Free Fire by Sebastian Junger Page A

Blanco on the ridgeline, who was hurriedly conducting the evacuation. “This was a much stronger warning than the previous one,” recalled Haugh. “I sent my swamper to the ridgetop with the saw and radioed that as soon as the lower Prineville contingent came into sight below me, I would bump up to the safe zone.”
    Suddenly, fierce westerly winds drove the fire dangerously close—though still hidden behind the thick brush—to the unsuspecting fire fighters. “The crew was unaware of what was behind them,” said Haugh. “They were walking at a slow pace, tools still in hand and packs in place.” As Haugh watched them, a smoke jumper appeared at his side. “He said that his brother-in-law was down in the drainage, and he wanted to take his picture.”
    That fellow was Kevin Erickson, and Don Mackey was his brother-in-law, now in serious trouble below. As Erickson aimed his camera, everything below him seemed to explode. “Through the viewfinder, I saw them beginning to run, with fire everywhere behind them,” Erickson said. “As I took the picture, Brad grabbed me and turned me around. I took one more look back and saw a wall of fire coming uphill.” Closing in on Haugh and Erickson were smoke jumper James Thrash and the twelve other fire fighters in a ragged line behind him. Though Blanco and others were now screaming, “Run! Run! Run!” on the radio, Thrash chose to stop and deploy the fire shelter he would die in. Eric Hipke ran around him and followed Haugh and Erickson up the hill. The three-hundred-foot-high flames chasing them sounded like a river thundering over a waterfall.
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    I n his book Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean writes that dying in a forest fire is actually like experiencing three deaths: first the failure of your legs as you run, then the scorching of your lungs, finally the burning of your body. That, roughly, is what happens to wood when it burns. Water is driven out by the heat; then gases are superheated inside the wood and ignited; finally, the cellulose is consumed. In the end nothing is left but carbon.
    This process is usually a slow one, and fires that burn more than a few acres per hour are rare. The South Canyon fire, for example, only burned fifty acres in the first three days. So why did it suddenly rip through two thousand acres in a couple of hours? Why did one hillside explode in a chain reaction that was fast enough to catch birds in midair?
    Fire typically spreads by slowly heating the fuel in front of it—first drying it, then igniting it. Usually, a walking pace will easily keep fire fighters ahead of this process. But sometimes a combination of wind, fuel, and terrain conspires to produce a blowup in which the fire explodes out of control. One explanation for why South Canyon blew up—and the one most popular in Glenwood Springs—was that it was just so damn steep and dry up there and the wind blew so hard that the mountain was swept with flame. That’s plausible; similar conditions in other fires have certainly produced extreme fire behavior. The other explanation turns on a rare phenomenon called super-heating.
    Normally, radiant heat drives volatile gases—called turpines—out of the pinyon and juniper just minutes before they are consumed. But sometimes hot air rises up a steep slope from a blaze and drives turpines out of a whole hillside full of timber. The gases lie heavily along the contours of the slopes, and when the right combination of wind and flame reaches them, they explode. It’s like leaving your gas stove burners on for a few hours and then setting a match to your kitchen.
    A mountainside on the verge of combustion is a subtle but not necessarily undetectable thing; there are stories of crews pulling out of a creepy-feeling canyon and then watching it blow up behind them. Turpines have an odor, and that’s possibly why some of the Prineville survivors said that