I can't guarantee it will be right.. nothing about this is right...I was a few hundred miles away when it happened, also sweltering in similar heat, and I resent the crap out of any good coming from bad, but in some funny way, that's what this blog is about, so follow if you will, on a trip that might seem a bit Machiavellian, a bit opportunistic, but if you were these 20 guys, the 19 departed and the one spotter who survived, I think you would be looking for any opportunity possible to make a difference to keep this from happening again, or becoming commonplace..
I've hung with Hot Shots before..they are a fun swaggering sort.. cocky young dudes in nature, usually 20 somethings, working hard, experiencing its rewards and it's solace, and trying to make a difference.. a lot of them tend to be veterans, looking for a bit of perspective in the great outdoors.. they get the same camaraderie, but their enemy is a physical force, somehow a relief you can't reason with it, as a forest fire just requires hard work and a bit of luck, and although it can be sad, it isn't sad the same way as a civil war or terrorism is sad.. it's nature, not misdirected man. If you spend time in the great wild areas of American West, usually public lands, or in the occasional dry years in the Appalachians or any of the big National Forests of the east, or even in the desert that is the Yukon Basin of Alaska ( 8 inches a year of precipitation on average, and it burns like you wouldn't believe most summers.. didn't know that did ya..) you will run into these scruffy cats, sportin' tan work pants, boots, official looking t shirts, usually a smile to offset the macho swagger, and it all tells you they must be a fun group to hang around a campfire with, especially if it gets out of control! They aren't smoke jumpers, they are usually too new for that, but they won't correct you if you make that mistake, but to a man, if they stick in the seasonal work long enough, they likely would make a smoke jumping instructor proud.. they are the Rangers to the smoke jumpers Special Forces, next in line, the shock troops, and there to help. They volunteer for reasons their own, and they serve their country, and to save lives, homes, and natural resources, like any other fireman, soldier, and emergency personnel you can think of..
So where am I going with this? This could be controversial, and it's a long thread to make, a tenuous one, but it can be argued that the Yarnell 19 were victims of Climate Change, and the kinds of victims a society can't ignore..
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/firefighter-built-protect-ariz-hotshots-crew-article-1.1389040
They were young, but they weren't kids.. they took the job willingly, they were too old to be victims, innocent bystanders, in fact, I would wonder just by looking at them, and knowing this kind of person, if any of them would want to be characterized that way... they saw themselves the way a SEAL Team sees themselves, or an infantry squad, or a group of cops.. they were proud to do their job and accept the risks as part of the occupation, but might be willing to cry foul if the risks are exacerbated by negligence:
Lemme quote their boss a month before this incident, from a Christian Science Monitor Article about the 19 young men from Yarnell
“On average, wildfires burn twice as many acres each year as compared to 40 years ago. Last year, the fires were massive in size, coinciding with increased temperatures and early snow melt in the West,” US Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in testimony last month.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0706/Arizona-wildfire-Details-emerge-on-tragedy-that-killed-19-hotshots/(page)/2The west has been burning more and more, and will continue to, in a vicious cycle that was first identified by climatologists and scientists in the 90s.. its a potent combination of warming temperatures, loss of biomass in some areas due to intensive uses like cattle ranging that make rains more intense but less consistent, a form of desertification, accompanied by fire suppression in other areas that make the forests more fuel laden, which leads to more intense fires that often overwhelm the fire resistance of the existing trees, and crowd out new growth. Those new trees are often destroyed, reducing their carbon trapping capacity while creating more undergrowth that is more fire prone in the spaces left by the dead trees.. There might be more factors, but you get the basic ecological ideas.. Global Warming plus 100 years of well intention-ed fire suppression, destruction of more resilient old growth stands, and ranching on public lands are leading to a dramatic and noticeable increase in fire frequency and intensity in the American west, and the sprawl of communities into these quite comfortable forest areas to live in has made more and more for the Forest Service to protect in terms of human homes and infrastructure.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/06/30/western-wildfires-are-getting-worse-why-is-that/
http://www.abc15.com/dpp/weather/weather_news/arizonas-climate-heating-up-faster-than-any-other-state
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/the-heat-is-on/
Tragedy places many above pointing fingers, it seems wrong, it seems like a violation of the sanctity of the tragedy, like arguing over a grave site, pettiness when nobility is called for, but If it is considered worthy to go after negligence in the Benghazi Embassy Attack, or in the Beirut Barracks and Embassy Bombings, or in Vietnam, Somalia, or a plane crash, or the Battle of The Alamo, then it is legitimate here, if nothing more than to understand, not to point fingers, but to find out why, because I am going to assert on the record that the record temperatures that played a part in this fire have an aspect of negligence to them, and almost all of us are guilty every time we burn fossil fuels, pour cement, or even breathe these days, but most of us are passively guilty, but our excuse of ignorance is fading.. but the actively guilty are those who are knowingly denying the human causes in Global Climate Change, lobbyists, corporations, and PR firms, and elected officials who fight these reforms as a huge crisis looms..
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/globalwarming-myth
http://environmentblog.ncpa.org/
Guess where I am going with this...
So where is the hope?
So obviously, as I step up my conspiratorial circumstance building and Militarize these guys for American deification, there is something about this incident that wasn't regular, wasn't just a fire.. every article about this incident seems to mention global warming as a potential factor, I have made the case that Arizona and the west are being dramatically impacted by the increase in Forest Fires for reasons that aren't a mystery, and unlike Katrina where the mysteriousness of the intensification of storm got replaced as the story by human suffering, politics, accusations of incompetence and even racism, even though white people in Mississippi were just as ravaged as people who do to some degree bear the burdens of living under river level, and again the story of Hurricane Sandy didn't quite explain how much was devastated, and heck, New York ain't entirely America by some peoples estimates, much the way Sept. 11 is in some ways still talked about a heck of a lot more in places other than the city where some 25 out of every 26 deaths occurred on that day, and polar bears are kind of a Disney Fantasy to some, along with Eskimos and the residents of Vanuatu or Tuvalu.. c'mon.. your island can't possibly be.. Sinking..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Tuvalu
Oh dear god it is..
You see where I am going with this now:
Try to shoot holes in the reputation of the Yarnell 19. You can't Swift Boat them, you can't say they made a huge mistake.. the wind shifted 180 degrees during the highest temperatures ever recorded in the area, and they followed their procedures properly and still couldn't survive.. they are Americans, they are sons of the heartland, they can't be confused with Prius drivers from Marin County, lumped with the shrill liberal young who will learn someday.. they weren't begging to be heard because they have a chip on their shoulder, the disregard able liberals that the Carl Roves of the world love to pigeonhole.. they were just dudes doing their job on a hard day, and they died doing it. I will give full allowances to the idea that forest fires have been happening since before we had any thoughts of global warming, and people died in them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Gulch_fire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rattlesnake_Fire
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-griffith-fire-20130701,0,1341812.story
But any good detective would have to add to the math of the Yarnell Fire mans actions to warm the planet, whatever roles luck, chance, fate and skill might have played..
For years the paper has been filled with the trickle of faces from our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and wherever Al Queda appears (places you are less likely to hear directly about Americans loosing their lives in, but we are there, trust me..).. before that there was Vietnam and the Cold War in America's recent memory... but until Yarnell, this new challenge to us, on the level of a War, perhaps eventually on the level of our greatest wars like WWII.
I don't want to play a Carl Rove card, the way they twisted the Sept. 11 attack into the absurdly labeled 'Afghanistan First Policy' no matter how completely fairy tail the connections between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq might have been, or the way Goebbels and Himmler fabricated public justification for the invasion of Poland to begin in earnest that horrible world war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Himmler
I could go on and on with propaganda and calls to action.. Pearl Harbor, the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tomkin, Silent Spring.. but if ever there were a set of young men who undoubtedly symbolize what has been lost and what can be lost if we don't take direct action on Climate Change, as they fulfill every positive stereotype that Americans hold dear, as arbitrary and clannish as that may be, it is these 19 guys, and I hope they don't mind, because I for one can't seem to get them out of my head.. For once in a situation like this, perhaps we can honor the dead for something other than as symbols for hate, for this war of sorts has the blurriest battle lines one will ever see.. as intertwined as the molecules of the air..
Never forget?
Never forget.
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