge John Tuchi was only appointed as a ‘Federal District’ Judge less than a YEAR ago, on May 16, 2014. These ‘Yarnell lawsuits’ were one of ( if not THE ) first case he was assigned as a Federal Judge… and now his decisions are already being ‘appealed’.
Not a good ‘out of the gate’ for Tuchi.
I think one of the strongest points in the appeal is that very early into the incident, ADF ordered the locals who WERE responsible for protecting the people and property of that area to STAND DOWN.
You don’t have to be a Harvard law professor to understand the potential implications of that order.
If the City Crews were not certified Wild Land Fire Fighters then they could not fight the fire how ever they could stand by for structure suppression if it was safe and feasible. And for Evacuation needs.
When the Fire blew up there was nothing city fire equipment or wild land fire equipment could do. When the wind hit the fire front it was all over for the towns in its path. The State had no responsibility for structure protection at that time.
My recollection of when the State told the local agencies to stand-down was that it was the first night, when the fire was only a couple of acres.
If that recollection is correct, there have certainly been a lot of people commenting on this site for a long, long time that they believe the fire would have been corraled that first night if someone had made the effort.
I would agree with that assumption.
I guess the real question is that if you have a duty to protect life and property and want to perform that duty, and then a higher authority comes along and prevents that, and orders you to stand down, aren’t they via that order, taking responsibility for that which they are preventing you from doing?
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE )
post on May 2, 2015 at 3:57 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> My recollection of when the State told the local agencies to
>> stand-down was that it was the first night, when the fire was
>> only a couple of acres.
Yes… and it wasn’t even really a ‘couple of acres’ yet.
It was just a ‘smoke’ showing up on the ridge.
No actual FLAME would even be seen until much later that night.
Arizona Forestry AFMO ( Assistant Fire Management Officer ) and current Duty Officer Russ Shumate had already arrived in Yarnell and verified that the ‘smoke’ was showing on Arizona State Trust land, and not BLM land.
The Peeples Valley Firefighters had offered to just (quote) “go up there and take care of it”… but Arizona Forestry AFMO and ICT4 Shumate told them to “stand down”. That it was now HIS ( Arizona Forestry’s ) fire and they would take care of it.
SIDENOTE: Don’t forget that the extensive interviews with all of the Peeples Valley firefighters that took place within 48 hours after the tragedy ( and all the photos and videos that were collected from them ) have still never seen the light of day. The Peeples Valley firefighters themselves have testified in media articles that these ‘investigative interviews’ and that evidence collection took place… but NONE of that has ever showed up in response to any valid Arizona Open Records and/or FOIA/FOIL requests.
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> I guess the real question is that if you have a duty to
>> protect life and property and want to perform that duty,
>> and then a higher authority comes along and prevents
>> that, and orders you to stand down, aren’t they via that
>> order, taking responsibility for that which they are
>> preventing you from doing?
Absolutely.
The LEGAL term is “Assumption of Responsibility”, and that legal concept applies to a lot of things… including even simple things like deciding to give medical attention to someone you find lying on the side of the road.
Once you do that ( assume responsibility )… you DO have ‘obligations’ and ‘responsibilities’.
If you don’t feel you have the competence or the skills to handle the task in a responsible fashion… the key is to just “not go there”. Do NOT go ahead and “assume responsibility” unless you are “up to the task”.
This will remain the ‘primary focus’ of the appeals of this decision.
There is NO QUESTION that Arizona Forestry employee Russ Shumate officially “assumed responsibility” for that fire ( on behalf of Arizona Forestry ) on the afternoon of Friday, June 28, 2013.
The QUESTION that will remain is whether, following that “assumption of responsibility”, there was then such a display of incompetence and negligence continuing on for the next 2 to 3 days that the valid Arizona taxpayers who were affected by that incompetence deserve some compensation.
Don’t forget that for a majority of the 160+ plaintiffs in the ‘property damage and loss’ lawsuits… one of the primary claims is that regardless of the incompetence displayed by Arizona Forestry on Friday and Saturday… the incompetence on Sunday alone is what caused them to not have enough TIME to evacuate properly and most of them lost some very valuable persona possessions ( and yes, some irreplaceable ) memorabilia.
If a lot of them has simply been given more TIME to escape the inevitable ( instead of having to just “run for their lives” as then ended up doing )… then a lot of these personal losses could/would have been avoided.
So it’s not just about a house burning down.
It’s about the total incompetence displayed on Sunday and the way Arizona Forestry totally mis-handled the trigger points and the evacuation notifications.
**
** CRONKITE NEWS POSTS VIDEO FLY-THROUGH OF PROPOSED ACCESS
** ROUTE TO THE YARNELL HILL DEPLOYMENT SITE MEMORIAL
Earlier today… Cronkite news posted a video segment from one of their live news reports that features very recent interviews ( within the last day or so ) of the following people…
Rowle Simmons – Yavapai County Supervisor and a member of the AZ State Sponsored Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board.
Deborah Pfingston – Mother of deceased GM Hotshot Andrew Ashcraft and an invited member of the design committee for the AZ State sponsored Yarnell Hill Memorial Site Board.
There really aren’t any ‘news flashes’ here in this progress report… but at about +1:30 into the video ( and during the in-home interview with Deborah Pfingston ), there is a Google Earth fly-through of this proposed 2+ mile ‘hiking trail’ that the Board has cooked up as the plan for people to access the deployment site ( since none of the landowners anywhere around the actual site want to grant any easements or access rights ).
It starts down on Highway 89 where there’s only room for 2 or 3 cars to pull off the Highway and then proceeds NORTH towards the deployment site.
It is, indeed, a LONG and STEEP hike just to arrive up on ridge at about the point where that two-track ( which became known as the ‘alternate escape route’ ) takes that turn to the EAST and then heads towards the Boulder Springs Ranch.
http://cronkitenewsonline.com/2015/04/creating-a-memorial-for-the-fallen-yarnell-hotshots/
If it is that little turn off down the hill where I think they mean, it will hold maybe five or six vehicles, however, that climb is bound to get people hurt unless they are avid hikers and in good physical condition. Likely a few will die of snake bite as well.
Ridiculous way to go I say when you have a nearly flat land walk if you start from below the Helms and skirt their property or alternatively go to the shrine area and walk a dirt road that will keep you on track to get to the site with only one steep hill climb with good walking conditions. Seems like someone wants to keep people completely out of the area picking out these ways to go.
Consult Joy Collura or Sonny on this one. Joy knows every land owner and every property and who is amicable to passing through and who is not.
Selling that property to the widows is disagreeable as well. Wrong thing to do in America considering that site should be accessible to everyone that wants to visit. What are they going to put cabins there so they can live there or is it just that they want to control who visits the site. I need a reasonable purpose for that land deal. There are Indian artifacts on the property and we ought to allow all tribes access as well–I am certain the tribes would agree to that. My opinion only, maybe you can explain something I do not understand on this one.
A simple question do the Helmes have enough money to out bid the widows and secure the title to more Acreage?
If they are not interested in a easement to the site I guess any thing is possible?
Just my thoughts……………………….
Very likely… and from a certain perspective… they would be foolish to NOT try and add that south half of Section 9 to their existing property.
Just look at that compound… and also the photographs taken INSIDE just the garage/workshop that accompanies the residence.
There’s more than $500,000 worth of tools and equipment sitting inside the garage alone. It’s an amazing ‘workshop’ he has there for himself.
And make no mistake… $500,000 is all they need to come up with and it is theirs.
The Yarnell Hill Memorial Board has only been granted $500,000 from the Arizona State Legislature and that money can ONLY be used to acquire the property. NONE of it is allowed to be used for either building the memorial itself OR for purchasing any ‘access rights’ OR for building any kind of ‘access trail’ to the site. ALL of that ‘extra’ stuff has to come from donations.
It is also not likely that they would bid the entire $500,000, either… so the maximum number at which they would probably have to stop bidding against competitors is more in the mid $400,000 range.
It’s an unusual situation… for competitors to KNOW ( for sure and certain ) exactly how much money another competitor has to use and what the maximum bid they could possibly make is.
Makes it easy to ‘outbid’ them at the actual auction.
Looks like the ALJ has a bunch more filings mostly again Legal Mumbo jumbo,
The last pages had something about McDonough’s deposition or past ones and the requirement of the court to summons I think again confusing to me.
Reply to Bob Powers post on April 30, 2015 at 1:37 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Looks like the ALJ has a bunch more filings
Yes. Another 223 pages showed up today and direct link to the new document is…
Filename: “2015_04 Updated 04.27.15.pdf”
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6N47Z5CNR-CXzBKWXBzUm9CYTA/edit?pli=1
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> …mostly again Legal Mumbo jumbo,
Yea… pretty much.
I have read through all 223 pages at least once… and there really isn’t anything NEW contained in this new upload.
It’s just a continuation of this ‘discovery’ process they are now going “full steam ahead” with, since there is no sign there will be ANY settlement in this AZF vs. ADOSH thing.
The only NEW documents are just more ‘responses to responses to motions… yada… yada… yada.
Arizona Forestry still wants as much as they can get out of ADOSH during this ‘discovery’ process… as well as wanting Judge Mosesso to outright dismiss ADOSH Citation 1 items 1(b) and 1(c).
1(b) is the citation for the near-entrapment situation involving McDonough.
1(c) is the citation for the near-entrapments in the Harper Canyon / Youth Camp area.
The absolutely ABSURD arguments that Arizona Forestry is making for these two sub-items of Citation 1 to be ‘dismissed’ are reprinted AGAIN in this new ‘dump’.
There is still NOTHING ( no response letters ) from Judge Mosesso himself about ANY of these pending ‘motions’ or ‘issues’.
At the risk of even being TOO simple here… let me see if I can just do a really quick ‘summary’ of what this whole “deliberative process” thing is all about and why there are SOOO many documents in this package now related to just that ONE ‘issue’.
It all goes back to the very START of this ‘discovery’ phase whereby each set of attorneys is supposed to ‘show their cards’.
The first thing that always happens there is that both sides are supposed to issue something called a PRIVILEGE LOG. That is simply a document which is supposed to detail WHICH documents ( or pieces of evidence ) that one side or the other admits to having… but they are NOT going to ‘share’ them with other side.
The PRIVILEGE LOG simply explains what those documents ARE… and ( more importantly ) WHY the attorneys are NOT going to ‘share’ those documents as part of the ‘discovery’ process.
There are all kinds of legitimate reasons why you don’t have to show the other side ALL of your ‘cards’ during this ‘discovery’ phase and before you ever get to what’s called the ‘evidentiary’ hearing’ part of the process.
Two of the most common ones are ‘attorney-client privilege’ and ‘deliberative process privilege’.
As it turns out… those ended up pretty much the ONLY two reasons that ADOSH listed for the documents it was planning on ‘withholding’ from Arizona Forestry during this ‘discovery’ phase.
So THAT is when Arizona Forestry itself decided to ‘attack’ ADOSH about this ‘deliberative process’ claim itself.
The ‘deliberative process’ exemption just means that you don’t have to give the other side any of the documents that simply show your own ‘process of deliberation’ as you reached your own conclusions.
ADOSH listed a number of DRAFT versions of the CITATION documents in their ‘privilege log’ and while they admitted those DRAFTS of the final CITATION ‘report’ existed… they simply said they would NOT be giving copies of those DRAFTS to Arizona Forestry because they simply represented their own ‘deliberations’ and ‘revisions’ before they reached the final ( PUBLISHED and SERVED ) ADOSH Citations.
Well… that just pissed the Arizona Forestry lawyers off.
They want to see EVERYTHING… including all DRAFT versions of the ADOSH Citation documents as they were being ‘worked on’ and ‘revised’ right up until the final version.
It’s easy to tell what their ‘thinking’ is on this.
If Arizona Forestry can somehow prove that there was ever any DOUBT, even amongst the ADOSH investigators, that any of these citations should be issued.. then the Arizona Forestry lawyers will be all over that like shit on shinola.
What complicates things here ( and this takes up a lot of real-estate in these continual motions and ‘response’ documents ) is that Arizona has some pretty sophisticated ‘Open Records’ policies and this ‘deliberative process privilege’ is actually not AUTOMATICALLY recognized in Arizona Courts as it so easily is in other States.
So you can imagine that’s why all the back-and-forth over this ‘deliberative process’ thing.
ADOSH is claiming they DO have the right to withhold documents because their own charter DOES give them this ‘deliberative process’ privilege ( just like FEDERAL OSHA has )… but since the Arizona Forestry layers really, really, really want to see all those ‘early drafts’ of the ADOSH citiation documents… they are throwing every legal argument they can into the works to try and say that ADOSH does NOT have the right to keep those DRAFT documents out of the “discovery” phase of this proceeding.
They were actually already ARGUING about these ‘privilege logs’ and these claims of “deliberative process privilege’ before Arizona Forestry even announced they were willing to ‘negotiate’ with the families of the deceased Hotshots over in the other “wrongful-death’ lawsuits.
As soon as Arizona Forestry finally said they WERE willing to ‘negotiate’ with the families of the deceased Hotshots… then ADOSH moved for ‘global mediation’ and said they were also willing to ‘participate’ in those negotiations.
It was actually a ‘good faith’ gesture on ADOSH’s part, at that point.
Once it was clear that Arizona Forestry was even WILLING to ‘negotiate’ about all this… ADOSH moved that it be GLOBAL mediation and that would give Arizona Forestry a chance to basically ‘make it ALL go away’… provided Arizona Forestry really was willing to negotiate a FAIR settlement and ‘in good faith’.
So once the scheduled March 2 and 3 ‘mediations’ became ‘global mediations’.. ADOSH was then telling Judge Mosesso that a lot of this “privilege log” and “deliberative process” crap they were fighting over didn’t need to be pursued anymore until everybody saw how those March 2, 3 ‘mediation sessions’ went.
Well… apparently that was all a DISASTER.
It looks like Arizona Forestry just showed up to those negotiations like a bull in a china shop and thought they could just make everything go THEIR way… perhaps with just an open checkbook, or something.
Arizona Forestry apparently discovered really quickly that the families of these dead Hotshots really did mean what they said in the lawsuits themselves.
It was NOT about “the money” at all.
They ( the families of the dead Hotshots ) really do just want the following…
1) The TRUTH. They want to know what really happened
and why their loved ones are DEAD.
2) Accountability. They want to know exactly WHO is responsible for that fire
being allowed to ‘escape’ and then being totally mis-handled the rest of the weekend.
3) Change. They really DO want to see the WFF Industry reacting properly to this tragic event and at least TRYING to identify the inherent ‘problems’ and at least TRYING to implement some changes that might prevent such a similar tragedy in the future.
Well… it’s still hard to tell what is going on with the negotiations but after the TOTAL FAILURE back on March 2 and 3… and now the SECOND 45 day ‘extension’ being granted… you can be sure it’s a bar-room brawl of some kind with the families sticking to their guns but Arizona Forestry still not wanting to admit that ANYONE did ANYTHING wrong ( in any way, shape or form ) on June 30, 2013.
But as for the original ADOSH Citations and this whole ( other ) “Arizona Forestry versus ADOSH” thing… it’s pretty obvious that NOTHING came out of the March 2 and 3 negotiations that offers any hope at all of the ADOSH Citations just ‘going away’.
So that’s when the pedal went to the metal again in this “AZF vs. ADOSH” thing, and why we are seeing this “full speed ahead” paper-frenzy again as they are now RESUMING the fisticuffs over those “privilege log” and “deliberative privilege” issues.
Arizona Forestry is back to wanting to see EVERYTHING that ADOSH has ( including DRAFT copies of the citations ) so they can just try and ‘punch holes’ in anything they can get their hands on.
And they ( Arizona Forestry ) actually MIGHT get a lot of what they are asking for.
They MIGHT get Judge Mosesso to agree that the ‘deliberative process privilege’ isn’t a good enough reason to put in you ‘prvilege log’ ( in Arizona, anyway ) for why you want to withhold certain documents.
They MIGHT get Judge Mosesso to agree that he is allowed to issue ‘dispositive motions’ ( as in… DISPOSE of things ) during this ‘discovery’ process.
They MIGHT also then get Judge Mosesso to agree that Items 1(b) and 1(c) of ADOSH Citation one should be ‘dropped’ before they even reach the ‘evidentiary’ phase.
OR… they might get NOTHING.
Judge Mosesso could do a major ‘slap-down’ for all the ‘lecturing’ the Arizona Forestry lawyers have been delivering to him about how he should be doing his job… and he might also not give them jack-shit as far as any ‘dispositive motions’ go.
We shall see.
Judge Mosesso hasn’t actually issued any RULINGS yet on ANY of this crap… but it’s pretty much ‘his turn’ now. He has to come back with some RULINGS now on some of this stuff.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The last pages had something about McDonough’s deposition or past ones
>> and the requirement of the court to summons I think again confusing to me.
I’m actually not seeing anything like that. Not in this NEW ‘document dump’ anyway.
It just has some ‘reprints’ of documents we’ve already seen like the one where Arizona Forestry is trying to make the news about Brendan’s therapist cancelling his last deposition because Brendan ( supposedly ) has PTSD work in THEIR favor.
That’s the document where, after they spill this basically ‘private medical information’ about Brendan’s mental health in a PUBLIC ‘motion’ filing ( which may have been legal but was still crass and unnecessary )… they then make that THREAT to Judge Mosseso along the lines of…
“If you don’t give us what we want and dismiss the ADOSH Citation related to poor, poor Brendan… then WE are going to call poor, poor Brendan to the stand and grill the shit out him all over again about all of this… and whatever bad effect that *might* have on his medical condition will be on your hands… not ours. Have a nice day, Judge”.
Thanks, WTKTT, for “unpacking” this.
I had made an attempt to ready the previous file. I’m no good at deciphering all this legalese, especially as it goes around and around and around, but that was kinda sorta what I thought I was seeing, also.
But I wasn’t sure.
So this REALLY helps.
WTKTT and ALL
1 through 36 of 223 are the new filings started April 21 on page 36.
So not the whole 223 pages are new for those that want to look at the current.
the 223 are filings for the month of April..
About the middle of the 36 pages there were some references about McDonough’s Depositions but I just think only reference’s
Yes… I know the ‘references’ you are referring to at that point in the document… but there really is no NEW information there.
That section MENTIONS McDonough and the times when ADOSH has mentioned him before in THEIR documents… but the ‘issue’ being discussed there has nothing to do with McDonough at all.
What the Arizona Forestry lawyers are ‘arguing’ there is that they shouldn’t have to have some ‘discovery related’ document removed from the record ( as ADOSH is requesting ) because ADOSH themselves have submitted the same kind of documents on other occasions… including when they were ‘informing’ Judge Mosesso about what was going on with the ‘follow the bouncing ball’ Brendan McDonough deposition attempt(s).
On ( PDF ) page 25 ( out of 223 page )…
—————————————————————
( Arizona Forestry lawyers talking to Judge Mosesso… )
ADOSH has made it a practice to write letters to the Tribunal ( Judge ) to communicate about discovery matters. For example:
– On November 25, 2014, ADOSH took it upon itself to notify the Tribunal that the Deposition of Mr. McDonough was not going forward at that time.
– Again, on December 16, 2014, ADOSH submitted an update to the Tribunal regarding the status of discovery responses.
– Then, on February 27, 2015, ADOSH communicated to the Tribunal about the Deposition of Brendan McDonough.
Each of the above discovery-related documents were submitted by ADOSH for the public file and were not part of or necessary to pending motions or other matters necessary for the Tribunal to rule upon at that time.
————————————————————–
The official ‘lawyer speak’ going on there amounts to…
Dear Judge… we shouldn’t have to withdraw the documents we posted that say things that ADOSH says we weren’t supposed to say because if we weren’t supposed to say them then look… here’s other documents from ADOSH that say the same kind of things they say we weren’t supposed to say so if they can say them and not have us say they shouldn’t have said them then why should they be allowed to say we shouldn’t say the same things they said when they said them?
Yes… they really DO teach them this shit in Law School.
WTKTT Thanks that was kinda where I was at Just a lot of Mumbo Jumbo to make any since of.
One of the things to keep in mind when looking at this ‘stream’ of documents appearing during this continuing ‘discovery’ phase of this “Arizona Forestry versus ADOSH” proceeding is that the Arizona Foresty lawyers are still on a ‘learning curve’ here.
In other words… this certainly isn’t the first RODEO for ADOSH.
This specialized process whereby an employer can ‘contest’ citations that have been issued is something ADOSH contends with ALL the time.
But it’s not every day that Arizona Forestry is told they ran a workplace where it’s a miracle that ONLY 19 of their employees died… and they get the ‘book’ thrown at them and charged with ( basically ) the MAXIMUM penalties that ADOSH is even allowed to levy on an employer.
The Arizona Forestry lawyers REALLY want this to all run as a regular CIVIL COURT case… but that is NOT what it is.
All that is going to happen here, in the end, is that there will eventually be an actual PUBLIC hearing ( not a TRIAL )… and the presiding Administrative Law Judge ( ALJ ) Michael A. Mosesso is either going to ‘uphold’ the ADOSH citations ‘as-is’… or make some ‘adjustments’ to them.
Those ‘adjustments’ could be either just a reduction in the fines levied… OR an actual ‘withdrawl’ of some of the citations…
…or the Judge could just say that ADOSH has already ‘made its case’… and that it WAS an ‘unnecessarily chaotic and unsafe workplace’… and the citations STAND… exactly ‘as issued’.
The recent ruling over in the ‘property damage’ lawsuits where the Arizona Forestry lawyers actually succeeded with that motion they filed for dismissal based on some whacked out idea that they have no DUTY and/or RESPONSIBILITY to EVER actually even TRY and ‘protect property’ really complicates things ( for THEM ) in both this “Arizona Forestry versus ADOSH” proceeding AND for the “wrongful death” lawsuits.
If Arizona Forestry is going to continue to maintain ( via their lawyers ) that they never have ANY DUTY whatsoever to actually PROTECT anything at all… then that makes the ADOSH findings of a “chaotic, misguided and unsafe” workplace even STRONGER… and it makes the ‘wrongful’ part of the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits even STRONGER as well.
If Arizona Foresty has no DUTY to even lift a finger to protect Peeples Valley, Yarnell or Glen Ilah…
…then what in the BLOODY HELL were all those firefighters even DOING that ENTIRE WEEKEND?
If none of them ever even had any DUTY to be ‘protecting’ anything… then why are 19 of them DEAD and a bunch more ALMOST DIED in that screwed up workplace?
Why weren’t the ‘evacuations’ just ordered up on Sunday morning… and the hell with even TRYING to ‘protect’ anything?
Actually… since ALL of this ‘litigation’ is actually ‘connected’ and the common denominator is that ‘Arizona Forestry’ is the primary ‘defendant’…
…watch for a new ‘motion’ appearing in the ALJ Hearing File that reflects the ‘success’ they seemed to just have with Judge Tuchi over in 2 of the ‘property damage’ suits.
If a Federal District Judge just AGREED with their motion for dismissal based on the grounds that Arizona Forestry NEVER had ANY DUTY or RESPONSIBILITY to be ‘protecting’ anything at all…
…then they could now try to move that chess-piece on the board over here in the “Arizona Forestry vs. ADOSH” proceedings.
They could file a ‘motion for dismissal’ for the Citation which says they were putting too much emphasis on structure protection and not paying good enough attention to firefighter safety.
There ‘argument’ would be that it’s not possible for them to have been paying too much attention to structure protection at all because that is NEVER what they were ever even concerned with because they have absolutely no DUTY or RESPONSIBILITY to ever actually be concerned about protecting anything.
Absurd… I know… but that’s how desperate Arizona Forestry is to get out from underneath all this.
They could “run that up the flagpole” and see if this OTHER Judge salutes it like Judge Tuchi did.
**
** TWO YARNELL PROPERTY DAMAGE LAWSUITS DISMISSED
**
** JUDGE SAYS ARIZONA FORESTRY HAD NO DUTY WHATSOEVER
** TO PROTECT ANY PRIVATE PROPERTY
Yep. That’s what he ( Arizona District Judge Richard Gamma ) just decided.
Arizona Forestry had NO DUTY to protect anything, even after they officially took charge of the Yarnell Hill Wildfire.
Zero. Zip. Nada.
So… what does THAT argument do to the ‘wrongful death’ lawsuits?
If Arizona Forestry had NO DUTY WHATSOEVER to ‘protect’ anything at all… then what in the BLOODY hell was Arizona Forestry ‘Division Supervisor’ employee Eric Marsh doing ordering Jesse Steed and Granite Mountain to ‘leave the safe black’?
The following article appeared at AZCENTRAL about 6 hours ago…
AZCENTRAL
Article Title: Judge dismisses Yarnell homeowners’ suits against AZ
Published: 10:13 p.m. MST April 29, 2015
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/arizona/2015/04/29/judge-dismisses-yarnell-homeowners-lawsuit-arizona/26585747/
From the article…
—————————————————————————————————
Yarnell residents are appealing the dismissal of two lawsuits against the state, but a legal expert says it’s rare for the government to be successfully sued over its handling of wildfires.
On Wednesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Richard Gama said the state did NOT have a duty to protect private property owners when the state’s Forestry Division managed the June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire.
“Public policy does not support imposition of a duty on the state to protect plaintiffs’ property from wildfires,” Gama wrote in dismissing both suits.
Craig Knapp, the attorney representing the Yarnell homeowners, said the judge’s ruling is “really bad news” for many Arizonans who live in wildland and fire zones.
“The state can now abandon a fire and let the homes go up in smoke with no real legal remedy for the residents,” he said.
Knapp filed a notice of appeal Wednesday after the judge issued his ruling. But lawsuits filed against the government over the way wildfires are fought are rarely successful, said Karen Bradshaw Schulz, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. She is the co-editor of “Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives,” a book published in 2011.
“The government, acting in its capacity as a firefighter, has strong immunity against legal claims for property damage,” she said.
Related Stroy: New account of hotshot deaths.
Schulz said courts have historically given the government absolute, unilateral discretion to decide how to fight wildfires. Part of that is done for safety reasons, she said, where the government may need to harm one property, such as lighting a backfire, in order to protect others.
Homeowners say they are disappointed with the ruling.
“We’re not going to drop it,” said Nina Bill Overmyer, a lead plaintiff whose house was destroyed. “I love this state. I’m a fourth-generation native. But that was the biggest fiasco and it can’t be allowed to drop.”
The fire destroyed 127 homes in Yarnell, Glen Ilah and Peeples Valley, rural mountain communities 35 miles south of Prescott.
Nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots died in the blaze.
The Yavapai County Assessor’s Office has estimated property damage from the 8,400-acre fire at $17 million.
The lawsuits against Arizona and its Forestry Division contend the entities failed to use ground and air resources to suppress the fire and sent away key ground and air resources under the belief the blaze “was dying out.”
No firefighters would have died and Yarnell would have escaped devastation if the state had competently contained the fire, the suits claim.
The lawsuits fault the state but not the hotshots.
The judge’s ruling, though, said the state’s management of the fire was not a service rendered to the property owners, but rather the Forestry Division’s authority over wildfires is for the best interest of the state.
“To this end, the (Forestry Division) worked on firebreaks to contain the fire on state trust land outside of Yarnell. It was unsuccessful,” the judge wrote.
The Yarnell Hill Fire was sparked by lightning on the afternoon of June 28, 2013. The fire started small, but managers had trouble containing it the following day. They called in more firefighters and ground resources.
By June 30, the fire was headed toward Peeples Valley, 4 miles north of Yarnell.
Thunderstorm activity caused an abrupt wind shift, pushing the fire away from Peeples Valley and into Yarnell.
Many residents escaped with only a few minutes’ notice. The fire trapped 19 of the 20 Granite Mountain Hotshots in a box canyon near Glen Ilah, and they had to deploy their fire shelters.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which represented the state, declined comment on the lawsuits being dismissed.
Lawsuits related to wildfires are not uncommon. Homeowners sometimes sue insurance companies for failing to provide enough coverage. Other suits are filed against entities that homeowners believe are responsible for the fire.
—————————————————————————————————
Please all affected by yhf do not be discouraged by news of this judge’s decision ; if you have a case or not. and this fire affected you…keep the faith.
Take a deep slow breath
To Sitta, Sonny and Joy appreciated. your statement.
Reply to Joy A. Collura post on April 30, 2015 at 6:09 am
>> Joy A. Collura said…
>>
>> Please all affected by yhf do not be discouraged by news of this
>> judge’s decision ; if you have a case or not. and this fire affected
>> you…keep the faith.
>>
>> Take a deep slow breath
Yes… and while you are ‘exhaling’ please keep in mind that one of the ‘comments’ being included in the article by this (supposed) expert lawyer Karen Bradshaw Schulz is basically a bunch of crap.
From the article…
—————————————————————–
Lawsuits filed against the government over the way wildfires are fought are rarely successful, said Karen Bradshaw Schulz, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. She is the co-editor of “Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives,” a book published in 2011.
“The government, acting in its capacity as a firefighter, has strong immunity against legal claims for property damage,” she said.
—————————————————————–
Horse-puckey.
Her statement only comes NEAR being true if you are talking about either the FEDERAL Government ( with constitutionally provided sovereign immunity ) or the ‘Government’ of a State that also has that written into its consititution or has passed its own sovereign immunity laws.
Arizona is NOT one of those states.
Followup…
It is important to point out that this ‘expert’ being quoted in the article above did not AUTHOR the book that is being mentioned about “Wildfire Policy”.
She was simply a ‘Co-Editor’ for this book along with former Smokejumper Dean Lueck.
The actual AUTHORS of this book are listed along with the ‘collected articles’ that make up the book itself.
The book is on Amazon for $75 bucks ( New ) or $66 bucks ( Used )
Wildfire Policy: Law and Economics Perspectives
Hardcover – November 28, 2011
by Dean Lueck (Editor), Karen M. Bradshaw (Editor)
ISBN-13: 978-1933115955 ISBN-10: 1933115955 Edition: 0th
Buy New – Price: $76.61
13 New from $66.60 – 10 Used from $75.81
http://www.amazon.com/Wildfire-Policy-Law-Economics-Perspectives/dp/1933115955
About the Authors…
NOTE: These individuals were just the EDITORS of this book and not the actual AUTHORS. The AUTHORS are actually listed along with the respective articles in the book itself.
Karen M. Bradshaw is a judicial clerk for the Honorable E. Grady Jolly of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Dean Lueck is a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Arizona. Prior to his academic career, he was a smokejumper with the USDA Forest Service in McCall, Idaho.
**
** PRESCOTT DAILY COURIER CHIMES IN
The Prescott Daily Courier (PDC) still hasn’t published their own version(s) of ANY of the many Mainstream Media stories that appeared recently with regards to Brendan McDonough’s BOOK DEAL… and how it was signed at about the same moment he was backing out of his last scheduled under-oath deposition…
…but the PDC has jumped right in this morning with their own version of the story about the 2 Yarnell property damage lawsuits being ‘dismissed’ yesterday.
However… the PDC article differs from the others in a couple of significant ways.
1) The PDC article refuses to mention the NAME of the Judge ( Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Richard Gama ) in their version of the story. They have duplicated some of the wire service paragraphs but have also gone out of their way to REMOVE Judge Gama’s NAME from their own story.
2) The PDC article says that attorney for the plaintiffs ( Crag Knapp ) ‘had no comment’ in response to their requests. Craig Knapp had plenty to say to AZCENTRAL and the wire services following the ruling. ( See AZCENTRAL article above ). It is ( apparently ) only the PDC who couldn’t get their own comment from Craig Knapp.
3) This PDC article now CONFIRMS that the Judge overseeing the OTHER ‘wrongful-death’ litigations ( Judge John Tuchi ) HAS granted Arizona Forestry’s recent request for yet another EXTENSION and a continued FREEZE of the court calendar so they can continue to negotiate a ‘settlement’ with the families of the deceased Hotshots.
The PDC article says this new ‘extension’ wasn’t even granted until April 20, 2015… and that it is now a 45 day extension instead of the requested extra 30 days.
45 days from April 20, 2015 means the Arizona Forestry lawyers now have until Thursday, June 4, 2015 to reach a ‘settlement’ with the familes of the deceased Hotshots.
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: 2 Yarnell lawsuits dismissed
Published: 4/30/2015 6:01:00 AM – By Staff and Wire Reports
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=144708
From the article…
——————————————————————————–
PHOENIX – Two lawsuits filed against Arizona by homeowners whose properties were destroyed by the Yarnell Hill Fire have been dismissed.
A Maricopa County Superior Court judge agreed Wednesday with the state’s argument that it didn’t have a duty to protect the property owners when it undertook management of the wildfire.
Meanwhile, a wrongful death lawsuit that families of 12 of the fallen Granite Mountain Hotshots filed against the state, alleging “gross and extreme negligence,” continues in U.S. District Court in Phoenix.
On April 20, U.S. District Court Judge John Tuchi granted another 45-day stay in the proceedings to allow for the continuation of settlement discussions. The April stay comes after two similar postponements in January and March 2015.
——————————————————————————–
Gary, thank you very much for your reply to my post. Obviously, you’re the kind of leader who can take feedback, even when it is critical. You’ve taught me a great deal about wff here. You are also an excellent writer. Thanks to Bob, too, for clarifying the facts around some of my assumptions and continuing the discussion. When you two, and RTS, SR, Rocksteady, and others share your experience, you’ve got lots of younger fire fighters learning and reaping the benefits.
Like Marti, I really love you all for working so hard on this and keeping the story alive. WTKTT and Marti have put in so much time; I often struggle to keep up and am grateful for your summaries. I also appreciate Sonny and Joy for being so open, brave, and decent.
I regret one of the things I wrote in my post: “getting themselves killed.” At best, it was insensitive of me. I wasn’t thinking specifically of GMIHC when I wrote it, but it’s clear that a reader would understand it that way. I often think about Scott Norris and Chris MacKenzie when I consider the Granite Mountain crew. These guys were no slouches, physically or mentally. In particular, Norris was a student of weather and fire behavior (I’ve wondered if he was their usual lookout). I suppose I connect with him because he was a reader, thinker, and observer of nature. Chris was experienced and alert. From his photos and videos, it feels like we know where is focus was, and that he had situational awareness. Sometimes it feels like we see the fire through his eyes up there on the ridge. I think I’ve worked side by side with guys much like Norris and Mackenzie.
We know there are a LOT of factors that led them down that bowl. The contributing factors were overwhelming — they had to have been. If men like Norris and Mackenzie could be led down into that bowl in those conditions (and with their experience!), how sure are the rest of us that we could never do that? How safe are the young men and women who are joining their first crews right now?
A part of me still believes they let themselves get killed. The 19 all made mistakes. If they had the chance to review the fire in the classroom the next spring, they’d all recognize it immediately. But I also think that my statement dehumanized them and blamed them, along with all the other people who’ve lost their lives on the fireline. My statement was too simplistic, and doesn’t get us closer to the truth. To the friends and loved ones reading this, I’m really sorry. You don’t deserve more hurt from yet another person who wasn’t there.
I think I (we) need to recognize that even the strongest, most experienced, and best trained among us still has real limitations (of endurance, of focus, of emotional/social stamina). Against that we have these myths, especially in wff culture (we can work 16 hour days perpetually and not lose our alertness, our family lives are going to be healthy with these schedules, it’s useful to put rookies through hazing, keep your brothers’ secrets, protecting participants is more important than the truth, etc.). We know that normal humans cannot truly multitask, and that sleep deprivation, hunger, dehydration, and fatigue all have physiological effects on the cerebral cortex. The 10 and 18 are excellent tools to help counteract chaos and fatigue. I want more, though. It’s still too easy for some people to die because others don’t follow the 10 and 18 (I’m thinking of Dude and Thirty Mile in particular).
A lot of words, here, I’m afraid. You all give me a lot to think about!
Thank you.
I have been fighting fire for over 33 years with not a single loss of life, so when 19 die because of failing to recognize the warning signs of danger, angers me to the core of my being. I have never, nor never will risk the lives of any one of my employees to save a structure nor a frigging bunch of trees…
The whole YHF bothers me to the point of going into a blind rage, because it was so preventable… if people took a 30 second time out and looked to the consequences of their decisions.
I am Canadian, but still feel the deep remorse for my fire fighting brothers south of the border….and am determined to find the truth so that this discussion board never needs to be resurrected after the next tragedy….
See the new post up above.
An Arizona District Judge has just decided to dismiss at least TWO of the Yarnell property damage lawsuits because he says that Arizona Forestry had NO DUTY WHATSOEVER to ‘protect’ jack shit… much less anyone’s home or property.
That makes this whole thing even MORE tragic, then.
It means that the ‘wrongful deaths’ are even MORE ‘wrongful’ now.
It means Arizona State Forestry ‘Division Supervisor’ employee Eric Marsh didn’t even have either the AUTHORITY or even the RESPONSIBILITY to order Jesse Steed and Granite Mountain to lift a single finger to ‘protect’ anything at all that day.
Back to the GM Lookout.
The one thing I have said over and over McDonough was not a qualified Lookout.
Experience with wild land fire, fire behavior, weather and its affects on fire, his trigger point.
Lack of radio procedures and talking to his supervisors more often. when he moved what were his responsibilities like finding a new vantage point so he could continue to talk with the crew and advise of fire activity. McDonough was more of a weather taker than a lookout.
The other thing that has always bothered me is the almost noncaring Marsh and Steed when
McDonough left his lookout spot and had no place to go. No Body cared or even talked to him
He should have been in contact or his Supervisors with Frisby for immediate extraction when he left his LO location. He had no safety zone and the UTV with Frisby was his life line. What the hell was going on there???
If I was McDonough I would have been a little torqued at my bosses for hanging me out to dry on that LO Location. Maybe that’s why he decided to start talking about what they did??????
Reply to Bob Powers post on April 29, 2015 at 12:17 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> Back to the GM Lookout.
>>
>> McDonough was more of a weather taker than a lookout.
Yes. Even Brendan McDonough basically admitted to ADOSH that was the case.
When the ADOSH investigators were asking Brendan what he was ‘relaying’ back to Marsh and Steed about the actual ‘fire behavior’… Brendan told them basically ‘not much’… and it was because every time he tried to tell Marsh or Steed something… they already KNEW it and said “Yea… we can see that.”
Brendan attributed the ‘pointlessness’ of reporting from his position to the fact that Eric Marsh himself was pretty much (quote) “Directly above me up on the ridge” for about the whole time Brendan was being the (supposed) ‘lookout’.
There really was nothing Brendan could see that Eric Marsh himself ( and Steed ) couldn’t see even BETTER that afternoon.
So Brendan seemed resigned to that fact all afternoon, and SAID SO to ADOSH.
He spun his weather like he was supposed to, but there wasn’t anything about the fire he cold tell Marsh or Steed that they could not also see even BETTER for themselves.
That really was just a “get him (Brendan) off the line before he has heatstroke” situation that day… even if Brendan himself was either never fully AWARE of that or wants to ever admit that was the reason for ‘the assignment’.
Brendan could have even imagined he was “Doing OK’ circa NOON… but Marsh and/or Steed might have already known better. ‘Donut’ might have looked like “death warmed over” by then and they KNEW they had to either just let him sit down… or just give him some worthless assignment to make him feel like he was still earning his overtime that day.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> The other thing that has always bothered me is the almost noncaring Marsh
>> and Steed when McDonough left his lookout spot and had no place to go.
>> No Body cared or even talked to him He should have been in contact or
>> his Supervisors with Frisby for immediate extraction when he left his LO location.
Brendan told ADOSH that before Frisby and Brown even gave him a ‘ride’ down to the old-grader location that Marsh and/or Steed had already ASSIGNED him a ‘Safety Zone’… and it was the old-grader location.
Marsh and/or Steed could have actually really, truly believed there was no need to be concerned about Brendan at all because he had this totally safe ‘old-grader’ location to use if anything weird happened.
They ( Marsh and Steed ) were totally WRONG, of course, but I’m talking about what they might have BELIEVED and not what the actual reality was.
And you are RIGHT… you DO have to wonder why it was that Brendan did NOT even think about even first informing Blue Ridge he was going to need that ‘dust off’ until well AFTER he had completed the entire HIKE down from the Lookout Mound itself.
Brendan says it took him about 3-4 minutes to hike down from the top of the mound to that spot near the T-intersection where he was going to accidentally ‘run into’ Frisby.
So what the hell was even HE thinking during that entire hike DOWN from the mound?
He already KNEW the fire was so close he better ‘abandon his position’.
Why would he then WAIT until finishing that hike to even CHECK and make SURE someone from Blue Ridge was going to be ABLE to come get him?
If he had only then found out that the UTV Ranger had blown a tire… or that Frisby and Brown were on some scouting mission way the hell up Highway 89 at that time… then those 3 or 4 minutes he had WASTED before even making contact with them were going to become really crucial in the timing of all this.
It really does appear that for those 3 to 4 minutes while Brendan was still hiking DOWN from the mound… he did not even THINK he was actually going to NEED a ‘dust off’ from Blue Ridge.
It could be that when Brendan finished the hike and actually out ‘eyes on’ that pre-designated old-grader safety zone… Brendan himself suddenly realized… “Holy shit… that’s not gonna be good enough. I’m in trouble. I better call Blue Ridge now”.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> He had no safety zone and the UTV with Frisby was his life line.
>> What the hell was going on there???
See above. Brendan DID testify that he was TOLD his “Safety Zone” was the ‘old-grader’.
When he, himself, finally realized that was a joke and that he NEEDED to be ‘evacuated’ actually remains a mystery. He wasn’t interviewed well enough by anyone to really nail all that down.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> If I was McDonough I would have been a little torqued at my bosses for
>> hanging me out to dry on that LO Location. Maybe that’s why he
>> decided to start talking about what they did??????
I doubt it.
I think until the day he dies Brendan McDonough will still be ‘believing the convoluted explanation that he actually gave to the ADOSH investigators.
Brendan actually told them…
“It’s not that they made the WRONG decision that day…
they just didn’t make the RIGHT one”.
I kid you not. That’s how he actually put it during his ADOSH interview.
That’s how desperate he is to never have to admit to himself ( or anyone else? ) that “his brothers” were even capable of making a very bad MISTAKE.
The ‘fine line’ that Brendan seems to be walking in his own mind NOW is that he DOES realize it was wrong of him to commit a class 2 misdemeanor and actually ‘obstruct’ those 2 official ‘investigations’… and that ARE some ‘details’ that need to come out that he can supply ( and always SHOULD have )… but I still don’t think he is ‘ready’ to get anywhere near admitting that ANY of “his Brothers” could have possibly made ANY kind of actual MISTAKE that day.
Actual QUOTE from Brendan’s second ADOSH interview 10/10/2013…
The decision was not WRONG… it just wasn’t RIGHT…
A = Brendan McDonough
——————————————————————————
A: And I’m not saying anyone made any mistakes because, you know, it – it happened because of what decisions were made. I know. Whether – whether it was – it’s not that it wasn’t a wrong decision. It just wasn’t the right one…
——————————————————————————
Forgive me if I get a bit sloppy here as I’m tired after two days of highly technical “Lightroom Workflow” and this conversation. But I’ll try.
As Sitta wrote just upstream”
“I think I (we) need to recognize that even the strongest, most experienced, and best trained among us still has real limitations (of endurance, of focus, of emotional/social stamina). Against that we have these myths, especially in wff culture (we can work 16 hour days perpetually and not lose our alertness, our family lives are going to be healthy with these schedules, it’s useful to put rookies through hazing, keep your brothers’ secrets, protecting participants is more important than the truth, etc.). We know that normal humans cannot truly multitask, and that sleep deprivation, hunger, dehydration, and fatigue all have physiological effects on the cerebral cortex. ”
———————-
We’ve got a Hotshot Crew that has been working their butts off and probably should have JUST SAID NO to this fire, all things considered, time-wise. As in “how much is that overtime worth if you’re not up to par and on your GAME in the face of a really dangerous wildfire?????”
On a fire that is being seriously mismanaged………
With an Incident Command Team that is still trying to even put itself together and WAY behind the curve……..
And a “Lookout” that was in no condition (or experience level) to actually be a LOOKOUT……
And under GYNORMOUS pressure from their “Host Unit” (i.e. the City of Prescott that, apparently, seriously HAD NO CLUE)….to PROVE THEMSELVES…….
And a Crew Superintendent that, given the hiring process, is under very little otherwise normal FEDERAL standards of hiring/rehiring/accountability…….
……..and also under that GYNORMOUS pressure to make this crew LIVE UP TO those HEROIC EXPECTATIONS………..
I mean, what possibly……….
…….could go wrong?
There are so many Lessons to be Learned here, but I’m not sure they’re limited to the 10 and 18.
To me they have much more to do with Management.
And does anybody at the Lessons Learned Center even get serious about looking at THAT????
So far, I haven’t really seen any of that so far.
If that stays the case, I’m not even remotely confident that the Lessons this Fire is capable of Teaching will ever be Narrated, much less Comprehended, much less LEARNED.
That’s my two cents worth tonight.
I’m not even sure we need Brendan’s under-oath on a stack of Bibles testimony to get us to here.
Which is, apparently, ADOSH’s opinion, also, at least so far.
OK I know I know I know I know that “escaping wildfires” are mostly in some kind of state of relatively total chaos during their first 48 hours.
And that that is considered “normal.”
So what is the “answer”?
I truly do not know.
But I’m seriously thinking, all things considered, given how we are now experiencing bigger hotter more extreme wildfires and, thus, more potential danger to the people fighting them…………
………something on a higher level than scrutinizing Brendan…………….
…….may need to be going on.
Thanks, Marti. Well stated. I feel EXACTLY the same way.
Some Reality Check here.
The new Fire Policy’s that eliminated the 10AM Policy is causing some of this cayuse.
Along with what some of us refer to as the Let Burn Policy.
IA was the first 12 to 24 hours. Now the suppress with the least amount of expense, Reduce the fuel loading by managing the fire rather than Suppress.
Back in the 80’s our management fires were in the wilderness and based on weather, time of year and available resources we never managed a fire in really dry or drought conditions. This seems to be happening now. so the escapes are extending out to 48 hours.
In the early 90’s Fires went to Type 1 teams if they had escaped the first 24 hours.
Fire agencies from my perspective have been slow to react to Drought conditions. Drought conditions use to be a 1 year thing in more specific areas where today they are covering entire States in the west.
If Fire agencies were expecting the drought to go away they have had a rude awakening and it is time to re-evaluate suppression needs and IA
priorities. I believe in urban interface areas that the old 10 AM policy should be in force during this critical Drought cycle.
With out calling it the 10 AM policy just a vigorous IA to control the fire in the first burn period is needed I believe that California is doing that now and being way more aggressive than the past few years.
While we lost fires back in the day we suppressed many before they escaped IA and reduced the acreage, protecting urban interface, and
reduced catastrophic Fires.
Yeah as with WTKTT I doubt he gets that he was very lucky to get out alive because given the non-response from Steed and Marsh, Frisby was his lifeline that afternoon and shouldn’t have been relied on. Run that scenario 10 times and several times Frisby doesn’t show up, and McDonough gets burned over with sustained direct flame contact.
Yes, and as I wrote downstream:
Marti Reed says APRIL 29, 2015 AT 5:45 PM
…I’m not assuming antibiotics, all things (including possibly not health insurance) considered.
But.
Otherwise yes.
And given what you etc. have written upstream,
It does kinda sorta look like they posted him out there to be the “Lookout” that they didn’t really need to be a Lookout that (ala Sonny) wasn’t a Lookout, and, thus, never realized the need for himself to continue being the LOOKOUT that they REALLY NEEDED when they started descending into that explosively-fuelled bowl.
Just another one of the many many many Shakespearian Twists in this Tragedy.
Marti Reed says APRIL 29, 2015 AT 5:46 PM
Who needs Shakespeare when you have REALITY?
Oh…and one more thing. My request for additional insight pertaining to the Granite Mountain Hotshots has already paid off, a whole bunch, so if anybody else out there is thinking about emailing me, please do, your name will be kept strictly confidential.
[email protected]
Thank you, Gary
That’s GOOD news… and speaking for myself ( and probably a lot of other people )… I certainly hope there’s a way you can ( obviously WITHOUT violating any requested confidences ) find a way to at least ( at some point ) SUMMARIZE what these ‘insights’ are.
Well…I haven’t been able to process what I have heard yet, much less figure out a way to share the info, but obviously before I even try that I would have to get permission from those who shared. Now I’m starting to sound like EN.
Great! Hopefully people will relay some insight on any prior bushwhacks and/or other crew movements that may have involved racing a fire and going a bit black in terms of no one being told where GM was / where they were headed.
I really appreciate your putting this call out.
What. Ever. It. Takes. To. Get. At. The. Truth.
BTW Husky all the way.
Gary, thank you for providing a confidential ear for people on the ground. I imagine it’s a relief for the ‘gagged’ to be able to tell someone about what they know. Even if none of this can ever go public, I think you do a huge service by letting people release some of the toxic secrets.
Yes, it was a spur of the moment thought, but it may help. I think there are people out there who would like or need to share, but they can’t do so in a public format for lots of reasons.
Oh, and one more thing, as long as I am apologizing for being such a butthead, I want to offer my sincerest apology for the snarky comment I directed at Elizabeth regarding Daniels and the Thirtymile Fire. I misconstrued the tone of her email when she was just expressing her opinion. That is one big problem in communicating on line, we miss non verbal’s and inflections in a person’s voice. Right now, my tone is humble and apologetic.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
I promise I will try harder to be less snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic from now on.
Ouch. I just got a little ‘dizzy’ trying to ‘scroll down’ through all of that.
I typed each one individually to teach myself a lesson.
OK, enough self-inflicted lashes, Gary!!!
I have to say that sometimes I appreciate your “snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic” sauce becuz sometimes I really feel that way myself.
After all, we’re only talking about 19 totally awesome (even with all THEIR warts) Dead Guys.
With a massive year-and-a-half-long cover-up going on about how they got to be those Dead Guys.
What’s NOT to be “snarky, opinionated, angry and sarcastic” about THAT sometimes?????
I find that the “girls” on the crew (not an insult, I have 2 daughters older than most female wff)
Is refreshing. They don’t have the testosterone fired stupidity that young “boys” on crews exhibit often…
The guys get tattoo’s, bad haircuts, mustaches, fireline “dares”etc to pretend to be “bad ass”… the Lasses let their work ethic show what they are all about…
LOL!
And yeah, we actually (for the most part although not always, all things considered) know how to actually talk with each other.
Truly, being a female minister working with lots of male minister was like…….
Whaaaaaaat????????
Seriously. It was ALL COMPETITION all of the time.
And those were just Ministers, not Hotshot firefighters.
I kid you not.
And they were, mostly (given my circles) self-identified “liberal” “progressive” “feminist-orientated” male Ministers.
What is it, the testosterone? I never could actually figure it out.
So, bringing this back to GMHS and Yarnell and this debacle.
I still think a 10-minute break for “democracy” i.e. “lets actually talk about this” could possibly have meant we wouldn’t have ever met each other around this “digital campfire.”
Unless something we still don’t know about was also going on………………
So there’s that.
And consider this, regarding all that testosterone, that I posted downstream:
“Marti Reed says APRIL 29, 2015 AT 5:27 PM
And remember, the one doing the spitting, in apparent disgust, is…….
…….none other than Clayton Whitted…………the one who self-identified himself as potentially “Christ” to the crew.
Reply
Bob Powers says APRIL 29, 2015 AT 5:55 PM
This is the moment when there should have been a discussion by the 2 Crew Bosses and the Capitan
over the safety issues of leaving the Black not just Steed making the Decision when he was not liking the Idea a solid front with solid safety concerns should have prevailed. More inter workings going on here
with this crew.
This whole thing is very similar to the Loop Fire a Superintendent wanting to make a name for himself and his crew ignored to other HS crews that refused to do what the Division boss was asking King jump in said we will do in even though he was tolled by the other 2 Superintendents it was a very high risk should the fir make a run up the draw / Chimney half the crew was caught in just that position..
And the rest is history.
Reply
Marti Reed says APRIL 29, 2015 AT 6:30 PM
Copy.
If the “I want to be Christ to this Crew” experienced Sawyer-Evangelist (faith over reason) guy is spitting in disgust while listening to this, after this whole day of otherwise impotent insanity…………..
(after, remember, being considered “heros” on both the Doce Fire and the Thompson Ridge Fire)…..
That just might indicate that maybe it was time for a 10-minute break for democracy?????
And I’m STILL writing this with Sonny’s downstream comment and the Gamble video running in the background of my mind……….”
For some reason I picture Bart Simpson at the chalkboard, writing this… (too much TV, I guess)
LOL!! Love it!!!
I just have to say how much I love you all. I really do.
Warts and everything.
I’d give up some big bucks to have an in-real-life “reunion.”
I’ve been on several “online” “citizens investigations.” Including Deepwater Horizon, Fukushima, and the Libyan Revolution.
This one has been, by far, the longest and, for the most part, the best. Even though, at times, it’s been just downright awful, and I know you all know what I mean by that.
What you said, Gary, in that convo about women fire-fighters, actually brought me to tears. I really appreciate your honesty. Even when you state things more brutally than I/we may want to “hear” it.
And Sitta, I have ALWAYS wondered whether you were male or female, and until yesterday, could never figure that out. I’ve ALWAYS appreciated what you have said and how you have said it.
And Sonny, I really agree with what you wrote just downstream. I just hadn’t had time to reply to it (I’m actually in an intense three-day class regarding Lightroom). About how all the higher-ups that mismanaged every inch of this fire are totally happy with this situation regarding Brendan.
And WTKTT, thanks for what you wrote me about your dad. I’m terrible at keeping up with my email, but I want you to know I read that, and didn’t really know what to say because my situation’s different, but it underscores the fact that we are all human beings here, beyond this particular subject and our various different thoughts about it, and that that’s what’s really important.
This really is a remarkable “campfire circle.”
And Joy, I really am glad you are still out there and about there, and still kicking it!
Even sometimes I realize how Elizabeth’s either intentional or unintentional inability to understand what is/was going on forced me to keep trying to re-understand it over and over again, thus refining my thinking and observing more than I might have otherwise.
And, yeah, religion is a beast. I could write a book about it. Or two or three. I worked it for thirty-five years as a “professional,” and a number of decades more around that as an “active layperson.” Now, when I tell people I no longer believe in “God” but maintain a working relationship with “angels,” people get all upset with me about that. But it’s true, and it was a hard-won lesson.
So, anyway, thanks everybody for hanging in there. You all are the bestest!
Namaste.
Gary Olson said:
“It didn’t make any difference what most of them thought about the value of protecting structures, how many times do I have to tell you people…hotshot overhead don’t give a fuck what most of the crew thinks and they never get asked what they think about anything because the hotshot overhead knows that they are not getting paid to think, they are getting paid to keep their mouths shut and cut fire line. Can’t you people even imagine what it would be like for 20 guys milling around in a crises all wondering what they should do, offering up their opinions on the options and then forming a committee to work on it? That would be how a hotshot crew of 20 women would do it, that is not misogyny, I have seen the studies that show how women cooperate and get good work done, except doing that on a wild fire would lead to 20 dead women. ”
I wish you hadn’t gone there, Gary. Most of the women I’ve met in wildfire are badasses. They pretty much have to be. I’ve seen all women crews, by the way, and none of them made the news for getting themselves killed.
Also, I’ve seen highly disciplined organizations in a lot of scenarios (including on fires) where the notion, “See something, say something” is taken very seriously. It’s one of those “newer” ideas that has saved some lives, I’m sure. The attitude of “STFU and dig line” can be the basis of an efficient and ethical crew culture. But it toes the line with macho, stupid, and dangerous. A good leader doesn’t have to run by consensus, but isn’t afraid to hear ideas from the newest member, either. A good leader can tell the difference between discussion which wastes time, and that which is more efficient in the long run, and fosters an atmosphere in which important information doesn’t get squashed because the newbie is too afraid to speak, or because they’re too insecure to hear it.
I’m glad that you and Bob survived your years under STFU leadership, but I’m not convinced it’s either necessary or the best way to work.
Sitta, thank you.
As you can see below, I’m questioning this whole thing, also.
Even while thanking Gary for the “reality check”.
It’s really late, and, thus, I can’t say anything more, coherently.
But I may do so, a bit more, tomorrow.
And what I have in mind is that Blackfeet Women Crew.
What Gary wrote: “I have seen the studies that show how women cooperate and get good work done, except doing that on a wild fire would lead to 20 dead women.”
From what I’ve seen, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
OK, it’s not a Blackfeet crew but an Apache Crew.
From Wildfire Today:
Apache 8, documentary about all-female fire crew
“Apache 8, a documentary about an all-female Native American wildland fire crew, is making the rounds of film festivals and public television stations.”
“http://wildfiretoday.com/2011/03/29/apache-8-documentary-about-all-female-fire-crew/
“Apache 8 tells the story of an all-women wildland firefighter crew from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, who have been fighting fires in Arizona and throughout the U.S., for over 30 years. The film delves into the challenging lives of these Native firefighters.”
I didn’t do that right. the URL to that is:
http://wildfiretoday.com/2011/03/29/apache-8-documentary-about-all-female-fire-crew/
And yes Marti, I actually have a story of how Apache 8 potentially saved my life on the Ship Island Fire as I was being burned over. I can personally testify as to how good they are.
Yes, I knew I was going to get into trouble on that one but I was trying to thread the needle between Marti’s attitude of let’s all work together like they do in all of the studies that show how well women work together in groups to accomplice complex tasks whereas aren’t able to do the same thing in my frustration trying to get them to understand hotshot crews are not run as democracy’s and why that can’t be.
I’m not explaining it very well but I’m sure you know what studies I am trying to describe. My attempt was an epic fail. I sincerely apologize to you and all of the women who have worked so hard to get a foot into the wildland firefighting door and have succeeded against all of the odds with a stacked deck..
And you are right, all of the women who have made it in wildland fire management have to work twice as hard and do twice as much to be considered half as good as a man. I got to know Shawna Legarza during the Battlement Creek Fire Staff Ride while she was the San Juan Mountain Hotshot Crew Boss and there is no doubt in my mind that Shawna is a lot tougher physically than I ever was and just as tough as any man I have ever worked with, plus, she is lot smarter than I am. I have already read her book while I am still trying to put mine together. And she is a good example of women who are on the fire line today.
I have also seen a photo of a woman on the Santa Fe Hotshot crew recently and she looks like she could kick my ass just as many other women could who are on the line today.
In my defense, I did get a Regional Civil Rights award for hiring the first female hotshot on the Coconino National Forest when the Coconino was setting the national standard for excluding women in fire. And…I always had women (as many as I hire) on my Santa Fe Hotshot Crew.
And for everyone else out there, I can testify that the wildland firefighting community has historically made the U.S. military look like a progressive woman’s rights organization who supports putting women in combat roles and I’m sure that is still going on today.
Thank you, Gary. I really appreciate what you are saying.
And, regarding this:
“I’m sure you know what studies I am trying to describe.”
I don’t need a study. I’ve lived there all my life. I was ordained in 1977. Not quite a wildland fire-fighting hotshot. But not too different, either.
Same game, when it comes to power-playing.
“The Church” is the epitome of conflicted patriarchy.
Sitta said, “I’m glad that you and Bob survived your years under STFU leadership, but I’m not convinced it’s either necessary or the best way to work.”
Now that I think about it, just because that is the way I was taught to run a hotshot crew and therefore how I always did it, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way and MAYBE that isn’t the best way to run a crew? How would I know, I never experienced any alternative way?
So Marti…I take it all back you might be right. At least it should be explored. I guess I have become a caricature of an old man who thinks everything has to be done his way just because that’s the way he always did it.
To the Ladies I was second in command on my HS Crew but the Super. was a solid
Fireman but we never ran a STFU crew. All the Supervisors Myself and 2 Squad bosses worked together and could discuss decisions with the Superintendent.
Some of the seasoned FF also could add there 2 cents if they had questions.
We all respected Chet Cash as a Highly Qualified leader when it was time to build line
He was the Boss and we did what he said. Each crew has there own way and Gary and I have worked a little different on Crews we discussed that way back.
The Old drill Sergeants were numerous back in the day and set the standard for Hot Shot Crews, as well as Smoke Jumpers. That form of supervision to a large extent is dissipering.
Back to Women on Crews—As early as 1974 as a Asst. FMO I had women on crews and Hired women in Northern Cal.
By the 1980″s Sawtooth IRHSC was Hiring women some of the best FF I was around. A couple made Squad Bosses. One went on to join the Idaho State Police as a Patrol Officer. A couple have moved up the ladder in Fire to GS 11 and 12 positions. and assigned as DIVS and OPS, as well as FBO,s lost tract of some since I retired. Women have won a place in Wild Land Fire thru Hard work and education They earned respect from the male dominated Wild Land Fire.
I might add.
The original wildland crew that became the Prescott Hotshots — the crew at Prescott College (when I was there and was friends with them and worked for the caterer on the fires near Prescott) — had three women on it. And yes, they were kick-ass.
Of course we all were kick-ass.
Outward Bound was not just included in the Curriculum.
It was required.
At least in that (the original) version of Prescott College.
I’m gonna bring this to the top, because I think this is too important to be buried in the weeds.
Gary Olson wrote:
Gary Olson says APRIL 28, 2015 AT 4:22 AM
“Well Marty…I could spend a lot of time responding to your post, but it is late so I am going to shoot from the hip. No offense…but you haven’t been paying attention to some of the very important things I’ve written. It doesn’t matter what the orientation of most of the GMIHC had…Eric Marsh told you that as well. Thank you for telling us what your favorite color is…now sit the fuck down because nobody here give a fuck what you think about anything asshole including what your favorite color is. Let that be a lesson to you!
It didn’t make any difference what most of them thought about the value of protecting structures, how many times do I have to tell you people…hotshot overhead don’t give a fuck what most of the crew thinks and they never get asked what they think about anything because the hotshot overhead knows that they are not getting paid to think, they are getting paid to keep their mouths shut and cut fire line.”
To which I just responded:
Marti Reed says
APRIL 28, 2015 AT 10:00 PM
Thank you very much for this/your correction!
I really appreciate your perspective on how the REALITY works on these fires, in spite of the various thingies the USFS etc say about how oooo-la-la IMPORTANT it is that “SAFETY IS FIRST” and “Fire-fighters have the right to object/turn down unsafe assignments” and “It’s REALLY important for fire-fighters to TALK about these things.
Definitely a REALITY CHECK.
And I have to say I was writing what I was writing more in the spirit of what WTKTT wrote below (or somewhere, it’s hard to say) in responses to what I wrote.
I.e. Given all the hardcore power framework of the way it really works on the fireline that you describe (where the orders are the orders and the firefighters are the robots that carry out those orders no matter what they might think), what might some of the minds of some of the actual fire-fighters on that crew at that time have been thinking regarding both the whole religious evangelism push on the part of at least three of its crew.
And the possible “We’ve gotta race down there and risk a lot to save a lot (no matter what)” — debunked as it may/may not be, depending on whatever “protect structures thinking” of whoever may have been injecting those thoughts into this whole situation (and we’re still, at this point not all that sure where those imperatives may have been coming from — and I’m concurring with Sonny’s thinking above this).
So I’m right now sitting here somewhere in a force-field that includes both what you are saying and what WTKTT is saying in response to what I wrote.
It may be of NO RELEVANCE whatsoever, in terms of the power structure and how that basically turns all of these IHC firefighters into essential line-cutting and tree-cutting-down “robots,” in spite of how “wildland firefighters” see “Hotshots” as the epitome of awesome wildland fire-fighters.
I’m really experiencing a cognitive dissonance here.
(I’m writing this while listening to an analysis of Baltimore on the radio, so there’s that……)
But it may be of some relevance in relationship to how whatever conflict might just possibly have occurred in the time framework between the “Options Conversation” at around 4:00 PM and the decision to drop down into that bowl full of “petroleum” at about 4:20 PM.
It’s not totally surprising to me that WTKTT and I BOTH spent a serious chunk of our time looking into this yesterday. Because, actually, in spite of the hard-core reality (which I really appreciate your describing) of what you are describing here, Gary, it’s also true that these fire-fighters were not actually (as the actual system requires them to be) mindless robots.
I am wanting to to try to find out who, among the crew, might have been, relatively speaking, more or less disposed to being influenced by that whole “faith over reason” kind of thinking, as seems to have been infecting not only the Granite Mountain Hotshots, but also, possibly, the larger fire-fighting community around them, as expressed by the narrative/mythology that, seemingly immediately, attached itself to it and continues to this day.
As I am writing (and trying to figure out) this really complicated thing, I am thinking that the basic CONFLICT here is that how can it both be assumed that Hotshots are considered to be both the most awesome wildland firefighters on the planet and also expected to be, essentially, as you are describing them, ROBOTS when it comes down to just doing what they are being ordered to do, when, all things considered, that order may, in fact, most likely lead to a really probably impossible to survive situation?????
I, as both a mother and a Girl Scout Leader and a leader of groups on journeys into the Grand Canyon, understand the importance of being able to both support and encourage the powers and values of “democratic” conversations around decisions, while also understanding the need, sometimes, under certain circumstances, for me, the adult/leader, to make decisions and enforce them when needed.
But to, as you describe, totally denigrate the thoughts/perspectives/wisdom/experience of members of a crew and their hard-earned experience-based wisdom and disregard it because that’s how the system works??????
If that is how “the system” works, and I appreciate your candidness regarding this, I truly believe there is a SERIOUS problem with “the system.”
And if that “how the system works” process is, probably, related to what happened on June 30, 2013, leading to the deaths of so many of these awesome wildland Hotshots fire-fighters,
I think “we” REALLY REALLY REALLY need to challenge that System.
———————————
Have at it.
I’m seriously curious.
Marti My perspective— In the Hot Shot Government Crews there is a Training Ladder and a Supervision Pyramid. There is a learning curve that was not present on GM. there is a large field of qualified Wild land FF to chose from to fill HS Supervisory positions. That equates into a quality of Supervisors, Gary’s old ways and some of mine have gone by the wayside some time ago.
I believe GM had no real history to fall back on and developed there own system of Supervision which may as well have led to there Mistakes and supervision trying to copy the Government crews Old or new ways, another human Factor to consider.
Thank you!
One of the things you have helped me see is that the way the federal crews are staffed is different from GMHS is some very serious ways. Overhead is “plugged” in by the national side, not the local side. And that makes a difference.
The “insider status” game GM used, that allowed Eric to become, and stay, the “little dictator” that he became, probably wouldn’t have happened if GM had been a true federal crew.
Unless I’m missing something.
No I think you have got the point.
The City promoted from within and did not fly job vacancies out side after the first supervisors were hired. I do not know if Government FF would have applied and lost their 10 or so years of Federal retirement.
That leaves crews like this with a smaller recruiting area for Captains or Superintendents. In The FS or BLM Superintendents are GS9 over $20
per hour. I do not know the current rate GS 3 is a start out at almost $13 per hour. Pulse the retirement system is very good for the fed’s.
From the other side it would be difficult for a Captain in a Municipality to apply for a Fed job like Superintendent.
So I am guessing this crew or those like them would end up in a very tight job availability circle and a definite one style supervision cycle
which again adds to the human factors. Like Gary said if it is the only way you are thought it is how you supervise.
If I am not mistaken Marsh when working for the FS was never in a supervisory situation until he went to GM as a Captain.
Gotcha, thanks!
If I had more time, which I don’t have, I would go see if I could find, in more detail, how Ironwood and that California County Crew were doing this.
And maybe it might have been the case that a little “ten-minute-break for democracy” (and NOT prayer or a sermon)……
……..at about 4PM on June 30, 2013………
might have meant
we might not have all met each other around this little campfire????
Given the fact that we can actually HEAR some of the GM Crew members literally ‘making fun’ and ‘being sarcastic’ in REAL TIME about what DIVSA Eric Marsh was saying to Jesse Steed ( as heard in the MacKenzie video clips )… it is actually inconceivable to think that as the seemingly benign “what’s your comfort level?” discussions got more and more ‘serious’ and ‘insistent’. following those ( recorded ) exchanges.. that GM Captain and acting SUP Jesse Steed was not ‘fully aware’ of how some/all of the crew felt about what they could all HEAR transpiring between Jesse Steed and Eric Marsh.
There might have even been a contiuing ‘running commentary’ in the background from some of these same FFs that we can hear for ourselves already making ‘sarcastic’ comments about what Mash was saying over the crew-net in the 3:50 PM timeframe.
Crew Members know that the radios are NOT DUPLEX.
When someone else ( like Marsh ) has pushed their transmit button and they are then TALKING over whatever frequency the conversation is taking place on… for as long as that person has the ‘transmit’ button pushed and is TALKING… they cannot HEAR what is being said on the other end even if it is within close range of the other handheld unit(s).
So it is perfectly possible that even AS Eric Marsh was ‘continuing’ these ‘comfort level’ conversations with Steed… some/all of the GM Crew that were near Steed might have been adding ‘running commentary’ while Marsh was speaking that only Jesse could hear.
Unfortunately… even if Brendan McDonough has his ears GLUED to the intra-crew… he, himself, would also NOT have been overhearing any of this possible ‘running commentary’ from crewman other than Steed.
I seriously doubt that, at any point, any of the other Squad bosses or crew that had any of those 11 ( Yes, at least ELEVEN ) handheld radios actually ‘jumped into’ the conversation.
But that doesn’t mean Jesse Steed wasn’t, himself, getting an ‘earful’ of opinion from ‘the crew’ about the decisions being discussed when Marsh had his transmit button pressed.
Pops in out of her Lightroom class to say:
I think you really might be on to something here.
The MacKenzie videos also show ( without a shadow of a doubt ) that some of the Granite Mountain Crew standing RIGHT BEHIND Jesse Steed didn’t even really care all that much WHEN they would make these ‘sarcastic comments’ about things Marsh was saying to Steed.
When Marsh says to Steed…
“I could just feel it, ya know”…
He then immediately RELEASED his ‘Transmit’ button. ( You can here the modulation shift and the ‘closeout’ at that moment ).
That’s the exact moment when the FF right next to Steed threw in his ‘saracastic’ response, spit on the ground, and the FF next to him audibly LAUGHED in agreement.
That ‘sarcastic’ response has always appeard to have been…
“Yea. We’ve been feelin’ it ALL DAY”.
So that FF didn’t even care that Marsh had released his Transmit button and the frequency and there was now the potential for Marsh to HEAR his sarcastic response.
It DOES appear that this FF got that comment in before Steed then pressed his own TRANSMIT button and turned his own microphone on…
…but my point is that this FF didn’t really seem all that concerned whether Jesse’s mic was ‘open’ or not… nor did the one who started LAUGHING in response to the sarcasm…
…and they BOTH most certainly had no reservations whatsoever about Captain Jesse Steed himself ( who was just 3 feet away ) hearing this ‘sarcastic’ response to Marsh’s statement.
And that was all just still benign “What’s your comfort level?” stuff.
Imagine when things started to get more intense.
At the very least… I’m sure Steed was at least SEEING the other GM Crew around them ‘shaking their heads’ as more detail emerged about what Marsh wanted them to do.
So ‘mindless robots’ theories beside… the MacKenzie videos themselves PROVE that probably NONE of these men had any ‘fears’ or ‘reservations’ about making it perfectly clear ( solicited or not ) to Captain Jesse Steed how they felt about things Eric Marsh was saying over the radio.
Yeah, that was/is my feeling too.
It was like this is all just total bullshit, as has been this whole day.
And in the back of my mind I still am running Sonny’s comment. Surrounded by that voice in that Gamble video.
I still think there’s something going on in all of this that we still don’t know.
And remember, the one doing the spitting, in apparent disgust, is…….
…….none other than Clayton Whitted…………the one who self-identified himself as potentially “Christ” to the crew.
This is the moment when there should have been a discussion by the 2 Crew Bosses and the Capitan
over the safety issues of leaving the Black not just Steed making the Decision when he was not liking the Idea a solid front with solid safety concerns should have prevailed. More inter workings going on here
with this crew.
This whole thing is very similar to the Loop Fire a Superintendent wanting to make a name for himself and his crew ignored to other HS crews that refused to do what the Division boss was asking King jump in said we will do in even though he was tolled by the other 2 Superintendents it was a very high risk should the fir make a run up the draw / Chimney half the crew was caught in just that position..
And the rest is history.
Copy.
If the “I want to be Christ to this Crew” experienced Sawyer-Evangelist (faith over reason) guy is spitting in disgust while listening to this, after this whole day of otherwise impotent insanity…………..
(after, remember, being considered “heros” on both the Doce Fire and the Thompson Ridge Fire)…..
That just might indicate that maybe it was time for a 10-minute break for democracy?????
And I’m STILL writing this with Sonny’s downstream comment and the Gamble video running in the background of my mind……….
Time to discuss something else….
Why was Brendan assigned as the lookout? He was only in his 2nd year???
Allegedly he was not “feeling well”…
By all accounts he met up with a couple other GMIHS members at a bar/pub/casino and they were elated that they got to work the next day on overtime….
I suspect, but no way can prove, that he may have over indulged in the alcohol.
A hotshot with a hangover in 100+ degree heat is a major liability… Not much production from someone who is in bad shape…
Maybe that is why they put him at the grader?
Feel free to comment… just a hunch I am getting
I have had this in the back of my mind for a long time, just now thought I should toss it out…
It is ( and has always been ) a good question that still has no definitive answer.
None of the investigators even bothered to ‘go into this’.
The broader question might be of the ‘chicken and egg’ variety.
Which came FIRST?
– The realization that Brendan should have never been included for that assignment because he still hadn’t recovered from his illness to take the 100+ degrees… and they now needed ‘something for him to do’….
OR
– The realization that even after working that location for X hours ( and starting burnouts ) that they only later got around to even bothering to set a ‘lookout’… and the not-feeling-too-well Brendan seemed the obvious choice?
Remember… we still have NO IDEA what Eric Marsh, Jesse Steed, Brian Frisby and Trueheart Brown actually talked about for a half-hour ( from 11:55 AM to 12:25 PM ) during that first ‘face-to-face’ meeting up near the anchor point.
All we got from any set of investigation transcripts or notes was something about agreeing that the morning briefings were for shit, and that there were some (solvable) tone guard problems, and then Marsh supposedly asked Frisby for ‘Gatorade and cubies’ and would they take Brendan down with them.
That’s it. No other information about what was actually SAID during that half-hur face-to-face.
I have always thought it was POSSIBLE that sometime during that half-hour the following conversation might have taken place…
————————————————————————–
Blue Ridge Superintendent Brian Frisby: Where’s your LOOKOUT?
Steed and/or Marsh: We don’t have one.
Brian Frisby: Really? You’re SUPPOSED to have a LOOKOUT.
Steed and/or Marsh: Okay. Whatever. We got a guy who isn’t feeling well. He can sit on that mound down there. Will that make you happy?
———————————————————————-
In other words… WHEN was the DECISION made to actually HAVE a lookout?
It obviously wasn’t made when they all ‘went to work’ up there and even started lighting those indirect burns ( that ended up doused against their wishes by Air Attack Rory Collins ).
It obviously wasn’t prior to Frisby arriving or Brendan would have passed them on the way down.
It APPEARS that the actual decision to even HAVE a lookout came out of the ‘face-to-face’ meeting itself.
If that is the case… then WHOSE decision was it, really?
Was it Marsh’s? Steed’s?… or was it actually Frisby ‘reminding’ them they should have already had one all morning.
Brendan McDonough *may* or *may not* actually know some of the answers hear about when the decision was made, or that it would be HIM, or what ELSE those four men talked about for half-an-hour.
When they finally decided ( almost 3 hours AFTER starting to work ) to even HAVE a lookout… Marsh and/or Steed might have decided all on their own that Brendan wasn’t ‘cutting it’ in the heat and they just “called him over” near the end of the face-to-face and just TOLD him he was going to go down with Frisby and Brown and sit on that mound down there.
Brendan might have thought ( himself ) that he was ‘doing fine’… but Marsh and Steed might have been thinking differently circa 12:20 PM and were genuinely concerned about him getting ‘heat stroke’.
But no one even asked Brendan whether he DID know anything about the actual ‘decision’, or not… nor did Brendan ‘volunteer’ anything about what he might have heard the 4 men talking about for that half-hour ( if he heard any of it at all ).
Just more ‘questions’ that really still need good answers.
Are you a Jeeper? Rocksteady makes after market Jeep parts.
Nope… got that handle from my rifle shooting abilities. ..
Will send you an email in a few days when I get some time…
You’re not the only one who’s been wondering about that, but I haven’t been able to find evidence one way or another about it. That there are training materials that say, “don’t put the weak/sick/hungover guy on lookout duty” tells me that crews have certainly sent less than alert and/or qualified crewmembers to that duty before.
This is about wff culture in general, not necessarily GMIHC: the video linked at the bottom of this comment had to have been produced and included in the 2011 annual refresher because A) a lot of wildland firefighters didn’t (and still don’t) really understand the responsibilities of the lookout, and B) too many crew leaders were sticking the hurt/weak/obnoxious person on lookout to get them out of their hair. It’s a good video, by the way.
http://youtu.be/6a7bHd9JjSw
That is a good info film on Lookouts. Look at it and apply it to what McDonough was not doing. In R5 in the mid 7os the went to a minimum Sector Boss for lookouts.
On my HS Crew either myself or a Squad boss took that position Both of my Squad bosses were Crew Boss and Sector Boss Trainees. It was like that on many crews.
And also tony an old acquaintances of mine from the 80’s
This has been bothering me all along, too. ESPECIALLY after I watched that video that Sitta posted, about seven months ago. Like SERIOUSLY.
Rocksteady, you wrote:
“By all accounts he met up with a couple other GMIHS members at a bar/pub/casino and they were elated that they got to work the next day on overtime….”
Which account exactly are you talking about? I hadn’t seen that, or else I did and it didn’t stick. I had in mind from somewhere (I know not where) that he had been sick for several days, like with a cold or something, and decided he was better enough to tag along on Sunday.
I believe that came from one of the magazine articles (Outside?).
I think both of those accounts (illness & meet-up with the boys) are probably true, and if the reports are correct, it’s likely that on 6/30 he was still recovering from his illness, and perhaps his night out as well.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE )
post on April 29, 2015 at 11:31 am
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> I believe that came from one of the magazine articles (Outside?).
Outside Online Magazine
Article Title: 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire
Published: Sep 17, 2013 by ( Former Hotshot ) Kyle Dickman
http://www.outsideonline.com/1926426/19-true-story-yarnell-hill-fire
NOTE: This article by former Hotshot Kyle Dickman was specifically based on direct in-person interviews with Brendan McDonough and GM family members.
It was published a full WEEK before even the Arizona Forestry subcontracted SAIR investigation document was made public on the morning of September 28, 2013.
From the article…
——————————————————————-
Across town, three other Granite Mountain hotshots—Christopher MacKenzie, Garret Zuppiger, and Brendan “Donut” McDonough—arrived at the Whiskey Row Pub, a dive in Prescott’s historic downtown. When the hotshots came to drink in groups, as they often did on rare days off, bartender Jeff Bunch gave them a discount. His son was a former crew member.
The trio sat by the pool tables in the back of the bar. Donut hadn’t seen Garret, a red-bearded 27-year-old, or Chris, his roommate and a nine-year veteran of firefighting, in a couple of days. Strange as it was, Donut (his nickname was easier to say than his last name) had missed his hotshot brothers. He’d come down with a cold on Thursday night and taken Friday and Saturday off.
“Donut, what the fuck are you wearing?” Garret asked. He had on a pink tank top: an easy target. The hazing went around the table, moving from Donut’s style to Chris’s poorly trained dog, Abbey, to Garret’s obsession with vinyl records, before the conversation eventually landed, as it always did, on the job.
“Any idea what the assignment is?” asked Donut. “All I heard was we got work.” He was feeling better and eager to get back on the fire line. Tomorrow was Sunday, an overtime day—nearly $20 an hour.
“More staging, I think,” said Chris. “We’ve been busting little lightning fires since you left.”
Seven small blazes had ignited in the mountains around Prescott during the thunderstorm the previous night. One of them, sparked by the lightning strike Lois and Truman had seen on Friday, had become a higher priority blaze after growing to 100 acres. It had been given a name: the Yarnell Hill Fire.
About the time the hotshots were finishing their beers, the incident commander, the general on the fire, had set up headquarters at the volunteer fire station in Yarnell and was ordering additional resources as fast as he could: eight engines, structure-protection specialists, air tankers, and three hotshot crews. Granite Mountain was one of them.
——————————————————————-
So unless Kyle Dickman is making all this up… it’s pretty obvious this ‘detail’ ( including what the table conversation was about ) came straight from Brendan McDonough.
MacKenzie and Zuppiger both DIED in Yarnell.
Notice also that Dickman is attempting to put a TIME on when these 3 GM Hotshots were FINISHING their beers.
In other words… how LONG they sat there drinking that night.
If this ( loose ) attempt at framing the ‘timing’ on Dickman’s part is to be believed… then the moment when Shumate was ordering all those ‘resources’ ( such as SPGS Willis and Cordes, etc. ) was around 10:00 PM Saturday night.
If that’s when they were ‘finishing their beers’… then Dickman is establishing that they were there drinking for at least about 2 hours ( 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM ).
>> TTWARE also said…
>>
>> I think both of those accounts (illness & meet-up with the
>> boys) are probably true, and if the reports are correct, it’s
>> likely that on 6/30 he was still recovering from his illness,
>> and perhaps his night out as well.
Dickman reports that Brendan himself reported it ( to Dickman ) as just a 48 hour cold/flu thing. He ‘came down with it’ Thursday night, took all day Friday and Saturday, but now here he was feeling good enough to throw some beers down on Saturday night.
Also keep in mind that according to this conversation being reported by Dickman… by the time Brendan even arrived at the “Whiskey Row Pub’ ( circa 8:00 PM? ), the ‘assignment’ in Yarnell had already been ‘accepted’ by Marsh and Brendan knew that. Brendan ALSO knew that he would be ‘joining’ them for the ‘overtime’ work the next day.
So that means that even before Brendan arrived at the Pub… Marsh or Steed must have contacted Brendan to see if they would be able to include him on Sunday’s roster… and that conversation must have been something like…
——————————————————————–
( Ring, ring ).
Brendan: Hello?
Marsh or Steed: Donut. We need 20 tomorrow down in Yarnell. How are you feeling by now?
Brendan: I feel better. I’m good to go.
Marsh or Steed: You SURE? Don’t bullshit. We got some alternates we can grab if you’re not sure. It’s gonna be damn HOT tomorrow.
Brendan: Yea. I’m sure. I’m good to go. Count me in.
Marsh or Steed: Copy that. Be at the Station by 5:15 crowtime.
————————————————————————
SIDENOTE: Even if Brendan THOUGHT he was feeling better by Saturday night… and well enough to sling some beers… if he had actually been on any antibiotics then he would still have been light-sensitive and heat-sensitive and he probably genuinely didn’t realize that was going to seriously affect his ability to perform the following day.
And that’s how it went down.
Apparently… Brendan WAS okay for the 50 minute 2 mile hike up to the ridge… and then a morning’s worth of line building and cold mop… but by NOON he was spent.
It’s also worth noting ( once again ) that Tex ( Sonny ) Gilligan’s initial impression about ALL of the ‘Granite Mountain Hotshots’ when he first saw them even hiking TO the ridge that morning was that they were ALL ‘spent and tired’… even before the work day had really begun.
And I think an ex-miner knows what ‘spent and tired’ men look like.
The fact that everyone thought it was a piece of shit scrub fire, there was no sense (to anyone involved in the management of the fire) that the 30th was going to be a bad day and everyone had better bring their A game….even though the fuels, weather and topography were telling them in black and white…
100+ degrees, single digit rh, chaparral, winds up to 50 mph….
If that does not make you say “WHOA, A game tomorrow” you should not be in the fire game. ..
Thank you for that.
I’m not assuming antibiotics, all things (including possibly not health insurance) considered.
But.
Otherwise yes.
And given what you etc. have written upstream,
It does kinda sorta look like they posted him out there to be the “Lookout” that they didn’t really need to be a Lookout that (ala Sonny) wasn’t a Lookout, and, thus, never realized the need for himself to continue being the LOOKOUT that they REALLY NEEDED when they started descending into that explosively-fuelled bowl.
Just another one of the many many many Shakespearian Twists in this Tragedy.
Who needs Shakespeare when you have REALITY?
I’m really wondering, all things considered, right now, how much and how often Kyle has interviewed Brendan and what Brendan has told him over all of this time.
The first chapter of his book looks to me like he was not only interviewing Brendan, but possibly several other people, given that there were other “GM Hotshots” connected to the GM Hotshots who weren’t on the Yarnell Fire.
Somewhere I read that one of them was even up hiking in the Grand Canyon and was like, OMG, I could have been there and then been there DEAD, too!!!
What I’m not looking forward to is May happening when I’m about five months behind in a lot of stuff I need to have done by now.
What I AM looking forward to is reading Kyle’s book. Even if it contains a significant amount of, as we photographers call it, “post processing.”
I have a feeling he’s been doing a WHOLE BUNCH of interviewing.
And he really really really does know fire and how it is fought.
I did state below that although I am not a Mormon, I have many family who are and I do have an affinity for them and yes, I think equating LDS with Scientology is very insulting, they don’t recognize Jesus Christ at all…right? Those two religions are further apart that Mormons and Baptists. And yes, “hate” was to strong of word for what you feet towards the LDS faith, I should have used words like…ridiculing, insulting, condescending, patronizing, dismissive, and yes, after a lifetime of listening to those kinds of comments and a lot worse, especially by Fundamentalists like Darrell Willis, I do have a tendency to come out swinging.
The more I learn about world history and other religions by cruising the internet, the more I realize that every Christian faith is essentially a breakaway religion from the Catholic faith, many of which started on pretty shaky grounds themselves. How about the Church of England and it’s churches in this country (Protestant?). And like I said before, the entire Christian religion started because a stone cold corpse came back to life and ascended to heaven, and just because a body isn’t where you left it the day before, certainly does not prove it came back to life and flew off to heaven…right? It takes faith to believe that, so I guess Mormons believing Joseph Smith found some things in a hole takes faith also. Does one seem more illogical than the other to you if faith is not in the equation ?
And I don’t care…work time, down time, shower time, break time, sleeping time, if religion and politics is being discussed among a group of people who have to eat together, work together, sleep together, go the bathroom together, and right on top of each other for weeks or months on, I really think religion should be kept way out of it because somebody is going to get hurt and crew production will suffer. Here’s a fact that hasn’t been discussed up until now…hotshots on the same crew get into physical fight sometimes…and when they do it is really ugly and has serious consequences.
Crew members who may be gay, cohabiting with a significant other, don’t believe in having children, don’t get engaged in charitable works, believes that marriage doesn’t have to be between a man and a woman and on and on and on, who are subjected to condemning lectures from others, especially others who are in charge is really wrong.
And I guess I will wait to hear from Mike, but I already know how many Christians would feel if the same thing was going on by those in charge at work if those in charge were Muslims trying to convert crew members to Islam. And you should know that as well.
Everyone seems to think that just because we haven’t heard about preaching to people who did not want to hear it was going on with GMIHC, that is certainly not proof it didn’t go on, we aren’t hearing anything about what went on along those lines.
How are this offer? If there are any former GMIHC members out there and you want to share what really went on with that crew, email me at [email protected], I will write a book about the GMIHC and I will donate 50% of all the profits from the book to the WFF in your name if you want. If you want to remain completely anonymous, you will be, I know how to protect the identities of Sources of Information. If there’s another story out there…let’s tell it so they whole truth is in the public arena. What you know, may be what the wildland firefighting community needs to here to nail down the lessons learned from this disaster, you might even save some lives.
And yes, WTKTT, your comments regarding the Mormon faith really did offend me and did make me very angry although I was just joking while trying to make a point about actually KILLING you. Your ridicule of their faith WAS very offensive, especially since you did it last year in a similar post and I jumped on you for that then. So you may not hate Mormons, but you clearly don’t have any respect for them or their faith and feel you have the right to publicly insult them while hiding behind an anonymous screen name, if you are proud of your positions, post your real name and email address so the Mormons know the name of who is throwing rocks at them. .
whoops should have put to WTKTT, mostly
Are you open to emails not specifically about the GMIHS history or religion?
Just old fart to old fart?
I am younger than Powers but not by too many moons
Right on…obviously I have to much time on my hands.
Reply to Gary Olson post on April 28, 2015 at 6:52 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Here’s a fact that hasn’t been discussed up until now…hotshots on the same
>> crew get into physical fight sometimes…and when they do it is really ugly
>> and has serious consequences.
This HAS been discussed… and in relation to ‘Granite Mountain’ and what happened with them on the Mill Creek Fire.
It was back in Chapter X ( TEN ) of this ongoing discussion.
Below is a direct ‘jumplink’ to the post about that ‘fistfight’ that Christopher MacKenzie had to ‘break up’ on the Mill Creek fire.
It was mentioned by Christopher MacKenzie himself during his job interview in April of 2013 to replace departing Squad Boss Philip Maldonado. MacKenzie mentions how he had to ‘step in’ and break up this fight as one example of his ‘leadership qualities’ as he was being interviewed for Maldonado’s job.
NOTE: We still do NOT know what this particular first-fight was ABOUT. There was no information in the job interview notes about that. Could have been religion, politics, who was taking too long in the porta-potty, just about anything. Dunno.
But it ( the fist-fight ) happened.
There’s also no telling how OFTEN this might have been happening on the ‘Granite Mountain’ crew. I get the impression not that often… but MacKenzie’s interview notes are ONLY referring to this one incident where he ( MacKenzie ) had to ‘break it up’.
Here is that exact comment back in Chapter X ( TEN ) of this ongoing discussion…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-x/#comment-182997
Part of that comment is reproduced below…
—————————————————————————————–
On November 19, 2014 at 11:49 pm, WantsToKnowTheTruth said…
** YARNELL WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME GRANITE MOUNTAIN
** ATTEMPTED TO BURN OUT THEIR OWN SAFETY ZONE
There has always been a PDF document that was part of the ‘Personnel Records’ release from the City of Prescott that contains some pretty important ‘clues’ about some things that HAVE happened in the past with Granite Mountain… and that document hasn’t been discussed much.
It actually contains written ‘proof’ of at least the following two things…
1) Yarnell was not the first time Granite Mountain had to ‘burn out’ their own Safety Zone under emergency conditions on a fire. It also happened on a fire they worked in Nevada.
2) There was at least one disagreement ( during a fire in Idaho ) among crew members that actually ‘came to blows’ and turned into a REAL fist-fight. Christopher MacKenzie was the one who had to ‘break it up’.
The actual NAME of this PDF document is GMHS1.pdf
It was referenced in some ‘Prescott News’ publisehd articles and is still sitting at the following unrestricted, public link…
The document is a 24.90 megabyte PDF file.
** THE GMHS1.PDF DOCUMENT ( 53 pages long )
Basically… this PDF file contains public documents related to the hiring of a new ‘Squad Boss’ for Granite Mountain to replace one of the current ones who took another job in March of 2013… just a few months before the incident in Yarnell.
The name of the ‘Squad Boss’ who was leaving GM was Philip Maldonado.
He had been with Granite Mountain for some time… and he is actually the ‘Squad Leader’ who was running the ‘Fire Shelter Drill’ seen in the now-famous online video of Granite Mountain practicing Fire Shelter Deployment.
Philip Maldonado is the one seen ‘standing over’ all the other Granite Mountain Hotshots and barking orders at them in this ‘Shelter Deployment’ rehearsal video.
A ‘Recruitment Committee’ was formed, job applications were received ( from FOUR current Granite Mountain Hotshots ), interviews took place, and a selection was made, all by the END of March.
ALL of this is totally documented in this GMHS1.PDF file, including all the NOTES that were taken while all FOUR of the candidates for the ‘Squad Boss’ position were interviewed.
It is in those ( handwritten ) NOTES taken by the FOUR members of the ‘Recruitment Committee’ during the job applicant interviews where some pretty interesting information comes out.
** GM HAD TO BURN OUT THEIR SAFETY ZONE IN NEVADA
( Original comment contains all the details from the interview notes about this ).
** GRANITE MOUNTAIN CREW FIST-FIGHT BROKEN
** UP BY CHRISTOPHER MACKENZIE
There are a LOT of other things contained in these ‘interview notes’… and there isn’t time to include them all right now… but here is just something else that is ‘documented’ in these ‘interview notes’.
When the committee was interviewing Christopher MacKenzie, he told them about a fist-fight that broke out amongst the Granite Mountain crew ( during their assignment on the Mill Creek Fire ) and that he had to ‘step in and break it up’.
The question ( out of the FIVE standard questions being asked of all applicants ) that Christopher MacKenzie seemed to have been answering for the committee at this point in his interview seems to have been standard question number FOUR…
4. What is your best leadership skill?
But ONE of the committee member’s notes about this ‘fist-fight’ ( Jesse Steed’s ) seems to indicate Christopher might have been answering standard question number THREE…
3. Tell us about a time when you had to build your squad’s confidence during your supervisor’s absence.
Both Eric Marsh’s and Clayton Whitted’s NOTES establish that this ‘fist-fight’ took place when Granite Mountain was working the ‘Mill Creek’ fire.
———————————————————————————————-
Comittee Member: Melissa Fousek
GM Hotshot being interviewed: Christopher MacKenzie
PDF page: 12
(4) Few people throwing blows – blew up. Sat them down & talked through
———————————————————————————————-
Comittee Member: Jesse Steed
GM Hotshot being interviewed: Christopher MacKenzie
PDF page: 7
(3) Butt heads – throwing blows. Dominate. Went good.
———————————————————————————————-
Comittee Member: Eric Marsh
GM Hotshot being interviewed: Christopher MacKenzie
PDF page: 17
(4) Mill Creek, people butting heads, fight started, talked a guy down
to not escalate problem.
———————————————————————————————-
Comittee Member: Clayton Whitted
GM Hotshot being interviewed: Christopher MacKenzie
PDF page: 20
4) Mill Creek. A couple people butting heads and throwing blows.
Reacted. Broke up fight.
———————————————————————————————-
Good catches, thanks!
Gary,
A little grit, mixed with the truth, always seems to get better traction.
While we don’t always agree, as I said before, I like your style.
Sonny says
April 28, 2015 at 11:00 am
Right on–How can he turn tail now with his previous statement of no blame. Does that mean he is willing to make up a new story that pays and had let the loved ones down in their hope to find closure in this incident.
The general public likes tall tales–but those in the firefighting community and the loved ones of those deceased only want the facts.
One thing the bosses on this tragedy enjoy is the fact that all this attention is going to a green-horn firefighter who poo-poos the common sense rules of safety and whose ass was grass had not some well informed and brave blue ridge fireman rised his life to retrieve the look out that did not look out.
The focus needs to be on the whole picture and why those that ran this fire did it the way they did. Those phone records in the hands of certain of the widows and others need to be read and I am certain they are hoping that someone will bother to get them to see who was communicating with Marsh and Steed and when, etc. and why that Willis said they had lost communication immediately after Marsh or Steed said they were safe in the black. What about Hall’s records, Willis’s records and every boss that had any thing to do with the Yarnell fire–who, when and under oath what were they saying. You can bet there will be a lot of 5th amendment testimony.
I would still like to know why investigators never contacted Joy to find out about those photos of quads at the fire on Friday–actual photos that exist. Are these something that will be in one of the books and being skirted at this time for monetary reasons? Sad we do not have the Gary Olsen’, WTKT, Powers, Marti’s, Ted Putnam’s and people of such ilk on this tragedy–right here in Yarnell on the ground looking into these things– Tell me why the sheriff department, the officials of the fire department on this Yarnell fire tragedy would refuse one of the leading fire death investigators from being admitted to the area or shown the way they went. You would think that they would want that man’s opinion and ideas considering he had 11 years of smoke jumping and firefighting experience to go along with his expertise from past investigations in such incidents. What the hell was in their minds to refuse him?\
I understand that you can’t have 20 men working together and have independent thinkers who would disobey orders that might do others harm. But dropping off into a tangled up maze of manzanita had nothing to do with harming anyone but those who dropped off into that steep box canyon. There is where at least someone with a lick of sense would have balked. Something in the human factor has to be considered here–and I believe it has to start at the very top–was that Roy Hall? Who is next and who after all was right above Marsh and Steed? Did they disobey superiors? I think not, in fact — someone was asking Marsh or Steed to drop down to Yarnell and that Helms was the shortest but most dangerous route and a sure killer if that wind changed–something those men had to know since I knew it and am not the least bit educated in fire fighting methods. The old mayor Kuydendall said common sense goes a long ways.
That they knew, yet what human factors caused them to fail? It was hot and they were indeed tired and overworked. But then consider my age at 71 and that Joy and I had struggled through that manzanita, brambles, catclaw and dead brush at the very place they died earlier that morning. It took us about 3 hours to cross only about a mile of that mess. We were often backtracking to find another way around the dense maze of manzanita and often on our bellies crawling under dense brush to get through. Granted, Marsh would have beat our time, maybe by 2/3’s considering how I saw him going up that mountain like a jack rabbit. Whew he was in shape but those fellows he had command of that day looked bushed when we passed them on our way south about 9:30. So they went meekly to their deaths? Why when before them at the very spot they went down Joy and I argued and you could not have gotten me down there for any reason-yet an hour later with the fire even more progressed they did it? There has to be plenty of convincing to get someone to do that. Joy told me later that maybe a bear or mountain lion blocked them. Not 19 men I replied. A flying saucer had unloaded an army perhaps and forced them down or shot them with a mind controlling frequency that confused them–or more likely they were tired and listened to orders without to much attention to their own safety. I have to believe there were some bosses involved here and even above Marsh and Steed and they are hoping Donut will stay in the lime light.
Yes bosses, I saw it once in a mining job that I quit while 6 others stayed on and got caught back in a mine– but the boss said it was safe, still I was the only one to pick up my check– but mine jobs are easy to replace, miners are hard to find and you can always tramp a mine to get another the next day. Maybe those fellows were worried and had permanent homes– the human factor caught them.
Brought to the top for clarity—–
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xiv/#comment-293263
This is a general response to what I interpreted as a “what is wrong with preaching” on a hotshot crew by Mike down below. And well…I think everything is wrong with it, especially if it is being done by anyone who is in any authority over that person. That is really wrong. The founders of the constitution pointed that out…right?
I have heard the same argument when it comes to prayer in the schools and the Ten Commandments on public buildings for years, but those are the arguments that always come from Christian Zealots and they become defensive and aggressive if anyone suggests that we should be as understanding about other religions.
How about carving some quotes from the Quran in marble and posting those around the famous courthouse on the square in Prescott, Arizona, how would you Bible Thumpers feel about that? I tell Mormon missionaries I’m not interested either when they come to my door, but they have never tried to preach to me for two fucking hours on a fire! Are you serious?
And secondly…I would say that unless you think it would be OK for a Muslim (or fill in the blank for any other religion around the world except for Christian) who is a squad boss or senior crew member or crew boss or Wildland Division Chief spending any time whatsoever trying to spread their interpretation of God and religion in a professional work setting in a government job is really, really, really wrong. How can you not get that?
Hotshots need to spend all of their time talking about what hotshots always talk about…the last fire, the next fire or some other fire, the best method for breaking in their fire boots and whose “Smokejumper” model of fire boots is best…White’s or Nick’s, which chain saw is better…a Stihl or a Husqvarna and when somebody new joins the conversation or they finish those topics…they start all over again with the same topics in that same order.
I am a White’s and a Husqvarna man myself, but after 40 years if I bring up a fire, fire boots or chain saws my wife freezes and then she offers to jump out of the moving car so she doesn’t have to hear about them anymore. And I stopped talking about that stuff more than 30 years ago and she is still jumpy. God…religion…on a hotshot crew…really?
The GMIHC wasn’t just different than all other hotshot crews, those boys functioned in an alternative universe and they just visited wildfires on this planet…I guess? WTF, over?
God and religion has no place being discussed on a hotshot crew or in any other work environment, hotshots are together 24/7 for weeks at a time, complete compatibility is critical. Just look at what discussing religion has done to us on this thread…if I could get my hands around WTKTT’s pencil neck, I would strangle the life out of him (just kidding John, I’m pretty sure death threats are on your list of no no’s, although you have never formerly forbid them and besides I think WTKTT is way to valuable to this thread, I would wait until we are finally finished and then kill him) for what he said about the Mormon faith.
And you think it is ok to talk about on a hotshot crew? Seriously?
As I told you earlier Mike, I have always found your comments to be insightful and thoughtful. I guess you and I are just going to have to agree to disagree about religion and God on the job.
Reply to Gary Olson post on April 27, 2015 at 11:14 pm
>> Gary said…
>>
>> Just look at what discussing religion has done to us on this thread…if I
>> could get my hands around WTKTT’s pencil neck, I would strangle
>> the life out of him (just kidding John, I’m pretty sure death threats are
>> on your list of no no’s, although you have never formerly forbid them
>> and besides I think WTKTT is way to valuable to this thread, I would
>> wait until we are finally finished and then kill him) for what he said
>> about the Mormon faith.
Gee… I was actually just about to compliment everyone for keeping the obviously potential 3rd rail high voltage discussion at a VERY civil level.
I actually thought it was going pretty well… given how volatile that kind of stuff can get.
LMFAO.
There IS ‘hard’ evidence that these things were going on in and around this organization known as ‘Granite Mountain’… and that it WAS ‘unusual’… even as ‘Hotshot culture’ goes… and I STILL believe it deserves to be talked about and whether there was ANY chance it might have had ANYTHING to do with the fatal ‘groupthink’ that took place in Yarnell on June 30, 2013.
I believe the discussion can/should continue on the same ‘civil’ level.
P.S. What does LMFAO stand for anyway…laying on my floor acting out?
Laff my F’ing ass off!!
If they would have spent more time discussing fire behaviour and entrapment avoidance, rather than the Gospel, maybe we would not be here on this site today 🙂
Oh, that’s a good one.
Was not meant in humour Gary, was meant in truth….
Reply to rocksteady post on April 28, 2015 at 6:48 pm
>> rocksteady said…
>>
>> Was not meant in humour Gary, was meant in truth….
I think he knew that.
He basically totally AGREED with what you said in this comment…
http://www.investigativemedia.com/yarnell-hill-fire-chapter-xiv/#comment-293660
Gary Olson said…
——————————————————-
…a squad boss or senior crew member or crew boss or Wildland Division Chief spending any time whatsoever trying to spread their interpretation of God and religion in a professional work setting in a government job is really, really, really wrong. How can you not get that?
…
Hotshots need to spend all of their time talking about what hotshots always talk about…the last fire, the next fire or some other fire,…
…
God and religion has no place being discussed on a hotshot crew or in any other work environment,
——————————————————–
no, I was making a reference to the LMFAO was a good one, not your comment as a whole, I know you weren’t joking.
and I agree with you.
What I am reading is that both of you are saying the same thing.
Which is a thing I totally agree with.
Given all of that, and given all of the/our responses to what Mike said:
“The facile logical leap from having strong Christian beliefs to being “reckless” because the Lord will save you seems a bit pat. It is not at all clear that any of the supposed “targets” of this religious discussion were put off by it or made uncomfortable. The idea that this would not be “allowed” on a hotshot crew is what seems extreme.”
I’m thinking Mike (who has always had LOTS of really well thought-out contributions to our gathering around this digital “campfire”) is probably doing some really deep thinking about all of this, as we all are.
I spent some time today (which I actually don’t really have, all things considered) looking at some of the profiles that have been published about each of these Granite Mountain Hotshots.
Asking two questions:
1) What was their relationship to Structural Firefighting?
2) What might have been their religious orientation (as documented vis a vis their own Memorial Services–which may or may not be a fair perspective, all things considered).
What I found was a fairly “motley” crew, on both counts.
They were somewhat “all over the boards” regarding religion, imho.
And they were also, somewhat “all over the boards” regarding having previously served on “structural protection oriented” fire organizations before their hiring by the Granite Mountain IHC.
So I currently think the crew was fairly “muddy” on both counts.
I think some of them might have been, via prior training, “predisposed” to place a “huge big deal” priority to the protection of structures, but I think that “some” was a pretty small minority.
And, via this search, i also think there might have been some of that crew. at that time, who might have been “open” to being effected by the three that, thanks to WTKTT’s research, we now know were feeling a need to evangelize the crew, I’m not sure, at this point that that was a really BIG portion of that crew.
I have to say that trying to do this kind of research is really really painful. Such a huge gynormous waste of some really potentially powerful and creative LIVES.
All that said.
I completely agree that “on the job: evangelism is not acceptable.
And, also I think that the days of “fire-wall”-separating of “wildland” fire-fighting from some kind of “structure protection” fire-fighting” are pretty much over.
Even though I “get” the difference between “structure protection” on a wildfire and “structural” fire-fighting.
These two are definitely different things (tactically speaking), and those who are having to do this in real time (including my own Bernalillo County Fire Department and my Albuquerque Fire Department must be having something of a difficult time trying to sort his seriously complicated beast out.
Interestingly enough, it seems to me that Kevin Woyjeck, for whom the Yarnell Fire was only his second fire with the Granite Mountain Hotshots (apparently the Spruce Fire the “day” before being his first), was actually a “rookie” on this fire, although his profile suggests he had some serious creds, both in the world of wildland and structural firefighting.
Ok it’s getting way beyond late for me and I’m getting seriously tired, so it’s time for me to say Goodnight!
Well Marty…I could spend a lot of time responding to your post, but it is late so I am going to shoot from the hip. No offense…but you haven’t been paying attention to some of the very important things I’ve written. It doesn’t matter what the orientation of most of the GMIHC had…Eric Marsh told you that as well. Thank you for telling us what your favorite color is…now sit the fuck down because nobody here give a fuck what you think about anything asshole including what your favorite color is. Let that be a lesson to you!
It didn’t make any difference what most of them thought about the value of protecting structures, how many times do I have to tell you people…hotshot overhead don’t give a fuck what most of the crew thinks and they never get asked what they think about anything because the hotshot overhead knows that they are not getting paid to think, they are getting paid to keep their mouths shut and cut fire line. Can’t you people even imagine what it would be like for 20 guys milling around in a crises all wondering what they should do, offering up their opinions on the options and then forming a committee to work on it? That would be how a hotshot crew of 20 women would do it, that is not misogyny, I have seen the studies that show how women cooperate and get good work done, except doing that on a wild fire would lead to 20 dead women.
That’s how I made squad boss and then crew boss, I kept my mouth shut and cut fire line until they told me to stop. And nobody ever asked my opinion about anything. I didn’t have an opinion, I wasn’t getting paid to have one, I was getting paid to keep my mouth shut and cut fire line or whatever else was going on at the time.
Now if somebody jumps in here and says no, that’s not the way the GMIHC was run, Eric Marsh treated everybody as an equal and they even wrote up a GMIHC Magna Carta to make sure everybody got treated as equals, but we aren’t hearing that, we are hearing the opposite.
Point 2…we have heard over and over again that the big selling point that Eric Marsh used to recruit for the GMIHC was the hook that they could work towards a full time job with…wait for it…benefits and job security if they did a good job as hotshots for a few years. The USFS and others offer similar hopes to get on engine crews etc. after putting in their time as hotshots and as you have probably figured out…most of the guys who went up the ladder in fire (at least before the consent decrees) were all former hotshot crew bosses and those who weren’t were former smokejumpers supervisors who used to be hotshots.
Check again…I will guarantee you everybody on that crew fit into one of only two categories, they didn’t have any idea where they wanted to go in life yet, so they figured they could make some good money in the meantime while having an adventure or they were hoping to get on full time with the PFD. The PFD is full of guys who used to be GMIHC, I bet the PFD hasn’t hired anybody in years who was not either a former GMIHC or highly qualified from a Phoenix metropolitan fire department or one in California and wanted to escape to the mile high city.
Point C…you haven’t been hearing anything from anybody about what it was like on the GMIHC, I have never seen a stronger or taller or bigger red wall than the one that has gone up around the history of that crew. Talk about a cone of silence.
Point IV…do you think anybody is going to come forward or would have come forward before they were killed and complained because the Jesus Freaks on the crew were breaking their balls all of the time about accepting Jesus as their savior and let the crew overhead baptize them is a porta tank? Who are they supposed to complain to, the Jesus Freak Squad Boss, or the Jesus Freak Crew Boss or Jesus’ contact on the PFD…Chief Willis.
That crew was run as an Eric Marsh cult. I mean come on, he shit canned his second in command because the guy was putting hotel miles on his credit card. Guess what? There was no city policy against that, Darrell Willis didn’t have a problem with it, the federal government, who is not known for lax travel policy’s officially lets employees do that because they can’t collect them for the government. And he shit canned a guy who had busted his ass for years to make it that far up the chain? And some of you people (what do you mean you people) have had the nerve to suggest Jesse Steed could have refused Eric Marsh’s order to take his crew down that canyon? He had a wife and two kids at home that was counting on him keeping his job.
Are you kidding me. Complain about how that egomaniac ran his crew, and hey, I think you can all tell that being an egomaniac who used to full of hubris and still is on some days, is something I know a little bit about. But guess what…all hotshot crew bosses are egomaniacs…and if they weren’t before they got the job, they work they way into it pretty fast after they sit on top of the Pillars that are built for them to perch on.. News flash…the widland firefighting community WORSHIPS hotshots and especially hotshot crew bosses.
Why do think nobody is attacking me and tearing me apart for the things I have written here…they are thinking…well, the stupid fuck WAS a hotshot crew boss…let’s cut the crazy fucker some slack, he went and saw the elephant and lived to talk about it.
The only thing worse than me trying to channel the GMIHC is you trying to do it…no offense, and just like the bigot WTKTT who hates Mormons…I love you too.
Fuck it. I’m going to get drunk and go to bed and I don’t even drink…any more.
Those that have never seen the Elephant have a lack of final understanding.
99% of the time the Crew Bosses/drill Sargent is the boss and many were well versed in Wildland Fire. What they said was what you did.
A testimony of Hot Shot Safety is in the statistics, 100 Crews–40,000 Fires or more per year since Storm king. Those are statistics to be proud of.
GM is turning into an anomaly that should never have happened.
The 10 and 18 were hillbilly, They left the black. no Lookout or Communications with OPS, Walked down a brush filled canyon with a active burning fire less than 3/4 of a mile from them.
I have said over and over those are just not things a Hot Shot crew dose nor most well qualified Wild Land Fire Fighters do.
Something very different was going on with this crew??????
Something very different indeed! I have come to believe the GMIHC were just that an anomaly. And I think that means there is no real danger of what happened to them happening to another crew, unless there is another crew out there that is being run like the GMIHC. Just teaching McDonough that the 10 and 18 are hillbilly speaks volumes to what was going on with the GMIHC. Volumes.
Thank you very much for this/your correction!
I really appreciate your perspective on how the REALITY works on these fires, in spite of the various thingies the USFS etc say about how oooo-la-la IMPORTANT it is that “SAFETY IS FIRST” and “Fire-fighters have the right to object/turn down unsafe assignments” and “It’s REALLY important for fire-fighters to TALK about these things.
Definitely a REALITY CHECK.
And I have to say I was writing what I was writing more in the spirit of what WTKTT wrote below (or somewhere, it’s hard to say) in responses to what I wrote.
I.e. Given all the hardcore power framework of the way it really works on the fireline that you describe (where the orders are the orders and the firefighters are the robots that carry out those orders no matter what they might think), what might some of the minds of some of the actual fire-fighters on that crew at that time have been thinking regarding both the whole religious evangelism push on the part of at least three of its crew.
And the possible “We’ve gotta race down there and risk a lot to save a lot (no matter what)” — debunked as it may/may not be, depending on whatever “protect structures thinking” of whoever may have been injecting those thoughts into this whole situation (and we’re still, at this point not all that sure where those imperatives may have been coming from — and I’m concurring with Sonny’s thinking above this).
So I’m right now sitting here somewhere in a force-field that includes both what you are saying and what WTKTT is saying in response to what I wrote.
It may be of NO RELEVANCE whatsoever, in terms of the power structure and how that basically turns all of these IHC firefighters into essential line-cutting and tree-cutting-down “robots,” in spite of how “wildland firefighters” see “Hotshots” as the epitome of awesome wildland fire-fighters.
I’m really experiencing a cognitive dissonance here.
(I’m writing this while listening to an analysis of Baltimore on the radio, so there’s that……)
But it may be of some relevance in relationship to how whatever conflict might just possibly have occurred in the time framework between the “Options Conversation” at around 4:00 PM and the decision to drop down into that bowl full of “petroleum” at about 4:20 PM.
It’s not totally surprising to me that WTKTT and I BOTH spent a serious chunk of our time looking into this yesterday. Because, actually, in spite of the hard-core reality (which I really appreciate your describing) of what you are describing here, Gary, it’s also true that these fire-fighters were not actually (as the actual system requires them to be) mindless robots.
I am wanting to to try to find out who, among the crew, might have been, relatively speaking, more or less disposed to being influenced by that whole “faith over reason” kind of thinking, as seems to have been infecting not only the Granite Mountain Hotshots, but also, possibly, the larger fire-fighting community around them, as expressed by the narrative/mythology that, seemingly immediately, attached itself to it and continues to this day.
As I am writing (and trying to figure out) this really complicated thing, I am thinking that the basic CONFLICT here is that how can it both be assumed that Hotshots are considered to be both the most awesome wildland firefighters on the planet and also expected to be, essentially, as you are describing them, ROBOTS when it comes down to just doing what they are being ordered to do, when, all things considered, that order may, in fact, most likely lead to a really probably impossible to survive situation?????
I, as both a mother and a Girl Scout Leader and a leader of groups on journeys into the Grand Canyon, understand the importance of being able to both support and encourage the powers and values of “democratic” conversations around decisions, while also understanding the need, sometimes, under certain circumstances, for me, the adult/leader, to make decisions and enforce them when needed.
But to, as you describe, totally denigrate the thoughts/perspectives/wisdom/experience of members of a crew and their hard-earned experience-based wisdom and disregard it because that’s how the system works??????
If that is how “the system” works, and I appreciate your candidness regarding this, I truly believe there is a SERIOUS problem with “the system.”
And if that “how the system works” process is, probably, related to what happened on June 30, 2013, leading to the deaths of so many of these awesome wildland Hotshots fire-fighters,
I think “we” REALLY REALLY REALLY need to challenge that System.
Reply to Marti Reed post on April 28, 2015 at 3:21 am
>> Marti said…
>>
>> I’m thinking Mike (who has always had LOTS of really well
>> thought-out contributions to our gathering around this digital
>> “campfire”) is probably doing some really deep thinking about
>> all of this, as we all are.
Agree. As Bob Powers himself said… “This is a hard subject to get your head around”… and it REQUIRES a fair amount of ‘reflection’ and ( yes ) some ‘soul searching’.
Mike is/was doing exactly that.
I (also) think he ‘landed’ on the WRONG conclusion(s)… but that’s what a ‘civil’ discussion is all about. We all get to ‘land’ in various places and then go from there.
Bottom line here is that while even I disagree with some of Mike’s basic ‘conclusions’ that ‘preaching in the workplace’ is ‘acceptable’… the FACT is that we still don’t have all the FACTS about this ‘evangelical subplot’ that seems to have been part and parcel of this ‘Granite Mountain’ organization.
Example: We KNOW ( for sure and certain ) that at least THREE MEN on that 20 person work crew were VERY interested ( and dedicated ) to ‘bringing others onto the Jesus train’ ( Whitted, Parker and DeFord )… and that ALL THREE of them were, in fact, ‘reporting’ their own preaching and evangelical progress and efforts back to their own various pastors and preachers.
But that’s still only THREE guys out of 20.
We also KNOW that the person in overall CHARGE of this organization ( Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis ) was, himself, a pretty amped-up no-bones-about-it “Jesus is Lord” kinda guy.
What we still do NOT know is all the actual ‘circumstances’ of all this ‘evangelical’ work and/or ‘preaching’ that was going on.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that neither of the following was actually happening on any kind of regular basis.
At least… there is no EVIDENCE any of the following things were happening.
1) Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis was showing up at ‘Station 7’ on a regular basis to ‘sign off’ on GM crewmembers task books ( see the personnel records… this is a fact )… but was also calling all the men into the Station 7 conference room and addressing them with “Before I sign off on your task books… Have you all heard the TRUTH?”
2) We also know for sure this same ‘amped on Jesus’ Wildland Division Chief was/is on the actual Board of Directors of the Prescott Salvation Army. No… it is NOT unusual for ex-Fire Chiefs to be involved with their own local ‘Salvation Army’… and it really doesn’t mean much one way or the other… but in THIS case it is at least an ‘indication’ that the Prescott Wildland Division Chief was familiar with ( and OK with? ) a ‘preaching for Jesus’ environment and would indicate he probably had a fair level of tolerance… if not active encouragement… for that sort of thing.
3) Eric Marsh and/or Jesse Steed were ever officially ( during work hours ) telling the entire crew… “Gaggle around, boys… Clayton and Wade and Dustin want to do some more evangelizing/preaching so STFU and listen to them ( again )”.
4) No one was filing any written complaints. They would have shown up in the Personnel files that City of Prescott was required to deliver to ADOSH. That reported ‘conversion’ of Brendan McDonough two weeks prior to the tragedy was, by all written accounts, something that happened during a ‘tools up’ moment in Nevada while Whitted, Parker, McDonough and (supposedly) at least 3 others were just sitting on a hillside and ‘talking about the Gospel’.
The accounts said they would “do that a lot”… but there is still no detail about how many actual crewmembers constitutes “they”, in these accounts.
In this particular ‘conversion’… the written accounts just make it sound like at the end of THIS particular “Gospel Time” moment on the Nevada Fire… the conversation ENDED with Brendan “accepting Jesus as his Savior”.
Whitted and Parker both reported that “conversion success” back to their respective pastors… but we still don’t know the full circumstances of how it went down.
It sounds like it was during ‘down time’ and could actually NOT be construed to be happening ‘during work hours’.
Being a Hotshot is obviously not a 9 to 5 job with an hour off to go to Taco Bell for lunch. These guys end up LIVING with each other. It’s more like going off to ‘Summer Camp’ and getting THAT close to the same group of people. You get close because you HAVE to. You actually can’t really ‘get away’ from them.
It was up to the managers and the supervisors to be keeping a ‘handle’ on all that kind of stuff. If Eric Marsh or Jesse Steed had felt that Whitted, Parker and DeFord were ‘gassing’ it too much with the ‘Jesus’ stuff… it was up to THEM to tell them to “put a lid on it”.
There is no evidence Marsh or Steed ever did any such thing… or that things ever reached the point where they needed to.
The CONTEXT of all of this is still simply what the ‘allowance’ of that kind of thing and that kind of ‘evangelism/preaching’ might have been doing to reinforce the ‘groupthink’ in that organization… which was going to turn into actual FATAL ‘groupthink’ on June 30, 2013.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I spent some time today (which I actually don’t really have, all
>> things considered) looking at some of the profiles that have been
>> published about each of these Granite Mountain Hotshots.
>>
>> Asking two questions:
>>
>> 1) What was their relationship to Structural Firefighting?
>>
>> 2) What might have been their religious orientation (as
>> documented vis a vis their own Memorial Services–which
>> may or may not be a fair perspective, all things considered).
>>
>> What I found was a fairly “motley” crew, on both counts.
>>
>> They were somewhat “all over the boards” regarding religion, imho.
I did pretty much the same thing… and I AGREE.
As of this writing… I think it’s safe to say the following…
1) Whitted, Parker and DeFord were the only THREE people on that crew ( with Whitted being an actual SQUAD BOSS ) who were AVOWED ‘Evangelicals’ and who had openly stated to others ( including their pastors and family members ) that they were ACTIVELY trying to convert and/or ‘bring GM crewmembers to Jesus”.
If there were even OTHERS on the crew doing this… there is no hard evidence of it ( like there is with the other three ) in any of the ‘obituaries’ or ‘who they were’ accounts that have appeared in the general media.
2) Whitted and Parker WERE successful in getting Brendan to climb onboard the Jesus train just 2 weeks before the tragedy… but there is no detail there about whether that meant Brendan now also became and active member of either of the churches that Whitted and Parker attended. Whitted was tied to this “Heights” Church there by the Prescott Airport and Parker was tied to pastor Todd League and his “Word” Church. We don’t know if Brendan ended up starting to show up at either one of them.
If he was only ‘converted’ just 2 weeks prior to Yarnell… and then Brendan actually suffered that illness just before Yarnell… then there probably wasn’t even TIME for Brendan to start showing up at either church.
3) Andrew Ashcraft appears to be the only LDS ( Mormon ) on the GM crew… but he was NOT in some kind of ‘evangelical mode’ like Whitted, Parker and DeFord were. Ashcraft was simply ‘walking the walk’ as well as ‘talking the talk’ of the LDS organization but was NOT actively trying to ‘recruit’ for the LDS organization.
4) The actual ‘religious affiliations’ of all of the other crewmembers is NOT readily discernible from any of the information in the published obituaries or the “who they were” profiles printed by the general media. Even the location ( as in, what church ) for their individual funeral services is no real indication of either their own level(s) of ‘faith’ or their identification with any particular denomination.
Example: Jesse Steed’s funeral was held at this same non-denominational ( but originally First Baptist ) church called “The Heights” where Clayton Whitted was a “Youth Minister”… but there’s no information that proves Steed was a ‘regular’ church-goer at that same place Whitted was a Minister… or that Jesse Steed was even all that religious at all.
We ALL have to get buried/cremated
SOMETIME… SOMEWHERE… by SOMEBODY.
The simple (final) ‘location’ is no real indication of anything, really.
Sometimes it’s just a ‘decision’ that surviving family makes FOR us, if we never bother to express any preferences while still alive.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And they were also, somewhat “all over the boards” regarding
>> having previously served on “structural protection oriented”
>> fire organizations before their hiring by the Granite Mountain IHC.
Agree.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> So I currently think the crew was fairly “muddy” on both counts.
Well… I wouldn’t call it ‘totally’ MUDDY for certain things.
See above.
Nothing MUDDY about where Whitted, Parker and DeFored stood with regards to ‘evangelism’ and convincing others that they should be on the ‘Jesus’ train. There is too much evidence on at least these THREE to say they were ‘muddy’ in any way. They were definitely ‘evangelizing’ and ‘preaching’ to the others… and expecting ( and getting ) RESULTS. ( E.g. Brendan ).
Ditto for the ‘Structure Side’. way of thinking.
There is DEFINITE proof for any number of these guys that they were ‘on that career track’ and weren’t the slightest bit interested in becoming career WFF Hotshots. The Hotshot thing was just ( as it is for a LOT of aspiring FFs ) just a ‘stepping stone’ towards getting onto an Engine Crew or hired by some Fire Department somewhere.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I think some of them might have been, via prior training, “predisposed”
>> to place a “huge big deal” priority to the protection of structures, but
>> I think that “some” was a pretty small minority.
Well… that’s really one of the biggest ongoing questions, isn’t it?
As Gary Olson has pointed out ( several times )… on the afternoon of June 30, 2013 it probably really didn’t matter at all what ANY of those men thought about anything. They were being TOLD what they were going to do and which way they were going to walk.
But as far as OBJECTING to anything… then YES… their own opinions about ‘saving structures’ certainly did matter.
If Brendan ever ‘talks’… It will be interesting to discover if there was ANY indication coming from Jesse Steed himself that the CREW was also expressing their ‘disinterest’ in ‘the mission’ Marsh was ( at first ) negotiating about.
Despite what Gary Olson keeps saying NEVER happens on Hotshots crews… something like that HAD been known to happen before with Granite Mountain.
It came out during Darrell Willis’ ADOSH interview and it was about that fire that GM got ‘demobbed’ from. Steed and THE CREW ( the sawyers in particular ) were all objecting to an ‘assignment’ and they were COLLECTIVELY telling Marsh they considered that assignment to be ‘unsafe’.
Marsh AGREED with them… and did a TDWAO with the DIVS about it.
This was all backed up in writing when Willis finally produced Eric Marsh’s written Unit Log describing the incident.
So there HAD been at least ONE time in GM’s History when the ENTIRE CREW did have INPUT about an ‘assignment’ and they were COLLECTIVELY ‘objecting’ to it.
Maybe there did come a moment, then, on June 30, 2013, when the “Structural side of firefighting” opinions of some/all of the CREW actually did ‘factor in’, and they MAY have actually been expressing their own opinions about that ‘mission’ to Steed… who then had to haggle directly with Marsh.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And, via this search, i also think there might have been some of that
>> crew. at that time, who might have been “open” to being effected by
>> the three that, thanks to WTKTT’s research, we now know were
>> feeling a need to evangelize the crew, I’m not sure, at this point
>> that that was a really BIG portion of that crew.
It is perfectly obvious from some of the ‘evidence’ now that ‘the three’ ( Whitted, Parker and DeFord ) were very much AWARE that only ‘some’ of the crew would even be receptive to getting onto the Jesus train.
They ( the three ) were all TELLING their own pastors when they were ‘reporting back’ that that was the case.
They ( the three ) had already been ‘scoping it out’ and they seemed to know who the valid ‘targets’ were. Brendan was the most obvious one.
They ( the three ) had already ‘reported’ to their pastors that some others were ‘close’ to being prime candidates. That means they HAD been ‘sizing them all up’.
It’s also clear that SOME of those fellas were the sort that the minute Whitted, Parker or DeFord had said to them… “Have you heard the TRUTH?”… the response was probably a middle finger.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> I have to say that trying to do this kind of research is really really
>> painful. Such a huge gynormous waste of some really potentially
>> powerful and creative LIVES.
I hear ya.
It is not possible to collect and read all these available BIOS and obituaries and not realize what amazing human beings were actually LOST on the afternoon of June 30, 2013.
They were ALL very, very special people… and truly ‘some of the best of us’.
That’s why ALL of us who have been asked to mourn them ( especially the families and the children now growing up fatherless ) learn what REALLY happened that day.
It’s just as important as it has ever been to know what REALLY happened.
Oh…and one more thing. I think that if that simpleton McDonough would have had a couple of Hare Krishna’s for squad bosses that idiot would be down where my office was at One Central Avenue at the downtown bus station in Phoenix banging on a tambourine and begging for pocket change.
And yes, WTKTT, we will continue to be as thick as thieves, you know I was just trying to make a point in my own colorful way. I mean…Joy said she would like to read a fire book by me just because she likes my quirky writing style…how cool is that?
Reply to Gary Olson post on April 28, 2015 at 3:23 am
>> Gary Olson said….
>>
>> Oh…and one more thing. I think that if that simpleton McDonough
>> would have had a couple of Hare Krishna’s for squad bosses that
>> idiot would be down where my office was at One Central Avenue
>> at the downtown bus station in Phoenix banging on a tambourine
>> and begging for pocket change.
Point taken… and I think you are right.
For Brendan… it was all about “my brothers” and finding whatever support and/or encouragement had been missing in is life. Adopting the same ‘religious’ beliefs as as held by some ( not ALL, but some ) of these people he now had a profound respect for is not unusual in any way.
Brendan was an ‘easy mark’ for anyone looking to ‘convert’ somebody and “show them the way”. All Clayton Whitted and Wade Parker had to do was work on him a little bit.
The others on the crew?… not so easy.
As Wade Parker ‘reported’ back to his pastor Todd League… some of the others were ‘close’… but it was gonna take more work than it did with Brendan.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> And yes, WTKTT, we will continue to be as thick as thieves,
>> you know I was just trying to make a point in my own colorful way.
Of course. I was/am a little confused though about where you (seem) to have gotten the impression that I ‘hate’ Mormons.
I don’t believe I ever said that… and I’m even more sure that I do NOT ‘hate Mormons’.
I mean… are YOU a Mormon, or something?
Did I piss YOU off, personally?
Was it something about how if people can just say they found things in holes in the ground and base an entire religion on it.. then the bar for being an actual no-shit ‘religion’ is obviously pretty damn low?
I will say flat-out that I do not UNDERSTAND the ‘Mormon faith’ ( and yes… I have read all about it and talked to some Mormons ).
I really don’t ( understand it )… but that doesn’t mean I hate anyone who has bought into that whole thing.
Yes… I think it’s right up there with Scientology, but ditto for that ‘group’. I don’t HATE them, either… I just don’t understand the whole deal or why it’s all so ‘secretive’…. like they are all Masons, or something.
>> Gary also said…
>>
>> I mean…Joy said she would like to read a fire book by me just
>> because she likes my quirky writing style…how cool is that?
If no one has ever told you before… you DO have ‘writing skills’.
If you’re balanced with the medication… it ‘flows’ and is fun to read.
If you wrote a book… I would buy a copy, fer sure.
WTKTT to even some how understand you need to read the book of Mormon.
If you have never toured a temple you will be even more sure there is some attachment to the Masons although I haven’t known any Masons that were Mormon. My Grand Father, Father, 2 uncles, and a cousin were all Masons.
A very solid Christian linkage with the Masons.
Those Swede Huskies are my choice too. There in Cloudcroft area we had 17 fallers–all but one used Huskies–that one was a Stihl user. I had two huskies for ten years making a living cutting wood–It was still going when I quit that work, though I had replaced rings and chain parts, but the main guts, crankshaft and jugs, head were still going. I hear those Swede cars go for a long time too.
Regarding religion–sounds like a quick discussion for fighters once they drop off in a box canyon and after knowing there is a fire that has suddenly reversed direction.
I once dragged a 82 pound cross for Jesus from Prescott Valley Flea Market (99) to around the square at the courthouse to a little Church on the Street place that fed the homeless. I ate there now and again. It was a ten mile drag in hot weather but I made it and took three days to recover. I think I got drunk with Jesus a few time after, but I never carried a bible to a job as a miner, logger or cowboy or a welding job. Common sense says people all believe what they are brought up with and such things are personal. I don’t give a damn if people believe in the devil–Americans are allowed to believe what they want. I think these Psychics have some things on the ball–and I think there are a hell of lot of gods there, well we saw a bunch there in the Yarnell incident bosses.,Gods too, and likely plenty of Aliens flying around as well. Marsh never mentioned religion to us at least–Willis seems to be on that line more than most. Good to have a St. Francis medal if you work on any hot shot crew the way I see it. Dragging a cross is a bit off beat but it will get you in shape and cursed at as well from some. Religious tolerance is really rare but protected by law but I can’t see it playing much into this incident.
I do have a sister that is a Mormon. Her husband was not too tolerant of that religion until I informed him that J. Smith was a 33 degree and many of their principles are based upon the Masonic beliefs. I am not an organized religion person–believe that most of it is a money game and hooks people, but there is more. When you start looking at the people in the frock and putting them on a pedestal you begin to see more of their ass and less of their real person. Giving power to these gods and demigods can be dangerous to your psych not to mention your health. Saw it in the Yarnell incident for sure.
Elizabeth said
on March 26, 2015 at 6:29 pm
“Do you remember the 30Mile Fire and Ellreese Daniels?
And do you HONESTLY fail to understand why Brendan – who is just a kid – is apparently a bit unnerved?”
So…I just want to point out that my snarky comment, (since I have been wrongfully accused of using uncalled for snarkyness towards Elizabeth) which I directed at Elizabeth, was in response to what I perceived as her snarky comment trying very unsuccessfully, in my humble opinion, to equate what McDonough is doing as a legitimate fear because of what Danield went through…that dog don’t hunt.
How anyone, could legitimately even begin to try to establish any relationship whatsoever between what Daniels went through (he was literally a worst case scenario and he suffered almost no consequences) as a justification (fearing potential consequences) for what McDonough is doing by refusing to talk, except to someone who is apparently paying him a lot of money (and hey, if McDonough can get money for his story…God Bless him, this is American after all and as I have repeatedly said, that kid needs to do something to turn his train wreck of a life around and that is going to take money BUT that does not justify him withholding information from investigators or the public who is paying for this entire incident) is beyond me. No one is going to even THINK about prosecuting McDonough for anything unless there is some video of him actually killing people.
And I do want to remind everyone, that in legal terms, OMMITTING information is treated in the same way as LYING about information.
Concerned Yavapai Resident said,
April 25, 2015 at 8:27 pm
“Not enough details shown to Yarnell Hill Fire to support any “amen” to Mr. Olson’s recent comments”
I was just trying to summarize where my thinking is at as all of this info goes by, but it is just my opinion, and yes, my opinion may change as more information comes out, my opinion has already changed a number of times.
For example, I started out repeating what I had always heard from within the wildland firefighting community, that Eric Marsh was a squared away crew boss who made an really bad but understandable decision and the GMIHC were a top notch crew.
I still think the GMIHC was a top notch crew but now I am questioning how understandable that decision was. What stunned me…and yes, stunned is not an exaggeration, is the fade video WTKTT made showing what that canyon and the valley must have looked like just as Eric Marsh made the decision the crew should go down that fuel filled canyon.
Here is a quick review of how all hotshots have died in the history of hotshots.
12 El Cariso hotshots cutting fire line in a canyon above the Loop Fire in 1964
3 Mormon Lake hotshots cutting fire line (then burning out) above the Battlement Creek Fire in a canyon 1976.
9 Prineville hotshots cutting fire line above the South Canyon Fire in a canyon 1994.
and now…19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, not cutting line, but they were certainly “working” above the fire in a…canyon on the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013,
I know Eric Marsh and the Granite Mountain Hotshots studied both the South Canyon Fire and the Battlement Creek Fire. Darrell Willis and I visited over breakfast (he bought) about the Battlement Creek Fire because he was getting deeply involved in studying that particular fire and subsequent disaster. I am pretty sure Eric Marsh would have studied the Loop Fire as well.
I am still completely baffled by what happened. I have yet to hear anything that explains why the Granite Mountain Hotshots left the black and went down that canyon. And I think the reason we don’t why yet is because McDonough is selling what he knows when he should be telling what he knows.
**
** DUSTIN DEFORD’S MOTHER ( CO-PASTOR OF HIS FATHER’S CHURCH ) TOLD
** THE NEW YORK TIMES THAT IN HER LAST CONVERSATION WITH DUSTIN HE SAID
** HIS ‘PREACHING’ TO HIS GM CREWMATES WAS ‘GOING WELL’…
I am back near a desktop again so here is that promised link to some NEW evidence that even Dustin Deford was ‘reporting back’ to his ‘pastors’ ( who happened to be his own father and mother ) about how his ‘preaching’ and ‘conversion’ efforts were going there in the ‘Granite Mountain’ organization…
Again… this is now evidence in ADDITION to the other evidence that Wade Parker had been ‘reporting back’ to HIS pastor ( Todd League ) in a similar fashion about his ‘progress’ with bringing as many GM crew as possible onto the ‘Jesus train’.
Wade Parker and Squad Boss Clayton Whitted were the ones who ‘double-teamed’ on Brendan McDonough at a fire in Nevada just 2 weeks before the Yarnell tragedy and they both got Brendan to accept ‘Jesus’ as his Savior.
Wade Parker reported that ‘conversion success’ back to his own pastor, Todd League.
Dustin Deford was then the one who was ‘preaching’ to the GM crew just ONE week before the Yarnell tragedy, during the Doce fire, and telling them that when you die… you only have TWO choices. Accept Jesus as your savior or BURN IN HELL ( forever ). No wiggle room.
The moment that Dustin Deford’s mother is referring to when she was speaking to the New York Times is, in fact, that known story about how Dustin was allowed to ‘preach’ ( for 2 hours ) to the Granite Mountain crew just a week before the Yarnell tragedy while they were all still working the ‘Doce’ fire outside of Prescott.
** FROM THE OFFICIAL NEW YORK TIMES GRANITE MOUNTAIN TRIBUTE PAGE
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/02/us/firefighter-victims.html?_r=0
—————————————————————————-
Dustin DeFord had an easy smile and an uncanny ability to make people laugh, said his mother, Celeste.
Growing up in the tiny town of Ekalaka, Mont., he would sometimes dress up in a full-body gorilla suit and lurch around town late at night, startling tipplers as they headed home from the taverns.
But his Christian faith was his foundation and his lodestar, his mother said.
On his Twitter account, he said he was living “by the grace of God, not sure where I am going in life, but desiring to follow God in each stage.”
The son of a Baptist pastor, Dustin DeFord had long wanted to serve, and he found a way to do so in firefighting. He was the fifth of 10 children, and many of his older brothers have worked as volunteer firefighters or battled wilderness blazes.
He joined the Granite Mountain Hotshots in 2012, but before landing the job, he asked friends on Twitter to pray for him as he interviewed with the team’s leaders.
Recently, during a lull in firefighting, Mr. DeFord told his mother that he had talked about grace and Christianity with some of the other Hotshots.
Not everyone on the team was religious, but Ms. DeFord said it had been an important moment for her son.
“That was our last conversation,” she said.
———————————————————————–
Does anyone here happen to know where Brendan McDonough’s phrase, “Risk a lot, save a lot” originated?
(Brendan’s use of it in speaking with the fire investigators was the first and only time I’ve heard it.)
I think it came from the ‘structural’ side of firefighting and the phrase is quoted
in many articles that predate the Yarnell incident.
Just ‘Google’ “risk a lot” “save a lot” and you will get tons of hits.
Example…
http://my.firefighternation.com/forum/topics/risk-a-lot-to-save-a-lot-is-bs
From this ‘Firefighter Nation’ article ( published in 2011 )…
—————————————————————————-
Thread SUBJECT: Risk a lot to save a lot is BS
Posted by capcityff on December 20, 2011 at 2:42pm
in General Firefighting & Rescue Discussion
Great article I just read. He talks about the “Risk a lot to save a lot” saying and how it really doesn’t make sense. Some people pull up on a vacant building and say that they aren’t going in because it’s vacant. Well do you really know that without a search? NO. Homeless people could be squatting or children could be playing around. The fire had to start some how. Our job is very dangerous at times and some people don’t realize that. They think they can just stand outside with a hose line spraying water into the building and everything is great. We shouldn’t only risk a lot to save a lot; we need to risk a lot to do our jobs.(as said at the end of the article)
—————————————————————————-
On the following page of (supposedly) ‘famous’ quotes that apply to firefighting ( sponsored by the Erie, PA Fire Department )… the “Risk a lot to save a lot” is actually being attributed to someone named ‘Chief Billy Goldfeder’…
Erie, PA Fire Department
Firematic – Quotes and Prayers
http://www.eriepafire.com/quotes.html
Risk a lot to save a lot.
Risk little to save little.
Risk nothing to save nothing.
– Chief Billy Goldfeder
NOTE: Right underneath that quote are two others which couldn’t possible be more relevant to what happened to Granite Mountain… and one of them comes from Mr. Mark Twain ( Samuel Clemens ) himself…
“Safety First” is “Safety Always.”
– Charles M. Hayes
Better a 100 times careful than once dead.
– Mark Twain
l
NOTE: I don’t see it appearing yet… but I still think a page of ‘fire quotes’ like this needs another ‘quote’ added to it that goes like this…
“Better to be a live hillbilly than a dead smart guy”.
Thanks, WTKTT. This helps a lot in bringing into focus one very small (but not insignificant) piece of the puzzle for me.
If you actually spend some time with ‘Google’ and search out that now infamous ‘quote’… the majority of the (recorded) online conversations and comments ( going back YEARS ) seem to agree that the QUOTE itself is BULLSHIT.
There ARE some people in the fire service ( structural and WFF ) that know BULLSHIT when they hear it.
The AGE of the quote itself also seems to be proof that this ‘phrase’ coming out of Brendan’s mouth in the ADOSH interviews was something he was TAUGHT.
Someone TOLD Brendan this was a legitimate ( and desired? ) way of approaching the work.
Risk a lot/risk a little/risk nothing was born out of too many structural firefighters dying in abandoned, derelict buildings for no reason whatsoever.
It has absolutely NO business being quoted in the wildland realm.
The quotes and commentary WTKTT references above reflecting negative responses to the standard, are, for the most part, nothing more than the types of disgruntled and ANONYMOUS comments which routinely occur when new safety standards interfere with the way firefighters have always done business (THEY DON”T LIKE CHANGE).
The same sort of ‘revolt’ occurred when the NFPA came out with the 2 in – 2 out rule, which likely has saved many lives, and was the result of too many firefighters dying without anyone being available to attempt a rescue.
Contrary to what WTKTT alludes to above, it is not BS, and, in fact, has become the rule in most progressive fire departments.
Most critics have become WAY too hung-up on the simplicity of the words. My interpretation in a nut-shell is;
Risk a lot
If you can potentially save a life, it’s OK to risk at lot. The main scenario where this gets really complicated, AND where a lot of firefighter lives were lost, was in abandoned buildings (assuming that someone is inside of every deserted rat-hole, will only get a lot more firefighters killed, AND SAVE NOBODY!) If there’s not a significant likelihood that someone is inside, then:
Risk a little
If all you’re going to save is a burned-out shell (or even a still-standing total loss), then no-one should die doing it.
Risk nothing
Surround and drown (there are always still risks, but……).
You won’t see anything in here that even remotely relates to wildland firefighting. That’s because this slogan was created to address reoccurring issues in the structural world.
THERE IS NO ‘risk a lot to save a lot’ in the wildland realm because no decisions need to be made on whether or not to enter a burning building to attempt rescue (while wearing SCBA), or simply to enter to put the fire out.
As a wise old hotshot related way back in the beginning of all these discussions, “structures are just another fuel type”.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE ) post
on April 27, 2015 at 2:34 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> You won’t see anything in here that even remotely relates to
>> wildland firefighting. That’s because this slogan was created
>> to address reoccurring issues in the structural world.
Yes. That DOES appear to be the ‘origin’ of this SLOGAN.
And that is ALL it is, really. A ‘dumb down’ of an ( always ) very complicated set of decisions.
The same ‘dumb down’ is now being used to describe the new policy for ‘active shooters’ which says it is no longer prudent to wait for SWAT to arrive/assemble.
Line Police officers are now ‘encouraged’ to “Risk a lot… save a lot” in ‘active shooter’ situations. If you are ‘first on scene’… then get in there and try to find the ‘bad guys’ before they even have a chance to kill any more people.
I find it more than curious, then, that a two-season rookie WFF with absolutely NO structural firefighting experience would then be quoting this ‘structural firefighting’ meme to ADOSH / OSHA investigators.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that his only firefighting experience was with an organization being run by some guy who, himself, had no real Wildland Firefighting experience?
Are we actually hearing Brendan McDonough reflect a meme that had been ‘passed on’ ( or filtered down ) to him via Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis?
Brendan basically called the long-established WFF safety rules “Hillbilly” in the same ADOSH interview where he was also quoting this same structural firefighting meme.
When SAIT Co-Lead Mike Dudley spoke to that roomful of Utah firefighters on June 20, 2014… he said this about whether not ‘Granite Mountain’ had been ‘influenced’ by any ‘structural firefighting’ concepts…
This was the FIRST thing Dudley said to that roomful of firefighters the moment after he was introduced and took the microphone…
SAIT Co-Lead Mike Dudley – June 20, 2014
——————————————————————–
So… the reason for asking about the structural protection… there’s been some allegations made in the past… and you still see it pop up every once and a while in the press about Granite Mountain.
So… Granite Mountain was a City Crew… Prescott Fire Department… Prescott Fire Department has a Wildland Division… real similar to the structure set up here under Unified Fire Authority.
Um… there was some implications that Granite Mountain was influenced because of their association with Prescott City to take on more risk when structures were burning within the Yarnell area.
The reason I bring that up is… keep in mind the structure.
You had Granite Mountain IHC under Prescott Fire Department sponsored by Arizona Division of Forestry to meet NWCG Interagency guidelines to be certified as a full IHC Hotshot crew.
The reason that’s important is that people do want to make that allegation… ‘well.. they were influenced by the structural side’.
No member of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, including Eric Marsh, who was the Superintendent and Jesse Steed, his Captain, were cross-trained in structural.
None of them cross-worked on the structural program during the off season.
What they were was a pure wildland firefighting organization… and for all the talk about Yarnell… Yarnell was a wildland fire incident… they were a wildland fire crew working on that incident.
And I say that up front because we… we did our check and we did our cross referencing… you don’t see any allegations that they were unduly influenced simply because they were part of that… uh… City department.
——————————————————————–
TWO important points here…
1) Jesse Steed was the one who actually ‘went along’ with taking his WFF crew out of the safe black and was ‘agreeing’ to whatever the ‘mission’ was that afternoon. Jesse Steed’s FIRST job with Prescott Fire WAS on the structural-side.
He LEFT that job and moved OVER to the ‘Wildland Division’ when it was created.
From ( one ) of Jesse Steed’s online obituaries…
http://www.azcentral.com/news/arizona/articles/20130703yarnell-hill-jesse-steed-obit.html
—————————————
Prior to joining the Granite Mountain Hotshots in 2003, Steed was a member of the Prescott Fire Department from 2000-02.
—————————————
2) Dudley was ‘technically’ correct that none of the GMHS were being officially ‘trained’ as ‘structural’ FFs during the off season… but he also neglected to point out that the entire Prescott Wildland Division was being run, managed and supervised by a former 14-year Fire Chief of the entire Prescott Fire Department who had NO actual pure-drop ‘Wildland Firefighting’ experience himself.
He ( Willis ) was ‘structural’.
Steed was never a member of the PFD structural side. He may have been previously employed by the Department, but if so, it would have been as a brush crew member.
Reply to The Truth Will Always Remain Elusive ( TTWARE )
post on April 27, 2015 at 4:18 pm
>> TTWARE said…
>>
>> Steed was never a member of the PFD structural side.
Copy that. As it turns out… a LOT of the online obituaries ( like the AZCENTRAL one quoted above ) and ‘info’ pages about Steed ( like the one at CNN news itself ) are simply WRONG.
Steed WAS in Prescott in the latter half of 2000 and early 2001… but he was NOT hired by the City of Prescott or its Fire Department.
Jesse Steed had joined the US Forestry Service by 2001 and had been hired to be a Hotshot for the “Prescott National Forest Hotshots”. Also a Type 1 IHC that had been around since the 1970s.
He STAYED working as a Hotshot for “Prescott National Forest” ( and not the City of Prescott or its Fire Department ) until 2009 when he LEFT the “Prescott Hotshots” and joined the “Granite Mountain Hotshots”.
Only then ( in 2009 ) did Jesse Steed actually become an employee of the City of Prescott’s Fire Department.
BTW: He and GM Hotshot Travis Carter did all this together. They were BOTH hired as Hotshots for the FEDERAL Type 1 IHC attached to the “Prescott National Forest” in 2001… and they were roomates until Steed got married in 2003.
In 2009… BOTH Jesse Steed AND Travis Carter left the “Prescott Hotshots” to now work for the City of Prescott and the “Granite Mountain Hotshots”.
The Granite Mountain Hotshots had only recently attained actual ‘Type 1 IHC’ status during the 2008 fire season.
>> TTWARE also wrote…
>>
>> He may have been previously employed by the Department,
>> but if so, it would have been as a brush crew member.
Nope. The obituary is simply mistaken on that point.
Steed went to Prescott circa 2001 to be a FEDERAL Type 1 Hotshot for Prescott National Forest and did NOT work for the City of Prescott until 2009.
I’d just note that what GM did would, in the structural world, probably be well outside the bandwidth of risking a lot to save a lot, as well. I think there is a natural tendency to like the sound of “risk a lot” to normalize what happened on the YHF, but to come up with an analogy for a structure fire would be tough because the bad judgment is so severe. The concept is risking a lot to save SAVABLE lives. Risking a little to save SAVABLE property. Risk nothing to save lives or property that are beyond hope.
So, I don’t know, ordering 6 firefighters to go walk on a roof with no PPE to ventilate it? Maybe ordering men without PPE into a building with large open spaces to search when you know flashover risk has been building? If you try to recreate what happened at YHF in terms of breaching standards, for me it drives home how stark what happened at YHF was.
But even in ANY of these ‘scenarios’ where GM might have been ‘Risking XXX’ to “Save XXX”… there is still the ASTOUNDING lack of COMMUNICATION.
Comparing what GM did to other ‘structural scenarios’ would be like an on-scene building fire commander suddenly hearing frantic calls on the radio… and only then discovering that 2 or 3 full engine companies had decided to enter a burning building WITHOUT telling him… and WITHOUT anyone else on-scene having any idea they were doing it ( if the SAIR is to be believed )…. without having the proper PPE to even accomplish such a thing and WITHOUT even being sure there was anyone that even NEEDED saving.
It even defies ANY/ALL “Risk XXXX to Save XXXX” logic.
The Boulder Springs Ranch didn’t need any ‘saving’.
It would have been ANOTHER 10-15 minute hike even AFTER reaching it in order for them to then just be 19 more bodies standing in the middle of a firestorm and then THEY, themselves, would have needed ‘saving’.
It ( still ) Just. Doesn’t. Make. Any. Sense.
Asking questions is fine, but the whole discussion below concerning religion and the GMHS seems to be coming from a certain viewpoint, one where the conclusions seem firmly fixed in the minds of some.
Evangelism, bringing believers to Christ, is not inherently Bible-thumping, extreme or fundamentalist. It is spelled out in the Great Commission in the Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes supposed “believers” are the ones most in need of being reconnected with Christ.
The facile logical leap from having strong Christian beliefs to being “reckless” because the Lord will save you seems a bit pat. It is not at all clear that any of the supposed “targets” of this religious discussion were put off by it or made uncomfortable. The idea that this would not be “allowed” on a hotshot crew is what seems extreme.
Mike,
From a standards and also a compliance perspective, open religious proselytizing while on the job is a problem. The religious belief itself is not the problem, nor is worship in appropriate situations.
Let’s leave to one side how comfortable a Jew or Muslim, or perhaps someone who was gay or lesbian, would have felt working on a crew with open religious practice as part of the work day. That is also a potential problem, and a reason not to bring religion into the work day, but not the issue here directly. Indirectly, it is an issue because it is another case where existing standards likely were not followed (I doubt Prescott had a policy allowing evangelism on Prescott time).
In the case of GM, you had a group of people who had concentrated a lot of the things that define us into solely their work. And, being subjected to open evangelism during the work day is, even if the evangelism is not coercive, one more huge pressure for everyone to think together and do together, without questioning.
It also seems possible that at least some of the crew did in fact view taking outsized risks as part of fulfilling a religious mission.
So, people thinking in lockstep, and one of the enforcers of that lockstep — shared religious belief — also potentially justifying violations of safety standards. And then those shared beliefs and experiences making it less likely that someone would object.
This is a hard subject to wrap your mind around.
I prefer to simply call it an interesting discussion on some human factors within the GM crew makeup. t is also hard to determine if there was any Religious overtones to the management of the crew except the internal evangelism.
I would be hard pressed to say there was some kind of cult leadership here.
I would also say that Religion like Politicks on Federal crews have regulations
that would be really sticky as to what was going on with GM during work hours.
It is another piece of the puzzle Big or Small????????
It is a subject most people shy away from and are uncomfortable talking about.
I am not as I have a Grandson who is a minister, a Cousin and his wife who are ministers and having been brought up in religious faith and still a member in the Church. I never brought that mission to work maybe just old school?
I guess I do not believe that the Church belongs in Politics or at work except as a personnel thing. There are just to many different Faiths to bring them into a Crew or a work place. I have worked with a mixed bag of Religions and Atheists thru out my carrier There is no discrimination concerning religion or non religion in the Government.
Agree. Given what I wrote below, I have another story.
During the second half of my decade in Flagstaff, I worked in restaurants. One of them was Kathy’s Cafe, which was started and owned, at that time, by a Scientologist. I didn’t know that when I started.
I slowly learned that. I actually did some explorations into Scientology. I found some of it interesting and useful, and some of it “twisted.”
It had great organizational/business principles, and Kathy used them explicitly. I.e. we DID have to learn those. And, I think, that was part of Kathy’s Cafe’s success.
HOWEVER. The more I “explored” Scientology, the more PRESSURE Kathy put on me to go FURTHER. And going FURTHER cost increasingly more MONEY. Which, the more I explored Scientology, the less I was interested in investing myself in going FURTHER.
That got really REALLY uncomfortable. It was one of the reasons I finally QUIT working at Kathy’s Cafe, in spite of the fact that I could make quite a bit of money there. Like serious money. It was a serious financial hit to quit, but I finally couldn’t stand the pressure any more.
If that pressure had been bubbling up from the BOTTOM, i.e. from another employee or two, I could have, with Kathy’s (if she had been NEUTRAL) dealt with it. But since it was coming from the TOP, I couldn’t.
That’s the part of this whole thing (and given the HEAVY tones of that SAME religious terminology used in the Memorial Service, which some have ALSO objected to) that really has bothered me.
And, because of THAT, I’ve been wondering if it was not only a part of the culture of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, but of the whole Prescott Fire Department etc culture.
And yes, I CAN see how an “over-reliance” on FAITH could lead to a subsequent “under-reliance” on CAUTION. That is not unusual, especially in young minds. And HEY, we also have FIRE SHELTERS!!!!
And look at how the whole thing was narrated, and not just by Darrell Willis. It was ALL about how “God had another plan for them that day.” Like SERIOUSLY.
And a bunch of it STILL IS.
It’s almost as if God led them down into that bowl and then, almost INEXPLICABLY, and thus MAGICALLY, turned that fire around and back on to them, so they could all fly up to heaven from there and painlessly look down upon their families from heaven and be their angels and lead them forever.
That’s a HUGE part of the “mythology” that has developed in that community since then, which I have watched, as both an anthropologist and a theologian, with a GREAT deal of interest.
Enough interest that I have OFTEN wondered how common that “world-view” is in Fire Departments. And so I appreciate this discussion, because it has helped me understand that, at least for the Federal crews (much as I have come to want to throw shoes at the USFS via this whole sad saga), that kind of CULTURE is not allowed, and for a variety of good REASONS.
PS. There is ANOTHER institution in Flagstaff that was then, and still is, run by a Scientologist. It’s called “Mountain School.” It’s a private school, and a really good one.
The inventor/director of that school was my Scientology “coach.” And she’s awesome. She never put any pressure on me to GO FURTHER.
She also ran/runs that school based on Scientology principles, but they’re implicit inside of her mind, and she doesn’t introduce anything ELSE of Scientology into that school. In other words, she doesn’t use the school to teach, much less “evangelize,” ANYBODY, regarding Scientology.
She just runs an awesome school.
There’s a DIFFERENCE.
Reply to Marti Reed post on April 27, 2015 at 9:43 am
PS. There is ANOTHER institution in Flagstaff that was then, and still is, run by a Scientologist. It’s called “Mountain School.” It’s a private school, and a really good one.
>> Marti said…
>>
>> The inventor/director of that school was my Scientology
>> “coach.” And she’s awesome. She never put any pressure
>> on me to GO FURTHER.
>>
>> She just runs an awesome school.
>>
>> There’s a DIFFERENCE.
Yes… there IS.
It’s called ‘evangelism’ versus simply quietly practicing the beliefs that you adhere to and ‘tending your own campfires’.
There is HARD evidence that quite a bit of active ‘evangelism’ was constantly being practiced within and around the organization called “Granite Mountain’.
Again… it would be VERY interesting to hear from ANYONE who used to work for Granite Mountain ( someone? anyone? ) about WHY they chose to leave that organization.
There might be a ‘common thread’ that emerges from those ‘stories’ similar to the story you just told about why you felt you needed to leave what YOU felt was a ‘good job’.
I certainly hope that Mr. Kyle Dickman has been successful in getting ANY/ALL of these DOZENS and DOZENS of former GM employees to ‘talk’ freely about their time with GM… and that when his book comes out we get a better ‘picture’ ( good, bad or ugly ) of what that was really like and even a better ‘picture’ of WHY these dozens and dozens of former GMHS have never had anything to say since the tragedy.
Good, bad, or ugly… it’s part of the ‘story’ that still needs to be told.
ADOSH tried.
At ADOSH’s insistence… the City of Prescott ( after first rsisting all attempts ) eventually supplied ADOSH with a comprehensive list of former GMHS for ADOSH to talk to.
ADOSH was never able to get a SINGLE ONE of them to talk freely about their time working with/for the organization known as ‘Granite Mountain’.
To this day… that is just ‘weird’ and the reasons WHY absolutely NONE of them felt ‘free to talk’ remains a mystery.
Ha Ha! As I have been writing all of this, Thom Hartmann is on the radio talking about the dangers and perils of mixing religion with both government and business.
So there’s that also.
We’re not the only ones.
It’s seriously UNCANNY sitting here in the midst of this conversation, listening to my radio.
Almost the SAME essential conversation is going on right now between Thom Hartmann and his callers.
Hot Shot Crews are mostly Blood Sweet and Pain.
There is no God Guts and Glory,
While God and Jesus may be in some silent prayers when things go to Hell That is not the normal discussions on a crew. There is a lot of BS and a lot of Four Letter words, and discussion on topics I wont mention here. After hours a lot of Beer, Girlfriends or home with wife’s/kids.
The last thing you wanted to do was hang out with the guys/girls you spent the last 14 days with.
No bible study or prayer meetings on the crews I knew.
Makes me glad that I do not practice any religion…
Just makes the whole scenario even more confusing. 🙂
Yeah, I’m guessing that’s why they’re increasingly making increasingly awesome annual videos.
Most of which don’t include much line-building.
And remember this.
Wade Parker, Dustin Deford, and Clayton Whitted weren’t just regular crew fire-fighters.
Clayton Whitted was a Squad Boss.
Wade Parker was named “Rookie of the Year,” the year before. And Danny Parker, his dad, was Chief of the Chino Valley Fire Department.
And Dustin Deford was a Sawyer. And, among Hotshots, Sawyers are pretty much the central PLAYAS on their annual videos. And there’s a REASON for that.
So there’s quite a bit of peer-INFLUENCE there.
Reply to Marti Reed post on April 27, 2015 at 9:35 am
>> Marti said…
>>
>> HOWEVER. The more I “explored” Scientology, the more
>> PRESSURE Kathy put on me to go FURTHER.
That’s how ‘recruiters work’. Even the ones constantly calling you at the dinner hour are trained to operate this way. It’s the ‘foot in the door’ approach that is as old as dirt.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> That got really REALLY uncomfortable. It was one of the
>> reasons I finally QUIT working at Kathy’s Cafe, in spite of
>> the fact that I could make quite a bit of money there.
>> Like serious money. It was a serious financial hit to quit,
>> but I finally couldn’t stand the pressure any more.
And to this day… we have yet to hear from the DOZENS and DOZENS of people who USED to work for Granite Mountain why THEY stopped doing that… even though a lot of them were not physically challenged by the work ( they could easily handle all that ) and they also never left Prescott.
They just decided that ‘Granite Mountain’ simply “wasn’t for them”… but won’t elaborate on that at all.
Almost like they are AFRAID to talk about what it was really like working for Darrell Willis, Eric Marsh and Granite Mountain… even to this day.
>> Marti also wrote…
>>
>> If that pressure had been bubbling up from the BOTTOM, i.e.
>> from another employee or two, I could have, with Kathy’s
>> (if she had been NEUTRAL) dealt with it. But since it was
>> coming from the TOP, I couldn’t.
Exactly. When management itself seems to be either ‘condoning’ or even ‘encouraging’ certain practices… it take the ‘objecting’ to those practices into another realm.
The infamous “Go along to get along or get gone” realm.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> That’s the part of this whole thing (and given the HEAVY
>> tones of that SAME religious terminology used in the
>> Memorial Service, which some have ALSO objected to)
>> that really has bothered me.
It is still ASTOUNDING ( during that Memorial Sevice ) the way Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis ‘previewed’ what he was going to end up repeating at that fire press conference from the deployment site.
During the memorial Service… Willis said this…
—————————————————————
Darrell Willis, a Prescott Fire Department division chief, said he traveled with the crew a couple of years ago when they fought a fire in Colorado. On the way back, the unit stopped in Glenwood Springs and then climbed Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters died in 1994.
“We spent the entire sunny summer afternoon evaluating, studying, talking about what happened there 19 years ago,” Willis said. “They were truly committed to never letting something like this ever happen again. They were committed to returning to you after every assignment. But there was another plan.”
——————————————————————–
So right there… before even having the chance to review a shred of actual ‘evidence’ Willis was ‘previewing’ the same opinion he would express some 23 days later during that press conference from the deployment site.
“God had a different plan for those men”.
No matter how many ‘;safety lessons’ they had reviewed… none of it mattered. They were going to get pulled into some God-made irresistible whirlpool on June 30 and get burned alive no matter what they themselves did. It was ‘fate’… or some such similar horseshit.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And, because of THAT, I’ve been wondering if it was not
>> only a part of the culture of the Granite Mountain Hotshots,
>> but of the whole Prescott Fire Department etc culture.
Not sure about the PFD… but here’s a quote from Prescott’s Public Information Officer on his Twitter page…
“Good luck,” I said to a self-described hobo/train-hopper passing
through Prescott. “I don’t believe in luck,” he said. “I believe in God”.
>> Marti also said…
>>
>> And yes, I CAN see how an “over-reliance” on FAITH could
>> lead to a subsequent “under-reliance” on CAUTION. That
>> is not unusual, especially in young minds.
This is a VERY important statement.
It basically sums up the reasons for fully examining what was really going on with this ‘Granite Mountain’ organization.
There is always a lot of shit that can ( and does ) ‘go on’ in any young person’s mind until they’ve walked around on the planet for more than just a short while.
That’s why there are ‘supervisors’ and ‘bosses’ and ‘chain of command’.
It’s to keep them from acting on the fact that they think they are immortal and then finding out too quickly and too suddenly that they are NOT.
Somehow… that all fell apart on June 30, 2013.
Even the men tasked with keeping these other younger, less experienced men ‘safe’ were negligent in their responsibilities and were not worthy of the trust that was being placed in them.
There are serious ‘Lessons to be Learned’ there… and situations that CAN be avoided in the future.
Followup…
The City of Prescott PIO ( Public Information Office ) referred to in the post above who felt the need to remind the general public on his Twitter feed that “There is no luck…there is only GOD”…
…was, of course, the infamous Wade Ward.
So when it comes to really examining the “human factors” that might have been ‘at play’ on the part of 19 employees of the City of Prescott in Yarnell on June 30, 2013… the ‘swimming pool’ is larger than just what was going on at Station 7 on the outskirts of downtown.
“There are serious ‘Lessons to be Learned’ there… and situations that CAN be avoided in the future.”
Agree 100%, but we still need to know EVERYTHING that happened that day…. BRENDAN, spill your guts boy!
Yes I have a few for Brendan as well.
Like if the crew was standing at the top of that brush filled canyon
did they have a group prayer before they took the high risk move to go to the BSR?
Had they had other times that they pushed the envelope with a prayer and beat the fire, giving them a feeling of invincibility. Maybe not but it is just more questions that need answered.
Reply to Bob Powers post on
April 27, 2015 at 1:05 pm
>> Bob Powers wrote…
>>
>> Yes I have a few for Brendan as well.
>>
>> Like if the crew was standing at the top of
>> that brush filled canyon
>> did they have a group prayer before they
>> took the high risk move to go to the BSR?
It’s a legitimate ‘question’ to ask.
Even if it wasn’t ‘the whole crew’… given what we know now about almost 25 percent ( 4 to 5 members ) of that crew… was it simply not uncommon in any way to look over and see at least those FIVE crewman ‘taking a knee’ like 5 ‘Tim Tebows’ and openly ‘praying’ about just about everything?
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Had they had other times that they pushed the
>> envelope with a prayer and beat the fire, giving
>> them a feeling of invincibility. Maybe not but
>> it is just more questions that need answered.
Agree. Maybe that sort of thing was ‘happening’… Maybe not… but if we are to ever fully understand the ‘groupthink’ and what it was really like within that organization… these ARE questions that deserve some insights/answers.
It’s also important to repeat that the entire basis for asking these kinds of ‘questions’… and seeking some ‘answers’… is not to be JUDGMENTAL about it all.
2 men led 17 others into a deathtrap that day.
NONE of those 17 felt ’empowered’ enough to object to the decisions to the point where any of them are left alive to tell us what really went down that afternoon.
ANYTHING that might shed some light on the kind of ‘groupthink’ that can/does lead to a disaster like this is RELEVANT if there is any chance of doing everything humanly possible to make sure it never happens again in the same way it did on June 30, 2013.
Have to agree with SR here and add that I think SR remains “dialed in” on this and is still successfully ‘framing’ the conversation as it relates to the Granite Mountain organization.
We are talking about people that walked into a deathtrap like unthinking lemmings. Anything that might help explain that kind of tragic myopia is still worth discussing.
I also appreciate what mike is saying. It’s a touchy subject. Wanting to just share a way of thinking and/or believing with others just because you genuinely believe you might be helping someone improve themselves his one thing.
Running around and aggressively trying to RECRUIT and also feeling the need to ‘report back’ to your superiors ( e.g. pastors ) on what the ‘score’ is and what ‘progress’ is being made on the recruitment front is something else altogether.
There IS, in fact, PROOF that the latter was going on inside of this Granite Mountain organization and it was going on with the complete knowledge, consent, and perhaps even the encouragement of the Granite Mountain management.
Any ‘story’ of Granite Mountain itself has to at least mention this open ‘Come to Jesus’ evangelism that was going on… or it is simply an ‘incomplete’ story about that organization.
SIDENOTE: I’m away from a desktop right now and I will post the actual link later… but there is even more evidence that Dustin Deford was ‘reporting back’ to his pastors ( who also happened to be his parents ) about his own PROGRESS with his own ‘evangelical’ mission to bring as many GM crew members as possible onboard the ‘Jesus train’.
In the New York Times official online tribute pages to the deceased Hotshots… Dustin Deford’s own mother ( and co-pastor along with Deford’s father ) is quoted as saying Dustin called her during the Doce fire ( and only 1 week before the Yarnell tragedy ) to tell her how thrilled he was that he was being allowed to openly ‘preach’ to the Granite Mountain crew and that he was also thrilled that some of them seemed close to being conversion candidates.
This is now evidence in ADDITION to the other evidence that Wade Parker had been ‘reporting back’ to HIS pastor ( Todd League ) in a similar fashion about his ‘progress’ with bringing s many GM crew as possible onto the ‘Jesus train’.
**
** DUSTIN DEFORD’S MOTHER ( CO-PASTOR OF HIS
** FATHER’S CHURCH ) TOLD NY TIMES THAT IN HER LAST
** CONVERSATION WITH HIM HE SAID HIS ‘PREACHING’
** TO HIS GM CREWMATES WAS ‘GOING WELL’…
I am back near a desktop again so here is that promised link to some NEW evidence that even Dustin Deford was ‘reporting back’ to his ‘pastors’ ( who happened to be his own father and mother ) about how his ‘preaching’ and ‘conversion’ efforts were going there in the ‘Granite Mountain’ organization…
Again… this is now evidence in ADDITION to the other evidence that Wade Parker had been ‘reporting back’ to HIS pastor ( Todd League ) in a similar fashion about his ‘progress’ with bringing s many GM crew as possible onto the ‘Jesus train’.
The moment that Dustin Deford’s mother is referring to here is that story about how Dustin was allowed to ‘preach’ ( for 2 hours ) to the Granite Mountain crew just a week before the Yarnell tragedy while they were all still working the ‘Doce’ fire outside of Prescott.
** FROM THE OFFICIAL NEW YORK TIMES
** GRANITE MOUNTAIN TRIBUTE PAGE
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/02/us/firefighter-victims.html?_r=0
—————————————————————————-
Dustin DeFord had an easy smile and an uncanny ability to make people laugh, said his mother, Celeste.
Growing up in the tiny town of Ekalaka, Mont., he would sometimes dress up in a full-body gorilla suit and lurch around town late at night, startling tipplers as they headed home from the taverns.
But his Christian faith was his foundation and his lodestar, his mother said.
On his Twitter account, he said he was living “by the grace of God, not sure where I am going in life, but desiring to follow God in each stage.”
The son of a Baptist pastor, Dustin DeFord had long wanted to serve, and he found a way to do so in firefighting. He was the fifth of 10 children, and many of his older brothers have worked as volunteer firefighters or battled wilderness blazes.
He joined the Granite Mountain Hotshots in 2012, but before landing the job, he asked friends on Twitter to pray for him as he interviewed with the team’s leaders.
Recently, during a lull in firefighting, Mr. DeFord told his mother that he had talked about grace and Christianity with some of the other Hotshots.
Not everyone on the team was religious, but Ms. DeFord said it had been an important moment for her son.
“That was our last conversation,” she said.
———————————————————————–
Asking questions is fine, but this whole discussion on religion and the GMHS seems to be coming from a certain viewpoint, one which the conclusions seem firmly fixed in the minds of some.
Evangelism, bringing believers to Christ, is not inherently Bible-thumping, extreme or fundamentalist. It is spelled out in the Great Commission in the Gospel of Matthew. Sometimes supposed “believers” are the ones most in need of being reconnected with Christ.
The facile logical leap from having strong Christian views to being “reckless” because the Lord will save you is a bit pat. It is not at all clear that any of the supposed “targets” of this religious discussion were put off or offended by it. The suggestion that this should not be “allowed” on a hotshot crew is what seems to be extreme.
Regarding this whole Religion thing as it pertains to the Granite Mountain Hotshots.
Ahem.
I have ALL ALONG been troubled, inside my own mind, regarding the, in my mind, fundamentalist Christian statements regarding this catastrophe, on both the parts of Darrell Willis (YIKES) and a whole bunch of other people.
I’m not sure I even know where to begin here. So I’ll just begin by thanking WTKTT and everybody else for, not only raising this issue, but conversing about it from their own experiences.
Having spent 35 years of my own life attempting to do Ministry, something I’m still conflicted as to whether that was actually what the Universe intended for me to have been doing, I could probably write a whole chapter to the BOOK Gary said I could have written by now about this fire if I hadn’t been busy, along with a number of others, writing my thinking for free.
(While all along commenting, periodically, about how it was time for me to retire from doing something for free that some lawyer would most likely have to hire someone like me (and WTKTT also) to do for about $100 an hour).
Since I could write a whole chapter about this religion thing, I won’t. I’ll try hard to be concise, instead.
Over the past almost two years, I’ve read all kinds of things about how various people interpret this thing religiously. And I’ve kept my mouth shut because I was thinking, given the combination of PRESCOTT (which I ALWAYS experienced as being pretty overwhelmingly conservative Christian) and FIREFIGHTING (“there’s no atheists in the foxholes cum firelines”),
“Maybe this kind of thing is considered relatively normal?”
I just didn’t have any kind of enough experience to make any kind of judgement about it.
So I never said anything. But I’m really glad you all did.
“Religion” is such a subjective thing. I’ve wrestled with what “religion” is for a really long time, both as an anthropologist and a theologian and a pastor and just, well, as a person. I actually define “religion” differently than about 99.99 percent of most other people. (That’s a whole NUTHER chapter/book).
I define “religion” as a practice based upon a worldview/cosmology. Nothing more, nothing less. re + ligare. re-linking. It’s how one re-links oneself. The “re-linking” is the practice. The worldview/cosmology is what one relinks oneself to. That worldview/cosmology can change, and then one’s re-liking/practice to it changes.
This is a pretty “radical” understanding of “religion.” But, then, I graduated from what is considered to be one of the most “radical” seminaries in the United States.
So that’s my basic “hermeneutics.”
Back to the subject at hand.
After WTKTT posted his postings, and folks (respected by me) commented on them, I spent some time looking around, this morning, on the google-machine, and found a few things.
I found the Wade Parker stuff, which I’m glad WTKTT posted, so I didn’t have to. Which kind of drifted me into what his dad had said. Which kind of drifted me into what was said at the Hotshots Prescott Memorial Service, which SOME people also found uncomfortable, based on comments on Wildfire Today’s posing of that Memorial Service.
Which made me think, “OK I’m not alone in that uncomfortableness.
I didn’t find much of anything else.
It appears to me that most of the other GM Hotshots were, relatively speaking, connected to “institutional churches.” I haven’t dug into this deeply, because I don’t have the time. So I may be incorrect here.
Meaning, they didn’t have any “self-perceived” need to be “converted” by the three who, thanks to WTKTT’s research and postings, considered it their “personal mission” to “bring” anybody “to Jesus.”
This is hard. I really could write a chapter here.
The possible PROBLEM I see here is this.
I, being a “Boomer’, was raised in the 1950’s-1960’s in what was even, at that time, a “progressive” Christian Church (the UCC) (and still is). I was therefore taught the essential stories and themes of the Bible. I knew what was in it. I knew the foundational stories. That was a part of my worldview/cosmology.
Jump forward a whole bunch of years. I had now pushed beyond the “institutional worldview of even the UCC” and joined a Unitarian-Universalist congregation and was now, as I had always done, teaching Middle School Sunday School.
These were kids whose parents, for WHATEVER REASONS, had abandoned Christianity.
These kids knew ABSOLUTELY NOTHING of the basic stories/themes/principles of anything regarding Christianity. They knew NOTHING of even Noah’s ark or the Exodus or ANYTHING of Jesus.
I was like WHOA!!!!!! How do I deal with that???? They are going to know NOTHING about this whole story/mythology/shaping of thought that is pretty much inherent of western history and everything else????
There are plenty of young people in this society who know NOTHING of a whole lot of things we writing here are at least basically familiar with.
OK. Back to Granite Mountain. And the evangelists among them. And in the context of Prescott, which always has been, in my mind, pretty seriously full of Conservative Christians. Let’s talk CULTURE.
So now we see that there were three Conservative Christians among the Granite Mountain Hotshots who, in their young fervent (something I also went through) lives, felt it important to introduce Jesus, and whatever they thought about him, to others, including their brothers on that Hotshot team.
Interacting with, at least, possibly, some members of that team who were, like my Middle High Sunday School kids, completely ignorant of anything Christian. and some others who were relatively not ignorant, and thus less capable of being manipulated by them.
That Hotshot team being under the ultimate supervision of Darrell Wills, who I have no idea what religious affiliation he is connected to, but his statements really bother me..
(Even though as I have, prompted by WTKTT’s posts regarding the Salvation Army, done some research today regarding them, found them not as bad as I expected. A conservatively-Christian-founded organization doing a lot of what is considered HIGHLY transparent and HIGHLY efficient (EAT THOSE WORDS Red Cross!!!) humanitarian work whle finding themselves having to pick their way through various land-mines regarding LGBT rights and abortion rights issues (that I’ve spend a bunch of years pushing on and dealing with). I really don’t find Darrell Willis’ support of them problematic, all things considered.)
And that Hotshot team being under the local supervision of Eric Marsh, who may have no longer been an alcoholic, but whose way of dealing with “underlings,” vis-a-vis Kyle’s First Chapter (but WHO KNOWS??) looks to me more like that of a “dry-alcohoic” than anything else. “Dry-Alcoholic” meaning someone who has separated from the bottle but has not separated from the original issues which led to the bottle.
So, given all of the above. I’m not surprised or mystified that several of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, in their early twenties, would have sensed themselves to have been “called” into some kind of “mission” to save something of the world via “sharing” their religious convictions. Especially to those who maybe were not already “religiously” “orientated.”
I’m not convinced that there were all that many of that team who were “in need” of that “ministry.”
It’s getting late and I’m getting a bit brain dead.
All the above being said, there are two things that bother me.
1) The possibility that this kind of religious “fervor” may have been agreed upon/allowed by the institution (especially given Darrell Willis’ religious interpretation of what happened). I.e. some kind of institutional support for this kind of evangelism within a team of Interagency Hotshots who, being supported by/certified by the Federal Government, had no business bringing religion into their everyday workings, much less their culture.
2) The possibility that this whole CULTURE of “trust THE LORD who will SAVE YOU (in one way or the other)” may have had some kind of impact on all those young minds to take a risk that otherwise wouldn’t have been considered acceptable, to do something heroic in the face of all the odds stacked against them. Under the supervisions of a Superintendent-cum-Division Supervisor who may have not fully dealt with his “dry-drunk” issues completely.
Which is why I”m thankful to those who have said this kind of culture thing would have not been allowed on a Federal Crew. And to those who expressed their own uncomfortableness with some of the things/meme’s expressed in the Memorial Service of the people who died on June 30, 2013.
And I have, to be perfectly honest, one of those “Be Better” white rubber bracelets wrapped around my right wrist. I wear it with pride. And respect. And honor.
Because, as Gary wrote, I believe these various young men were, all things considered–in the current condition. of the USA and all that THAT entails (including all those supposedly “terrified” police shooting black men because they “fear for their lives”) –some kind of version of “heroes,” in spite of what they each decided, all things considered, that led to their deaths.
So, given that, maybe one of the MANY Lessons Learned. from this fire, is that the USFS, and their derivative agencies, needs to quit EXPLOITING the desire of these young people to do something to “save the world” in order to carry out their strategies (or WAIT! Those may be dictated by the US House of Representatives??? Etc???)?
Thank you, Gary Olson, for writing down below that, yes. no-one should be embarrassed (or made to be embarrassed) for demanding what is owed to them for these deaths via the law and FAIRNESS.
Yes, thank you. We owe them and money is all we have to give them. It is a poor substitute, but just ask Bob or me…we both lost of fathers in similar situations, (Bob’s fighting fire and mine digging uranium to build the bombs to defend this country) and our mothers hardly got anything, which can greatly compound the loss. I know.
Thanks for this reply.
And I would reply back.
My dad was compensated to the tune of $150K for the glandular cancer he got by being the Chief Meteorologist for the entire Atmospheric Nuclear Weapons Testing Program.
He finally, after about FOUR YEARS of documenting all of this (he was a mathematical genius and a stickler for documentation), and also arguing with the nuclear compensation program (he was also really committed to also ARGUING when he knew he was right), got that $150K payment approximately a month before he was diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer (something I was predicting was happening to him WAY before that diagnosis).
Thankfully, that $150K payout managed to give him enough of a “slush fund” to quickly buy me the Subaru station wagon I was going to need to haul him and his wheel-chair around to all the chemotherapy and doctor’s appointments and etc etc that ensued during the next four months…before he finally died, in spite of it all.
After (about a year) which, that Compensation Fund also paid out to my mom another $150K. Part of which I have just now inherited.
All along my dad was a staunch supporter of nuclear power. We argued about this for DECADES.
When Fukushima happened four years ago March, and I helped Live-Blog it on DailyKOS. I said to him (post-humously of course) —
“OK dad, I won that argument and therefore you owe me, so I’m going to take enough money out of your Trust Account to buy myself an iPad.”
In other words, I’m really sorry to read here that your father died as a result of that quest to somehow corral and capture the power of “Uranium Boy” before, as the Hopis foresaw, humans had evolved enough to handle, responsibly, that power.
My father died as a result of that also. Even though he always believed in that attempted quest.
Does anything of this have to do with wildland fire-fighting and the deaths of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots?
I don’t know. Maybe that thing that we humans have, that hubris that says we can, somehow, “control” nature???
There seems to be a large chunk of evidence that we can. There also seems, at this point. to be maybe even a larger chunk of evidence that we can’t.
PS. I really do hope I can stage a trip to Flagstaff, using my daughter and her Flagstaff-based father as an anchor point, so that, among other things, I can arrange some kind of LONG conversation with you.
**
** GM HOTSHOT WADE PARKER WAS REPORTING BACK TO HIS OWN PASTOR
** ABOUT HOW THE ‘CONVERSIONS’ ( TO JESUS ) WERE GOING OVER IN THE
** GRANITE MOUNTAIN ORGANIZATION.
There’s never been any question that ‘2012 Rookie of the Year’ GM Hotshot Wade Parker was ‘big on Jesus’, and, indeed, his official obituary in the Prescott Daily Courier said ‘worshiping Jesus’ was, hands-down, Wade Parker’s FAVORITE thing to do…
From the PDC Obituary…
——————————————————————————
“Wade loved Jesus and was a great Christian man. Wade’s FAVORITE thing to do was worship Jesus. He loved to play the guitar and sing. He wanted to help lead worship someday and did sing sometimes on the youth worship team. He grew up very involved in church and was a mentor in his youth group and community.”
——————————————————————————
What this doesn’t say, however, is that Wade Parker seemed to have made it his own personal ‘mission’ to convert as many of the Granite Mountain Hotshots as he possibly could to his same ‘Jesus-centric’ belief system.
Parker was even REPORTING back to his own pastor about the ‘progress’ of this ‘mission’ and how many of the ‘Granite Mountain’ crew were already ‘onboard’ the ‘Jesus’ train… and how many others were ALMOST there and just needed a little more ‘work’.
I kid you not.
It was actually He ( Wade Parker ) and the other preacher-wannabee ( Squad Boss Clayton Whitted ) who had apparently ‘double-teamed’ Brendan McDonough and finally ‘won him over to Jesus’ just 2 weeks before the Yarnell tragedy.
In other words… Parker was reporting to his own pastor that he and Whitted ‘double-teamed’ Brendan in order to get that ‘conversion’ job done.
Here is the article that details Parker ‘reporting’ back to his own pastor how the ‘conversions’ were going over there in the ‘Granite Mountain’ organization…
From the “Assemblies of God” ( AG ) Online Newsletter
Evangelism, Worship, Discipleship and Compassion
Article Title: Can One Young Hotshot Impact the World for Christ?
Published: Monday, September 30, 2013 – 3:09 PM
http://ag.org/top/News/index_articledetail.cfm?Process=DisplayArticle&targetBay=c97d4d5c-a325-4921-9a9e-e9fbddd9cdce&ModID=2&RSS_RSSContentID=26611&RSS_OriginatingChannelID=1184&RSS_OriginatingRSSFeedID=3359&RSS_Source=search
From the article…
NOTE: The very first paragraph details how Parker and Whitted basically ‘double-teamed’ Brendan McDonough to get that CONVERSION done just 2 weeks before Yarnell…
—————————————————————–
Sweat-stained and coated in a layer of black powdery dirt from their exertions, Wade Parker, 22, and his friends Clayton and Brendan and several other elite firefighters sat talking on the side of a New Mexico mountain, looking across miles and miles of sun-baked land. As often was the case, they were talking about God. As the discussion closed, Wade and Clayton led Brendan to Christ . . . .
From the time Wade Parker was a young boy, his role model, hero and father, Danny, would tell him, “Wade, not everyone has the opportunity to change the world, but everyone gets the opportunity to change their world (the people around them).”
“Wade was an intense guy who worked hard and gave everything he had every day,” says LCC Head Baseball Coach Scott Crampton, “He was a young man coaches like to be around.”
But as much as he gave of himself physically to sports, when it came to worshiping God and doing his best to live for Him, he was just as committed.
“Even as a very young boy, Wade would close his eyes and lift his hands, worshiping God, singing at the top of his lungs,” his father, Danny Parker, recalls.
Chris Hunter, a former high school teacher of Wade’s, says she recalls how Wade, as a senior, had come to her and told her how he wanted to pray that all his friends would come to know God.
“I told him, you’re thinking too small, Wade,” Hunter says. Wade would go on say he’d pray the whole class of 2009 and even all of Chino Valley High School would believe in the Lord. Hunter’s response: “That’s really nice, Wade, you should be doing that. But for who you are, Wade Parker, that’s just too small.”
Hunter remembers the moment the light came on in Wade’s eyes as he realized the truth of her prophetic words. “He said, ‘Okay, this is what I pray, that I have an impact on the world with the message of Jesus Christ.'”
After playing college ball for a year, Wade chose to follow his real passion – to become a firefighter like his dad. Not settling for the ordinary, Wade worked hard to be selected to an elite firefighting team. He made the team, and in 2012 he was named rookie of the year.
For over a year, Wade had been sharing Christ with his friends on his Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting crew as they traveled across the West working the frontlines in fighting some of the fiercest and mostly uncontained fires. Some of the team had already made decisions for Christ – including his friend Brendan “Donut” McDonough on the side of that mountain in New Mexico – others, Wade had confided in his pastor, Todd League of Chino Valley Word of Life (Assembly of God), were just so close to accepting Christ.
——————————————————————————————————–
So there we have a report of Wade Parker reporting directly to his pastor ‘Todd League’ about ‘how the conversions were going’ over in the Granite Mountain organization… and it happened ( apparently ) sometime just AFTER he and Whitted had convinced Brendan to convert, but right BEFORE the Yarnell tragedy
He was telling his pastor Todd League that Brendan was already a SCORE… and that other Granite Mountain crew members were CLOSE to being ‘onboard’ the Jesus train. Apparently… just a little more ‘pushing’ required to get them into the ‘endzone’.
SIDENOTE: This Chino Valley ‘Word of Life – Assembly of God’ thing is another one of these hard-to-nail-down Butler-Building Christian deals just like the ‘Heights’ thing that GM Squad Boss Clayton Whitted was a ‘Youth Pastor’ for. Definitely ‘Bible thumping’ and ‘ALL Jesus, ALL the time’ approach… but it’s hard to put an actual identifiable ‘denomination’ on the effort. Even the church’s own public website is no help. It really just falls into that “free range evangelical church” category that is making up thier own rules as they go along and there’s no way to even determine whether it came from any original ‘Baptist’ leanings, or not. The pastor of THIS operation ( Todd League ) is the guy Wade Parker was ‘reporting to’ about the ‘conversions progress’ over on the Granite Mountain crew.
Also NOTE: This ‘Word of Life’ thing is another ‘family business’ style operation just like the church being run by GM Hothshot Dustin Deford’s parents. As with Dustin Deford’s parents… In this case… BOTH Todd League and his WIFE, Susan League, are listed as the ‘pastors’ of this ‘church’.
But there’s even MORE ( in the article )
This pastor Todd League goes on to say that even when he was doing the ‘pre-marital’ counseling for Wade Parker and his fiancé Alicia… Wade Parker was talking to League about how the ‘conversions’ were going with his crewmates over in the Granite Mountain organization…
Also from the article…
————————————————————————————-
Pastor Todd League says he had just finished pre-marital counseling with Wade and his fiancé, Alicia, the week before Wade left to fight the Yarnell Hill Fire. He says Wade desperately wanted to be a good husband, but he also took time to talk about reaching his Hotshots team members for Christ.
“Wade told me in our last session that there were several guys that were close to accepting the Lord,” Leagues says, “and I truly believe God allowed Wade to be there in those last moments for those boys!”
Yet, even though the death of the Hotshots team made world news, the question remains: How was Wade’s desire to impact the world with the message of Jesus Christ to be fulfilled?
While in college, Wade, who was teaching himself guitar so he could one day be a worship leader, sent home a poem he felt the Lord had given him that he wanted to turn into a song. Two lines of the poem seem particularly poignant:
“…Till the end of my days I will speak your name into the world. So I lay my life down at your feet, the everlasting King.”
And then, of course, there is Wade Parker’s father… Danny Parker.
“I don’t mind talking about my son,” he says with conviction. “I will tell the world about my son and God in his life, and I will never turn down the opportunity to tell the world about Wade and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
So perhaps, Wade’s true desire is already on its way to being fulfilled after all.
“The times I feel Wade’s presence the most is when I’m worshiping the Lord,” Danny says, his eyes closing as tears form again, “because Wade loved to worship. And the most awesome thing about that is getting to be in the presence of the Lord and feel my son too.”
————————————————————————————-
So it really is beginning to look like this “Granite Mountain” organization was a rolling “Salvation Army”, or something.
If you hadn’t ‘accepted Jesus’ yet… there were at least 3 guys on that crew ( one of them might be you Squad Leader, Clayton Whitted ) who were dyed-in-the-wool “ALL Jesus, ALL the time” evangelicals who were making it their goal in life to make SURE that you did ‘convert’.
1) Clayton Whitted – Preacher wannabee – Helped convert Brendan
2) Wade Parker – Favorite thing to do was ‘worship Jesus’ and try to convert
other people. Wanted to convert everyone he came into contact with including
as many as possible on the Granite Mountain Crew. Helped convert Brendan
along with Whitted.
3) Dustin Deford – Was allowed to actual ‘teach’ the Bible to the crew in 2 hour
blocks of time and said they only had two options if they should happen to
die. Accept ‘Jesus’ as your Savior… or BURN IN THE FIRES OF HELL… forever.
No wiggle room. No other options.
4) THREE not enough? Even MORE of these kinds of guys on that crew? Dunno yet.
And at the true HELM of this ‘rolling Salvation Army’ was another preacher-wannabee piece a-work who also inserted his invisible friend ‘Jesus’ into conversations ( both public and private ) every chance he got… AND who also stood on the spot where they all died and was the official ‘spokesman’ for Arizona Forestry at the first press conference from the deployment site.
During that press conference… his ‘official’ explanation about what happened that day was that “God had a different plan for those men”. Nothing to see here. Move along.
That was, of course, Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis.
Darrell Willis is, in fact, officially on the ADVISORY BOARD for the Central Arizona Salvation Army.
I kid you not.
?? SUMMARY ??
I really don’t have one yet for this ongoing discussion about all this ‘evangelism’ that was going on in and around the Granite Mountain organization.
Every time I go to ‘summarize’ this I find yet another fundamentalist preacher-wannabee who was either ON the Granite Mountain crew or closely associated with it… and ACTIVELY trying to ‘recruit’ people to Jesus while working on the firelines.
This simply CANNOT be NORMAL for ‘Hotshot crews’.
There is something about all this that ties directly to the ‘culture’ and the ‘work environment’ and *may* have also been direct causal factors in the tragedy.
But until I stop finding actual Bible-thumping, Jesus-dumping, ‘preacher wannabees’ on the CREW itself… I’m not going to ‘summarize’.
For all I know at this point ( I’m still researching )… every single one of these guys ( including the Uber-Mormon Ashcraft ) might have thought they were constantly on some kind of “mission from God”, or something… and this had everything to do with the “bad decisions with good outcomes” that seemed prevalent in this organization and that eventually got them all killed on June 30, 2013.
More later.
**
** DARRELL WILLIS AND THE SALVATION ARMY
This is a ‘followup’ to the post above with that article about GM Hotshot Wade Parker actually reporting to his pastor ( Todd League ) about how the “conversions to Jesus” were going within the Granite Mountain organization.
I off-handedly referred to the fact that there is now evidence of at least THREE GM Hotshots ( including one squad boss ) actively ‘recruiting’ GM Hothshots to ‘Jesus’ as being some kind of ‘rolling Salvation Army’.
As it turns out… Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis IS ( and has been for some time ) on the actual ‘Advisory Board’ of the Central Arizona Salvation Army… and he has received AWARDS for his Service to the SA from that organization.
Yea… I know… NOT unusual for a former Chief of a Fire Department to be actively involved with a local ‘Salvation Army’… but given all the active ‘recruiting for Jesus’ that was going on inside that Granite Mountain organization… it’s just one more ‘interesting’ thing surrounding this whole story.
** WILLIS’ ‘BLOOD AND FIRE’ PIN?
Just recently… and following his sudden SECOND ‘resignation’ from the Prescott Fire Department… Darrell Willis took ALL of his fire service medals and pins and badges to a local FRAMING company there in Prescott and paid them to put them all into a special SHADOW BOX for him.
That FRAMING COMPANY in Prescott was called “The Frame and I Gallery and Framing Shop”.
When the project for Darrell Willis was completed on April 16, 2015, apparently Darrell Willis gave them permission to PUBLICLY post the results and to use it as ‘promotional material’ on their own website.
So here are the PUBLIC photos of that SHADOW BOX that was created for Darrell Willis containing all of his Fire Service medals and paraphernalia…
The Frame and I – Gallery and Framing Shop
Chief Willis ShadowBox Framing Project
http://frameandi.com/chief-willis-shadowbox-framing-was-an-extra-special-project-for-the-frame-i-in-prescott/
From that PUBLIC ‘promotional page’…
———————————————————————-
04.16.2015
Chief Willis shadowbox framing was an extra special project for The Frame & I in Prescott
We were proud to frame former fire chief Darrell Willis ‘s badges, pins and honors from his position in the fire department in Prescott Arizona in a custom designed shadowbox frame.
( FULL PHOTOGRAPH SHOWING THE SHADOW BOX )
( FILLED WITH ALL OF DARRELL WILLIS’ PINS, BADGES AND MEDALS )
Caption underneath the ShadowBox photo:
Chief Willis shadowbox framing displays badges, pins and nametags from a long and storied career in Prescott.
———————————————————————-
On the left side of the ShadowBox there appears to be a standard Salvation Army BLOOD AND FIRE pin / medallion.
Other ‘copy’ from this PUBLIC ‘promotional page’…
———————————————————————-
Chief Willis shadowbox framing is one of the more personal and historical projects we’ve done. It made us get a little philosophical… At the end of the day, when your work is done, what to do with all those mementos of your career? Sure, you could keep them in a box that you get out once in a while and fondly remember… but that is easily hidden and often forgotten. A custom framed shadowbox tells the story of your life’s work and lets you share it with the world. When these items walked in our door, we knew they deserved a special shadowbox to show them off. Chief Willis was at the helm at one of Prescott’s most difficult times, the loss of the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshot wildland firefighters. We thank him for his service, and we really hope he likes his shadowbox! For more about Chief Willis’s retirement, click here.
Chief Willis dedicated his life to serving the public, and his contribution is well honored now! To start this project, we built a frame out of a deep pewter colored molding, slightly on the modern side. The backdrop is a rich deep blue suede cloth matboard, with a painted bevel “pinstripe” inside to tie all of the elements together. Anti-reflective, museum quality Artglass was used to keep mirror-like reflections to a minimum. Every piece was sewn or pinned into the frame, we don’t use glue to attach the items (just in case he decides to come back out of retirement 🙂 ). Can you think of anyone who might deserve a display like this? We all know somebody who’s worked hard all their life. Skip the gold watch and tell their story out loud, for a change. Shadowbox their memories and save them for lifetimes to come. Bring it all to The Frame & I where we can help with framing your custom shadowbox, just like we did for Chief Willis.
———————————————————————-
In December of 2013 ( the same month the Yarnell Hill Fire ADOSH investigation report was released )… Darrell Willis received a ‘special award’ from the Southwest Divisional Commander of the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army – New Frontier Chronicle
Article Title: The Salvation Army of Phoenix doubles its kettle
kick-off fundraising goal.
Published: December 12, 2013 – By Marlene Klotz-Collins
http://www.newfrontierchronicle.org/racing-legend-drives-awareness/
From the article…
——————————————————————-
Salvation Army Southwest Divisional Commander Lt. Colonel Joe Posillico presented a special plaque to Chief Darrell Willis, co-founder of the elite firefighting unit, Granite Mountain Hotshots.
——————————————————————-
Another article about the Salvation Army giving out an award.
This one directly mentions that Darrell Willis is on the ADVISORY BOARD for the Salvation Army…
The Prescott Daily Courier
Article Title: Hamptons honored ( by Salvation Army ) for aiding
Hotshots’ families after Yarnell Hill fire tragedy
Published: 10/2/2014 6:04:00 AM by Karen Despain
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=136748
From the article…
——————————————————————–
Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis noted the difficult logistics of bringing the remains of the fallen 19 firefighters home to Prescott from the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix.
“We lost 25 percent of the Prescott Fire Department,” Willis said. “That event changed me and the community forever. We determined we needed help to move forward to help families, plan a world-class memorial event” and to keep the fire department running in the face of the loss of the Hotshots.
The Salvation Army was part of the support system that came into play, said Willis, who is also on its advisory board.
———————————————————————–
Just one more followup on this…
What’s different about this article is that this one says that Darrell Willis was/is on the actual “Board of Directors” for the PRESCOTT Salvation Army, specifically.
It was in Willis’ PUBLIC BIO that appeared for one of his ‘on the road’ speaking engagements in 2014.
Roseville, California, City Awards – May 9, 2014
Honoring Roseville Police and Fire Departments…
Roseville, California
http://www.rosevillecityawards.com/?page_id=266
Darrell Willis,
Special Guest Speaker – Wildland Division Chief, Prescott, AZ
————————————————————————-
2014 Speakers
Darrell_Willis_profile
Darrell Willis is an Arizona native who grew up in a fire service family. Darrell is currently the Wildland Division Chief for the City of Prescott, AZ. Prior to that, Darrell was the Fire Chief of Prescott for 14 years. Prior to being promoted to Fire Chief Darrell spent 9 years as Deputy Chief in Prescott. Darrell started his career in the fire service in 1975 as a volunteer firefighter in Bullhead City, Arizona then moved to the Mesa Fire Department for a 9-year stint before moving to Prescott. During his 14 years as chief, Darrell was appointed as interim City Manager for a 4-month period while a search for a permanent manager was conducted. Darrell is a member of the IAFC, AFCA serving two terms as president, NFPA, Governor’s Forest Health Committee, and Prescott Area Wildland Urban Interface Commission. Darrell is an Operations Section Chief on the Central West Zone Incident Management Type ll Team and has served as a Division Supervisor and Structure Protection Specialist on one of the Southwest Regions Type l teams. Under Darrell’s leadership the Wildland Division and Granite Mountain Hotshots were established.
Darrell is married to his High School sweetheart, Judy, they have 3 grown children and 5 grandchildren. Darrell’s son Jared, is a six year veteran with the Prescott Police Department as a patrol officer and SWAT team member. Darrell is a member of the Board of Directors with the Prescott Salvation Army.
————————————————————————
**
** GRANITE MOUNTAIN AND MORMONS
As long as we are ( finally ) ‘riding this 3rd rail’ and not afraid of the voltage…
>> On April 25, 2015 at 1:21 pm, Bob Powers said…
>>
>> And so we have the Idea that the 10 standard orders are old school and Hillbilly. God
>> will always protect us put your faith in him and do the job and what you are ask to
>> do we are on a mission from god…
>>
>> Is that possibly the way they fought fire?????
>>
>> I truly hope not but it scares the hell out of me.
Until we know the ‘full story’ of the operating dynamics of this ‘Granite Mountain’ organization, then there IS every possibility this kind of “mission from God” thing WAS a fundamental and underlying ‘Modus Operandi’ and a contributing factor to why 2 men were allowed to lead 17 others to their deaths on June 30, 2013 in Yarnell, Arizona.
We KNOW that the actual Wildland Division Chief for the Prescott Fire Department was a “God, Guts and Glory” and preacher-wannabee kinda guy who rarely missed a chance to insert his invisible friend Jesus into actual public statements and/or press conferences.
We KNOW that just 14 days before the tragedy… while GM was working a fire in Nevada… one of the actual GM SQUAD BOSSES ( Clayton Whitted ) had the ingrained inclination ( and found the time ) to show Brendan McDonough that HIS ‘invisible friend’ Jesus was “his Savior”.
We KNOW that that just 7 days before the tragedy ( and apparently while GM was working the Doce fire ) yet ANOTHER preacher-wannabee and GM crewmember named Dustin Deford was allowed to hold a 2 hour Bible class where he told his GM crewmates that if they didn’t accept HIS ‘invisible friend’ Jesus as their ‘Savior’… then they would BURN IN THE FIERY LAKE OF HELL forever and ever and ever and ever. No ‘holding cells’ available or even the ‘purgatory’ waiting period that the Catholics are still selling.
So given all THAT that we DO know… how much do we still NOT know about how much there might have been a big MINISTRY component to this ‘Granite Mountain’ organization and people ( Prescott Wildland Division Chief included ) thinking that some of these burning bushes they kept running into on the firelines were actually talking BACK to them?
If anyone does any kind of BOOK about this organization and the Yarnell incident itself and they do NOT ‘explore’ this ‘doing it for our invisible friend Jesus’ aspect of this organization then that BOOK will not be a good, complete research effort.
There definitely WAS that kind of ‘component’ present in the ‘Granite Mountain’ culture.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I would also add living in Idaho with Mormons I have seen The Baptist
>> Church Picket The New Mormon Tabernacle here in twin. There is no
>> love lost between the two religions.
No. That’s because one really doesn’t even think the other even QUALIFIES as a ‘religion’. You do have to admit that if the ‘Church of the Latter Day Saints’ gets to actually be considered a real ‘religion’.. then the BAR is actually pretty low. It means anyone, at ANY time, could say they found things buried in holes in the ground and never have to prove anything to anyone… but still get full non-profit religion status and lots and lots of followers and donations.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I wonder how the Mormons on GM were treated.
I didn’t mention the obvious ‘Mormon’ component in the GM makeup down below because I was still just trying to verify how MANY of them there really were who ended up dead on the floor of that Box Canyon.
It’s always been absolutely clear that Andrew Ashcraft was a Mormon because of how much press that Mormon “Be Good” bracelet thingy that he wore on his wrist got, which is actually visible in some of Christopher MacKenzie’s photos taken of Ashcraft on June 30, 2013.
It was a widely distributed story… especially since Andrew’s wife Juliann said PUBLICLY any number of times that she absolutely considered it some kind of ‘sign from God’ that this white rubber ‘Be Good’ bracelet survived the fire… while other personal possessions of Ashcraft’s that were also returned to her were totally melted.
SIDENOTE: Andrew Ashcraft was not raised as a Mormon. He ‘converted’ and then got ‘sealed’ to a Mormon Temple only AFTER he married Juliann Ashcraf. It is a fact, though, that once Andrew was ‘onboard’ with the whole LDS thing and had ‘converted’… he was ALL IN and truly ‘onboard’. He was ‘walking the LDS walk’ as well as ‘talking the LDS talk’… which basically just means that even if those other ‘fundamental Christians’ on the squad thought the whole LDS thing was ‘cult’ or ‘weird’… Andrew Ashcraft could have easily been just as dedicated to the whole MINISTRY aspect and “Firefighting as a mission from God” thing as THEY ( apparently ) were.
There were TWO other GM Hotshots who were raised in Utah… but I haven’t been able to confirm whether either one of these ‘Utahans’ were officially LDS or not.
Those TWO ‘other’ individuals would be Jesse Steed and Joe Thurston.
As far as Jesse Steed goes… it’s actually not looking likely at all that even though he was raised in Utah that he had any LDS connections at all.
GM Captain Jesse Steed’s FUNERAL was actually held at the same “Heights” church in Prescott where GM Squad Boss Clayton Whitted was a ‘Youth Pastor’.
Yes… that’s the same GM Squad Boss Clayton Whitted that performed this apparent “Come to Jesus” ceremony with Brendan McDonough just 2 weeks before Yarnell.
As for Joe Thurston… there is every piece of evidence that he was one of the best human beings you could ever want to meet while he was walking around on the planet… but even though he was raised in Utah there is no evidence he was LDS.
BOTTOM LINE: Andrew Ashcraft literally ‘wore his beliefs on his wrist’ with the whole Mormon ‘Be Good’ bracelet thing… but there is NO evidence that this caused any undue friction with the other obvious ‘fundamental Christians’ involved with the GM organization ( including Wildland Division Boss Darrell Willis ).
** THE MORMONS HAVE THEIR OWN ‘GRANITE MOUNTAIN’ FACILITY
Here is just one more piece of ‘irony’ connected to this whole Yarnell tragedy ( and yes… I agree with Gary Olson that sometimes that word is woefully inadequate to describe some of the events and connections coming out of this tragic incident ).
As it turns out… the Mormons have their own ‘Granite Mountain’.
It’s actually the NAME they chose for that secret facility that they spent millions of dollars creating in the early 1960’s outside of Salt Lake City store the BILLIONS of genealogy records they secretly have been collecting for decades in order to do what they call ‘endowments’ where they basically ‘baptize’ dead people into the Mormon church.
** The Granite Mountain Records Vault
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/granite-mountain-records-vault
The world’s largest collection of genealogical records is housed in a secure vault located in the mountains near Salt Lake City, Utah. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built the Granite Mountain Records Vault in 1965 to preserve and protect records of importance to the Church, including its vast collection of family history microfilms.
Granite Mountain is a mass of solid rock one mile up Little Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Range of Utah, not too far from Salt Lake City, Utah.
This is where all the ‘names’ come from for the ‘secret’ ceremonies that the Mormons do whereby people who have died are then ‘baptized’ into the Mormon Church, or something like that.
Actually.. the term THEY, themselves, use is that people are ‘endowed’ into the Church… and it all involves the ‘Temples’ and ‘Wards’ and ‘Quotas’ and other mysterious shit.
Followup…
Here’s another pretty good rundown of the Mormon GRANITE MOUNTAIN facility and a pretty good ‘description’ of this whole mysterious ‘endowment’ thing…
http://www.goodmorals.org/mormons/index.asp?poetlist=ChapterSix.htm
——————————————————————
Granite Mountain
To store and preserve the microfilmed records, President and Prophet David O. McKay in the late 1950’s ordered the construction of the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a mammoth underground nuclear bomb-proof storage facility.
With seven hundred feet of solid granite overhead and steel doors weighing a total of thirty-two tons beveled inward so that even an atomic blast would only seal them tighter, the hundreds of thousands of rolls of microfilm found a secure home.
By 1982 Granite Mountain contained over a million hundred-foot rolls of microfilm containing at a minimum two billion names, and perhaps upwards of ten billion.
Twenty years later there are 2.3 million rolls of microfilm in “The Vault” at “Granite Mountain”.
“The gathering of all genealogically valuable records of mankind,” writes a church specialist, “is the long-range goal of the Genealogical Society.” Ensign, August,1974.
The Church estimates that about fifty billion people have lived on the earth since the creation. According to Church historians Arrington and Bitton.
—————————————————————————-
Another Followup…
>> On April 25, 2015 at 6:35 pm, Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Well…I can give you a hint. I know for a FACT that Darrell Willis and
>> those who share his religious beliefs do NOT CONSIDER MORMONS
>> TO BE CHRISTAINs who believe in, or worship Jesus Christ as their
>> Savior and they consider them to be cultists, heretics and they believe
>> that Mormons can legitimately be subjected to religious hatred and
>> persecution sanctioned by God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ…
>> Amen. Any questions?
I just thought that I would point out here that when GM Squad Boss Philip Maldonado decided to finally leave ‘Granite Mountain’ and take a ‘steady’ job with the Prescott City Solid Waste Division in April of 2013… they had to REPLACE him.
That’s when that ‘Crew Boss Selection Committee’ was formed.
That ‘Selection Committee interviewed several candidates from the current GM ranks and used a straight ‘point rating’ system when evaluating the candidates.
Three of the candidates being interviewed for the GM ‘Squad Boss’ job were…
Andrew Ashcraft ( The known Mormon ).
Robert Caldwell
Travis Turbyfill
Travis had the absolute highest ‘point score’… followed by Andrew Ashcraft ( the Mormon )… but the job still bypassed them BOTH and went to Robert Caldwell instead.
Sp guess who was ON that ‘Selection Committee’?
FOUR people…
Melissa Fousek – Prescott Human Resources Division
Eric Marsh – GM Superintendent
Jesse Steed – GM Captaion
Clayton Whitted – GM Squad Boss
Notice who the FOURTH person was.
The same GM Squad Boss Clayton Whitted who had ‘baptized’ Brendan McDonough out in the field just 2 weeks before the Yarnell Tragedy.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> The type of Christians WTKTT is describing share way to much in common
>> for me by at least thinking, if not actually acting out, to treat Mormons like
>> fundamentalist and radical Sunni’s Muslims treat Shia Muslins and vice
>> versa. Listening to them on a role when they feel secure among friends
>> and those who think like they do can be downright scary…and very
>> disturbing.
There is no actual evidence that there was any ‘animosity’ towards the known LDS member Andrew Ashcraft.
Ashcraft had ‘converted’ to LDS after marrying his wife Juliann… but once he did… he was ALL IN. He “walked the LDS walk’ as well as ‘talked the LDS talk’… and that made his dedication to the ‘service’ aspects of the job just as ‘up front and center’ as was apparently the case with the fundamental Christians on the GM crew.
So it was probably a ‘nothing so unites people as a common mission’ thing.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> And I for one, think this entire train of thought (what role religious beliefs
>> played in the deaths of the GMHS) is alien, scary, disturbing and a bunch
>> of other similar adjectives and unfortunately is starting to be all to
>> PLAUSIBLE and make a lot of sense as a legitimate theory in identifying
>> causal and contributing factors in the Yarnell Hill Fire Disaster.
Yea… this actual conversation is probably making some people squirm… and it has always had that sort of ‘third rail’ feeling to it and people get scared of the kind of ‘voltage’ that can be released from such conversations…
…but if ( as we are being told ) all kinds of BOOK DEALS have already been made and, indeed, are being told one is just about to come out…
…it’s important to talk about this and wonder if ANY of these authors are going to have the ‘sand’ to ‘go there’ and discuss this element of the Granite Mountain culture and organization.
Forget about the evidence of GM Squad Bosses actually ‘baptizing’ crew members in the field… and others being allowed to PREACH directly to the entire crew and tell them that if they don’t accept Jesus they are going to BURN IN HELL ( just 7 days before they did just that )…
…the Prescott Wildland Division Chief stood in front of the world and said the ultimate explanation for why there were 19 dead ‘elite’ Hotshots on the floor of a fuel-filled blind box canyon was because (quote) “God had a different plan for those men”.
This RELIGIOUS and/or MINISTRY component of this GM organization was REAL… and there is EVIDENCE to prove it was REAL… and it needs to be DISCUSSED and/or DOCUMENTED.
Any BOOK or MOVIE that totally IGNORES this aspect of this organization known as ‘Granite Mountain’ and how it all *might* have factored into both the decision making and the tragic results will simply have NOT done a good job with the known information.
A couple of quick notes—
Utah—While known for the center of the Mormon religion it also has a very large contingent of the Catholic religion. almost as many as the Mormons.
Mormon religion believes Jesus was a Apostle like the other ones in the Mormon church and not the savior of all man kind. There are many Apostles in the Mormon Church described in the Book of Mormon. That’s where Christians start to get tangled up with the Mormon Faith and there teachings .
This discussion evolves back again to the human aspect of decisions made
that helped establish the accident—Human factors in many different forms
have been identified as cause factors in fatality fires.
I agree and I think most people don’t realize that it’s hard to throw a rock in all of the Great Basin states and not hit a Mormon or someone who has Mormons in their family or list of close friends.
The Extremist Bible Thumping Fundamentalists are strongest in the Midwest and in the deep south, where I don’t live…thank God for her grace and goodness.
Although Extremist Bible Thumping Fundamentalists should be more careful who they talk in front of…it’s hard to throw a rock and not hit a Mormon or someone who has Mormons in their family or list of close friends in Prescott, Arizona.
And I do know you are right smack in the middle of Mormon Country up there in the Great State of Idaho.
You are Right Gary and I will say a number of Mormons are my friends and even close friends.
and yes in Idaho severial work for the FS and BLM.
I was never around the Mormon Religion until I moved to Idaho. Never had any problems but took some time and friends to understand their religion.
Yes the teen agers go to cemeteries and baptize the dead into the Mormon church and then list them as past Members never did understand that.
Right on Bob. And I think we could be friends in the real world too. You are my kind of guy. Live and let live unless somebody screws with you or those you love. Let everyman (and woman) pick out his own religion just as long as he doesn’t try to push it down your throat. And realize that with every religion, you can’t look to closely at everything they believe because there’s is a pretty good chance a lot of it doesn’t really add up and takes an awful lot of blind faith to accept just about any religious teachings.
The important thing, is does it benefit mankind or does it tear society down and I just about everyone should be able to agree that although there is no definitive proof that anyone found anything in the ground a long time ago to get a tax exemption, there isn’t any proof that a corpse rose from the dead and flew back to heaven either.
Some things we just have to take on faith. The real question should be…does the Mormon religion add positive things to mankind’s existence overall. And I think most people except for Radical extremists who are fundamentalists in their own religion, would say that yes, the Mormon religion does good work, benefits mankind and provides a positive structure for their members and their communities.
And of course you are right that nobody listens to us anymore, but they did back in the day…didn’t they Bob? And I actually prefer my new status much better, I can spout off all I want to and because nobody listens to me, I will never have any ownership or responsibility when things go to hell in a hand basket.
That’s somebody else’s problem now. I can just sit back and mutter…I told you so…you should have listened to me even though I can’t remember what I told you to do. You still screwed up!
Oh…and one more thing. Mormons do believe that Jesus Christ is well…Jesus Christ, their Lord and Savior in spite of what the Radical, extremists, Bible thumping intolerant Fundamentalists say in private and on their talk radio shows.
And WTKTT is right about a lot of things but he is wrong about one thing for sure, when Mitt Romney ran for president, those bad people did not insinuate anything…several of their leaders and spokesmen said in no uncertain terms that they considered Mormons to in a cult and accused they of not even being Christians, as in believing in Christ, in the national media for the world to hear and they spouted really crazy things on their talk radio programs and in their own congregations. I know, I heard it firsthand.
I really dislike intolerant people.
I hear Ya—
Back in the day I said it like it was– it was either Black or White— no shades of gray.
But I generally won the argument based on fact— I can be hard headed if you haven’t noticed.
But I have always been tolerant of others, Religion, Color or Sex what ever. I have made friends from all walks of life maybe because I never could be a phony or a yes man . I think we would get along well you remind me of my old Forest FMO Dale Jarrell. Also a Hot shot superintendent once with the Helena Hot Shots and also an R4 IC with a team for 8 years.
Well that’s enough of that back to the discussions.
Reply to Bob Powers post on
April 26, 2015 at 9:03 pm
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> I have always been tolerant of others,
>> Religion, Color or Sex what ever. I have
>> made friends from all walks of life maybe
>> because I never could be a phony or a yes
>> man .
It’s called tolerance.
I think it’s also obvious from your powerful and consistent ‘message’ about SAFETY ( and the fact that you are still alive to be powerfully and consistently DELIVERING that message back to the community ) that throughout your career you always INSTINCTIVELY knew who/what the real enemy was.
The FIRE.
The FIRE doesn’t care what Religion, sex, gender identification preference or Color you are.
If you are out there FIGHTING it… and you don’t ALL constantly and diligently follow the hard-wrought rules of your profession… that ‘enemy’ will kill you ALL dead…
…and in one of the most horrific ways that anyone can ever die.
That teaches its own kind of ‘tolerance’.
Thanks for organizing some (or most) of the known facts for this thread. This entire aspect of the disaster is very complex and as you have said, is not something most people will get anywhere near.
I am not going to expect to read anything about any of this angle in any book about the Yarnell Hill Fire. I did read the teaser for Dickman’s book and I think it will be the standard red white and blue, apple pie, God, Guts and Glory, hotshots are the Special Forces of wildland firefighters and will not say anything that will upset any of the Granite Mountain Hotshot families he interviewed, which was probably all of them.
It will be the kind of book that adds to the already existing and rapidly growing legend of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and the Yarnell Hill Fire, and maybe that’s the way it should remain, American needs heroes.
Although…Pat Tillman’s family said they wanted the truth no matter what it was, and they meant it. And in the end they brought the U.S. Army to its knees and gave them a spanking for their attempted manipulation of the facts to create a story book…story.
So who knows, in this day and age of social media where anybody can put forward their opinion on anything…the same old rules don’t apply anymore in the same old way.Time will tell.
Although I do want to remind you that I said a long time ago on this thread that I think the Granite Mountain Hotshots are heroes no matter what the specific circumstances are leading up to their deaths because of what they did while they were alive to help fight this nation’s wildfires and not because they are dead.
And just like Pat Tillman, they will always remain as heroes regardless of whether they died because of serious errors in judgment and mistakes, or by the enemy they were fighting.
Reply to Gary Olson post on April 26, 2015 at 12:28 pm
>> Gary Olson said…
>>
>> Although I do want to remind you that I said a long time ago
>> on this thread that I think the Granite Mountain Hotshots are
>> heroes no matter what the specific circumstances are
>> leading up to their deaths because of what they did while
>> they were alive to help fight this nation’s wildfires and not
>> because they are dead.
Agree ( and I have also said the same thing before ).
They did not have to DIE to ‘become heroes’.
They were already ‘heroes’ because of what they were DOING each and every day up UNTIL the day they died.
That’s why it is ( and has always been ) so ABSURD that the very people who say they want to HONOR these men have also always felt that “telling the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” wasn’t an option.
>> Gary Olson also said…
>>
>> And just like Pat Tillman, they will always remain as heroes
>> regardless of whether they died because of serious errors
>> in judgment and mistakes, or by the enemy they were fighting.
Funny you should mention Mr. Pat Tillman, given the recent thread about all the ‘God’ stuff surrounding ‘Granite Mountain’.
You also don’t need ‘God’ to be a ‘hero’… as Mr. Tillman’s own brother pointed out at Pat’s ‘televised’ funeral.
There is that now famous moment from Pat’s funeral when people like Senator John McCain ( who also spoke after the Granite Mountain deaths ) and Maria Shriver neglected to do their homework and be informed that Pat Tillman was an atheist.
They got up and spewed ‘God’ stuff… and then Pat’s brother Richard took the podium and let them have it.
* Senator John McCain’s last part of his ‘speech’ to the Tillman family…
To Marie, Pat and Danny, to Kevin and Rich, to Alex and all Pat’s friends, I can only offer you the assurance that my faith promises me is true. To all of you who loved Pat, and were loved by him, he will never be so far from you that you cannot feel his love. And you will see him again, when a loving God reunites us all with the loved ones who preceded us in death. Take care of each other until then, as Pat would want you to. May God bless him. And may God bless us all.
* Maria Shriver’s last part of her ‘speech’ to the Tillman family…
Pat… your family doesn’t have to worry any more.
Tou are HOME… you are SAFE… and you will not be forgotten.
* Then Pat’s Brother Richard took the podium and said…
I didn’t write shit… because I’m not a writer.
But I’m not gonna sit up here and break down on ya.
Pat’s a fuckin’ champion. Always will be.
Just make no mistake.
He would WANT me to say this.
He’s not ‘with God’.
He’s fucking dead. He’s not religious.
So…thanks for your thoughts… but he’s fucking dead.
Here’s a YouTube video of these same moments from the funeral…
The Tillman Story – Richard speaks about his brother
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRNxiPVZ69Q
And another Youtube video about this famous moment from
Pat Tillman’s ( televised ) funderal.
This is the Bill Maher interview with Richard Tillman ( Pat’s brother ) after the (televised) funeral…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwsy8FEL0ls
Richard Tillman said…
—————————————————————-
I found it offensive ( what Senator McCain and others said at my brother’s funeral ).
I don’t just walk into someone’s church and say… “This is BULLSHIT”.
So don’t come to my brother’s service and tell me he’s ‘with God’.
He wasn’t religious.
He’s not what these people want to believe he was.
He’s simply not ‘with God’. He’s fuckin’ DEAD.
——————————————————————–
one of the best eulogies I have ever heard. I saw it on the documentary “The Tillman Story” and reinforced in Krakauer’s book: “Where Men Win Glory”. Nothing angers me more than those sanctimonious water walkers who prattle on and on at funerals, boring the living shit out of everyone by their piety, and name dropping “Jesus”, “God”, “Savior”as if they lived in their back pocket. I want to be cremated without ceremony and have the jumpers spread my ashes over the Trinity Alps to the tune of “Tomorrow Wendy” by Concrete Blonde: “I told the priest
Don’t count on any second coming
God got his ass kicked
The first time he came down here slumming
He had the balls to come
The gall to die and then forgive us
No, I don’t wonder why
I wonder what he thought it would get us
Hey, hey, goodbye”
WTKTT said, “Have to agree that this ‘aspect’ of the ‘human factors’ that obviously contributed to the tragedy hasn’t been talked about nearly enough.”
1. I FIRMLY believe ALL of the causal and contributing factors in the Yarnell Hill Fire Disaster will be found in the human factors category.
2. There were no equipment failures that I am aware of to date. The radios performed as they were designed to do, the GMHS hid their intentions and objectives from others. The fire shelters performed as they were designed to do AND at a perfectly acceptable level. Fire suits like Red Adair’s company wears would not have saved the GMHS.
3. The fire team performed as they were designed and intended to do. They ORDERED the GMHS to “hunker down in the black and stay safe.” The Yarnell Hill Fire was managed by CHAOS…but Chaos runs all big and bad fires for the first 36 to 48 hours, hotshots are trained to survive and perform productive and meaningful work in that specific environment. CHAOS is to be expected and it is assumed Chaos will be in charge when hotshots first arrive on a true wildfire.
4. The Arizona State Forestry performed as they were designed and intended to do by the Arizona State Legislature and the taxpayers of the Great State of Arizona. They have always cut corners and taken short cuts on all of their fires, they don’t have the funding to do anything else because unlike the U.S. government, they can’t simply print more money or augment their budget by accounting tricks. Their fire plan almost always works, in fact, I don’t know of another time in the history of the Arizona State Forestry up until the Yarnell Hill Fire it hasn’t worked. Can you name another fire where their fire strategy and tactics didn’t achieve the Arizona State Forestry’s primary goal, spend the least you can AND avoid catastrophic results? I can’t.
5. The fire performed as it was designed and intended to do…BIG and BAD (by God or another higher universal intelligence, I don’t know…fate, chance, Lady Luck, Mother Earth) after decades of budget cutbacks, successful fire suppression, urban encroachment into wildlands, residents who were either unwilling or unable to make their property “fire wise”, global warming and many other factors I can’t think of right now.
6. The Serious Accident Investigation Team performed as they were designed and intended to do. They covered up and glossed over as much as they could to protect the interests of their employers…YOU.
I’m afraid I have some really bad news for those who loved the Granite Mountain Hotshots. The Granite Mountain Hotshots died because Eric Marsh made a really bad decision and Jesse Steed did not overrule him as he technically could have as the GMHS Crew Boss if he would have been willing to accept the consequence that the Yarnell Hill Fire would have been his last fire as a Granite Mountain Hotshot and probably in the employment of the City of Prescott and Jesse Steed’s family needed the security that his job provided for them. So he didn’t. He took a chance, he rolled the dice that was the crew logo for Granite Mountain 7. He lost.
That is what happened. I’m deeply sorry for your loss.
Oh…and one more thing. I keep reading that people want the truth, no matter what the truth is. I just told you the truth, now the only question is…can you handle it?
AMEN BROTHER
The truth is never easy— nor are the decisions made by those who lead—
And since I have appointed myself as the lead in summarizing where this thread has led, and stating the hard truth (or maybe that is why God has left me on this earth for as long as he has, when he has taken others far more deserving than me already, maybe this is my mission from God, what do you Bible Thumpers think of that possibility?) here is one more.
Nothing…and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, you can force the tip of the Big Dog’s tail to agree to in front of an Administrative Law Judge will make difference in how the Big Dog fights. You will never be able to force the Big Dog to let his TAIL WAG him. Haven’t you believed anything I have written?
If you want changes in how wildfires are being fought in this country, you need to be talking to the Big Dog or the 800 pound silverback Mountain Gorilla (or use whatever metaphor pleases you) in the living room…the United States Forest Service. As goes the USFS…so goes all wildland firefighting agencies! Period. End of story.
And there is only one force that the USFS listens to…the United States Congress, when and IF they tie specific objectives, restraints, conditions, policies, requirements and so on and so forth to their BUDGET!
The families of the Granite Mountain Hotshots had (or used to have…I don’t know exactly where public sentiment is at now after the lawsuits were filed) the moral authority and wave of public support to influence your U.S. congressional representatives like nobody has ever had pertaining to a wildland firefighting issues in the history of the United States to mandate some real changes. Not just fluff with smoke and mirrors agreed to by petty nobody attorneys in a closed door room somewhere in downtown Phoenix.
How much do I think you are entitled to? Fairness has absolutely nothing to do with it…and it never has. This is America…you are entitled to as much as the system is willing to give you or you are able to make the system give you. Nothing more and nothing less.
That is how it has always been with mankind for thousands of years (once we precluded torturing and executing the offending party and took that out of the equation) whether you were a subject of medieval England or ancient Rome. If you have been wronged you are entitled to seek monetary compensation from those who wronged you, even if it was the Great Khan granting you so many sheep or horses for your loss.
It IS about the money. You are entitled to it. You should stand on the roof tops and shout it out. Somebody is going to have to pay to raise the children of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, somebody has to compensate their loved ones somehow…and money is all there is. So IT IS about the money…and it should be. And if anyone you talk to doesn’t understand that…direct them to me and I will explain it very slowly to make them understand as best I can.
Reply to Gary Olson at 7:25 p.m. In answer to your question (in the event you really do happen to be interested in hearing it) I would have to say this: “Yes. I can.”
I am inclined, however, to add the following: There seems to be an awful lot of people I know who CANNOT (handle it). I have watched while many of these people try to bury the truth in the hopes that it will never (ever) see the light of day. I have seen just how many individuals there are who shy away from the truth . . . there are some who just walk away, and some run. I have seen numerous people close their eyes to it, while just as many simply avert their eyes in an attempt to remain willfully ignorant of it.
But, I have a sense that you know about these kinds of things already. Along with how likely it is to remain this way for a very long time.
Agreed.
Not enough details shown to this fire for any person to say “amen” to Mr. Olson.
Not enough details shown to Yarnell Hill Fire to support any “amen” to Mr. Olson’s recent comments.
Concerned Yavapai Resident said,
April 25, 2015 at 8:27 pm
“Not enough details shown to Yarnell Hill Fire to support any “amen” to Mr. Olson’s recent comments”
I was just trying to summarize where my thinking is at as all of this info goes by, but it is just my opinion, and yes, my opinion may change as more information comes out, my opinion has already changed a number of times.
For example, I started out repeating what I had always heard from within the wildland firefighting community, that Eric Marsh was a squared away crew boss who made an really bad but understandable decision and the GMIHC were a top notch crew.
I still think the GMIHC was a top notch crew but now I am questioning how understandable that decision was. What stunned me…and yes, stunned is not an exaggeration, is the fade video WTKTT made showing what that canyon and the valley must have looked like just as Eric Marsh made the decision the crew should go down that fuel filled canyon.
Here is a quick review of how all hotshots have died in the history of hotshots.
12 El Cariso hotshots cutting fire line in a canyon above the Loop Fire in 1964
3 Mormon Lake hotshots cutting fire line (then burning out) above the Battlement Creek Fire in a canyon 1976.
9 Prineville hotshots cutting fire line above the South Canyon Fire in a canyon 1994.
and now…19 Granite Mountain Hotshots, not cutting line, but they were certainly “working” above the fire in a…canyon on the Yarnell Hill Fire in 2013,
I know Eric Marsh and the Granite Mountain Hotshots studied both the South Canyon Fire and the Battlement Creek Fire. Darrell Willis and I visited over breakfast (he bought) about the Battlement Creek Fire because he was getting deeply involved in studying that particular fire and subsequent disaster. I am pretty sure Eric Marsh would have studied the Loop Fire as well.
I am still completely baffled by what happened. I have yet to hear anything that explains why the Granite Mountain Hotshots left the black and went down that canyon. And I think the reason we don’t why yet is because McDonough is selling what he knows when he should be telling what he knows.
GARY
My Amen over your sentence on truth seems to have got a different take.
As one FF Hot Shot to another ” AMEN BROTHER ” is a statement of agreement not a Prayer. Internal lingo not meant for those who do not understand the Hot Shot Pride.
Sorry Yavapai Valley Resident there is no Amen yet to the details which keep on coming you misunderstood my comment…….
WTKTT and I beat the Ellreese Daniels and the Thirtymile Fire to death below, but here it goes again but Elizabeht and probably some others weren’t paying enough attention so here is a summary of what really happened.
After the amateurs, agency hacks, top managers (see the entire SAIT resume) everything but anybody who knows squat about conducting a real investigation got done peeking around the edges and writing up their normal blah, blah, blah, nothing to see here, nobody did anything wrong, it’s just smoke and mirrors, move along citizens there’s nothing to see here (see Dr. Ted Putnam’s comments over and over again, but pay special attention to his white paper, The Collapse of Decision Making and Organizational Structure on Storm King Mountain) some real investigators, federal Special Agents, GS-1811’s, who work for the United States Department of Agriculture – Office of the Inspector General who were trained as investigators at the finest law enforcement training facility in the (according to them) the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Glynco Georgia (where I spent more than a year of my life over a 25 year period that seemed like an eternity each and every time I was there) were brought in because what Ellreese Daniels did was so outrageous, and then he did compounded his problem by lying his ass off, which really pisses off federal agents (you don’t have to talk to them, but if you do, don’t lie to them) and U.S. Attorneys about everything he did, that somebody couldn’t ignore it no matter how much they wanted to and that somebody was probably the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington, since I doubt anybody from the U.S. Forest Service thought bringing in criminal investigators to muck around in one of their fire investigations was a good idea.
The U.S Forest Service makes the U.S. Military look like a progressive institution that is open and eager to try new ideas, concepts, and things out just for the fun of it. And it was after and only after, the investigation by the OIG that Ellreese Daniels, the crew boss of the four firefighters that died, was charged with 11 felonies, including four counts of manslaughter. Which sounds pretty serious, but here is the bottom line, the charges were later reduced to two counts of making false statements to which Mr. Daniels plead guilty and he was sentenced to three years of probation and 90 days of work release.
So let’s review, Ellreese Daniels made a lot of really bad decisions that tracked directly back to him that directly resulted in the deaths of four firefighters, and then he seriously compounded his original problem by repeatedly lying about what he did while trying to cover it up to the point where he finally pissed off the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Washington so bad, the U.S. Attorney finally ordered some OIG Special Agents to go in there and make an example out of that stupid ass so every else will think twice about lying their asses off the next time they screw up so badly they kill some firefighters and those decisions track directly back to them with no plausible deniability, which as you have seen from the Yarnell Hill Fire…plausible deniability almost ALWAYS exists, even when any rationale person thinks it could not possibly be there.
So in other words, Daniels did far worse than anyone else has in the history of wildland firefighting, no one else has ever even come close to being investigated by criminal investigators and I personally think the whole thing was an anomaly, an outlier, a OTO (one time only) that was based far more on the personality of that particular U.S. Attorney, who is now without a doubt long gone and in political office or a very lucrative private practice. That was the federal government nuclear option…and the bottom line is Daniels got three years of probation and 90 days of work release. Big Deal. McDonough probably got more than that for his chicken shit B&E or burglary or whatever it was. McDonough in a worst case scenario was talking informally (not under oath) or talking to any investigators who had any power.
Although I do want to add one caveat. Those boys with ADOSH were kick-ass and I would have lost a ton of money betting on the outcome of their investigation. Those guys have got some stones. What they did almost restored my faith in the system, naw…I just messing with you, it would take a lot more than what even those guys did to restore my faith in the system. I think their investigation was an anomaly, an outlier, a OTO. I hope those guys were eligible to retire. Or if not, maybe they will like living in Eloy, checking migrate farm workers port-a-potties for hazardous waste in the cotton fields in 120 plus degree heat.
So…I know you are wondering, if I was King For a Day, what would be the ONE thing I would do to change the system. I would mandate a change in the composition of the next Serious Accident Investigation Team to include people whose jobs and futures do not depend on them covering up and the glossing over of mistakes. There should be a citizen participation just as there are citizen review boards for progressive and modern police departments to review serious complaints or incidents. People have never been very honest when they are in charge of investigating themselves.
Yes, there will be a hue and cry and much wailing, weeping and gnashing of teeth by those who manage wildland firefighting personnel and resources and threats they will stop volunteering (many are volunteers and wildland firefighting is NOT part of their normal duties and responsibilities or part of their job descriptions) to go fight wildfires just like there was after the Thirtymile Fire. Why? These same people to not demand nor are they entitled to immunity from making reckless, irresponsible, dangerous, decisions in every other aspect of their lives…do they? If they are drunk, eating an ice cream cone while texting as they look for a CD on the floor of their car while they go through a school zone at 65 miles an hour and kill and a group of children in a cross walk…they don’t expect not to pay any consequences do they?
If there are never any consequences for really, really, really, bad decisions that a reasonable person who had similar training, backgrounds and experiences would have made under similar circumstances well…than that factor never has to enter into anyone’s critical thinking during the decision making process. Maybe…just maybe…managers should be expected to stop and think…hey, wait a minute, what IF my stupid decision results in the deaths of someone’s children, spouse, parent, sibling or other loved ones and that was not a reasonable and prudent decision under the circumstances, what will happen to me. Many of those who work in law enforcement have been required to make those kinds of decisions for decades now and that list is growing longer with each and every new video that emerges. Why should wildland firefighting decision makers be any different?
There have been literally thousands of death and accident investigations conducted on federal and state lands and the Yarnell Hill Fire has never been approached like a typical death investigation. The hard questions have never been asked, even by the SAIT folks. Why?
If a boat operator, driver, climbing guide, sky dive instructor, parent, scout Leader etc, who’s decisions led to 19 deaths was being investigated everyone wouldn’t say “well I’m sure he thought he could make it” without asking these questions:
Did Marsh abuse drugs or alcohol? We’re tox screens done? I remember a USFS Hotshot crew boss in the 70s/80s that smoked dope every day, with the whole crew, on the bus to and from fires.
What was Marsh’s state of mind and mental health? Was he suicidal? Did he have a hero complex? Did he like to lead the crew into dangerous situations and “save” them? Would he consider that “training”?
What was his relationship with Steed, his replacement in waiting? Would he force a bad situation to prove he was right?
The SO appears to have not completed a standard investigation, instead leaving to the fire experts. I think that is typical in fire deaths.
The problem is that the questions are hard. I’ve had to ask similar questions to grieving survivors, parents, and loved ones. Nobody wants to think bad do the dead especially a peer, but that is not what real investigators are paid for. Yes…there needs to be some changes, but so far nobody has asked for the right changes to be made.
So…WTF, over?
FYI – I apologize for all of the editing errors above…but frankly, I am getting sick and tired of spending hours composing and editing comments for this thread when it appears that most people (or at least those who really matter in the big scheme of things) aren’t paying any attention and could care less.
We are old retired farts that have no say any more in the real world of wild land fire—–We can only hope that some of what we say here actually gets to some one who gives a shit and can still do something in the bigger scheme of things.
Otherwise Gary as you know we are just talking to the Wind.
The Only small hope I have is that a nation wide group of Incident Commanders stands up and forces Change. But in this day and age maybe that is a dream as well.
Agreed.
Gary,
Very obvious and necessary questions. Thank you for having the stones to mention them.
As a backdrop, there’s also the obvious, Who at PFD had truly deep experience in this area?
One of the interesting things with this fire is how profound many of the standards violations were. Normally, you have a few common elements in accidents. Intentionally racing the fire is not one of those common elements. People being fairly predictable, I have a feeling this was not even the first conscious decision to have a footrace with a fire, much less the first big deviation from standards. (Actually, the way the pending burnover of McDonough was treated earlier in the day was itself a big deviation from standards.)
So, one of the things somebody should be asking is, In all likelihood there were earlier footraces, so When and where? How did the pattern get started?
**
** WERE SOME GRANITE MOUNTAIN MANAGEMENT AND SOME CREW
** TREATING IT ALL AS ACTUAL ‘CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY WORK’?
Reply to SR post on April 24, 2015 at 6:37 am
NOTE: I found even MORE evidence of this active ‘preaching’ going on within the GM crew and DURING fire assignments…. even above and beyond Brendan saying that just two weeks before the tragedy in Yarnell… Youth Minister and CREW BOSS Clayton Whitted had sort of ‘baptized’ him and/or conducted some kind of “accept Jesus as your Savior” thing with him.
This additional account was even AFTER that and even closer to the Yarnell tragedy.
It involves Dustin Deford also ‘preaching’ to GM ( as a group ) and it looks like it was on the Doce fire just ONE WEEK before the tragedy in Yarnell.
So I thought SR’s comment from below needed a ‘longer’ response in order to further support the ‘context’ that SR has already written about.
>> SR said…
>>
>> The quote from the Dickman article emphasizes another factor in terms of
>> promoting groupthink, namely open religious study/religious talk while on the job.
If it’s just ‘campfire talk’ or ‘water cooler talk’… that is one thing.
If it’s a repeated pattern with what appears to be the full support of the employer and/or management and what appears to be ‘required’ ( or at least ‘expected’ ) participation by the employees… that’s something else altogether.
It really does look like GM operated more towards the LATTER than the FORMER and it might even be said that some GM management ( particularly Darrell Willis ) and some GM Squad Bosses and Crewman ( Clayton Whitted, Dustin Deford, others? ) were treating this whole thing as some kind of ‘missionary work’ instead of just a firefighting job. They might have all believed ( quite literally ) they were on some kind of “mission from God” pretty much ALL of the time… and not just in Yarnell on June 30, 2013.
There ARE quotes to back this up such as Clayton Whitted saying he was sure that GOD had put him there on that GM Crew in order for him to be ‘Christ’ for them… or something like that… and now quotes from Dustin Deford emerging much to the same effect… that GOD had put him there on that crew in order to “do his will”.
More like ‘missionary work’ than ’employment’, apparently.
Again… here is that quote from the Dickman article describing the moment Brendan McDonough was “Saved” or “Born again” ( or something like that ) just 2 weeks before Yarnell…
————————————————————————-
Clayton Whitted, a squad boss like Robert, was a former youth pastor at the Heights Church in Prescott. During some shifts on the fire line, the crew would openly discuss Jesus or ask Clayton to tell stories from the Bible. It was through him that Donut accepted Jesus as his savior, on a fire in New Mexico two weeks before Yarnell Hill.
————————————————————————-
As far as an actual (Christian) DENOMINATION goes… the ‘Heights Church’ where SQUAD BOSS Clayton Whitted was a ‘Youth Minister’ is one of those that is hard to nail down.
The church’s own website says it started out as the “Prescott Heights First Baptist Church”, which puts the origins in the BAPTIST area of Christian denominations… but their website also says they DECIDED to go officially ‘non-denominational’ in the year 2005 and just call themselves “The Heights Church”… right around the time they built their new multimillion dollar facility right there on Larry Caldwell Road just south of the Prescott Airport.
The KEY point is that this “Heights Church” ( as per their own online information ) falls into that ‘evangelical’ category of Christian denominations where the emphasis is on ‘missionary’ style work and ‘bringing others into the fold’.
One of those “ALL Jesus, ALL the time” organizations with the additional viewpoint/tenet that it is not possible to try too hard to live a ‘perfect life’ and strive to behave EXACTLY like the ‘Christ’ figure at all times.
I’m going to come back to this ‘tenet’ in a moment, because it is REPEATED in the behavior/teachings of the ‘other’ preacher-wannabee that was on the GM Crew ( Dustin Deford ) and the ‘speeches’ he used to make to the GM Crew… and it also aligns with what SR is saying up above about ‘the promotion of groupthink’..
As it turns out… Prescott Wildland Division Chief Darrell Willis and SQUAD BOSS Clayton Whitted weren’t the only obviously uber-religious individuals associated with “Granite Mountain”… NOR was Clayton Whitted the only actual preacher-wannabee with ‘minister’ credentials actually serving on the fireline as a GM crewmember.
Dustin Deford ( from Montana ) was just as ‘intense’ about his religious faith and beliefs as SQUAD BOSS Clayton Whitted was. Maybe even moreso.
Apparently… Dustin Deford would ‘preach’ to the crew just as often as Clayton Whitted would… and from the same ‘evangelical’ style denominational perspective as Whitted.
Dustin Deford came from a family of 12 ( TWELVE ) in Montana BOTH his Father and Mother were/are ‘ministers’… and Deford had NINE brothers and sisters.
Dustin Deford’s father ( Steve Deford ) and his mother ( Celeste Deford ) are the actual Co-Pastors of the “First Baptist Church of Ekalaka, Montana”.
They are also bona-fide ‘missionaries’ and hold actual IFCA credentials.
So there is that same ‘evangelical’ BAPTIST based denominational component also seen with SQUAD BOSS Clayton Whitted.
From the ABOUT box on the Church’s own website…
———————————————————————————-
The First Baptist Church of Ekalaka, Montana”.
Pastor Steve DeFord and his wife Celeste are both 1981 graduates of Prairie Bible College. They entered the pastoral ministry in 1990, first as Church Planters, then in 1996 they came to First Baptist Church in Ekalaka as the senior Pastor. Of their ten children, two are still in High School. They have two daughters-in-law and 4 Grandchildren. Pastor Steve is a member of IFCA International, and he and Celeste are missionaries
———————————————————————————
NOTE: This church still hasn’t updated its website since the Yarnell tragedy. Steve and Celeste DeFord HAD ten children prior to losing Dustin in Yarnell. They are now down to only NINE children.
** DEFORD’S FATHER SAYS HIS SON PREACHED TO GM
Just 24 hours AFTER the Yarnell Tragedy… Dustin Deford’s ‘pastor’ father actually posted a long email/letter to his preacher colleagues via the official IFCA website.
NOTE: “IFCA International” “IFCA” stands for “Independent Fundamental Churches of America”. They say they are “A Fellowship Committed to Biblical Ministry”
In that letter… Steve Deford is telling his fellow evangelical pastors that his son Dustin Deford had been ‘preaching’ to the Granite Mountain Hotshots ( as a group ) just a week before they all died… and that he was reminding them all that “Jesus was their Savior” and may have been unknowingly “preparing them for DEATH”.
He said his son Dustin Deford explained to the Granite Mountain Hotshots that you only have TWO choices when you die. Accept ‘Jesus’ as your Savior or BURN IN THE FIRES OF HELL.
No ‘gray area’ or ‘wiggle room’ there, apparently.
The following online article is where this email was first reported along with the contents of it…
Life – Religion & Spirituality – Western Religions
Article Title: Firefighter Deford may have helped fellow hotshots prepare for death
http://www.examiner.com/article/dustin-deford-may-have-helped-fellow-hotshots-prepard-for-death
Here is MOST of that article.
It really is quite revealing with regards to ‘attitudes’ and ‘reasons for doing the work’ that seemed to be prevalent within that GM organization.
The “It’s not just a job… it’s an adventure” Marine corps thing seemed to be being UPGRADED to something more like… “It’s not just a job… GOD put me ( and YOU! ) here to do HIS will”.
—————————————————————————————
Dustin DeFord perished in the Arizona wildfire along with 18 other Granite Mountain Hotshots on June 30, 2013. Dustin’s father, Steve DeFord, is the missionary pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ekalaka, MT, and a longtime member of IFCA International. Steve sent an email to his fellow missionary pastors on Monday, July 1, 2013, asking for their prayers and telling about an experience Dustin had. Steve said that his son had a rather unusual opportunity about a week before the tragedy. During some down time, Dustin had talked with most of the crew for about two hours and shared the gospel with them. This means he explained that only two destinies are possible after death—eternal life for those who trust in Jesus Christ, or perishing in the Lake of Fire, commonly called hell. The verse most frequently associated with the gospel is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Dustin’s dad wrote, “In Eternity we will get to meet any who may have called on the name of the Lord in those last moments.”
In the Billings Gazette, Lorna Thackeray wrote about Dustin and his family, which included nine siblings. Two of his brothers are also firefighters, and his dad Steve volunteers for the county rural fire department. The article stated that fire played a big role in Dustin’s life and death, but “DeFord always believed that God was his guiding force. On his Facebook page a year ago, he talked about wanting to find work in Western Montana. ‘But for whatever reason God has moved me to HOT Arizona instead….I’ve been chasing wildland fire jobs for a few years and now I have been wondering why I’m doing it. Is it because this is what I want to do, or is it something God is using to prepare me for later in life?’” The article ended with another Facebook quote from Dustin one year ago: “My life is proof that God wants to use me — starting now.”
One way God used him was to help his fellow firefighters understand that God freely offers an eternal relationship with Him, made possible because Jesus paid the penalty for our sins, when He died as a sacrifice, and then conquered death by rising again. God requires nothing from us except the faith to believe that what He says is true. Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that hears My word and believes on Him that sent Me, has everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24). God does not require any actions or rituals, such as baptism, last rites, joining a certain church, or good deeds. Otherwise no one could make a last-minute decision. The thief on the cross who asked Jesus to remember him, received Jesus’ promise that he would be “with” Jesus “today.” Wherever Jesus went after death, that former thief was there too. (See Luke 23:39-43, 2 Corinthians 12:4, Revelation 2:7.)
The 19 brave firefighters who died in the Prescott fire no doubt knew they were facing death as they huddled under their shields. Perhaps they remembered their discussion with Dustin and put their trust in Jesus Christ before they died. If so, like Dustin, they perished physically, but not spiritually. They will live forever eternally with God.
———————————————————————————–
There is even more stuff like that in the article… but at least that’s the highlights.
So Dustin Deford’s father ( Steve ) says this about his own son’s work
with the Granite Mountain Hotshots…
—————————————————————————————-
One way God used him was to help his fellow firefighters understand that God freely offers an eternal relationship with Him, made possible because Jesus paid the penalty for our sins, when He died as a sacrifice, and then conquered death by rising again.
—————————————————————————————-
That means ( according to Dustin’s father ), Dustin Deford WAS treating his time with Granite Mountain as some kind of “missionary work” and he was ACTIVELY trying to convince as many of them as possible that “Jesus was their Savior”.
Apparently EXACTLY like Clayton Whitted also kept doing… and ‘succeeded’ with Brendan just 2 weeks before Yarnell.
It’s really not possible this kind of ‘evangelical’ missionary stuff could have been going on ‘on the job’ with this kind of regularity without the full knowledge ( and consent ) of management.
>> SR also said…
>>
>> Devout religious faith can be a great thing, but having a former pastor
>> talk scripture with the rest of the crew while at work is troubling
See above. Apparently it wasn’t even just ONE.
There were at least TWO of these ‘evangelical’ guys on the crew.
Looks like Clayton Whitted and Dustin Deford were actually competing ( or just taking turns ) for ‘time on the soapbox’ for the “ALL Jesus, ALL the time” show.
>> SR also said…
>>
>> not because of the scripture, but because of the degree of social
>> pressure implicit with that type of bonding going on 24/7.
Yes. There DOES come a point where people who are prone to this sort of religious thinking 24 hours a day come to believe ( and even convince others ) that the work they are doing is a MINISTRY… and not even just a JOB.
And once you get into that “We are doing GOD’S WORK” mental zone… there CAN be this ‘pressure’ being exerted on those around you to “get with the program”.
“Esse quam videri” ( To be rather than to seem ).
“Whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers” ( Risk a lot, save a lot ).
Work ethics and moral ethics can start to get all ‘tangled up’ when you have this kind of mentality going on.
Remember the famous “look up” peer-pressure experiment done in New York City.
If only one person was on the sidewalk looking up at something in the sky… then just 4 percent of people passing by would also bother to ‘look up’.
If TWO people were ‘looking up’… then the chance of others feeling the need to also ‘look up’ jumps to 30 percent.
If FOUR people are ‘looking up’… then the chances of others even just passing by feeling the need to “do what they are doing” and also “look up” ( even though they don’t know why ) jumps to 80 percent.
In other words… “peer-pressure” does not operate on a LINEAR scale.
It operates on a GEOMETRIC scale… and increases RAPIDLY even with just a small amount pf people being convinced to ‘go along’ with ‘the thinking’ and ‘the behavior’.
>> SR also wrote…
>>
>> I may have been the only person troubled by EM’s interviewing technique,
>> but I still remember that one of the things EM also asked in interviews
>> was “When was the last time you lied?” It’s a stupid question as well
>> as inappropriate. But, starts the whole work relationship off with a note
>> of “I have the power and social status to ask real personal stuff and
>> you will listen.”
Yes. It does… but I think you might have meant to say…
“I have the power and social status to ASK real personal stuff and you will ANSWER ME when I DO ASK IT”.
Definitely a ‘power / control” thing. Putting people in their place and making it clear
you are DOMINANT over them and you expect to know EVERYTHING they are doing
and thinking.
This relates directly to all that trouble Marsh had with his former Captain which Marsh himself said “upset him greatly” and “made him very angry”.
It wasn’t about any actual fireline experiences.
It was about Hotel points on a Credit Card.
Marsh found out his former Captain had been putting the ‘Hotel Points’ for stopovers onto his own Credit Card and then using them later for himself and his family.
So even though Darrell Willis himself later said this didn’t bother HIM ( Willis ) all that much… because Prescott didn’t even have a way to put those Hotel Points on any City based card so what the heck… someone might as well be using them ( as kind of a perk )…
…Eric Marsh thought this was “totally immoral” behavior and made such a big deal about how he could not possibly “work with such a person with such low moral standards” that this is what led to that former GM Captain resigning… and then being replaced with Jesse Steed.
It really does indicate someone who is “wound WAAAY too tight”.
>> SR also wrote…
>>
>> When you see a municipal crew doing things like open worship, that
>> a federal crew would get tangled up with if they did it openly, and all
>> the other irregularities that have been documented, I don’t think that’s
>> an accident that those irregularities existed together.
No. Not when there is then also the chance that the ‘mentality’ being ‘pushed’ within that organization is that this isn’t just a job… it’s a “mission” and we are not just performing a societal task that taxpayers are paying us to do for them… we are actually “pleasing GOD” with this wonderful work that we do.
We’re not JUST HEROES… we’re ‘missionaries’ and GOD smiles on us and the ‘work’ we do.
Or something like that.
There IS evidence that THIS is actually how some of the GM management and squad bosses and crewmembers were actually ‘thinking’ about this work they were doing… and that this ‘way of looking at the work’ was being ENCOURAGED within that organization.
And that, of course, includes the Prescott Wildlland Division Chief himself.
Treating it ALL more like a MINISTRY rather than just EMPLOYMENT?
>> SR also said…
>>
>> When you see that kind of open mixing of private faith and work, it’s also
>> much easier for me to see why EM may have thought it was OK to risk
>> the crew by forcing them to race the fire to the BSR to????? even if EM
>> himself had no clear idea what they would do or be able to do once they
>> got to the BSR.
Exactly.
When you believe you are just sort of ‘generally’ “on a mission from GOD”… then you don’t need all the details beforehand in order to take big risks. ( Like Brendan McDonough told ADOSH… “Risk a lot. Save a lot” ). You just GO. You just HEAD THERE and assume that “God will show us what to do when we get there”, or something like that.
I’ve got news for anyone who thinks that way, however.
If you believe the printed texts… then even the ‘Christ’ figure was in the habit of setting his own ‘lookouts’.
In the ‘Garden of Gethsemane’ story the ‘Christ’ figure (supposedly) told some apostles THREE TIMES to “Stay awake and keep LOOKOUT”… but all three times they fell asleep and it pissed the ‘Christ’ figure off.
The very “Mount of Olives” hill where this (supposedly) all took place had also been named “Mount Scopus” ( As in… “Lookout Hill” ) by the Roman commander Titus.
ALWAYS set LOOKOUTS!
** SUMMARY
So there really is the distinct possibility that there was this MINISTRY component to the “Granite Mountain” organization and that people from the management level down to squad bosses and crew members not only permitted this kind of ‘thinking’ and approach to the work… but it was actively ‘encouraged’.
Only some more ‘stories’ from people who used to work for this organization would shed more light on the true ‘dynamics’ at play here within this organization.
Given the fact that the “human factors” component was probably THE greatest contributing factor to the Yarnell tragedy… then anything that sheds more light on the actual ‘culture’ and the dynamic of the actual ‘working environment’ in this ‘Granite Mountain’ organization is still totally relevant.
It is still ASTOUNDING how there are so many people who USED to work for ‘Granite Mountain’ who are still alive… but ( to this day ) NONE of them have come forward to say anything at all about what it was like to actually WORK for/in that organization.
No stories at all. Not good, bad… or ugly.
The SILENCE there is still highly unusual… and DEAFENING.
And so we have the Idea that the 10 standard orders are old school and
Hillbilly. God will always protect us put your faith in him and do the job and what you are ask to do we are on a mission from god…
Is that possibly the way they fought fire?????
I truly hope not but it scares the hell out of me.
I would also add living in Idaho with Mormons I have seen The Baptist Church Picket The New Mormon Tabernacle here in twin. There is no love lost between the two religions.
I wonder how the Mormons on GM were treated.
Well…I can give you a hint. I know for a FACT that Darrell Willis and those who share his religious beliefs do NOT CONSIDER MORMONS TO BE CHRISTAINs who believe in, or worship Jesus Christ as their Savior and they consider them to be cultists, heretics and they believe that Mormons can legitimately be subjected to religious hatred and persecution sanctioned by God the Father in the name of Jesus Christ…Amen. Any questions?
The type of Christians WTKTT is describing share way to much in common for me by at least thinking, if not actually acting out, to treat Mormons like fundamentalist and radical Sunni’s Muslims treat Shia Muslins and vice versa. Listening to them on a role when they feel secure among friends and those who think like they do can be downright scary…and very disturbing.
And I for one, think this entire train of thought (what role religious beliefs played in the deaths of the GMHS) is alien, scary, disturbing and a bunch of other similar adjectives and unfortunately is starting to be all to PLAUSIBLE and make a lot of sense as a legitimate theory in identifying causal and contributing factors in the Yarnell Hill Fire Disaster.
I am not a Mormon, but I have family members who are.
The quote from the Dickman article emphasizes another factor in terms of promoting groupthink, namely open religious study/religious talk while on the job. Devout religious faith can be a great thing, but having a former pastor talk scripture with the rest of the crew while at work is troubling not because of the scripture, but because of the degree of social pressure implicit with that type of bonding going on 24/7. I may have been the only person troubled by EM’s interviewing technique, but I still remember that one of the things EM also asked in interviews was “When was the last time you lied?” It’s a stupid question as well as inappropriate. But, starts the whole work relationship off with a note of “I have the power and social status to ask real personal stuff and you will listen.”
When you see a municipal crew doing things like open worship, that a federal crew would get tangled up with if they did it openly, and all the other irregularities that have been documented, I don’t think that’s an accident that those irregularities existed together. When you see that kind of open mixing of private faith and work, it’s also much easier for me to see why EM may have thought it was OK to risk the crew by forcing them to race the fire to the BSR to????? even if EM himself had no clear idea what they would do or be able to do once they got to the BSR.
Have to agree that this ‘aspect’ of the ‘human factors’ that obviously contributed to the tragedy hasn’t been talked about nearly enough.
Discipline is one thing. Taking that to extremes and/or running something akin to a ‘cult’ is something else altogether.
The Prescott Daily Courier even said flat-out that Clayton Whitted considered himself to be ‘Christ’ on that crew… and that ‘God’ personally put him there to do that.
I kid you not.
From the Prescott Daily Courier… just 7 days after the tragedy…
The Prescott Daily Courier
Obituary: Clayton Thomas Whitted
Published: 7/7/2013 6:00:00 AM
http://dcourier.com/main.asp?SectionID=167&SubsectionID=468&ArticleID=120992
From the article…
—————————————————————————–
Clayton transitioned to the Granite Mountain Hot Shots in 2008…
Clayton knew God placed him on the hot shots in order to be Christ to his crew.
—————————————————————————–
Really?
GOD placed him on that Hotshot Crew?
I’m sure Whitted saw a LOT of ‘burning bushes’… no question… but was there one that started talking back to him, at some point?
…OR did he simply look in the Prescott Daily Courier classifieds one day and see something like this…
———————————————————————————–
Christ needed for Hotshot crew. Long hours. Some miracles required.
Contact Darrell Willis, Wildland Division Chief, Prescott Fire Department.
————————————————————————————
There are even new glimpses of how this ‘God, Guts and Glory’ ‘military style’ operation ran in the new book coming out on May 12 by former Hotshot Kyle Dickman.
Dickman’s ‘point of attack’ for this book ( the place where he decides to start the story ) is the first day of the 2013 season when the temporary help showed up at Granite Mountain Station 7 to join the ‘full timers’.
He is looking at that moment through Grante McKee’s eyes… who no more wanted to be a ‘Hotshot’ than he wanted to be the man in the moon. McKee was just trying to make a little money that summer and then maybe go on to being a an EMT.
AMAZON – Book Release
On the Burning Edge: A Fateful Fire and the Men Who Fought It
By Kyle Dickman ( Available starting May 12, 2015 )
http://www.amazon.com/Kyle-Dickman/e/B00NVSDYTC
From the link above…
About the Author
Kyle Dickman is a former editor at Outside magazine and a former hotshot. He spent five seasons fighting wildfires in California. Dickman’s reporting has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Turin.
Book Excerpt – Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
———————————————————————————–
Chapter 1
The Perfect Profession
A few minutes later, a diesel Ford F-250 that was lifted eighteen inches off its oversize tires rumbled into the parking lot. Donut emerged and walked straight up to Grant and the other rookies. “You guys ready to learn?” he asked. Then he took his place nearby and struck up a loud conversation with other veterans.
“Get your asses in here!” boomed Eric Marsh, the crew’s superintendent, from inside the station’s ready room. He always looked forward to the return of the seasonal firefighters.
Grant McKee joined the throng of men funneling through the shop door and took a right into a conference room.
Up front, Marsh sat alone.
“Morning, gentlemen,” Marsh said. A seasoned firefighter, he was in his early forties, a handsome man with a lantern jaw, a handlebar mustache, and a red-and-black Granite Mountain Hotshots ball cap pulled over a head of salt-and-pepper hair. One arm was in a sling from a mountain-biking accident weeks earlier, a fact he chose not to elaborate on.
As the shuffling of chairs Quieted, Marsh looked out at the faces. Five crewmen had left Granite Mountain over the winter, and Marsh had to hire replacements, which was always a bit of a gamble.
Marsh introduced himself and asked the crew’s full-time firefighters to do the same. Known collectively as the overhead, these seven hotshots commanded Granite Mountain. Jesse Steed, thirty-six, was the captain, the number two in command. People called Jesse the picture-perfect hotshot, and the ex-Marine, who was six-four and more than 220 pounds, never disputed the point. Beside Jesse sat the crew’s three squad bosses:
“Tell us about yourselves,” Marsh said to the crew. Most of them didn’t know one another and didn’t want to speak. Marsh’s way of dealing with their shyness was to force his men to get over it. “Give us your name, how many years you’ve fought fire, and something . . . your favorite color, whatever you’d like,” he said.
At twenty, Grant was the youngest guy on the crew. He played it cocky, standing, saying his name, and coolly explained that his cousin was Bob Caldwell, one of the squad bosses. It didn’t go so easily for all the new guys.
“Dustin DeFord,” said a redheaded rookie who sat near Grant. “My favorite color is”—DeFord paused for a second—“black. It reminds me of fire.”
“That’s nice, Dustin,” Marsh said. “Thank you. Now please sit the fuck down.”
————————————————————————————
“Sit the FUCK down?… after doing what Marsh TOLD him to do?”
Charming.
So some definite ‘drill sergeant’ type stuff going down there, according to Dickman. Typical ‘denigrate and humiliate’ with the ‘control goal’ in mind stuff.
HUGE CAVEAT for above.
This is just a ‘preview’ of how difficult it is going to to be to determine whether anything former Hotshot Kyle Dickman says in his book is based on ‘testimony’ or ‘interviews’ or is being made up out of whole cloth.
Was someone other than McDonough actually THERE at that meeting he is describing and was able to HEAR these ‘quotes’… and did Dickman get to sti down with either them OR McDonough and obtain these ‘quotes’… or is this Dickman already making things up out of whole cloth in even the first few paragraphs of his book?
It’s hard to say.
While I am a Christian This aspect of the crew is outside federal employment
and federal work ethics as well as discrimination.
Was it a requirement that all GM hires had to be Christian?
I have had people on a crew from many different religions If people wanted to have a prayer privately that was their choice.
I Had Muslims, LDS, different Christian faith’s and yes an occasional Atheist.
The Crew my father died with were all Christian Missionary’s.
Fire Fighters work some times 7 days a week few are lucky enough to have Sundays off. Most crews and fire fighters in general work 6 to 8 months a year with weekends as part of their duty time. So most do not see the inside of a church
during fire season. Religion, Baptism and prayer are not a normal part of a Hot Shot Crew or most other crews.
Once I started with the Forest Service I and my Family lived in the Mountains 1 or more hours from a Church during the summers for half my carrier I worked week ends. THAT IS WHEN MAN CAUSED FIRES START and you want the most fire fighters available. Patrols, Engine crews, Helitack Crews Smoke Jumpers, and Hot Shots. In southern Calif. our fire season started in early march and went till the end of November.
This always struck me as strange on this crew,. How ever as I noted above some Pickup crews may be from church or missionary groups. Those have their prayer times, but they are not recruiting members.
I guess I have mixed feelings about what GM was actually doing and how involved it was in Hiring and work???????
Reply to Bob Powers post on April 24, 2015 at 9:31 am
>> Bob Powers said…
>>
>> While I am a Christian This aspect of the crew is outside
>> federal employment and federal work ethics as well as
>> discrimination.
>> Was it a requirement that all GM hires had to be Christian?
I don’t think so… but as I said up above… this ASPECT of the ‘Granite Mountain’ operation still hasn’t been talked about much.
Probably because some people think even talking about this kind of stuff is some kind of ‘third rail’, or something.
I believe there were some Mormons on the squad… and as I’m sure you are aware… some of these ‘fundamental Christian’ sects don’t even consider the Mormons to be ‘Christians’ at all. They view that organization more like a ‘cult’. There were a lot of not-so-veiled statements to that effect emerging from some ‘Christian leaders’ when Mitt Romney ( a Mormon ) was running for President.
We already know that the Prescott Wildland Division Chief ( Darrell Willis ) is/was practically a preacher-wannabee and would insert ‘God’ and/or ‘Jesus’ into every conversation he could get away with…
…but whether those ‘on his sleeve’ religious beliefs ended up influencing any HIRING practices has never been fully determined.
It’s also sort of a mystery where Marsh stood on the whole ‘God’ part of the ‘God, Guts and Glory’ narrative they had going there in that ‘Granite Mountain’ organization.
He was a recovering alcoholic… but there’s no word whether his original detox was through the usual AA channels or not.
Unless there’s some real evidence I missed… I would only venture a guess that Marsh fell somewhere on the agnostic scale.
In other words… there’s no evidence that Eric Marsh was ever ‘taking a knee in the endzone’ like Tim Tebow, or something.
It’s actually a little funny after all this time and all this investigating and all this reporting that this kind of thing is NOT fully known about Eric Marsh.
Was he QUIET about his own religious beliefs… or was he all ‘up front and center’ about that like his boss Darrell Willis always was?
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> I have had people on a crew from many different religions If
>> people wanted to have a prayer privately that was their choice.
>> I Had Muslims, LDS, different Christian faith’s and yes an
>> occasional Atheist.
>>
>> The Crew my father died with were all Christian Missionary’s.
>>
>> Fire Fighters work some times 7 days a week few are lucky
>> enough to have Sundays off. Most crews and fire fighters in
>> general work 6 to 8 months a year with weekends as part of
>> their duty time. So most do not see the inside of a church
>> during fire season. Religion, Baptism and prayer are not a
>> normal part of a Hot Shot Crew or most other crews.
There is also no evidence ( yet ) that “Bible Story Time” and stuff like Whitted convincing McDonough that Jesus was his Savior was ever actually ‘on the agenda’ for Granite Mountain, the organization.
It might have been just ‘campfire stuff’.
Taking a knee before and after on-the-job hikes like Tim Tebow would do on the football field is a different matter altogether… but there really is no evidence that kind of “Praise the Lord” stuff was going with GM DURING work hours.
Then again… ( as I said up above )… I’m not sure this has all been actually fully researched even after all this time.
>> Bob Powers also said…
>>
>> Once I started with the Forest Service I and my Family lived in the
>> Mountains 1 or more hours from a Church during the summers for
>> half my carrier I worked week ends. THAT IS WHEN MAN CAUSED
>> FIRES START and you want the most fire fighters available.
>> Patrols, Engine crews, Helitack Crews Smoke Jumpers, and Hot
>> Shots. In southern Calif. our fire season started in early march
>> and went till the end of November.
>>
>> This always struck me as strange on this crew,. How ever as I
>> noted above some Pickup crews may be from church or
>> missionary groups. Those have their prayer times, but they
>> are not recruiting members.
>>
>> I guess I have mixed feelings about what GM was actually doing
>> and how involved it was in Hiring and work???????
Well… the CONTEXT in which it all might be relevant is the fact that 17 men allowed 2 others to lead them to their deaths and (apparently) NONE of them spoke up about it.
The question that remains, then, is what kind of ‘culture’ or ‘work environment’ or ‘work atmosphere’ existed that could cause that to happen… and what’s a good way to mitigate that sort of thing from happening AGAIN.
The MILITARY aspects were certainly already there… in “full metal jacket”, as they say. That’s a given. But I don’t think the religious aspects have ever been fully factored into the equation. Not yet, anyway.
There IS evidence this particular organization had a LOT of people involved that could be called “Bible Thumpers” and they wore their beliefs on their sleeves ( right up to the Wildland Division Chief ).
How that, combined with the MILITARY ‘culture’ firmly in place, might have contributed to what ended up happening on June 30, 2013 is something that hasn’t been fully looked at yet. Not really.
Maybe Kyle Dickman really DOES sort of ‘get into this’ in his upcoming book.
Not in any judgmental way… but just a better reporting of the ‘facts’.
In all the reporting that was flying around in the months following the tragedy… Kyle Dickman was the only one who even bothered to mention that the attention to ‘God’ and ‘The Bible’ in this organization was strong enough that Clayton Whitted was out there in the fireline actively helping people like Brendan McDonough COME TO JESUS… WHILE they are fighting a fire.
That’s unique… and interesting information that only Dickman reported.
Maybe Mr. Dickman has expounded on this and explores this aspect of that organization a little more in his new book. We shall see.
Typo…not the man you named marti…RM…
MARTI- I WILL REPLY IN CAPS BELOW TO THE LAST CHAPTER COMMENT YOU MADE.
Marti Reed says
April 21, 2015 at 6:22 pm
Joy:
I have to admit I LOLLED when I read this:
“Where is my Angostura aromatic bitters?”
I WISH I COULD “LOL”…ACTUALLY IT IS A MIX OF QUININE AND AROMATIC BITTERS BUT LATELY I MAY TOSS IN A FEW GRANOLA IN IT BECAUSE I HAVE TO EAT BUT WHO WANTS TO EAT WHEN SUCH CRAP IS BEING PLAYED OUT IN SUCH A MANNER AS IT IS TO MAKE ME SO ILL. I AM NOT SAD OR MAD THAT A BOOK IS COMING OUT. SHIT, DICKMAN’S WE PRE-ORDERED HIS OFF AMAZON IF NOT JUST TO DISSECT IT TOO AND WE WILL WHEN JOHN MACLEAN AND FERNANDA SANTOS DO AND I HOPE MICHAEL KODAS AND HOLLY NEILL DO AS WELL…THE PART THAT UPSETS ME IS THERE IS NOT A NIGHT I CAN GO TO SLEEP THAT I THINK OF THE KIDS OF THESE MEN WHO PERISHED AND I WANT US ALL TO BE ABLE TO PIECE THIS PUZZLE AND BECAUSE OF THAT REASON I AM GOING TO SHARE A LITTLE MORE ABOUT THE HISTORY AFTER THE YARNELL HILL FIRE. IN THE VERY BEGINNING IN EVACUATION DEWANNA SPOKE TO US AND IT SEEM ODD SO WHEN THAT HAPPENED I THOUGHT “KOOKIE” LADY BUT THAN WHAT SHE SAID CAME TO TRUE…GLOBE AND KINGMAN AREA FIRE…???…THAN WE GET JOANNA DODDER NELLANS SAYING THE VERY PHOTOS AND VIDEOS WE HAVE HAS THE GRANITE MOUNTAIN HOTSHOTS, HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?
YET YOU DO NOT SEE MANY STORIES BY HER ON NEW DEVELOPMENTS ESPECIALLY WHEN AZCENTRAL PUT OUT A PIECE NOT ACCURATE. AS TIME UNFOLDED AND WE HAD HIKES AND PEOPLE COMING TO US EVEN AT THE YARNELL POST OFFICE OR PRESCOTT LIBRARY OR EVEN BUCKY’S CASINO IT BEGAN TO ADD UP “ODD” AS MAYBE THERE WAS MORE TO THIS FIRE THAN WHAT IS SHOWN. THAN I LEARNED BY A LOS ANGELES CHIEF THAT THEY RESTRICTED MY HIKING AREA AND SO I CONTACTED PAXON/PAYNE AND GOT A MAP. AS I HIKED PEOPLE I WOULD LET THEM KNOW AREA THEY WERE HIKING ON. WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT TO HOLLY NEILL FOR ME TO HIKE HER AND ERIC MARSH’S BEST FRIEND TO A CERTAIN SPOT BY THE SHRINE AREA LAST SUMMER? SHE NEVER BOUNCED BACK AND FORTH TO ME ON IT YET I WOULD THINK SHE WOULD WANT TO CONNECT TO THE PERSON WHO SHOWED US THE VIDEO BUT NEVER WAS ASKED THAT SO THAT SEEMED STRANGE. WHAT WAS STRANGE IS ON THAT HIKE HER GOOD FRIENDS TOLD ME STUFF HOLLY NEILL NEVER TOLD ME SO THAT SET WRONG I LEARNED IT FROM ANOTHER VS HER. NOW, HOLLY NEILL IS TO ME A TRUE LADY AND A WOMAN YOUNG WOMEN SHOULD LOOK UP TO AND I STRONGLY SUPPORT ANY BOOK SHE PUT OUT. THE ONLY THING I PUBLICLY COMMENTED WAS WE NEED TO STATE IF MARSH WAS AT RANCH AS IT WAS WRITTEN AT BILL GABBERT’S THAN WHERE IS THE SOURCE OF SUCH INFORMATION. SOURCES DO MEAN “SOMETHING”. I WOULD LOVE TO READ A BOOK BY GARY OLSON AND MURRAY TAYLOR BECAUSE OF THEIR STYLE OF WRITING. THE MOST IMPORTANT NEW INFORMATION AND BUCKY’S CASINO VIDEO SURVEIILANCE CAN NUMBER ONE CONFIRM I WAS PRESENT FIRST AND I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THE EVENT BUT VERY ODD GOD SHARED TO US NOT JUST A FEW FIREFIGHTERS BUT HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF ALL KINDS OF RANKS. SOME DAY I WILL WRITE ABOUT EACH AND EVERYONE THAT SPOKE TO US THAT NIGHT AND THEREAFTER. THERE IS INDEED MORE TO THIS FIRE. WHAT I HAVE SEEN AND HEARD IS THEIR HANDS ARE TIED DUE TO FEAR AND CAREER. SAD. WHY ARE SO MANY PEOPLE WHO WERE “ON THE SCENE” NOT EVEN INTERVIEWED OR MENTIONED IN SAIR OR WITH OSHA? WHY? WHY IS MY CASE LABELLED “HIGH PROFILE” WHEN RESEARCHING OUT FOR A LAWYER (TO HAVE A LAWYER TELL ME THEY CAN WIN THE CASE AT A HIGH FEE AND WHEN I LEARNED HOW I THOUGHT—HORSESHIT—I AM ACCOUNTABLE AND RESPONSIBLE FOR MY COMMENT BUT AGAIN MY COMMENT CAME ABOUT AFTER AUTHORITY ROLE HARRASSMENT AND THEY WERE TAKING THE SIMPLICITY OF MY CASE TO CREATE ANGLE AND AGENDA; NO THANKS- RATHER NOT HAVE LEGAL HELP OR HAVE A WIN WIN ATTITUDE IF THAT IS WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN) TO THAN HAVE MY CASE COME TO AN ORDER 4-17-15 WITHOUT ME BEING NOTIFIED/PRESENT AND MY HUSBAND CALLED ME TODAY TO LET ME KNOW THE PAPERWORK MADE IT IN AND HE AND THE CLERK SAID I WOULD HAVE TO HAVE A LAWYER EXPLAIN IT TO ME; THE THREE PAGES. I AM IN NO HURRY TO GET THE PAPERS WHEN I SAW THE JUDGE WHO SIGNED THIS ORDER WAS ONE WHO IN RECENT YEARS WAS APPOINTED BY THE SAME JUDGE WHO DID MY ORIGINAL HEARING. WHY IS IT MY CASE WAS SUPERFAST AND MY APPEALS NEVER HAPPENED JUST RECEIVED PAPERWORK WITH ORDER AFFIRMED… I NEVER SAW IT YET BUT SEEMS SAD THIS JUSTICE SYSTEM. SURE GLAD I DO NOT HAVE TO BE IN A COURT ROOM THOUGH. NOW AS FOR ANY OF THESE CASES I NO LONGER WILL GO WILLINGLY/FREELY INTO ANY CASE DUE TO THE UNJUST WAY MY CASE WAS SHOWN; FIRST FIND MY ASS THAN SUBPEONEA MY ASS IS MY WAY OF THINKING NOWADAYS. YOU ARE SUPPOSE TO BE ABLE TO APPEALS OR ASK FOR CHANGE OF VENUE…I BET YOU ALL DID NOT KNOW BUT MY FAMILY HAS STILL BEEN APPROACHED…WARNED…ETC…THIS 2015. —THAT ALONE TELLS ME SOMETHING. I AM OUT CAVING AWAY FROM CIVILIZATION SO NOT MUCH THEY CAN DO TO BOTHER ME. I AM HANGING OUT WITH SONNY’S BUCKAROO TENNESEE WALKER HORSE “FAITH” AND 3 JACKASSES (JASPER/PICO/GRACIE) AND WE HAVE PEACOCKS AND TURKEYS ON OUR HIKES NOW—FUNNY SCENE. GO LOOK MY NAME UP ON ANY INMATE/COURT RECORDS ACROSS THE USA AND I HAVE ONE WHERE A DEFAULTY PHOTO LIGHT CAUGHT ME AND 3 OTHERS WITH FLOW OF TRAFFIC AND THAT DANG SUN GLARE ON GLASSFORD HILLS RD WHEN CARNIVAL WAS IN TOWN AND I HAD BIG RIG AND FIFTH WHEEL I WAS GOING WITH TRAFFIC. I GOT THE OTHERS CONTACT INFORMATION AND WENT TO THE STATION AND ALERTED THEM. I WAS GOING TO FIGHT TICKET BUT I HAD SO MANY JOBS AT THAT TIME I JUST PAID IT AND DID A CLASS BECAUSE EVERYONE SAID IT’S THE “IN” THING BUT I FELT I WAS RIGHT AND GUESS WHAT THE OTHERS NEVER GOT A TICKET IN THE MAIL BUT ME…KINDA THE WAY THIS SUCKY WORLD GOES…THEY WERE SO BIG THE VEHICLES THAT I WAS THE ONE CAUGHT IN A TINY ASS YARIS. NOW MY CASE IS DONE IN REGARDS TO THE YHF AFTERMATH AND A COMMENT I MADE ON INVESTIGATIVE MEDIA LAST FALL 2013. THE ORDER ENDS AT THE END OF THE YEAR. IF THEY COME UP TO A NEW YEAR AND PULL THIS SHIT AGAIN…ENOUGH! REALLY. IT HAS TO STOP! NOW THE INFORMATION OR NAME DROPPING I WANT TO GIVE JOHN DOUGHERTY DOES REFER BACK TO THE MANY PEOPLE WHO KEPT COMING TO US THIS 2015 BUT I JUST RECORDED IT AND LEFT IT ALONE BECAUSE IT SERVED NO PURPOSE FOR THE CHILDREN OF THE GMHS FATHERS AND FOR THAT ALL I CAN CONTINUE TO STATE IS THERE IS MORE DETAILS AND THESE PEOPLE NEED TO COME FORWARD. ALSO THE TRUE HERO IS THE MAN WHO PICKED UP BRENDAN. THAT BOOK WOULD BE A BETTER SELLER THAN BRENDAN’S BOOK INDEED. WHO ELSE WOULD MAKE A GOOD BOOK? SOME OF THESE YARNELL HOMEOWNERS WITH THEIR VIDEO/PHOTO/ACCOUNTS. THAT IS FOR SURE. HOW COME THE PEOPLE NEXT TO THE HELM’S WERE NEVER INTERVIEWED AS THEY SAW BRENDAN LEAVE? THEY COULD HELP CONFIRM TIMES AND STATE BRENDAN WAS IN…RIGHT?!
But seriously.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by this:
“I hope the realism cores to the beginning of the day on 6-30-13 when changing at the crew buggies off Sesame Street area and Brendan mentions the one man who was having radio concerns from the start”
Are you talking about Rance Marquez, who is the only one who seems to have been having trouble with that?
NO, I AM TALKING ABOUT THAT MAN YOU MENTIONED BUT BRENDAN… FOR HIM TO BE OPEN ABOUT THAT MORNING AT THE CREW BUGGIES AS THEY GEARED UP AND HE NEEDS TO SPEAK DID ANY OF THEM HAVE COMMUNICATION CONCERNS FROM THE GET GO? AND WHEN ANSWERING IT REMEMBER THE HIKERS WERE NEAR THEM THAT MORNING…I DID NOT KNOW WHO THEY WERE AT THE TIME BUT YOU ALL HAVE TO REMEMBER WHERE WE HIKED UP THAT MORNING…ALSO BRENDAN CAN SHARE IN ALL HONESTY HIS DEMEANOR AT THE BUGGIES AND HE CAN SHARE TO ALL WHY HE BECAME THE LOOKOUT.
And you say this:
“I hope he talks about “how” he became the lookout for that Yarnell Hill Fire versus another person.”
Absolutely!!!!!
EVERYTHING I have read/watched/heard says that a Lookout needs to be an EXPERIENCED (even to the level of a squad boss) wildland firefighter, completely on top of his/her game, who has enough authority to be able to even, if necessary, challenge decisions that are being contemplated by the Captain/Supervisor.
Sometimes, even, that Lookout is “elevated” to be a Division Lookout.
I totally don’t understand this decision.THAT IS WHERE BRENDAN CAN ELABORATE ON TOPIC
To the extent that, it seems to me, a REAL Lookout would have, even if evacuated the way Brendan was, would STILL have understood the importance of continuing to keep track of both the SITUATION (even to the extent of driving to the Ranch House Restaurant, or even the Yarnell Fire Department, where he could have continued to keep his eyes on both the fire and the crew) and the location of the crew.
What is this deal about Granite Mountain choosing to designate their Lookout on the basis, seemingly, of his not really being quite “up to it” on the fireline that day?????
This has ALWAYS bugged me.IT SHOULD BUG BRENDAN TOO. IT SHOULD BUG HIM SOOOO MUCH THAT HE WOULD JUST OPEN UP AND SHARE VERSUS ALL THIS SHENANIGAN
You wrote:
“I hope when he writes the book he has it engrained that 2 track ridge moment that aired over the radios and where a lady dispatcher is not in SAIR/OSHA reports nor ever interviewed. ”
I’m not exactly sure what you are referring to here, but I do know that you have periodically mentioned this dispatcher being silenced.WE WERE TOLD BY FROM LOCALS TO FOLKS ON THE FIRE TO SO MANY AVENUES HAVE COME TO THE HIKERS THAT THIS WOMAN CAN SHARE A GREAT DEAL OF THE FINAL HOURS YET NO WHERE ON ANY REPORTS.
You said:
“Terrible news for me personally to hear that this young man has decided to make the first account be shown in a book deal versus just coming out when SOOOOOO many lives were lost and SOOOOOO many lives this has affected…what a true shame.”
See what we’ve been discussing above along the lines that Brendan (or his publishing “handlers”) may THINK he can just make the first account be in a book deal, but that dog ain’t gonna hunt, all things considered.I RECKON BECAUSE BELIEVE IT OR NOT I HAVE HAD MY LIMELIGHT PHASE ALREADY AND IN THAT I KNOW THE INS ON THE HORESHIT THAT TRAGEDY SELLS…AND WHAT IS GOING ON…SOME TRY TO JUSTIFY TO ME THAT IT IS OKAY AND IT IS NOT OKAY FOR MANY REASONS…
You wrote”
“is it hearsay or facts?”
I think it’s facts, at this point.I HOPE IT IS JUST PROPAGANDA AND HYPE AND NOT FACTS
I thinks it’s a possibility, however, that it won’t stay “facts” for very long.
See what I wrote above about how it appears he may have been recruited into this “book deal,” and the deal was announced on that Publishers Marketplace website, at which point AZCentral decided to interview the agent, and then VOILA we now have what we now have.
The fruit-basket has been seriously upset.
EVENTUALLY, the TRUTH of this fire is going to emerge. It has to.I AM NOT SO GUNGHO ON THAT ANYMORE—I USE TO HAVE FAITH IN THAT—YET I SEE HOW RIDICULOUS THIS WORLD IS—
As you say, In God’s time.ASSURED IN HIS TIME BUT I AM NOT HAPPY WITH WHAT IS GOING ON… I’m not a major believer in what most Americans call “God.” On the other hand, I DO believe the Universe is intelligent, and, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of it bends toward justice.
As long as we HUMANS (as in all the recent PUSHES in the direction of truth and accountability regarding Police Brutality indicate) keep staying “AWOKE” and unwavering.
Which is EXACTLY what you and Sonny have been doing along.
And so I thank you, in general, and, specifically, for writing this post.SONNY AND I THANK YOU FOR THAT—IT IS TRUE. WE DON’T EQUIVOCATE—EXCEPT MAYBE MY EMOTIONS— IT HAS BEEN A HARD JOURNEY TO LOOK AT AERIAL’S AND FOOTAGE AND THINK WE ARE NOT MUCH CLOSER TO THE TRUTH AND FOR PEOPLE TO THINK JUST BECAUSE DONUT OPENS UP FINALLY THAT THE TRUTH WILL BE KNOWN—THAT IS NOT NECESSARILY TRUE….
Reply
Thanks WTKT for the laugh–crazy town and I am still smiling about that comment. There are several things that are apparent regarding Donut. First he could not have had much of a bond with the others involved in the tragedy. He was a part timer and undoubtedly not greatly concerned with what happened to the others else he would not have kept back what he knew from the beginning. He must have seen an opportunity for profit or someone coached him on keep his pie hole zipped and the opportunity to profit hit him some later. It is a case of dollars over truth–and a young man who has denigrated his character before men of honor.
When it comes to crime, burglars and child molesters are highest to repeat. Maybe liars are right up there with them, In most instances where 19 deaths were involved and an official investigation was willfully mislead. one would expect some judicial anger. Not much here.
The guy who wondered how Donut’s book will be classified I had another laugh. Stretched truth and lies, history as written by influences. and now outside influences, memory distortion, dollar sign eyes, and a number of other factors will have changed the story Donut has for us. It will be questionable bias and perhaps some of the wiser ones here will able to clean it up some to get the real story out of what is said.
Fortunately Donut escaped. Witnesses said when they saw the faces of Donut and the guy who retrieved him, they decided they better leave Yarnell immediately.
Does a year of part time fire fighting make you an expert at anything. Not a guy I would think I would want as a look out. What is his actual experience on a fire? How much time would he have to understand how to survive–apparently he did not have that knowledge and only a brave blue ridge guy took a risk of his own life to save Donut. That blue ridge guy is a hero and maybe they ought to make a movie on him while Donut is the inadequately trained fire fighter whose only hope of survival depended on that blue ridge guy. I truly think the movie maker has this thing wrong. The youngster that is withholding the truth had only survived because a truly brave and knowledgeable firefighter saved him.
Does Donut think the system did him wrong and now he is repaying by withholding that crucial information? Something I wanted to add in finding reason one would keep facts hidden. Listening to his monotone talks makes me think there is an absence of affect–something that would cause a disregard for the harm the withholding of facts would be to the loved ones and others involved in this investigation.
Reply to Sonny post on April 23, 2015 at 4:05 pm
>> Sonny said…
>>
>> Does Donut think the system did him wrong and now he is
>> repaying by withholding that crucial information?
At this point… there is no telling what Brendan McDonough does or doesn’t ‘think’ about anything. Until he, himself, actually comes out and SAYS why he committed a class 2 misdemeanor and purposely “obstructed official investigations”… it’s hard to say WHAT his motivations really were/are.
>> Sonny also said…
>>
>> Listening to his monotone talks makes me think there is an
>> absence of affect–something that would cause a disregard
>> for the harm the withholding of facts would be to the loved
>> ones and others involved in this investigation.
I agree. If you go back and actually LISTEN to the AUDIO recordings of the ADOSH interviews with Brendan McDonough and you now keep in mind the FULL range of information that was in his possession… but he was REFUSING to share with the ADOSH investigators…
…then the only conclusion that can be made is that you are witnessing ‘one cool cucumber’ who almost represents a ‘professional liar’ the way he can keep so cool as the investigators get closer and closer to what he has decided he is NOT going to share with them.
It’s impressive.
Is that one of the side-effects of PTSD?
It can turn you into an absolutely cool-as-a-cucumber bald-faced LIAR?
( And if anyone tries to say that listening to someone trying that hard to NOT share what they know during an interview isn’t the same as listening to someone actual LIE about something they saw/heard… I have some land I want to sell you down in the Everglades ).
In some cases… I think what we now hear Brendan pulling off in those ADOSH interviews is even HARDER than just telling straight-up bald-face lies about something you saw or heard.
Or requires more SKILLS at being DECEPTIVE, anyway.
First, I want to say I agree with Sonny’s assessment of McDonough and the situation in general one hundred per cent.
Secondly, I want to point out that the law views an OMISSION of the truth in the exact way same as a LIE. Omitting facts is the same as lying about facts.
Reply to Sonny post on April 23, 2015 at 3:29 pm
>> Sonny said…
>>
>> There are several things that are apparent regarding Donut.
>> First he could not have had much of a bond with the others involved
>> in the tragedy.
There’s actually no question that Brendan had an UNUSUAL bond with SOME of those men, but since others were also in their FIRST season in 2013 it’s also true to say they probably didn’t know ‘Donout’ at all… and vice-versa.
So it was a ‘mixed bag’ as far as ‘bonding’ goes. Close to some, but not at all to others.
For the ones that Brendan WAS ‘close’ to… it’s safe to say it was a STRONG bond.
This wasn’t just a JOB to Brendan. It was a ‘way to be’ and, in almost a very literal sense, represented some kind of ‘salvation’ to a kid whose life had been recently spiraling out of control.
Kyle Dickman ( whose own book is due out this coming May 12 ) wrote in his article over a year ago that Brendan was even ‘baptized’ ( or something close to it ) by GM Squad Boss Clayton Whitted just two weeks before the tragedy in Yarnell.
Here is that quote from Kyle Dickman’s original article at…
Outside Online Magazine
Article Title: 19: The True Story of the Yarnell Hill Fire
Published: Sep 17, 2013 by Kyle Dickman ( former Hotshot )
http://www.outsideonline.com/1926426/19-true-story-yarnell-hill-fire
From the article… regarding Brendan being ‘close’ to some GM crew…
——————————————————————————-
After his first season, he’d proven himself to the rest of the men. Last year he got a tattoo on his calf of a frosted doughnut combined with Granite Mountain’s logo. “Now they tell me, ‘You’re slower than shit and look like a Neanderthal, but we know you won’t quit,’ ” Donut says. “They’re more my brothers than my actual brother.”
It’s a familiar story in hotshotting: the discipline and rigor of crew life puts wayward young men on track. But Granite Mountain had a more nurturing atmosphere than most crews. Clayton Whitted, a squad boss like Robert, was a former youth pastor at the Heights Church in Prescott. During some shifts on the fire line, the crew would openly discuss Jesus or ask Clayton to tell stories from the Bible. It was through him that Donut accepted Jesus as his savior, on a fire in New Mexico two weeks before Yarnell Hill.
—————————————————————————————
>> He was a part timer and undoubtedly not greatly
>> concerned with what happened to the others else he would not have
>> kept back what he knew from the beginning.
I think “in the beginning” ( as in… right after the tragedy happened ) was a pretty crucial time for Brendan.
I mean… you have to REMEMBER what was actually happening back then in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
All the PUBLIC was being told was that 19 (supposedly) ‘elite’ Hotshot firefighters were found burned to death on the floor of a blind box canyon… and that there had apparently been no LOOKOUT to warn them they had been steadily walking into a deathtrap.
Then we also immediately hear that the only member of the crew to SURVIVE was, in fact, the same guy who had been designated to be their LOOKOUT that day.
There were VERY few details coming out at first… but until we all started to learn more it really didn’t look very good for this LOOKOUT who also then suddenly had a name… Brendan McDonough.
Then we hear about his ‘record’. Thefts, drugs, etc. Again… before even more details emerge about what happened on June 30, 2013.
So for a while there… it made perfect sense that Brendan McDonough was ‘lawyering up’ and being careful who he was talking to and about what.
I don’t blame him for any of that ‘initial’ carefulness.
The way it all looked for a while… he NEEDED to be talking to a ‘lawyer’.
Time went on, more details emerged ( and were confirmed ), and it eventually became obvious that regardless of whether Brendan was ever really qualified or experienced enough to have been designated as a LOOKOUT that day… his actual involvement in the actual burnover in the box canyon was pretty much zero. He had been officially ‘relieved’ of his previous lookout duties and no one had even ASKED him to RESUME those duties that day once he had ‘evacuated’ from that spot by the old grader.
But even so… some people were ( and are? ) still looking at Brendan ‘sideways’ just for what he did ( or didn’t ) DO that afternoon. Some still think that no matter whether anyone had specifically ASKED him to… it should have been obvious to Brendan that he needed to find a new place to ‘keep an eye’ on them as they made that risky move to the BSR.
>> Sonny also said…
>>
>> He must have seen an opportunity for profit or someone coached him
>> on keep his pie hole zipped and the opportunity to profit hit him some
>> later. It is a case of dollars over truth–and a young man who has
>> denigrated his character before men of honor.
Somewhere along the line… I think Brendan’s original legitimate need to be ‘careful’ what he said and who he said it too ( because of the very real chance he could be actually charged with negligence or dereliction of duty ) turned into ‘something else’.
Some kind of ‘contest’ like “Ask me the right questions and I MIGHT give you the right answers… but if you don’t ask me the right questsions… Ha ha… tough shit… I’m not going to volunteer anything”.
We still don’t know if THAT attitude that he took with him into the ADOSH interviews was just ‘coaching’ from his attorney Emily Dolan, or was coming from Prescott City ‘handlers’ like Jon Paladini and/or Darrell Willis… or if Brendan had really already made this “I’m not going to tell them what I really know” decision all by himself.
What Brendan still fails to realize is that for as long as he has let this go on… and with all these incremental ‘decision points’ of his own… the STORY of WHY he was basically committing the class 2 misdemeanor crime of ‘obstructing an official investigation’ is now just as much a part of the WHOLE STORY here as it is what he did or didn’t hear over a radio on June 30, 2013.
BOOK DEALS don’t result in a real ‘cross-examination’.
THAT is what Brendan still seems really ‘afraid’ of… and has been from day one.
People (finally) actually ASKING him the RIGHT questions and he HAS to answer them.
He ‘loses control’ at that point… and he doesn’t want that to happen.
I really don’t care what Brendan’s ‘motivations’ are at this point.
I also don’t think he fully realizes how SICK people are of hearing about him.
For the sake of the ‘full story’ and ‘for the record’… I still think he needs to be DEPOSED, under-oath, and in a setting that *could* actually result in perjury charges if he decides to try and bullshit his way through the depositions and still ‘control the story’.
After that… I don’t care how much money he makes as “The lone survivor of the Granite Mountain Hotshots”.
I don’t care if they make a movie and he gets to do a cameo as the “third Hotshot from the left”, in the background.
I don’t care if he goes to work for whatever helicopter company is going to be offering expensive private ‘aerial tours’ of the area ( and you know someone is going to ).
He still needs to have TESTIFIED to what he knows BEFORE he starts milking that knowledge like it’s some kind of cash cow.
And if Brendan himself can’t see the SENSE of that… and that that is the way it needs to go down… then he really DOES need professional help.
I think another piece of the puzzle is The BRIHS if as we believe one or more of them also herd the entire discussion on GM Crew Net.
As long as the FS keeps the muzzle on the FS Employees Brendan is free to hold
what he knows.
If the BR crew knows something and one or more of those crew members no longer works for the FS/Government, They are all of a sudden free to open up Pandora’s box and Brendan has lost his with held surprise information.
Brendan is walking a very narrow path to protect what he herd as long as the Feds keep a check on there employees Brendan is free to wait and see if he is called to testify. Right now he holds the cards in a good poker hand. He can hold them or fold them when he wants to or is forced to.
I think Brendan knows that he can’t control what the FEDS are ( or are NOT ) doing… and I don’t think he, himself, is even SURE any of the other Blue Ridge Hotshots who were driving the other THREE GM vehicles heard the same things he did.
So given both of those realities… I think he’s decided not to worry for one second about what any Blue Ridge Hotshots may or may not know.
What Brendan CAN ‘control’ is who HE is talking to… and what HE is telling them.
That’s why I think the BOOK DEAL option looks like the ‘way to go’ in Brendan’s mind.
Brendan wants to remain ‘in control’ of WHO he is talking to…. and WHAT he is revealing.
What I believe scares Brendan most, even now, is not so much the part of a deposition where he finally has to tell what he has always known… what SCARES him is the ‘cross-examination’ part.
You know… actual adults asking him question that he is REQUIRED to answer truthfully… with no bullshit games.
I think that scenario ( and the loss of control it represents ) still SCARES him.
Easier to work slowly ( and carefully ) with an ‘author’ who is being PAID to not be too ‘rough’ on you or ‘piss you off’.
It’s complicated, fer sure… but even now I think Brendan’s ‘choices’ are more based on how he thinks he can somehow remain ‘in control’.
Even now… I believe he still WANTS to remain ‘in control’ and NOT have to answer questions he doesn’t really want to answer.
NOTE: The last posting from Chapter 13 brought forward to this new Chapter 14…
On April 22, 2015 at 11:40 pm, Gary Olson said…
Well…it seems I owe Brendan an apology.
“I’m sorry for every thing I have said about you up until now Brendan, we can all learn something from how clever you are, at least I know I can.”
You have played everybody for a fool and now you will get the last laugh on your way to the bank. Isn’t America Great?
On April 23, 2015 at 1:06 am, Gary Olson also said…
Oh, and one more thing. I’m not going to buy any of the books, I am going to wait for the movie to come out. I bet there won’t be a dry eye in the house. I thought the movie about the Maersk Alabama was pretty good, although I did wait for it to come out on DVD. But I won’t do the same for the movie about the Yarnell HIll Fire, I will pay full ticket price with surround sound!
P.S. Marti…you could have written a book, but you can’t sell something you have demonstrated you are willing to give away for free. How much do you want to bet this thread is being used for research by any number of people writing books about the Yarnell Hill Fire and the day the Lone Survivor fought his way through the flames and lived to tell the tale…for a price?
P.S. WTKTT…if the Administrative Law Judge who is hearing this case had any stones, we would have already heard Brendan’s story by now…so don’t hold breath waiting for him to compel Brendan to talk.
Now that’s what I call a tight Brotherhood!
Gary… I’m still not sure about Judge Michael A. Mosesso and what his ‘SAND’ level is.
There’s really no telling what this particular Judge might do once he comes to realize that there’s a good chance the key witness in this case he happens to be presiding over is ( and HAS been ) basically just jerking EVERYBODY off.
Some Judges don’t take kindly to that or the ‘contempt’ for the court proceedings that it demonstrates…so I suppose we shall see what’s going to happen here.
As for the’book deal’… your instincts above are spot on. It’s pretty much a given, already, that this is just as much a MOVIE deal as it is a BOOK deal.
That’s how this Steve Fisher ( Brendan’s Beverly Hills agent ) guy operates. He doesn’t even DO deals unless there’s a screenplay and a movie looming ‘on the horizon’.
Ditto for this Stephan Talty ‘ghost writer’.
Ever since he coauthored the ‘Captain Philips’ book and got a taste of the kind of money that shows up when there’s also the chance of a movie deal… those are the projects HE has been focusing on as well.
One of the troubling aspects of both Fisher and Talty’s involvement is that neither one is dedicated to the TRUTH nearly as much as they are dedicated to just having a successful return on whatever they get involved with.
These guys are NOT biographers or interested in doing a documentary.
They are in the MOVIE business.
To this day… the other members of the Crew of the ‘Maersk Alabama’ cargo ship are ‘suing’ over what they say were the obvious ‘falsehoods’ in Captain Richard Philip’s original book that was co-authored by this Stephan Talty guy.
For starters… they say there was too much ‘glossing over’ the realities in order to make Philips look like “the hero”. They say there were many “bad decisions with good outcomes” going on BEFORE this incident and that Captain Philips had been taking WAAY too many chances in those known-dangerous waters prior to the actual bad-incident.
The chances of anything really ACCURATE and TRUTHFUL coming out of this “McDonough / Fisher / Talty” tryst aren’t looking too good.
If it’s anything like the ‘Captain’s Duty’ book that Talty co-wrote with Captain Phillips himself… some facts will be there… but it will be a ‘treatment’ of the story designed to move on to a screenplay and a movie.
FYI- I hope you are right about the Judge and I am completely wrong.
Awhile back, someone requested some good video footage of wildland fire burning around a Safety Zone. Here is a link for the August 11, 204 Beaver Fire Entrapment Facilitated Learning Analysis (FLA). There is another link embedded in the FLA for the YouTube video footage of the event. This occurred on the Klamath National Forest in Northern California. This was a very interesting event with a good outcome and many lessons to be learned. Both reading the report and watching the video will benefit and educate you. Go to the center of page 13 for the video clip and several fire progression photos
http://www.nifc.gov/wfstar/modules/summary/2014season/Beaver_Fire_Entrapment_FLA.pdf
I realize that you all are onto other subjects now but just wanted to close a loop here.