Doug Campbell (RiP) Did the PFD GMHS Know or Ignore his Tried-and-True Campbell Prediction System? 2
This preferred Title replaces the Wix website size constraints version - "Doug Campbell (RiP) Did the Prescott FD Granite Mountain Hot Shots (GMHS) Even Know, Train In, or Ignore his Tried-and-True Campbell Prediction System leading up to and including their detriment on June 30, 2013? Part 2 of 2"
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Abbreviations used below: Wildland Firefighters (WFs) - Firefighters (FFs).
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Carried over from Part One - Doug Campbell passed away in Ojai, CA on July 13, 2021. This is a tribute to our self-avowed Politically Incorrect Hot Shot Friend and Brother, Mentor, Leader, Visionary, and Creator of the Campbell Prediction System (CPS). Doug Campbell (RiP) was truly a remarkable man with a wide range of wildland fire interests in fire behavior, leadership, and human factors; enhanced by always being grounded by family, friends, loved ones, and collegues. Whatever he did, he did it with eagerness, enthusiasm and enjoyment. He was always respectful and always logical. He was at ease "speaking truth to power" for the benefit of all WFs and FFs.
He taught us to think of the predicted fire behavior intuitively, in terms of logic. Doug was truly blessed with an incredibly brilliant mind, equipped to reach the highest intellect, and yet still able to identify with and relate the simple aspects of reading a wildfire's signature to discern what it was telling us. He died, much too soon. However, many of us were blessed to have attended his lectures and read and researched and applied his works. And this is what was to eventually become the Campbell Prediction System (CPS). We promise to pass this "Old School" work on to others. Thank you. We will miss you.
Figure 1. Doug Campbell (RiP) in his younger days in 1953 as a Tanker Truck Operator (TTO) on the Los Padres NF in California. Source. CPS Emxsys.com Preface
For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11 (NKJV)
Consider now a trusted mentor, Chief John Hawkins reshared a post on leadership: One of the most important attributes of a leader is their ability to admit their mistakes. Leaders are called upon to make countless decisions, and sometimes things inevitably go wrong. Unfortunately, many people may see admitting a mistake as a sign of weakness, but the opposite is true in many instances. Remember that mistakes are vital to our growth; we often put way too much pressure on ourselves to seek some unrealistic ideal of perfection. As the leader, let your team know that there’s no shame in making mistakes, and most importantly, you have their back when they happen. I have seen people in eadership positions duck and throw their people under the bus when mistakes happen, and this leads to mistrust, lack of inspiration and the fear to try anything new. However, admitting your errors has the potential to strengthen your relationships with your team. Admitting your mistakes communicates in a powerful way that you believe in the relationships you’ve developed. The most extraordinary people in their felids have made countless mistakes; they didn’t give up. Instead, they persevered and inspired many people to follow their example; as Albert selEinstein puts it, a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new, and according to Steve Adubato, Ph.D., the sign of a superior leader is not that they avoid making mistakes; it’s that when they do, they are humble enough to admit it and learn from them.
Mr. Campbell (RiP) explaining the Genesis of what was to eventually become the Campbell Prediction System (CPS).
"I remember an incident that made me forever curious about forest fires. During the summer when I was about six years old, my mother drove our ’38 Chevrolet up the Donner Highway in Northern California. The roadway was lined with tall virgin pine and fir trees on both sides.
She stopped the car when we arrived at the edge of a forest fire that was raging on both sides of the road. I was notably impressed by the awesome spectacle that my young eyes beheld. In the roaring fire, entire trees were engulfed in flames. A shower of sparks fell on trees that would be the next to go.
Not knowing why my mother had stopped, I asked what we were doing here. She replied that she was bringing my father something he would need. When I asked where my father was, she waved toward the raging white-hot ball of flames that by now was devouring trees at a tremendous speed. “He’s in there somewhere,” she said. I was terrified that my father was in there. Surely he was burned up I thought. But through the swirling smoke and spark showers I saw him walking up a dirt road toward the car. “How did he do that?” I wondered.
In these few short moments, I had witnessed my first forest fire, had learned that my dad was in it, had concluded that we would surely never see him again, and had then witnessed a “miracle” when he walked out of the flames alive. That must have had some effect on me!
I grew up in California wildfire country, experiencing a normal childhood. I attended high school in Santa Ynez commuting from a little settlement named Paradise some 20 miles north of Santa Barbara. There I roamed the hills and river bottoms with local boyhood friends and spent some of the best hours of my life searching the Forest Service dump nearby.
Occasionally, we would find such treasures as an old fire tool, canteen or headlamp. Most were disabled or completely worn out, but we thought it was great fun to scavenge for these prizes.
On July 2, 1950, the day of my 16th birthday, I saw a large column of smoke above Santa Barbara. It was north of town, apparently near the community of Paradise. I was shopping with my mother at the time, although I hated going because it took me away from the forest haunts I loved much more than town.
I talked her into stopping in at the Los Prietos Ranger Station to inquire about the fire. There, I met one of my best pals, Ronnie Cline, who was also there to learn about the fire.
Somehow we were hired and assigned to a fire job on that fire. I remember when the initial excitement had worn off hours later, I wondered how I got way out here in the middle of nowhere walking behind a dozer that was cutting a fire break and covering Ronnie and me with a thick, choking coat of dirt. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do, and Ronnie did not seem to know any more than I. Sometime after dark, the cat stopped for fuel and we took a break from walking up the long ridges toward Pine Mountain. Atop a little knoll within the burn I spied a group of the regulars sitting around a fire with a 5-gallon can balanced on rocks emitting the delicious smell of coffee. These men were worn down from a 16-hour battle, and would have to get up and go after it again in a short time.
When I reached for the coffee can my foot dislodged one of the support stones that kept the can level, and the whole thing tipped over spilling the coveted coffee and putting the warming fire clear out. My hair stood on end as Ronnie punched me and said, “Run!” Frozen to the spot, I gathered in the different expressions of the now standing bunch of men and noted they were all unpleasant. I heard a few cuss words but I somehow survived my first encounter with the old line firefighters. Later that night, we were looking for a place to grab a few winks, but Ron and I had no gear for sleeping, just the clothes on our backs.
The tractor driver dug a ditch and parked the tractor over the top. We crawled under the tractor and spent the night snug in the hole until the morning light revealed numerous scorpions among us.
That is how my Forest Service career began. By the time I had completed high school, a year of college and a hitch in the U.S. navy as a weatherman, I had several fire seasons under my belt. Most of the training I received was hands-on and under the supervision of one of the crew bosses.
Jimmy Waller, one of my bosses, wanted to teach me how to heel a calf with a rope. He would get me to run around the station yard at San Marcos summit engine station and he would rope my feet. If he got one foot in the noose I would usually just hop on the other foot, but when he roped both feet in the noose, they were jerked out from under me and I hit the dirt and flopped in the yard like the calf I imitated.
Waller is still around the Santa Barbara area I guess. In those days he was a dandy dresser and was the spic-and-span ranger on the station. His cowboy boots were polished, his hair slicked back, his pants and shirt sported fine creases and his Forest Service badge was polished to a brilliant sheen. On Sundays, he was particularly neat and shiny.
One Sunday, as he strode by the corner of the old fire station, I swung the rope as he had taught me and roped his hind foot just as neat as you could imagine. I hauled back on the rope and flopped that dandy in the dirt right in front of the station. I did, however, spend the remainder of the day perched on the water tank with the ladder pulled up so he couldn’t climb up until he cooled off some.
It was on one of my first timber fires while assigned to an engine crew that Jimmy taught me about stump holes. We were sent to a fire on Figueroa Mountain in the summer of ’51 with the old Green Hornet fire engine. It was a 1948 Ford 1.5-ton truck with a bolt-on tank and pump. We arrived after a couple of hours on the road and when we approached the fire scene, I recall the fire was on the up-hill side of a narrow bench road above us. We were attempting to hold the fire above the road and were holding our own when some line boss on scene barked orders for us to bring the truck quickly to a slop-over below the road.
We rolled down there and positioned the truck in the middle of an inside turn in the crooked road above the slop-over. The chief who was yelling orders grabbed the live reel hose and dove over the bank directly toward the fire below. I started the pump and gave 100 pounds of water pressure to that line. When I looked over the road berm, the fire was running up the draw toward us and the guy manning the hose was gone! The hose he had taken over the side was abandoned. Before I could get my fear and confusion under control, I hosed down the sky. I saw Jimmy jump into the engine cab filled with smoke and the fire’s licking tongues of flame. He had guts that cowboy. Rolling the windows up, he ground on the starter. The truck was reluctant to start (you probably remember how Fords like to keep you in suspense), but after a few seconds more of grinding the truck engine caught and roared to life. I was covering the flame side, crouched beside the rear wheel weary of the fumes from the gas cap watching the paint beginning to blister spraying water like crazy from a 1/8-inch nozzle.
Jimmy got us out of there and saved the truck, but I never again saw the guy who jumped over the side into the flames of that slop over. Later, when things calmed down Jimmy taught me about hot stump holes. He pointed to a white ash circle among some pine trees and told me to take the hose and straight stream those little white ash circles to mop up the fire. I did as I was told and found that when I shot a stream of water under pressure into the ash, the stream blew the ash and coals up into the air and my face as well. Jimmy got a good laugh on me for that one.
In 1959 I was the Captain of an engine company on the Cleveland National Forest at Descanso Ranger Station. I was a believer in training the crew. We trained and trained developing skills and techniques to use the equipment to its fullest extent. I thought the crew was the best-trained and most able crew anywhere. I would find out later that I still had more to learn. The dispatch came one hot summer afternoon. We were driving to the edge of a wildfire along a dirt road at the top of a ridge. A water tender — we used to call them nurse tankers —was backing away from the fire and blocking our passage. The driver was older than I and though he was not as experienced as I at firefighting, he was a good truck driver and a part of my crew. He yelled for me to stop and retreat. The fire was making a run toward the road.
I didn’t recognize any danger from the scene before me and so continued in toward the advancing fire. Positioning the engine just off the road, we laid hose toward the fire with the intent of hitting the base of the flames as the fire topped the ridge in front of us. The fire enveloped me and my hose-man in a fiery wave, arcing over us and licking the truck behind us. The engineer was an aggressive young man named Chuck Mills. He was committed to keeping us in water, and to do that job he had to crouch under the truck for protection from the flames. Every few minutes he would roll out from under the truck to put out fires on the hose bed, only to dive back under the truck. Somehow we held the fire as planned and felt like we’d really done some good firefighting that day.
Later, the District Ranger, Ed Hielman, called me and gave me a cautionary lecture about being too aggressive on attacks. I was too proud of my crew to take it seriously, a rather common attitude among firefighters I think. Another life lesson was about to be given to me. One Saturday, Chuck Mills and I were fooling around the fire station where we both lived arguing about hydraulics or some such thing when a fire call came in. We were in T-shirts and jeans and thought nothing of jumping into the engine and rolling to the fire in street clothes.
We picked up a couple of crewmen who were in the barracks and tore off Code 3 to the scene. I positioned the truck on one flank and made the engine position safe. I started a hose lay through the spotty burned area to the other side of the fire where we would “Y-off” and lay hose both ways. Chuck Mills was the nozzle man and was squirting water and adding hose to the lay. It was near a large boulder surrounded by unburned brush where he signaled to cut off the flow of water so that he could add two gated Y’s to the end of an inch-and-a-half hose line. It would take 15 seconds according to our proficiency drills held in the station. As the water was cut off, the bush next to the large boulder flashed and the flames licked over Chuck. He gasped for air and inhaled hot gases. He dropped like he was tackled and started crawling toward the safety of the engine. I ran to him, pulling him out of the area and got him into a sheriff’s car for transportation to the emergency ward.
Chuck was almost killed that day. He did not have any burns, but the hot gases he inhaled almost did the job anyway. After that, he quit smoking saying he’d had enough smoke for a lifetime.
So I started to realize that there was some training missing. We knew our apparatus as well as any crew. We were strong and aggressive and could conquer most fires. Now there was doubt. A small flare-up almost cost me a good friend and companion.
I was becoming a little wiser and more cautious with each new experience. Winning another promotion, I accepted another kind of assignment. I was to be the Superintendent of the El Cariso Hot Shot Crew, based at El Cariso above Lake Elsinore, CA. In 1959, the El Cariso Hot Shots had been burned over on the Decker fire. Five firefighters were killed. I took over the position and vowed to remember the lessons of the past. I devoted my efforts to the safety of the crew for the two years I remained as Superintendent. During that two-year period between 1961 and 1962, Gordon King and I started to make fire line fire behavior predictions. We would go to an overlook where we could see the place where the crew was burned over on the Decker fire. We began to practice a discipline of making sure our tactics were developed after the fire line prediction was made. We had our share of close calls during the two years, but came out without any losses. I continued to climb the ladder of the Forest Service organization and in 1966 found myself the D.F.M.O. ([District] Fire Chief [Management Officer]) on a district of the Sequoia National Forest. That summer the El Cariso Hot Shot crew suffered another burn over situation loosing 13 good firemen to the flames. Gordon King, the crew leader, had extensive experience and had been on Hot Shot crews for 11 years. After the accident he was devastated, never recovering from his anguish. I think that I realized for the first time that if it could happen to Gordon King, it could happen to anyone!
More to Know—the Other Half of the Story
Figure 2. Doug Campbell "Teaching 1953". Source: CPS, Emxsys.com Preface
The importance of knowing the capabilities of the crew and equipment to fight fires is evident; but if you do not know what the fire is going to do it is just not enough.
The question before us now is, “How do firefighters engaged in operations on a wildfire maintain a safe work situation? Luck?” Surely the old timers who saw many of the historic fires would know. I knew such people. Stubby Mansfield was such a man. He had a feel for fire. He knew what to do and when to do it. I have seen him in action. In fact, a number of other seasoned firefighters seemed to know what the fire would do and over the long haul. They maintained a good safety record even with great exposure. What is it that they know, these Charley Caldwells, the Mark Linanes, and other long-enduring Hot Shot crew leaders?
And so began my search for fire line prediction knowledge. I found that the people who knew fire and could avoid trouble still had no language with which to communicate that knowledge to others. Think about this for a moment. How do you as a firefighter tell others what you think is about to change? Do you draw upon some past fire behavior training to do it? It’s not easy to relate the fire behavior training offered to on-the-spot predictions that would have saved Chuck Mills from injury, prevented Gordon and his crew from anguish and death, or averted the tragedy Danny Street faced when he lost men on the Decker fire. Were these fire behavior events predictable? Were these fire behavior changes predictable by on-the-line firefighters? I can’t help but think that some of the old timers would have avoided the danger.
Although I attended the fire behavior courses offered during the span of my career, I still did not find the answers I needed in the material. The fire behavior courses taught me the fire behavior perspective of a planner rather than a firefighter. And I had not seen any planners in accident reports of burn over situations. Rather, I needed to know how to predict changes in fire behavior while engaged in the work of fire suppression. And though I applied the fire behavior officer’s training while assigned to large forest fires, I never felt that predicting the least, greatest or average flame length or rate of spread to be particularly valuable to the users of the information. Even the prediction of the future fire perimeter was not especially important most of the time. It seemed more a curiosity for the operations chief.
So I continued on my search for an on-line fire behavior prediction system that could prevent accidents.
It was while I was reading a research paper written by Clive Countryman, a research forester working for the Forest Service, that I found some of the information that would lead to a whole new prediction system. The Concept of Fire Environment published in 1966 unveiled for me a methodology for the creation of the missing fire behavior language. From the day I read that paper to this point in time, I have worked to apply the basic idea of fuel temperature differences of various aspects and times to develop a predictive tool that the line firefighter, or anyone, can use.
In 1987 and 1988 after I had been retired from the Forest Service for four years, the dispatcher called to ask if I would be available to go to fires and serve as a Fire Behavior Analyst. I accepted but with some misgivings because of being out of active service for four years. I received travel orders and boarded a flight for Northern California. Before that assignment concluded, I had worked over 80 shifts on the fires of 1987. The next fire season, I was again called. This time my orders were for Yellowstone where I logged another 20 shifts as a Fire Behavior Analyst.
Since I had no computer to practice the Fire Behavior Analyst textbook procedures, I worked from the basis of my experience and used the new fire line behavior prediction system I was developing.
The personnel in Plans and on the fire line responded with encouragement. They were supportive and gave me great performance ratings for my work.
After the ’88 fire season ended, I started to write the training program that is now the Campbell Prediction System (CPS). The CPS reveals how burn over situations could have been predicted by the line firefighter, and incorporates a new language that until now was nonexistent.
My hope is to provide a basis for firefighters and others who are interested to be able to predict changes in fire behavior. If accurate predictions can be made of fire behavior change, then there should be no burn over situations. No firefighter should be so aggressive that he or she would risk burn over of themselves or their crews to protect any property. No firefighter should attack before predicting the fire behavior’s potential for change.
I do believe I know what those observations were that the seasoned firefighters used. And with a language, the prediction system becomes “teachable” at last.
The LORD is near to all who call upon Him, To all who call upon Him in truth. Psalm 145:18 (NKJV)
Wildland Fire LLC link for AZ Department of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) documented "Inspection Narrative" chronicle of their investigation. Worth readingfor a YH Fire and GMHS overview
Are we putting our firefighters in danger? Column - Tim Wendel (July 1, 2013) (all emphasis added)
"I had just come back from my first fire as a member of the Payson (Ariz.) Hotshots and, frankly, I felt lucky to be alive. Earlier in the day, our squad had been positioned along a ridge top. We were told to expect breezes out of the east and flame-lengths of five to seven feet. Instead the weather changed, as it often does, and the winds blew out of the west, causing flames three times as tall as a man to overrun our positions. It happened so quickly that for an hour or so after the firestorm swept over us we thought we had lost a member of our crew. But he had been lucky, finding a safe place as the flames edged past his position."
"I thought about that afternoon when I heard about Sunday's Prescott, Ariz., tragedy in which 19 firefighters had been killed. The [GMHS] Prescott (sic) crew was one of the best and part of the tight-knit world in Arizona, which included my former Payson crew, the outfits from Mormon Lake and up near the Grand Canyon."
"Fighting fire has been a rite of passage in the West for generations. Young men, and increasingly young women, sign on for the adventure and the chance for a rookie to make $1,000 a week with overtime and working away from your home forest."
"But after the Thirtymile Fire in northwest Washington in 2001, which saw four young firefighters die, leaders stressed that new safety guidelines and practices would be implemented. Yet those working in this field, on the fire-line, contend that longtime rules are too often ignored. For example, in the case of the Thirtymile Fire the crew was trapped on the wrong side of a dead-end road. Every one of the 10 standard orders, the rules for engagement, was broken."
"In the weeks and months ahead, we'll learn what happened at Yarnell Hill. We do know that the firefighters were placed in such a dangerous position that they needed to deploy their fire shelters, tent-like structures that are often the last hope against intense flames and heat."
"But I cannot help wondering, yet again, if something remains inherently wrong in what young firefighters are sometimes asked to do, the positions they are placed in. In the old days, if a forest fire raged out of control, it could be contained in the next valley over. 'Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it,' said Steve Hart, incident commander in Colorado, 'so you might as well sit back and have a Snickers and a Coke.'"
"We seem to make progress in a lot of areas of our lives thanks to our initiative and new technology, but keeping young people from dying on the fire-line somehow seems beyond us."
"That's why I was in the line for the pay phone that evening back in 1981. I reached my fiancée back East and told her to set a date for our wedding. I felt like I was lucky to be alive and I've never fought a fire again."
Tim Wendel is a writer in residence at Johns Hopkins and the author of 10 books, including Summer of '68, Habana Libre and the novel, Red Rain.
"Character is easier kept than recovered." The International movie quote
Consider now two articles by InvestigativeMEDIA investigative reporter John Dougherty that cover the questionable GMHS June 30, 2013, dispatch and accepted assignment. They basically dovetail each other. The points discussed within these articles should certainly be considered as causal factors in this YH Fire and GMHS debacle. And there must be something of substance to them because PFD Darrell Willis and the Southwest Coordination Center (SWCC) refused comment on the issue. And the timing and substance of the Dispatch logs to get the GMHS is instructive revealing a concerted effort to lock in on the GMHS.
Evidence mounts that Granite Mtn Hotshots shouldn't have deployed. August 21, 2013. John Dougherty. InvestigativeMEDIA. Tucson Sentinel
This article was also published on August 21, 2013, on the InvestigativeMEDIA website under this title: "Yarnell Hill Fire: The Granite Mountain Hotshots Never Should’ve Been Dispatched, Mounting Evidence Shows.
"The Granite Mountain Hotshots may have reached the maximum consecutive days for work before mandatory time off was required, although officials at the SWCC have declined to confirm or deny that or otherwise comment on why they turned down Arizona’s requests."
"Despite the refusal by the SWCC, records show, the state contacted Granite Mountain superintendent Eric Marsh directly via email on the evening of June 29 and requested that the crew proceed to Yarnell the next morning. The state Forestry Division declined to comment when asked whether it circumvented the SWCC by sending the dispatch order directly to Marsh."
"Prescott Fire Department officials, including Wildland Division chief Willis, also wouldn’t comment on this point."
"Before the Granite Mountain Hotshots even approached Yarnell Hill, a substantial amount of information shows, serious problems already had engulfed the crew. The personnel-related matters call into question whether the crew met minimum hotshot qualifications."
"The systemic crisis gripping an overworked crew — along with its baffling decision to leave a safe zone and move down a canyon through a treacherous, 10-foot-high thicket of unburned fuel toward a rapidly approaching wildfire — has raised fundamental questions about whether the nation’s only hotshot crew attached to a municipal fire department was a blueprint for disaster."
"On extended periods of activity while based at home, the crews have a minimum of one day off every 21 days, according to the ["Red Book"]."
"SWCC officials refused to respond to questions about whether Granite Mountain had reached its requirement for mandatory days off by June 30. But excerpts from the Arizona Interagency Dispatch Center log suggest its members had."
"At 8:10 p.m., Arizona dispatch contacted the SWCC again and stated: 'Placing order for Granite Mountain IHC. ... Three minutes later, the logs show that 'ALB' (short for Albuquerque, where the SWCC is located) responded with a terse message to Arizona dispatch: 'Can’t accept assignment.' ... The state continued to press for a second hotshot crew. At 8:49 p.m., Arizona dispatch contacted the SWCC and advised, 'We have pushed orders for another Type 1 crew.'”
"The dispatch logs show that the SWCC did not respond to this message.
Twelve minutes later, state dispatcher Havel notified state fire managers and other Arizona dispatchers assigned to the Yarnell Hill Fire that he had 'e-mailed a resource order to Eric Marsh for Granite Mountain Crew C-5.' Marsh was superintendent of the Granite Mountain Hotshots."
"The next day, about 8 a.m., the Granite Mountain Hotshots reported for duty in Yarnell."
"Although the certification checklist was required to be signed by the crew’s superintendent, Marsh did not sign the document. City personnel files show that Marsh was reassigned to light duty in mid-April for six to eight weeks and was not attached to the Granite Mountain Hotshots when the certification was signed."
"During his absence, Granite Mountain captain Jesse Steed became acting superintendent. Steed signed the certification checklist on April 23 and passed it up to his superiors. Willis and Fraijo signed the certification checklist on the same day. ... Willis declined in an email to answer questions concerning the certification checklist, and Fraijo did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Prescott City Attorney Jon Paladini."
"Such an apparent misrepresentation on the certification checklist would be a breach of ethics, according to the Standards for Interagency Hotshot Crew Operations manual."
“It is the responsibility of the superintendent and first line supervisor to objectively assess their crew to see if [members] are meeting the intent of this document,” the manual states. “They are duty-bound to not misrepresent the IHC community. Leadership of the highest moral character is required during these decisions.”
The checklist isn’t the only problematic documentation issue.
As the problem-riddled Granite Mountain crew marched up Yarnell Hill on the morning of June 30, on what appears to have been a federally required day off, it was led by Marsh, a superintendent who had not been in the field all season.
Further complicating the situation, the Arizona Forestry Division did not assign an independent division supervisor to oversee Granite Mountain’s assignment to cut trees and shrubs to create a fire line on the southwest flank of the blaze. Instead, it had Marsh do it.
Though it is not unusual for hotshot superintendents to be assigned as division supervisors, former hotshot crew bosses say, it is unusual for them to then remain with crews.
The division supervisor is in charge of all operations in a designated geographic area and often acts as the lookout so he can make decisions based on the most current information about weather and fire conditions, former hotshots say.
“The division supervisor should have been the lookout,” says former Little Tujunga Hotshot Larry Sall. “The kid who was the lookout [Brendan McDonough, 21, the sole survivor among the Granite Mountain Hotshots] should have been on the line.”
"Authorities typically try to keep a tight lid on information related to fatalities involving wildland fire crews. But considerable information already is known about events leading to the burn-over that killed the Granite Mountain Hotshots."
"Because the fire occurred on state land and the victims were part of a city fire department, there has been much greater access to facts than normally occurs when only federal agencies are involved."
"In addition, there have been at least three important public statements by key figures since the incident. Willis’ July 23 press conference at the deployment site was followed a week later by statements from Deputy State Forester Payne, who said in a widely publicized interview that mistakes were made by Marsh that put the crew at risk."
During the earliest stages of the aftermath of the June 30, 2013, YH Fire and GMHS debacle, Deputy State Forester Mr. Payne really opened up about GMHS and Marsh boldly asserted what needed to be stated.
Consider now two videos titled Granite Mountain Hot Shots Deployment Site Yarnell, AZ Parts 1 and 2 news conference (July 23, 2013) where Wildlands Divsion Chief Darrell Willis discusses what might have happened to the 19-member GMHS in their final moments before they were engulfed in a wildfire on June 30, 2013.
How and why the City of Prescott ever allowed this man to say the things he says and reveals many aspects of the alleged "Prescott Way" of doing things is beyond this author's comprehension. However, we are certainly thankful that they did. It is also the feeling and conclusion of many experienced WFs and FFs - anger being the major one - as indicated in the comments from the July 24, 2013, IM GMHS "last stand" article below.
Moreover, the authors feel that these videos are especially instructive revealing all manner of PFD and GMHS attitudes, accepted and expected behaviors, and decison-making when it comes to the human factors and leadership of the PFD and GMHS. Many of these are recognized as "Human Factors Barriers to Situation Awareness" and used to be called "Hazardous Attitudes" in the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG - April 2018 online version) on page xii, that ultimately resulted in their deaths.
Figure 3. IRPG Hazardous Attitudes screenshot page xii Source: NWCG IRPG (2018)
Figure 4. Cartoon image titled "Oh ye of little faith" revealing a small boatload of sheep with the apostole Peter "walking on water" in the upper right, while one of the other sheep attempts the same, while yet another one wearing a scuba tank, is about to join them. Source: Argus Communications
Several of the above Hazardous Attitudes applied to the GMHS decisions and outcomes leading up to and including that day, (i.e. Invulnerable - this can't happen to us; Impulsive - do something even if it's wrong; and without a doubt Groupthink - afraid to speak up or disagree. Were they Kool-Aid drinking Sheeple?
Brethren, do not be children in understanding; however, in malice be babes, but in understanding be mature. 1 Corinthians 14:20 (NKJV)
Figure 5. (upper) and Figure 5a (lower) Granite Mountain Hotshot Shelter Deployment Site, Yarnell, AZ (7- 23-2013) PFD Wildlands Divsion Chief Darrell Willis discusses what might have happened to the 19-member GMHS in their final moments before they were engulfed in a wildfire on June 30, 2013 Source: YouTube, InvestigativeMEDIA, Dougherty