their escape routes—clearly demarcated paths of retreat—and safety zones: areas cleared of flammable materials that are large enough for firefighters to weather an out-of-control blaze. Sometimes safety zones are clearings bulldozed into the “green,” the unburned vegetation beside a blaze. But more often, when a fire explodes, hotshots retreat into the cold ash left behind by the flames—the “good black.” With no chance of rekindling, it’s often the safest place to be during a rapidly intensifying fire. On the flag fire, Steed pointed inside the theoretical blaze’s perimeter. Granite Mountain’s safety zone was the good black.
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Wildland firefighters bring blazes under control by building boxes of nonflammable things around them. In one combination or another,that means surrounding the flames with water, roads, rock, bare dirt, and already burned fuel. To do this, firefighters have a relatively short list of tools at their disposal. Engines, air tankers, and helicopters use water and retardant to either knock down the fire’s spreading head or soak the vegetation ahead of the flames to slow its growth. Hotshot crews, though, use chainsaws and hand tools to remove the vegetation and create a continuous line of bare dirt or rocks around a fire.
The guiding principle of fire agencies is that the cheapest and most effective way to fight fires is to catch them when they’re small. They’re kept small by attacking them early. In a typical blaze, one of the country’s 826 operating fire lookouts—or, these days, someone with keen eyes and a cell phone—calls in a smoke report, and the closest available resources mount the initial response. The first wave of firefighters sent to a new blaze during peak fire season is usually designed to be overkill. On a hot and breezy June day, that first order might include three fire engines, a twenty-person handcrew, a helicopter, and an Air Attack plane that does what ground resources cannot by tracking the fire’s overall progression from above.
Engines, limited by road access and the amount of water they can carry, can hose down the flames faster than hotshot crews can build line. As such, in hopes of slowing the fire’s spread, engines tend to lead the initial attack while the hotshot and handcrews follow behind. If the flame lengths are small, crews build lines directly on the fire’s edge. This is called “going direct,” and if crews succeed in lassoing the blaze, the tactic stops the fire where it lies. When a fire’s burning more intensely, hotshots step back anywhere from a few hundred yards to five miles and build “indirect line” by constructing firebreaks on ridges ahead of the combustion. Once the box (which is rarely actually square) is complete, hotshots burn out or back-fire, intentionally igniting the vegetation between the line and the wild flames, thereby robbing the blaze of the fuel it needs to survive.
During the drill in the pine forest outside Prescott, the men of Granite Mountain needed to prove that they were capable of using all the skills needed to control fires of varying sizes. With Steed’s orders in hand, they broke into action.
Heavy aluminum cabinets creaked open. On one side of the buggy men found their Pulaskis—ax-adze combinations that are the signature tool of wildland firefighters—and rhinos, a burlier version of a hoe. On the opposite side, the sawyers unloaded their chainsaws while the swampers passed out red liter bottles of extra gas and oil to each crewman. On a busy day, a sawyer can go through more than twenty liters of fuel, and all the hotshots shared the burden of the extra weight. Within minutes, Granite Mountain was ready to go. With food, a jacket, files for sharpening tools, parachute cord for tying up whatever needs to be tied up in the woods, flares for lighting backfires, a lighter, a file, spare chains or chainsaw air filters, eight quarts of water, and half a dozen other random items, each