How and why is the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire SAIT Investigator allegedly unethically continuing to attempt to foist his vision quest upon us while making a profit from the 19 GMHS deaths in 2025? Pt. 1
- 21 minutes ago
- 88 min read
Restating the post title beyond the limited Wix title allowance: How and why is the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire SAIT Investigator allegedly unethically continuing to attempt to foist his vision quest upon us, avoiding the truth of the matter, failing to utilize all the available evidence at his disposal, all while making a profit from the June 30, 2013, 19 GMHS deaths in 2025?
Author Fred J. Schoeffler and other contributing authors
Views expressed to "the public at large” and "of public concern"
(Crystal Cox vs. Obsidian Finance Group, 2011),
DISCLAIMERS to follow: Please fully read the front page of the website (link below) before reading any of the posts. This includes that you must be at least 18 years of age or older to view this website and these posts.
This post is based on the author's professional judgement and opinions based on available evidence, with no intention to defame individuals.
The authors and the blog deny responsibility for misuse, reuse, recycled, and cited, and/or uncited copies of content within this blog by others. The content, even though presented publicly, if being reused, must get written permission in doing so due to copyrighted material. Thank you.
Abbreviations used: Wildland Firefighters (WFs) - Firefighters (FFs).
All emphasis is added unless otherwise noted. All Figures are Snippets.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
Psalms 23:4 )(NKJV)
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
Bertrand Russel - British logician and philosopher
Reality cannot be ignored except at a price;
and the longer the ignorance is persisted in the higher
and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.
Aldous Huxley
They must find it difficult, those who have taken
authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.
Gerald Massey
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. Massey was an English poet and writer on Spiritualism and Ancient Egypt. His quote criticizes and derides blind obedience. Question what we’re told, to seek truth independently of power. Wisdom lies in discerning the real truth, not what authority labels as truth. (Facebook)
Consider the Fig. 1. video for what appears to be an alleged Cheshire Cat grinning and Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Team-Serious Accident Investigation Report (SAIT-SAIR) Lead Investigator Bradley Mayhew, in what this author and other experienced current and former FFs, WFs, Hot Shots, and concerned, curious, and perplexed interested publics, personally and professionally alleges would become and hopefully always remains to be the biggest wildland fire cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history! According to the dubious Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Team- Serious Accident Investigation Report (SAIT-SAIR) p. 34, one of the "two local residents, avid hikers who are familiar with the area," Joy A. Colura, alleges that "Brad Mayhew is the new John MacLean because he was an 'on-the-inside' guy with practical experience vs. being purely academic."
Figure 1. YH Fire SAIT-SAIR Investigator Mayhew Source: YouTube, FireX
“Be sure your sin will find you out”
Numbers 32:23 (NKJV)
If an Investigator stands to gain financially or professionally from the investigation's outcome or the event itself, it creates a powerful incentive
to prioritize personal gain over their ethical obligations.
The Author
“True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge,
but the refusal to acquire it.”
Karl R. Popper
Definition of a Conflict of Interest - "A conflict of interest involves the abuse -- actual, apparent, or potential -- of the trust that people have in professionals. The simplest working definition states: A conflict of interest is a situation in which financial or other personal considerations have the potential to compromise or bias professional judgment and objectivity. An apparent conflict of interest is one in which a reasonable person would think that the professional's judgment is likely to be compromised. A potential conflict of interest involves a situation that may develop into an actual conflict of interest. It is important to note that a conflict of interest exists whether or not decisions are affected by a personal interest; a conflict of interest implies only the potential for bias, not a likelihood. It is also important to note that a conflict of interest is not considered misconduct in research, since the definition for misconduct is currently limited to fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism." Joseph E. Murphy, JD, CCEP. Cosmos.
In light of this YHFR post’s title, this author has found nothing on the Internet or in any of Mayhew’s literature, presentations, etc. where he makes or insinuates a direct statement about factually profiting financially from his divisive YH Fire Lead Investigator position - yet! In this author's professional opinion, despite actually allegedly profiting from it, it was implied by his ensuing actions and comments.
The goal of this author on this lengthy YHFR post is to respectfully, yet tolerably, call out and reveal, in this author's professional opinion, that Mayhew allegedly has been unethically continuing to attempt to foist his vision quest upon us by avoiding the truth of the matter, failing to utilize all the available evidence at his disposal, all while making a profit from the June 30, 2013, 19 GMHS deaths in 2025. And that Mr. Brad Mayhew was allegedly christened to become the self-proclaimed, groomed-for-years, pre-planned YH Fire & GMHS Lead Investigator by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS). In addition, in this author's professional opinion, he was alleged to be and did eventually become so by deceit and design. And so, for years, this author has further alleged that Mr. Brad Mayhew, a former Los Padres Hot Shot, at the behest of his at-the-time HS Supt's request for this author to check out his proposed LCES training, with this author approving what he had to offer, suggested going forward with it. And he did. This began his meteoric career after vouching for him. He eventually would form his highly profitable and successful "Fireline Factors - Human Factors, Risk, Operational Learning" company in 2007, as shown in Fig. 2a. below. The issue in question is his alleged making a profit from this fatality based on his Lead Investigator position and status. He claims that he currently "serves as a wildland firefighter on the Santa Ynez Helitack Crew in southern California."
Consider this June 2021 FMT article regarding Mayhew's LCES proposal. From another perspective - the 10s, 18s, and fire doctrine. The author is Larry Sutton, the former Fire Operations Risk Management Officer at the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, ID. Fire Management Today. Volume 70 • No. 1 • 2010 that stated: "As for LCES, that too is dynamic guidance. Brad Mayhew, a former hotshot, developed a variation on LCES that he calls “F LCES ∆.” The “F” stands for fire behavior, which urges you to consider the potential “worst case scenario.” LCES is looked at to determine if it’s adequate for that worst case. And the “∆” (delta) represents change - it is there to remind you to consider “what’s changing now” as well as “what might change later.”
Behold, so saith former USFS Party-Liner Sutton, giving credence to the alleged Pastor: "Brad Mayhew discussed the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire accident, where 19 firefighters died, highlighting the lack of clear communication and decision-making. He identified four theories on the crew's actions but noted a common theme: firefighters often see risks but fail to communicate effectively. Mayhew emphasized the need for leaders to define when, how, and to whom crew members should speak up. He proposed a four-question framework for leaders to establish clear communication protocols, ensuring concerns are addressed promptly and effectively. He also introduced a training guide to help leaders build these protocols and integrate them into regular drills."
"Develop a framework for risk communication protocols on your crew by answering 4 key questions: (1) When do you want your people to speak up? (2) How do you want them to speak up? (3) How can they expect you to respond? (4) What should they do if they don't get the expected response? Action Items - incorporate the risk communication protocols into crew training to build familiarity and practice with the system."
The alleged extremely animated, babbling, convulsive, spasmodic, and often contradictory Pastor Mayhew in his Oct 3, 2024, Yarnell Hill Fire. What Have We Learned? - FIRExTalk SoCal 23, YouTube video above, transcribed using the Otter.ai app with editorial discretion, with mostly capitalization and spelling: "In 2017, I'm sitting out behind my fire station next to the pull-up bars. And the reason why there's a guy a couple years younger than me, they could do more pull-ups than me, and I wanted to beat him, so I was doing extra pull-ups anyway. I'm sitting behind the station by the pull up bars, getting some extra sets in, and I sit down on this this stump, the oak, while I, was while I was kind of waiting, I pulled out a piece of paper, and on the top of that paper was written how we learned from the Yarnell Hill Fire [YH Fire]. It was underlined. And other than that, the page was blank. And I've been racking my brains [He actually claims to have multiple brains here!] trying to figure out what goes on this piece of paper. I call people all around the country, different agencies, different levels, different backgrounds, and nobody had an answer for me to have a fire service to learn from the [YH Fire].
"This is personal to me. When I started as a ... well, and firefighter, I was a rookie Hot Shot on the Los Padres Hot Shots, we were taught that we learned how bad things happen. We study those bad things. That's what we do. My Superintendent, Stan Stewart [RiP] used to tell the guys he was this, you know, superhuman figure to, you know, to a rookie, your Supe is like superhuman. And his silver mustache, he used to save us. You boys think you're bulletproof. I thought that too when I was 23, well, we're not bullet ... And so he taught us. He taught us about the mistakes that he made. We did case studies, we studied accident investigations, we visited accident sites. When we had an opportunity to speak to people who had survived some of these historic events, the bosses brought them so we could learn from them and listen to them. And the whole point was to learn from the past, to learn, and to grow. And I found these presentations so compelling, so moving. The thing was, for me, I, you know, sometimes people want to honor the fallen through. There's all kinds of loose honoring, many ways. But for me, as a young Firefighter, what I decided was that my way, the best memorial that I can build is the memorial that I build with my actions as I try to study history, learn from the past, get stronger, smarter for the future. That's the best thing that I can do to honor the past, and that is the best thing that I can do for the guys around me right now. That is the best thing that I can do for the future. That is the best memorial that we can build. And I took that mindset with me and and I also want to say that's not just that. Wasn't just something about my Crew, something we did on our Crew. This is a major component of Firefighter history from the very beginning, one of the most famous Wildland Fighters of the 1900s was the 1910 Big Burn, 1000s of acres burned. Some Firefighters lost their lives, and afterwards, the agencies said, wait, we have to learn from this thing. And one of the things that the Forest Service did, they created vast infrastructure. They strung telephone through the wilderness so that they could have better communication so they could prevent and fight fires like this in the future. And I just want to say, by the way, that, that I'm going to give a few more examples of this Firefighter tradition of history and learning, and I'm going to be kind of focused on ... on the wildland kind of subculture of the American Fire Service. But it's not just wildland. You know, we could talk about the history and tradition of innovation in local and state government Fire Programs, right? And start with Ben Franklin and go all the way up through the modern era wing spread, if you talk about Alan Brunacini and Chief Golder, the people that they inspired, and Halligan, and the history behind the Halligan and all that we could, but today we focus, that would be a different talk. But the point is, this is not just some wild land phenomenon. This is ... this is the history. This is Firefighter history. But I'm going to focus on the ... the wildland piece.
"But anyway, so another thing that happened after the 1910 tragedy is, one of the Firefighters was named, was named Pulaski. And what Pulaski did was he went out after the accident, and he took care of some of the guys that were injured, and he tended the graves of some of the fallen because the agencies wouldn't do it. So he did it himself, and he needed it in secret, because he didn't want it to be this big political thing. And then the other thing that Pulaski did was he worked in his workshop, and he created this new tool that we know today as the Pulaski. And so the point is, so I consider Ed Pulaski a triple hero. One is what he did on the 1910 fires. Two is where I took care of his guys after the tragedy. And three is the fact that he created this tool that we use to this day. Right? That's, this example of something bad happens and firefighters find a way to do something good and make things better for the future. That's, this history and tradition. We fast forward to 1937, a group of young men lost their lives on the Blackwater Fire [WLF LLC]. And after that, the Lead Investigator went out, and he drove innovation. A man named Godwin. He drove innovation. It eventually led to the creation of professional Fire Crews, and eventually the creation of Hot Shot Crews and Smokejumpers. And if you run a Hot Shot, you may not think that Smokejumpers are that big a deal, but they kind of are. It's true, you know, anyway, but those ... those innovations came from Firefighters looking at the Blackwater and saying, We can do better. We will do better. We're going to get ,we're going to get stronger for the future. We can get smarter for the future. We can get better at what we're doing. That spirit of learning and innovation after the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire [WLFLLC], Firefighters realized that there was something fundamental that they did not understand, and that was extreme fire behavior. So they started studying fire behavior, and that led to the creation of these fire behavior research programs, training programs, and we all are heirs of that to this day. If you've ever taken [S]-190, it's because of those young men that died in 1949 on the Mann Gulch Fire. We can keep marching through history after the 1956 Inaha Fire [WLF LLC] was the 1957 Task Force. The 1957 Task Force included a group of vets who said, Listen, we got all this on-the-job training. We got all this sort of wit and wisdom of wildland fire that you just sort of absorbed by working as a Firefighter, but what we really need is some kind of structure to our guidelines. And so they created what we today know as the Fire Orders, incredible innovation. And anyone who's ever set foot on a wildland fire can tell you that they owe their life in a way to the Fire Orders, right? So that group of Firefighters in the 50s saw something bad, they did something good that, that affects us, that benefits us, this day. Fast forwarding after the 1970 debacle in Southern California, there was this, or in actually, in the State of California, this series of fires called, I like to call it the California Fire Siege. But it was this fiasco. It was a cluster of fiascos, right? And afterwards, firefighters said, this is ... this is not alright. I mean, you had people, you know, one Engine's going to one fire, and then they're seeing on the, on the freeway, the other Engine for the place where they're headed, going to the place where they just chaos, right? Firefighters got together from Southern California, and they said, we have to improve. We have to figure out how to work together better. And they created the Incident Command System; 1994, so much progress had been made. And you know, I'm giving highlights, right? There's so many great things that we haven't touched on. So much progress had been made by 1994, it seemed like most of the old problems had been addressed. And then a tragedy happened on Storm King Mountain [South Canyon WLF LLC], and a group of Firefighters lost their lives, and the fire service looked at that and said, we have to do better. There's something we don't understand. And so then there's this, this revolution of saying, wait a minute. We've looked at fire behavior, we've looked at tactics, we've looked at guidelines, we've looked at how we organize. We looked at fire equipment and fire communication and radios, and all these different things. What we need to look at now is Firefighters themselves. How do we operate? How does our situation awareness work? How do we make decisions? How do we work together as teams? How do we succeed and how do we go wrong at a human level?
"I call that the Human Factors Revolution [Which this author alleges to have given to him], and it led to the leadership development movement. It led to accident investigation reform. It led to the risk revolution. It led to learning culture and the learning culture movement in the fire service. This is incredible. These are incredible, breakthrough, innovative movements. And they all came out, if you follow the thread, they all came out of a group of Firefighters looking at what happened at South Canyon [Storm King Mountain] and saying, We can do better. We will do better, and we're going to find a way this Firefighter's history of learning and innovation. What really made this real for me was not just these big historical examples, you know, of, like national history. What made it real for me was what I saw in my Crew Leaders and in ... in the Captains and the Superintendent that I worked for, they were the ones that modeled this idea of operational learning, of learning from the past, getting stronger and smarter for the future. And I carried that with me, and I carried that with me as a young Firefighter. I carried that with me as I progressed and started developing some of my own innovations, and I was honored to receive the Paul Gleason Lead by Example Award for innovation as a young Firefighter because of that innovation. [In effect, this event thoroughly stunned many of us Truth Seekers and Truth Tellers to this very day!]
"But I carried these values with me, and then eventually got involved in accident investigations and trying to reform accident investigations, all the way up to when I was asked to serve as Lead Investigator on the Yarnell Hill Fire [WLF LLC]. So 2013. I remember the night. I'm sitting in my hotel room, so I'm looking out into the distance, thinking, what the heck did I just sign up for? And I made this decision. What it was, I resolved that I will do my utmost in this investigation to learn from this, to make it so that other Firefighters can learn from this. This is the accident of our time, and just as every generation before us learned from their accidents and passed something down generation after generation after generation that came down to me in the same way. I'm going to do my part here for the future, for my generation, for the future of the Fire Service, and I just had this one little part to play as Lead Investigator, will get the job done, will fade off in the sunset, and a Fire Service will do what it always does, which is to learn and grow and innovate, because that's our history. So during the investigation, I did the best I could, I gave the best I could at that time, and I fulfilled the promise that I made, but what I realized four years later was that I needed to ... to renew that promise, to make a new promise again. I'm going to do my best to find a way to learn from this thing. And I don't know what that's going to look like, but it was a life-changing decision, and so I applied for the lead with absence, and ended up actually leaving my agency to focus on this full-time travel back to the accident site. And I remember going there and looking around and going, okay, what can we do with this? How can we learn from this? How can we ... how can we do something meaningful for the future. And, well, I came up with all kinds of things. And if you're interested in some of those details, there's a ... I just started something called the American Fire Saga blog, and it's about the Saga, the American Fire Service. It's about my own kind of saga of exploration. It's about this accident. It's about other accidents in history. And so I just want to invite you that those posts are there for you. I hope they inspire you. I hope you find some things there that you can use and apply. So I want to let you know that ... that is a resource that's available for you is to go check out the American Fire Saga blog.
"But what I want, what I wanted to talk about today, what I wanted to share with you is that, as I was struggling to come up with these practical lessons that Firefighters could use and apply, I was traveling around, you know, doing different training stuff, different, different places. And one firefighter that I really respected, he was retired, and he said, Well, Brad, appreciate what you're doing. This is good stuff. You know, he was the Manager. He started with a compliment, this is good stuff. And he said, but I think you need to think about the big picture. And that is not a criticism that I get a lot, but that's what he said, think about the big picture. And I said, Well, what do you mean? Think about the big picture. And he said, Well, Brad, it's good that you are trying to find lessons to learn from this event, but the American Fire Service is full of innovative, creative people, and maybe your job ... yes, keep going with the lessons that you're trying to develop and discover, absolutely. But I think you have a broader mission, and your broader mission is to figure out how you can inspire other innovators. I thought, wow, what if that, what if that's what could come out of this tragedy, not just that we learn lessons to improve ourselves and our career, but what if part of what we can do is actually get better at learning and innovation. That's incredible. So I went back and I started studying this history, and I tried to learn and analyze and think about what, what even is this history of learning innovation. Where does it come from? How does it happen? You know, we, I casually said earlier, you know, Fire Service learns, the Fire Service innovates. What the heck does that mean, right? So I'd like to share a few of the key principles. You might call them Common Denominators of Firefighter learning and innovation that I saw in our history. The first thing is, this is the, I think this is the first and most important truth, ... is that we have a history and tradition of innovation, and this is so important. This is an essential part of Firefighter culture. We see something bad, we learn something good, right? There are ... there are some folks out there who tend to be Traditionalists and say we should hang on to our tradition. I respect tradition, and part of our tradition is to continually adapt and grow. If you want to be a Traditionalist, you have to innovate. You have to support innovation, because that's the tradition. And on the other hand, there are some who say, well, we want change, and we want and they disrespect tradition. They disrespect history. Well, they're wrong too. The best innovators in our history. And there may be some examples, but I ... they may be exceptions, but you won't find too many exceptions. Our innovators embrace firefighter history. They embrace history, and they see themselves as building on it and contributing to it. It's not a rejection of history, and it's not a ... it's not a tradition above all else. It's embracing a tradition of learning and innovation and then doing our thing at our time. That's how Innovators think. That's the first key point: there's this Firefighter tradition and history of learning and innovation. The second thing is, as I mentioned, I talked about, I gave you these examples of learning and innovation kind of at a big, big national level, you know, major events. But it's not just that. It's it also happens in these, what may not ever make it into a newspaper, right? The learning and innovation, and the leadership that I saw from my leaders, from my bosses, from the Captains I worked for. That's also part of this Firefighter tradition of learning and innovation. And all around this country, there are Firefighters tinkering in workshops, doing a little research on some side project, you know, trying, building training, improving training, trying to find some way this, that that tinkering, that that is, that is part of the DNA, that is part of Firefighter DNA. It's it is inherent to the history and the identity of Firefighters. So that's the second thing, is that when we're talking about Firefighter innovation, we're not talking about something, something kind of grand and intangible. Sometimes it is really, really a big deal. But it's not only that. It's also something that's happening in every station in this country, in ... in every canyon where there's Firefighters right now. Number three, these innovations, you know, we tend to, I tend to think of innovation as something that agencies do, or that a profession does, or that you think of it as something that comes from a committee or from an office, right? But the truth is, when you look at the history of Firefighter innovation consistently, it's an individual rolling up his sleeves, just like Ed Pulaski all the way through history, just like Chief Brunacini. It's firefighters seeing a problem and deciding they're going to find a way to do something about it. Agencies are important. We need Agencies. But Agencies don't innovate. Firefighters innovate. This is a key truth of Firefighter innovation. Another kind of Common Denominator is that Firefighters innovate when they realize no one else is coming to solve this problem, when you realize no one's coming. If something's gonna happen here, I gotta find a way. That's when innovation happens. That's when problem-solving happens.
"One investigation I did, there's this group of Firefighters in canoes. It was in Minnesota, [Pagami Fire WLF LLC], and the fire was doing crazy stuff not done in that area for like, 150 years. And these, this group of four Firefighters is standing on one side of this little strip of land, one side of the portage. They're going, what the heck are we going to do? And they know this, but they're in a slot where that, they didn't get radio ... they didn't have radio coverage, and so they weren't getting messages from others, telling them, giving, giving them updates on what the fire was doing. And so they're standing there, these four Firefighters trying to figure out, what are we going to do? And there's this war in the distance that can't really be the fire, but it is the fire, but they're thinking that can't be the fire. They're waiting for somebody to give them the clue to tip off, of what, what the heck is going on? What they're supposed to do, and where are they going to go? And they make this decision, we gotta do something. Nobody's coming. We're not getting any more information. We're not getting any more update. Where is it? We have to move. We gotta find a way. And so they make this decision that ends up saving, that ends up saving their lives. I believe it ends up saving their lives. But that moment that, that moment of problem solving happened, when they realized it's up to us to figure something out. The next big insight that was really profound for me and really inspiring and very touching, and that I want to share with you, is that when Firefighters solve Firefighter problems, it helps people that you never would have dreamed of. So I mentioned the Incident Command System [ICS]. And remember, this, is this, this thing that Firefighters did because they had a mess on their hands. It's embarrassing, and all these problems, failures, and all of this, right, Firefighters, so we gotta do something there. So they create the Incident Command System right, in the starting, getting rolled out in the mid-70s, right? Group of Firefighters, gotta do something.
"Well, after the Exxon Valdez disaster and kind of clean-up problems, the Coast Guard said, we got this problem, which is, we're trying to coordinate these different efforts, and it's not going how we want. What are we going to do? You know what they did? They start, they looked at ICS, and they looked at what firefighters did, and they said, We're going to start using ICS after an earthquake in Mexico, devastating earthquake in Mexico, and the State Department sent people down to try to help, try to do some kind of disaster relief. It didn't go real well. It was a mess all of this. They said, what are we going to do? They looked at ICS, and they adopted ICS for their disaster relief efforts. And all across the country, different agencies, different first responders, Fire Departments, firefighters started adopting the incident command system to help deal with complex situations, and then after 9-11, it became a national standard. So this is an example now, when, when first responders in our country, first responders, when we send disaster relief overseas, right? When we ... when, when Deepwater Horizon happened, right? People are using the Incident Command System to make things better. This is incredible. This is the ... the ... the result of a group of firefighters in Southern California going, we got a mess here, we got to make something better. And their innovation, their creativity, their drive and determination. Think of the effects that's had around the world. Think of the ... think of the ducks in the Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon that are better off today because of those Firefighters decades earlier. So this is a key concept. This is a really big deal. It's that when Firefighters innovate, they don't just solve firefighter problems. They do things that make the world better in ways that you couldn't have predicted. You couldn't have guessed or dreamt that it would work out that way. And this is incredible, and it makes me wonder."
"And this brings me back to that moment, looking at that blank page, about how do we learn from the Yarnell Hill Fire, the fact that as a profession, we have not yet started to learn from this."
OMG! Well now, "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!" This author alleges at this juncture that Mayhew is obviously setting the stage here for him being the ONLY ONE to teach us about the YH Fire and GMHS tragedy lessons learned, while also allegedly profiting from it with that statement. Instead, Mr. Mayhew, how about revealing the documents, facts, photographs, recordings, and videos that would expose the truth from what has been documented that you garnered and have allegedly criminally and unethically omitted from your less-than-factual YH Fire Investigation? And, also your one quote that follows immediately below.
"And I want to acknowledge something, there are people that have done a lot to try to help, to be positive, to do good after this tragedy, and they deserve all the credit in the world, and I don't in any way want to miss the opportunity to recognize that there are people that have made heroic efforts."
And yet Mayhew gives NO credit to this author's numerous published works documented in Part 3. of this post, nor those of “Joy A. Collura, one of the two local avid hikers who are familiar with the area" who photographed, videoed, and spoke with members of the GMHS on June 30, 2013," according to the SAIT-SAIR.
This author alleges that both the above and the following statements are true because Mayhew and likely other SAIT Investigators are allegedly uniquely complicit in and responsible for the "mystery surrounding the facts of the event, and it's unprecedented in the lack of learning" claims, alleged facts, and unprecedented mystery.
"It's unprecedented in the mystery surrounding the actual facts of the event, and it's unprecedented in the lack of learning that has come out of it.
And I just wonder.
I just wonder what we have missed out on, what the world has missed out on by the fact that we have not yet begun to learn from this tragedy.
But what we need to say, what we need to be honest about, what we need to face is that as a profession,
we have not yet started to learn from this tragedy,
not like we have in history. This event was unprecedented, unprecedented in its severity."
Setting aside the fact that he uses the same Oct. 3, 2024, dates, consider now the Mayhew Oct 3, 2024, Communicating During DARC Times | FIRExTalk SoCal 23, virtually identical to his Oct 3, 2024, What have we learned? FireX YouTube video above, transcribed using the Otter.ai app: "So 2017, I decided to go back to the accident site, and everything was different. This is the site of the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire, where 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots lost their lives, not wandering around. It's been four years. Nothing looks the same. The brush has grown back, trying to find, trying to find my way. The reason I was there was because I was determined to find some way to learn something meaningful, some kind of meaningful lessons from this tragedy that can be shared with other Firefighters to help serve a fire service for the future. So, I finally find the spot that I'm looking for, and where it, is, is, it's this spot near the one spot I call it the Hunker Rocks, where it's the last place where the Crew was together. We have pictures, and the guys are okay, and they're smiling and joking around, and everything's all right. I looked at those pictures a lot during the investigation, because it's our last glimpse into what was happening with them before the decision was made to leave the black, so I went up to that spot and I sat on this flat rock, and as I was looking around, because I had spent so much time watching these videos and looking at these pictures, I kind of my mind sort of superimposed the guys on the rocks around me. When I sat there looking at what they were looking at, trying to think about, maybe what they could have been thinking about, looking for some lesson, some insight, Something that we could take away for the future. I had nothing.
"I had nothing because we don't know, I don't know how they made the decision to leave, The whole accident turns on this moment right here, and we really don't know how it happened.
"There are four big theories, or four big kinds of theories that are out there. So you have a 20-person Crew, and the theory is that maybe the Superintendent wanted to leave, and then Crew members didn't like that idea, but they went along with it anyway. That's one theory. The second theory is maybe the Assistant Superintendent, Captain, maybe he was the one that wanted to leave, and he kind of drove that decision. Another theory is that maybe the decision was made together, and the guys who were there didn't either, didn't see the risks or didn't speak up about the risks that they saw. And then there's a fourth theory, which is that maybe there's some pressure that came in from outside, one way or another, that influenced the Crew's decision-making. When I say these are four theories, what I mean are, after the accident, I traveled around the country, doing my best to share what I could, what I did know, what I did understand about this event, and I listened to Firefighters tell me their ideas. And it's speculative. You know, this is just Firefighters coming up with ideas, trying to explain what we will have an explanation for. And me personally, from an Investigator mindset, I didn't put a lot of stock in this speculative turning, you know, but as I'm sitting up here, something struck me. And what struck me was this idea of all these theories, all these ideas that Firefighters have, they all have something in common. They all involve Firefighters on the Crew seeing the risk but not speaking up about it, or not speaking up about it effectively, that's what all the speculative scenarios have in common. And what dawned on me that day was, maybe this tells us something. It may not tell us something about what happened on 30, June, 2013, but maybe it tells us something about Firefighters. So there's this gap in what we know, and what's happening is that people try to fill that gap so that, so that it makes sense. But what are they filling the gap with? Well, they're filling the gap with the things, that we fill the gap with the things that we know, what we've seen, what makes sense to us. We fill it with what we're afraid of, with what we know is possible, what we don't want to happen, what we think could happen, right? In other words, what Firefighters are filling that gap with is it's a window into the fire service. It may not tell us something about what happened on 30, June, 2013, but it may tell us something about us and how we operate. I think what it reveals is that we know there's an issue when it comes to speaking up effectively about risk."
Although originally attributed to YH Fire Investigator Mayhew, this bolded statement, based on his alleged similar sentiment, stammering, tone, verbiage, and such, lacks any documented source evidence of such. "Profiting financially from wildland firefighter deaths raises significant ethical and moral concerns. I think every leader's nightmare is something bad happens to their Crew, and then afterwards they find out the Crew members saw things starting to go wrong, they heard problems. They knew things were on the wrong track, but they didn't speak up about it effectively, and that information didn't make it to the truth there. So what we're going to talk about today is I don't want that nightmare to become your reality. And I've done plenty of firefighter interviews after close calls, accidents, even successes. And I've heard, I've never once heard somebody say, Boy, I really am sure that, that when the guys were scared, nobody said anything about it. Never heard that. Heard a lot of guys with a lot of regret learning over the course of the investigation, discovering that actually the warning signs, there were people in the situation that saw the warning signs, and for whatever reason, that information never actually made it to the people who were making the decision."
At this juncture, let's take a shallow dive into alleged Pastor Mayhew's financial world (accessed July 2025), regarding information posted in the officially sanctioned Federal "HIGHERGOV" website for the "Period of Performance" heading with a Start Date of (4/10/16) and an Ordering Period End Date of (4/10/21) for his Blanket Purchase Agreement No. AG024BB160003.
"Government Description - A Human Factors Specialist (HFS) support is required for incidents that meet the threshold on the Forest Service Chiefs' level review or investigation when this threshold is reached the Director of OSOH [Office of Safety and Occupational Health] will select teams based on a list of available personnel. This list will be forwarded to the Chief's office, and a Letter of Delegation will be prepared assigning individuals to positions on the Team."
"Awardee - Fireline Factors Consulting. Awarding / Funding Agency
"Individual Order Limit - $25,000. Vehicle Ceiling - $500,000 (0% Used)"
In full disclosure of intellectual honesty, to bolster this author's and curious others' deep-seated beliefs whether it is unequivocally unethical and immoral for a PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR being paid with Federal funds to profit from the 19 GMHS' deaths, please consider the following focused AI response to this Google search question: "Is it ethical to financially benefit as a private investigator to be paid with federal funds from a professionally completed wildland fire investigation?"
"AI Overview - Receiving federal funds as a private investigator for a professionally completed wildland fire investigation is ethical, provided the work is conducted with strict adherence to legal and ethical guidelines for government contracts. The key ethical considerations involve transparency, impartiality, and avoiding conflicts of interest.
"Factors that make payment ethical. Adherence to regulations: The private investigator and the contracting government agency must follow all relevant federal, state, and local laws. This includes regulations governing the use of federal funds, procurement practices, and ethical conduct for contractors.
"Clear contractual terms: A professional contract should clearly define the scope of the work, deliverables, and payment structure. This ensures transparency and prevents any ambiguity about the financial arrangement. Professional standards and qualifications: The private investigator must be properly licensed and qualified to perform wildland fire origin and cause investigations. This typically involves certification from recognized professional bodies, such as the National Association of Fire Investigators (NAFI).
"Impartial and unbiased investigation: The investigator has an ethical duty to be a "truth seeker, not a case maker". Their findings must be based on evidence and objective analysis, regardless of the client or funding source.
No conflict of interest: The investigator must not have any financial or personal conflicts that could compromise their objectivity. For instance, an investigator should not work for both the government and a private company that is a potential party in the fire. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) states that government business 'shall be conducted in a manner above reproach... to avoid strictly any conflict of interest.'
"Proper conduct and evidence collection: The investigator must follow all legal and approved techniques for gathering evidence. This includes respecting privacy, avoiding trespassing, and maintaining a clear chain of custody for evidence.
Misuse of confidential information: If the investigator uses privileged information obtained during the federal investigation for personal gain or to give an unfair advantage to a private client, it would be a serious ethical violation.
In summary, as long as the engagement is handled professionally, transparently, and without conflicts of interest, a private investigator's compensation from federal funds for a wildland fire investigation is ethically sound. The same standards apply to government contracts with any private professional service provider." (End of AI Respones)
Interestingly, even though it's an AI response, it clearly speaks for itself.
Consider delving into our 2020 Applied Human Factors & Ergonomics (AHFE) paper revealing the SAIT's bogus "conclusion" of no fault and no wrongdoing, even though 19 GMHS died in one fell swoop, titled: Credible Evidence Continues to Surface Regarding a Likely "Friendly Fire" Incident Along the Sesame Street and Shrine Corridor Area on June 30, 2013. (Schoeffler, Honda (RiP), and Collura. AHFE, 2020) "Abstract: On June 30, 2013, nineteen Granite Mountain Hot Shots (GMHS) perished on the Yarnell Hill Fire. The Serious Accident Investigation Team - Report conclusion states: “no indication of negligence, reckless actions, or violations of policy or protocol.” Was an unfeasible firing operation dismissed? Video-audio and Hearsay-Exception evidence indicated uncollaborated independent action while GMHS hiked downhill through unburned fuels. Was there a concurrent rogue firing operation? Indications of an unfeasible goal pursuit continued with everything contradicting a sound plan. Contemplated failure led to more entrenched behaviors. Weather deterioration and increased fire behavior were interpreted unrealistically. Both visual and auditory stimuli decreased significantly under stress; listening to cues weakened vision-intense visual cues diminished hearing, triggering tunnel vision and auditory exclusion. Fixated goal setting, non-critical thinking, indecision-making, single-mindedness, and leadership dysfunctions concealing possible dire consequences resulted in disaster. “Friendly Fire” decisions and actions are discussed for lessons to reduce similar tragedies. Keywords: Wildland fire, Hearsay Exception, Tunnel vision, Auditory exclusion, Destructive goal pursuit, Friendly Fire."
The 2020 AHFE authors' paper linked here and cited above also provides several more very cogent and revealing sources on this subject that surround the alleged YH Fire Investigator's lack of, and this author's and others' continued exposure of the truths and alleged lies about the biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history. In this author's professional opinion, Mayhew's alleged actions to prevent it are based on his financial and twisted personal motivations to quash the truth and his convoluted, contradictory, direct, and underhanded involvement.
Consider now this germane misinformation research paper titled: The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation by these UK English scholars, Vellani, Zheng, Ercelik, and Sharot. Cognition. (2023).
"In sum, we show that even a single previous exposure to information will increase the likelihood of sharing by enhancing perceived accuracy. This will create a viscous cycle of exposure – increase belief – sharing – exposure - which in turn can influence actions."
This author alleges that Mr. Mayhew masterfully utilizes the little-known False Balance Fallacy: Incorrectly Presenting Different Sides as Equal, as posted in the informative (Effectivology, 2025). "Reactive Devaluation: Unreasonably Negative Responses to Proposals. Reactive devaluation is a cognitive bias that causes people to devalue things that are offered to them, especially if offered by someone they perceive negatively."
It is dangerous to be right in matters on
which the established authorities are wrong.
Voltaire - French writer & philosopher
Profiting financially from wildland firefighter deaths raises significant ethical
and moral concerns.
This Author
Consider now this AI response to the statement immediately above: "The idea of profiting financially from the deaths of wildland firefighters is deeply concerning and raises significant ethical questions.
Here's why it's ethically problematic:
Exploitation of Tragedy: Turning a loss of life into a financial opportunity can be seen as exploiting the grief and vulnerability of families and the wider firefighting community.
Prioritizing Profit over Safety: Any perception of prioritizing financial gain from deaths, even indirectly, could raise concerns about whether appropriate measures are being taken to ensure firefighter safety.
Undermining Trust and Morale: Such actions can erode trust in organizations and leadership, potentially impacting firefighter morale and willingness to serve in high-risk situations." (End of AI response)
After considering this statement above, claiming that financially profiting from the YH Fire investigation is ethically and morally questionable, check out Mayhew's alleged nauseating narrative as he prefaces and then spews his October 2024 related "established" FireX video disengenuously and selectively using his alleged "facts" in his blather titled and quoting: "What lessons have we learned since the Yarnell Hill Fire? In this insightful video, wildfire expert Brad Mayhew discusses the crucial lessons learned since the tragic Yarnell Hill Fire. He delves into the aftermath of the 2013 disaster, where 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots lost their lives, and shares key takeaways for future firefighting strategies and safety improvements. This conversation sheds light on the importance of risk management, situational awareness, and the evolving tactics in wildland firefighting. Join us for an in-depth look at what has changed in the fire community since the Yarnell Hill Fire, as Brad Mayhew offers his expert analysis on fire behavior, leadership, and the future of wildland fire safety.
Keywords: Yarnell Hill Fire, Brad Mayhew, Granite Mountain Hotshots, wildfire safety, firefighting lessons, wildland fire tactics, risk management, fire behavior, wildfire tragedy, situational awareness, leadership in firefighting, fire safety strategies."
Consider this Fig. 2. Snippet of our YouTube comments from Mayhew's spew, deleted and/or hidden from view from the Fig. 1. video above.
Figure 2. Deleted comments from Fig. 1. Source: YouTube, FireX
And then, this author further alleges that Mayhew intentionally, and quite deftly, both somehow covertly and overtly, obsequiously rocketed onward and upward as the odious pre-saged eventual author of the SAIT-SAIR; and what would eventually allegedly become the biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history! The U.S.F.S.-funded Serious Accident Investigation Team-Serious Accident Investigation Report (SAIT-SAIR) (AHFE, 2022), authorized and lead-authored by Mayhew, dubiously found "no indications of negligence, reckless actions, or policy, protocol, or procedure." For those of us who prefer to state that convoluted double-talk and nonsense in the positive, it should be phrased thus: How is it possible to do everything right and yet kill 19 Prescott FD GMHS in one fell swoop? (AHFE, 2022), (YHFR, 2023), (YHFR, 2023.1), and (OUCI, 2025).
This author alleges Mayhew skilfully exhibited the following deviant behavior at the 2023 San Diego Shelter Island Wildland Fire Safety Summit, further tackled and described in this Psychology Today article titled: “Gaslighting is used by people to make other people question their version of reality,” writes therapist Claire Jack (2025): "It’s an effective way of convincing someone else that you’re right and they’re wrong. By doing so, you can manipulate people into acting in ways which meet your needs and place them in a weak position within the relationship. ... Disregarding someone else’s emotional and processing needs in this way, over time, has the effect of silencing them. What point is there in discussing things with you if you deny the significance of what happened before? ... Such a reaction also validates any bad behaviour that may have occurred during the argument (shouting, name-calling, etc.) and trivialises the hurt the other person feels as a result."
Moreover, in this author's professional opinion, for anyone that was (un)fortunate enough to attend the 2023 Southern California Wildland Fire Safety Summit, there is sufficient actionable evidence that Fireline Factors Mayhew allegedly prohibitted anyone speaking up about seeking the truth by this author and YH Fire eyewitness Joy A. Collura countering, disagreeing, and/or questioning his conclusions, motives, etc. as a speaker or presenter during his hour-long exhibition on the subject of "The Firefighter Tradition of Learning and Innovation - Brad Mayhew - American Fire Saga " the April 12, 2023, San Diego, Shelter Island, Wildland Fire Safety Summit conference, while allegedly and unethically making a sizeable profit on their deaths with his presentation noted below in Fig. 2b. Moreover, his "The Firefighter Tradition of Learning and Innovation" title should give it away whether he’s ostensibly concerned about the real truth instead of his alleged mythical SAIT-SAIR truth.
Figure 2b. 2023 South CA Wildland Fire Safety Summit agenda Source: Eventbrite
Schoeffler’s 2023 San Diego Wildfire Safety Summit Evaluation
Did the information provided here meet your
expectations?
Yes **
No
Please explain briefly*
Overall excellent conference until Brad Mayhew's histrionic "The Firefighter Tradition of Learning and Innovation" and "American Fire Saga" animated performance, including ignoring one of the two YH Fire eyewitnesses, Joy A. Collura's "comments, questions, or smart remarks" which he requested. And his assertive response, "Not you Fred," when I raised my hand to respond to his request for "any other comments or questions." And Bill Bondshu spearheading me with his assertive response and shutting down the presentation.
Both Joy and I always behaved and spoke professionally
and respectfully, as expected and also as requested by Bill
Bondshu. And yet Mayhew was allowed to act and speak both
unprofessionally and disrespectfully. Why the double
standard? Why were we the only ones subjected to the bold
restriction of our First Amendment right of Free Speech?
How and why is it that Mayhew is given the ONLY source, venue, individual, whatever to have a monopoly on all things about the Federally-funded June 2013 YH Fire and GMHS SAIT-SAIR debacle? Most of us consider this tragedy to be the biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history.
And, of course, the YH Fire and GMHS "Lead Investigator" Brad Mayhew's histrionic "The Firefighter Tradition of Learning and Innovation" and "American Fire Saga" animated performance, where he danced around laughing, and joking about what most of us consider to be the biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history. And how and why you all allow Mayhew to be the ONLY source, venue, individual, whatever to have a strictly enforced monopoly on all things about the Federally-funded June 2013 YH Fire and GMHS SAIT-SAIR debacle. You aligned with and honored your “LEARNING FROM THE PAST” theme with ALL other presentations EXCEPT for Mayhew's histrionics and feckless attempt.
What subject matters would you like to see addressed at future summits?*
Open discussion about the June 2013 YH Fire and GMHS debacle. I think about those men EVERY day! I read, research, present, and write articles, papers, and posts about this predictable and preventable tragedy on a regular basis. Fred J. Schoeffler - Project 10 & 18 International.
Here are my Google Scholar articles and such
(https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WeaMSJkAAAAJ&hl=en) and our internationally-acclaimed-and-recognized-and-cited YHFR website
(https://www.yarnellhillfirerevelations.com/blog-1) where we honor the dead by telling the truth instead of lying and dishonoring the dead, revealing evidence of up to three separate firing operations responsible for the GMHS deaths, how Mayhew’s SAIT blocked the ADOSH investigation the entire way, the countless missing evidence and Public Records, and so much more.
Do you have any comments on the guest speakers?*
I helped Brad Mayhew out when I was still the Payson HS Supt. when former LPHS Supt. Mark Linane asked me to look at his nascent work on LCES; approving and encouraging him to carry on with it. And he did! If you check out his Fireline Factors website, you'll readily notice
(https://www.firelinefactors.com/) they have chosen him to "investigate" and "review" numerous other wildland fire mishaps because I allege he drank the Kool-Aid and toes the Party Line and will write whatever they tell him to write! Lead Investigator Brad Mayhew is profiting off the deaths of the 19 GMHS and his Federally-funded YH Fire SAIT-SAIR by being paid to come to allegedly to "investigate" it and also these venues (SD WF SS and SCFFW) selling his book series while refusing to allow open discussion when he asks the question: "Are there any comments, questions, or smart remarks." He totally avoided the actual posted content and topics of his alleged presentation! And the SD WF SS assuredly PAID for his histrionic performance masquerading as a presentation.
Any additional comments or suggestions for the cadre
concerning the summit?*
We are "ALLOWED" to talk about ALL other historical wildland fires except one - the YH Fire and GMHS debacle! Why is that? You all most definitely opened a lot of eyes and inquiring minds when Mayhew outright ignored Joy, assertively rebuffed me, and then Bill B. "spearheading" me and shutting it all down! So then, allow others to discuss and/or present on the June 2013 YH Fire and GMHS debacle because people are starving for honest dialogue and information on this subject, because for ten years now, they intuitively "know something is wrong about the whole thing." In other words, this will go on for eternity.
Interestingly, retired Placer Hills and Newcastle Fire Protection Chief Kirk Kushen posted recently on LinkedIn a glowing review for you guys. "One of the best conferences there is! Bill Bondshu did a great job spearheading this event! It was always very informative and a good time was had by all. ..." Always very informative? And a good time was had by all. Really? I commented on his post, however, he either blocked it or removed it. Thanks, Chief.
Thank you for the opportunity to take a moment for me to provide valued information and input comments for future summits. I hope that others took the time to honestly leave their comments as well." (End of Schoeffler’s 2023 San Diego Wildfire Safety Summit Evaluation)
This author will only when judged necessary, integrate germane relevant select facts, ideas, quotations, and reflections from the writing of others and then blend them within this author's dialogue and ideas inside brackets ([ ]) as discussed in the following article here by Clarice Feldman (April 30, 2023) titled: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace - "The forces determined to monopolize the public square through censorship, lies, and social pressure have devastated universities and scholarship generally, [which has] allowed a corrupt [wildland fire] bureaucracy to ravage both our [personal and professional] lives, and stuck us with the most incompetent and corrupt [wildland fire] leadership in our history."
Figure 2c. Plato's quote on wise men vs. fools speaking. Source: Facebook
Consider now a few of the one-and-only, world-renowned intellectual Thomas Sowell and his germane quotes squarely relating to this post.
1. “Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly, and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.”
2. “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
“In other words, evidence is too dangerous—politically, financially, and psychologically—for some people to allow it to become a threat to their interests or to their own sense of themselves.”
The author's intentions are fairly simple. Among other things, initially stating the value of the renowned and trusted, retired Lt. Colonel Grossman's worthwhile book titled: On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdog (Mylin Shaatan). And also to maintain our YHFR legacy as truth seekers and truth tellers is always strengthened by presenting a defensible, unified, well-reasoned case. This author has also provided links for as many of the sources referenced as possible so that you may more easily avail yourselves of further research opportunities.
Moreover, this author highly suggests utilizing the Socratic Method of teaching as applied in Law Schools, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. Professors often use this method for hypothetical applications of law or to review a case. (JD Advising, 2025). And so should we to make up for the intentional lack of accurate and truthful information in the majority of the SAIT-SAIRs and certainly in almost all of those "no blame, no fault" Facilitated Learning Analyses (FLA), self-created by the self-established Dr. Ivan Pupulidy's alleged Golden Goose named Coordinated Response Protocol (CRP), noted as (CRaP) by this author because, for the most part, it is just that! "Dr. Ivan Pupulidy created the U.S. Forest Service Office of Innovation and Organizational Learning to focus on understanding risk in complex adaptive systems and foster a culture of learning in the agency. Ivan developed the Learning Review, which replaced serious accident investigation in the U.S. Forest Service. ... Currently a Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Ivan teaches courses in learning-based safety and human potential for the Advanced Safety and Engineering Management master’s degree program. His courses and career focus on risk and safety in complex systems and high-risk environments. Ivan earned a Master of Science degree in Human Factors and Systems Safety at Lund University, Sweden, under the renowned Professor Sidney Dekker, and he completed his PhD in Organizational Transformation at Tilburg University, Netherlands." By all means, the Sister Learning Reviews (LR), etc., are also alleged seriously lacking in the valued core sources of wildland fire human factors, psychology, wildland fire weather, and wildland fire behavior, etc.
It's interesting that Mayhew is also a fellow Sweden Lund University graduate and alleged YH Fire Party-Liner, along with Dr. Ivan Pupilidy and Joseph Harris who claims a Master's Degree in Human Factors and System Safety, where they studied and graduated from the world-renowned Lund University, which publicizes: "This programme is for everybody who wants to expand their knowledge and practical skills for the safety challenges of the twenty-first century. Its program offers you the latest thinking in the new view of human factors, accountability, accident models, and resilience engineering. The understanding of accidents, risk and safety is changing. We no longer see human error as cause, but as a symptom. We recognise the exciting possibilities of systems thinking for accident analysis and organisational improvement. We are shifting from reliability to resilience and the enhancement of adaptive capacity. We look for new relationships between stakeholders to create forms of accountability that do not harm safety. "
Consider now in Fig. 5d. below, this former USFS Blue Ridge Hot Shot Superintendent Brian Frisby's USFS-redacted email thread Snippet with fellow Lund University-programmed USFS National Human Dimensions Specialist Joseph Harris, also a Lund graduate, regarding the nascent 2016 YH Fire Staff Ride and some disturbing, yet unsurprising, now exposed and well-known comments and details about the YH Fire, i.e., "the picture that is being painted is very different than what we remember" after being "swept under the rug." Clearly, the YH Fire Investigator Mayhew would have allegedly known about this evidence.
Figure 3. Former BRHS Supt. Frisby's USFS redacted email thread with USFS Harris. Source: YHFR
To set the stage for the following post, directly related to Fig. 5. above, for clarification and context purposes, Deborah Pfingston is GMHS Andrew Ashcraft's (RiP) Mother, who long ago knew of and sought assistance on IM. On April 12, 2014, at 8:11 am, Deborah Pfingston said: “Thank you for doing this digging for me. … I have theory – of which I have had many but discover they won’t work –I really think there was a back burn set possibly by the trailers. Thoughts!” This is the Shrine area of the Sesame Street-Shrine Corridor. [A "backburn" is a hillbilly, hoackey, unapproved euphemism for the officially sanctioned NWCG definition or term for a burn-out and/or firing operation.]
Here is the renowned WTKTT's June 1, 2019, InvestigativeMEDIA trenchant comments on the above: WantsToKnowTheTruth says June 1, 2019, at 5:12. THE PFINGSTON / HARWOOD PODCASTS ( CONTINUED ). BRIAN FRISBY IS TALKING TO OTHER HOTSHOT CREWS ABOUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AT THE YARNELL FIRE. ... "Apparently, Blue Ridge Hotshot Superintendent Brian Frisby is sick and tired of being told he can’t discuss what he knows ( and has ALWAYS known ) about the Yarnell Hill Fire. ... According to Deborah Pfingston and former GM Hotshot Doug Harwood… Frisby spoke to an entire California Hotshot Crew just last summer about what REALLY happened in Yarnell, and whatever he told them was enough for them to realize the SAIT investigation was a total FARCE. ... In their ‘introduction’ to their PODCAST Episode 8, published just 5 weeks ago on April 24, 2019, Harwood ‘reads’ an email they received from one of the firefighters on this Hotshot Crew that Frisby spoke to." ... Our Investigation, Our Truth: What Happened to the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshots PODCAST Episode 08: Your Changes, Our Changes Published: April 24, 2013. Episode 8, Part 1
+0:48———————————————————————————————————–Doug Harwood: We have a comment from a firefighter on a Hotshot crew in California. He says…“My Crew was lucky enough to work with Blue Ridge last summer. On one of the slow days the Blue Ridge Supe ( Brian Frisby ) took time to speak to our whole Crew about the events of that day. Between THAT conversation, and listening to your podcasts, I’m appalled by the FAILURE of our original investigation. Not only was it an injustice to the perished firefighters, it’s a disservice to our current firefighters as well. How are we supposed to learn ANY lessons from the tragedy if we don’t know exactly what happened?”
Doug Harwood: We want to thank that firefighter for his message.
Deborah Pfingston: Yes. Thank you so much.
The trailers that she refers to are The Shrine area!
And just for the sake of completeness … Here is the email that Joy Collura obtained showing Blue Ridge Hotshot Supt. Brian Frisby officially telling U.S. Forestry Service ‘Human Factors Specialist’ Joseph Harris that the “human factors” at the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire were definitely “off the charts”… and much of what happened that day HAS been “swept under the rug”…
———————————————————————————————————–From: Frisby, Brian H -FS Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2016 10:08 AM To: Harris, Joseph R -FS Subject: Human Factors!
"Good morning, Joe,
"It sounds like you have had the opportunity to go through the Yarnell Hill staff ride and may have some questions about some of the human factors that contributed that day. Talking to ( Redacted ) it sound[s] like the picture that is being painted is very different than what we remember. I have been invited to the operational staff ride on the 26th and 27th of this month, unfortunately any input is probably too late.
"I can tell you that the human factors that day were off the charts. We both know that the overall decision to leave the black was made by ( Eric Marsh ) but there was so much that went on that day that has been swept under the rug that may have affected the outcome.
"I would love the opportunity to talk to you about it, I believe there is a lot to be learned from this event and if we are going to adopt this as an agency we need to get this right. Anyhow hope you and your family are doing well and I hope to hear from you. Thanks."
Consider the following WFSTAR video An Analysis of Burnovers which discuss and mention many of the historic burnovers and fatalities, including the YH Fire and GMHS debacle.
Figure 3a. An Analysis of Burnovers Source: WFSTAR
This author posted the following comment on July 25, 2025, on the Fig. 3a. video, so we will see if they "allowed" it, and how long they will "allow" it. "Fairly good video for lessons learned on most of the historic burnovers, entrapments, and fatality fires that we are familiar with. However, the NWCG declares: 'For brevity purposes, we will reference all direct fire contact and exposure fatalities as burnovers.' In my professional opinion, that official statement detracts from the true lessons to be learned from the failure to follow the tried-and-true Rules of Engagement and recognize, heed, and mitigate the Entrapment Avoidance Principles that keep us out of fire shelters and the severity of fatalities. Deploying one's fire shelter is almost always the failure of the above."
Consider this YouTube video titled: "How to Properly Refuse Risk, incorporating the Risk Management Process, 10 Standard Firefighting Orders, and 18 Watchout Situations, referenced in the Incident Response Pocket Guide (IRPG)."
And you'll want to ask yourselves why these restrictions listed below are in the NWCG "Learn more" link that follows, when it is supposed to be all about learning? "Comments are turned off. Learn more
"Comments may be turned off across YouTube because:
The video owner selected the setting to "Disable comments." ... The channel or video’s audience is set as "made for kids." Learn more about this type of content. ... You or your system administrator have turned on Restricted Mode. Learn more about this setting. ... Comments on automatically generated Art Tracks are turned off if the primary artist doesn’t have an Official Artist Channel. Learn more about Art Tracks. ...
YouTube may have turned off comments on some content for safety reasons, like to protect minors or for other safety violations. Learn more about our Community Guidelines. ... Note: We know that comments are important to creators and viewers alike, but we also take the safety of minors and other vulnerable groups seriously. Sometimes we may turn off comments on content, even if that content doesn't violate our guidelines. We do this to protect vulnerable creators or audiences."
Consider now the valuable, yet disconcerting insight within USFS Human Dimensions and Lund University graduate Ed Harris's 2015 Wildland Fire Leadership Master's degree thesis titled: "Do Staff Rides Help Move the Forest Service Towards Its Goal of Becoming a Learning Organization?"
"On today's blog, we share U.S. Forest Service Fuels Specialist Joe Harris's master's degree thesis on Staff Rides and whether or not they help the Forest Service in its goal to be a learning organization. ... We encourage students of fire and leadership to review the research and conclusions. Are we learning from our experiences? Can we do better?"
"The Abstract - The Forest Service has declared its intention of becoming a learning organization. As a means to that end, the Forest Service has borrowed and adapted the staff ride concept from the military. This paper describes the staff ride product and compares it to what scientific research tells us about the nature of learning. Focus group sessions were conducted to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of staff rides. ... This research is intended to provide a scientific and argument basis for the digitalization of the staff ride environment for a particular organization. As such this thesis is a much a design document as it is a piece of empirical research. Designing "into the future" especially for the Forest Service's requirement, requires designing for an organization whose learning and organizations needs are quite broad and sometimes contradictory. Further sorting out of real world teaching events like the staff ride that should be transferred to digital environment at this point in time rests more on intuition than science."
Harris further curiously quotes about the alleged gap between the truth and Staff Rides: "While staff rides are effective, they are expensive and are not scalable. There is also a perceived gap between the traditional written report and the staff ride. The Forest Service can make progress toward its goal of becoming a learning organization by closing this gap through designing learning products that aim to replicate the emotional and intellectual impact of the staff ride to a much wider audience."
There is also a perceived gap between the traditional written report and the staff ride.
Joseph Harris - Lund Univ.
Tying the alleged Harris “ gap” comment and the following DFFM Truett comment, please recall that former CDF John Truett, who is now the Fire Management Officer (FMO) at the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management (DFFM) and anointed YH Fire Staff Ride Coordinator, allegedly suggested to one of the YH Fire "local knowledge hikers" Joy A. Collura, in a phone interview several years ago, something to the effect of "the truth doesn't matter on a Staff Ride." Really? Since when is the truth insignificant on a Lessons Learned Staff Ride, as implied in the official Wildland Fire Leadership Development Program (WLFLDP) statement below? This author alleges that Truett highly vets these YHF GMHS Staff Rides, thus favoring Party-Liners and Kool-Aid Drinkers. However, the official GMHS Memorial Trail is public land, and so, our solemn First Amendment rights override any alleged bluffs, intimidations, or threats.
The official Staff Ride statement below is remarkably spot-on and quite telling, often missed and/or unquoted, and clearly addresses the prominence of all Staff Rides. Especially the one for the alleged biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history, the YH Fire, and what inevitably would become, by judicial edict, the officially sanctioned GMHS Staff Ride. InvestigativeMEDIA (WantsToKnowTheTruth says May 22, 2016)
Quote source document: Wildland Fire Leadership (2021) Staff Ride/Case Study/Site Visit - What's the Difference?
"A staff ride should avoid being a recital of a single investigation report. Such reports rarely address the human factors that affect individual decision-making. For this reason, providing participants with a variety of information sources is important."
(NWCG, WFLDP)
Seriously consider utilizing the renowned, innovative, and successful Khan Academy's version by Rogerio L. Roth titled: The Socratic Method Reloaded: A Rereading to Improve a Technologically Sound Education from the (2016) Intl. Journal of Learning, Teaching and Educational Research. And their Case Study - How Khan Academy Leveraged AI to Change Education (2024), written by Puran Parsani. "Khanmigo is an AI chatbot tutor, built on the GPT-4 architecture, designed to engage students in interactive learning sessions across a wide range of subjects. Unlike traditional educational technologies, Khanmigo uses the Socratic method to prompt critical thinking and independent problem-solving. Rather than simply providing answers, it encourages students to think deeply and reason through problems."
Consider now our 2023 YHFR post titled: Speaking Ill of the Dead By Lying About Them? Or Honoring the Dead By Searching For The Truth If They're Considered as Public Figures? Part 2 in that YHFR post's Figure 3a. (July 2023) The in-depth genesis and history of the derogatory and even unethical phrases and alleged actions and behaviors of "speaking ill of the dead" and "defaming the dead." Contrast those with the more beneficial and positive healing aspects of "honoring the dead." For those inquisitive readers, it is worth the time to delve into the Ninth Circuit rulings on a First Amendment Free Speech issue regarding whether "bloggers" have the same First Amendment rights as established journalists (Crystal Cox vs. Obsidian Finance Group, 2011), and the legal principles of "the public at large” and "of public concern" is cited here and on our YHFR website post.
Consider also the informative and insightful link for The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12), by Edmund Burke. Project Gutenberg (2005) regarding dissent and speech, among other subjects.
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
Ephesians 6:12
A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth
German theorist on war, Carl von Clausewitz
“If you do not engage in the illegal cover-up, you will be fired for insubordination. ... The biggest mistake that you will make in life
is believing that governments act in the public interest. ... Knowledge is having a mental history of past events. ... Wisdom is having the ability to relate those past events to the present and future."
Steven Magee (Truth Teller) BukRate
Training should also include information about the limitations of human information processing, since every individual is prone to cognitive biases and will experience these biases while in firefighting roles. (Clancy, 2010, Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire conference)
Consider now below the Otter app written transcription of the Wildland Fire Safety Training and Refresher (WFSTAR), Wildland Fire LLC (WLF LLC), former National Park Service (NPS) Hot Shot Superintendent, Fire Management Officer, and National Advanced Fire & Resource Institute (NAFRI) Center Manager Brit Rosso's Weather Channel video clip (Fig. 3.) regarding his emotional, heart-felt YH Fire speech, about the importance of talking about the Yarnell Hill (YH) Fire, thus countering what the alleged odious Mayhew believes and endorses, being the complete opposite by restricting, ceasing, and threatening removal of anyone countering and/or questioning him during his alleged discussions. Below is the Otter app written transcript of the WFSTAR and WLF LLC's video clip of his capably sincere YH Fire speech, stressing the importance of respectfully talking about the YH Fire to heal as well as learn from this tragic event, in pursuit of truth, is rooted in respect for the 19 GMHS and their families:
"My name is Brit Rosso, Center Manager with the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center. Quick fire background, I spent about 21 years on a Hot Shot Crew, spent a few years as a District FMO, been working with the Lesson Learned Center for the last three or so. I'm here today talking about the Yarnell Fire. We're all struggling with how to process what happened on June 30, 2013. Know we're all struggling out in the fire community about where are the lessons? What are the take home messages? What can we learn from this incident? ... What I want to share with you is how important it is to talk about it. Not only to talk about it, to let you know that it's okay to talk about it. And, it's important that you do talk about it. Share what you've learned by reading the reports and watching the videos and have open, honest, respectful dialogue. Be willing to listen to other people's opinions and have that respectful dialogue with your fellow firefighters. ... By having this dialogue, ... by facilitating these conversations about Yarnell … this is where the learning is going to happen ... is with you and your brothers and sisters out there in the field. It's the 20th anniversary of South Canyon. We're still learning from South Canyon 20 years later. Yarnell just happened eight months ago. We'll be learning about the Yarnell incident for years to come. Time and patience are going to be key for learning from this incident, by asking you to just take the time and be patient as we work through this together."
Consider the Wildland Fire WFSTAR Yarnell Hill Fire Weather Channel Video in Fig. 4. (2018), containing former NPS Hot Shot Supt. Rosso's spew.
Figure 4. WFSTAR YH Fire WX Channel Video Source: NWCG, WFSTAR
And regarding Brad Mayhew's alleged questionable decisions and actions during the informative and entertaining 2018 Southern California Foresters and Fire Warden (SCFFW's) conference in 2018, when author John Maclean and alleged Investigator Holy Neill attempted to offer their Yarnell Hill – Five Years Later presentation, when one of the two "local knowledge hikers" Joy A. Collura boldly and confidently stated in an email: "I did find it funny that to share five years later [2018] on YH Fire as keynote “speakers” [John Maclean and Holly Neill] and then to have Brad Mayhew interrupt, cost the organization $ two grand $ and I have this blog, freely sharing yet [it] is not free to run it or to gain these records and interviews sharing documents. I am not making a book or movie, which, in the end, these speakers are doing just that. I think making any monies on the tragedy is beyond messed up."
Alleged Pastor Mayhew spew endures: "So what can we do? Well, that's kind of that was my big insight that day. Was, look, we've been hearing for at least my entire career. I was told, if you see something, say something. If things are starting to go wrong, speak up. But how often does that actually happen? How often does it happen that things are starting to go wrong, and the people in this situation are able to speak up, speak up effectively in a way that serves the decision makers, and then take a new direction?
"How often have you done that? How can I buy them? It doesn't happen as often as we'd like to think. Why? Why is that?
"The traditional answer is, the reason it doesn't happen is because bosses are overbearing, and that's why it doesn't happen is because the bosses are mean, and so the Crew members don't speak up. That's why that's the old story. But it seems to me that's not very true, because I work for great bosses. I work for some not so great bosses, and let me tell you, Firefighters don't speak up effectively. It's not about how cool your boss is. So what can we do about it? Well, this, this insight, inspired me to go back and look at my own experiences as a Firefighter, the fires that I was on, the tons I tried to speak up, times I was successful, times I wasn't, times I didn't speak up. And it made me go back over the investigations that I and other people's investigations, my own investigations, and I went out and I just started talking to other Firefighters, one conversation after another, one by one."
Consider below in Figure 4a, the classic June 30, 2013, 1629 hrs. photo image Snippet with Google Earth Overlay by WantsToKnowTheTruth (WTKTT), of the YH Fire, GMHS locations, Boulder Springs Ranch (BSR), GMHS travel routes, and eventual Deployment Zone (DZ) and Fatality Site based on GMHS Christopher MacKenzie's (RiP) June 30, 2913, photo. His photo was given a YH Fire SAIT evidence number (IMG_1334.JPG) and posted in one of our 2018 YHFR posts. However, it was never utilized by the Lead Investigator Brad Mayhew, in the SAIT-SAIR, who, in its place, allegedly deceitfully chose to use the idealized image in the SAIT-SAIR Figure 16. instead of the factual IMT Plans Chief Brian Lauber image in Figure 4a. immediately below to support the PFD Wildland Battalion Chief (WBC) Willis' literal bogus contention of fire above and fire below the GMHS during his July 2013, YH Fire and GMHS Deployment Zone News Conference Part One (YouTube) partially cited here: "... they were committed to go downhill. ... they knew that they had fire on both sides of them, they knew they had fire behind them and now they had fire ahead of them."
Figure 4a. June 30, 2013, 1629 hrs. photo image Snippet with Google Earth Overlay of the YH Fire & GMHS locations & travel routes. Source: Lauber, WantsToKnowTheTruth (WTKTT).
This Fig. 4a. photo above was taken by ASF Brian Lauber, the YH Fire IMT Plans Chief, from Hwy 89 near the Assembly of God Church in Yarnell, AZ. It was given a specific SAIT-SAIR evidence number (IMG_1334.JPG), given to and seen by Mayhew; however, he never utilized it as evidence. And it was further enhanced by the cryptic and talented InvestigativeMEDIA contributor WantsToKnowTheTruth (WTKTT) with Google Earth overlay icons revealing the GMHS locations, travel routes, etc. It has been used most often by the authors because it best reflects one of the main themes of this YHFR website: the extreme fire behavior likely resulting from one of several firing operations and the fatal GMHS decision to leave their Safety Zone ("the black") at the worst possible time. This occurred when they made that fatal decision without clearly and specifically notifying anyone, either an Operations Supervisor or Air Attack, of their intentions, clearly violating the communications Fire Order No. 7!
Regarding WantsToKnowTheTruth (WTKTT) - because the Wix video link is failing to populate his YouTube video links, please take the time to venture into WTKTT's videos and Google Earth overlay mastery in the link below, with 77 subscribers and 80 videos. (https://www.youtube.com/@wantstoknowthetruth1553/videos)
"The measure of a man is what he does with power."
Plato
Power reveals character. Professionals wielding authority with integrity and purpose foster trust and impact, ensuring ethical leadership shapes positive outcomes. This author alleges Mayhew should heed this advice.
Figure 4b. Idealized image of alleged fire spread Source: SAIT-SAIR Fig. 18
This author alleges that the SAIT Lead Investigator and others decided to use this idealized Fig. 4b. SAIT-SAIR Fig. 18. image (p. 77) rather than the factual June 30, 2013, 1629 Lauber photo Figure 4a. to support former PFD now DFFM Willis's bogus "fire above and fire below" contention from his July 27, 2013, YH Fire Deployment Zone News Conference videotaped by John Dougherty of InvestigativeMEDIA (IM). Listen carefully. What fatal factors does PFD Willis reveal on the July 7, 2013, GMHS Deployment Zone News Conference video?
Figure 5. Former PFD Wildland Division BC Willis (center-right-) Part 1. answering media questions on July 23, 2013, at the deployment site where the GMHS died on June 30, 2013, Snippet. Source: John Dougherty (IM)
Figure 5a. Former PFD Wildland Division BC Willis Part 2. answering media questions on July 23, 2013, at the deployment site where the GMHS died on June 30, 2013. Source: John Dougherty (IM)
Who Are the Underground Honor the Fallen Group, Couple Dozen Current and Former Federal WFs and FFs, and Others; and What Are Their Underlying Goals and Ulterior Motives for Defending the GMHS Flawed and Ultimately Fatal Decisions and Actions on June 30, 2013? Schoeffler and contributing authors (YHFR, 2023).
It is vitally important to endeavor toward writing as clearly and as understandable as possible for the general public, WFs, FFs, and especially to the family, friends, and loved ones of the GMHS. Of course, this includes the skeptics within the latter category in the Underground Honor the Fallen Group (HTFG, 2013) posted on our YHFR website. The HTFG struggles with knowing - and ultimately accepting - the truth about what happened and why, yet they are working in concert to discredit those who wholeheartedly support the tried-and-true Rules of Engagement. The HTF Group has chosen to censor the truth from what is and has been obvious to any honest observer and/or inquisitive soul, of the June 30, 2013, tragedy history. The authors allege that the HTFG and their ilk are on a different path; the alleged unethical machination is a one-way route of deception to come to the untenable Orwellian conclusion that "We could see ourselves making the same decision they’d made."
"We could see ourselves making
the same decision they’d made."
Do you think that Mr. Mayhew is allegedly following in the footsteps of Bertrand Russel, a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, and moralist critic who analyzed the psychology of emotional manipulation and how it fuels mass support while suppressing reasoned voices? (SE of P, C. Pigeon, 2007) Because that is allegedly what he thrived on, silencing dissent and discussion at both the 2023 San Diego Wildland Fire Safety Summit and the 2018 So Cal Foresters and Fire Wardens Conference -Wildland Fire Training and Safety Conference (SC FFW WF).
Figure 5c. 2018 Safety and Training Conference Source: SC FFW WF
Consider now the Otter.ai transcript of the alleged Pastor Mayhew, stammering and stuttering along, albeit making occasional good suggestions while ultimately quashing dissent and/or disagreement from this author and ignoring one of the "YHF local knowledge hikers" and co-author of the YHFR website, Joy A. Collura. He continues with his alleged blather here at the March 2024 San Diego Wildland Fire Safety Summit on Shelter Island at Humphrey's Inn forum: "Have you ever spoken up effectively on fire? Why? Why not? When does it happen? When does it not happen? And what I discovered changed my perspective on this whole issue of speaking up effectively. I'd like to share with you a couple key concepts, and I want to share with you a practical tool that you can use right now on your Crew to level up your leadership and communication on your Crew. So the first thing is that a lot of our training and policy and a lot of our investigations, a lot of how we approach communication is based on the idea that fire is basically safe, stable, straightforward, and simple, right? So we have these ways that we're taught to communicate that are very, very effective almost all the time, because usually where we are operating for practical purposes is pretty safe. What we're dealing with is pretty simple, right? When you Firefighters don't have any problem saying that somebody took their ice cream out of the freezer, and they didn't. They shouldn't have done that, but they did it, right? We don't have problems speaking up in a 4s environment. But here's the point when things are falling apart on fire. It's not like that. The fire environment is inherently dynamic, risky, complex and ambiguous, dark, D, A, R, C, Dynamic, Ambiguous, Risky and Complex. And so one of the reasons that communication breaks down just when you need it the most is because the way that we have learned to communicate and the way that we are good at communicating is calibrated for an environment that's a 4s environment. But now you're in these moments that are dark, this moment where it becomes extremely risky, extremely dynamic, extremely complex, ambiguous, right? How do you talk about that thing that's going wrong when you're not sure what that thing is? You're not sure if it's actually going wrong. You're not sure when it's going to go wrong. Is it going wrong right now, or is it going to go away? And then this other thing is the real problem, right? That's, that's the nature of these moments that we're talking about. And so I began to ask myself, so then, why is it that Firefighters don't always speak up effectively when the moment calls for it?
"Now, of course, I just want to acknowledge very briefly, this whole issue of communication is much more complex than just why don't people speak up, right? This is a very multi-faceted issue, but you got to kind of anchor in somewhere and then fly, right? So we're going to start with this question of why, what? Why don't Firefighters speak up in these critical moments, and what can we do about it? And it seems to me that a major thing that I saw listening, and that I heard listening to Firefighters, is that in the moment when it's time to say something, it's not so clear what to say, it's not so clear when to say, it's not so clear how to approach the person that needs to hear this, right? So we tend to think it's supposed to be black and white, but when you really listen to people talking about those moments, what you recognize is that there's all this uncertainty, and that uncertainty in the Crew dynamic is what leads to people going right. I'll give you an example of that. How many times? And there's somebody that, if you're with a group of people watching this right now, there is somebody who has watched another Firefighter backing up a rig, and you have watched that person back right into a pole, and you watch it happen, and as it's happening, you're thinking, Ah, they're going to see it, they're going to see it, they're going to see it, and then crunch, right? Why didn't you speak up?
"Probably going to mean that by the time they speak up, it's too late to do anything about it, right? So as a leader, there is no perfect. Because right?
"So this is a key concept. We want to think that speaking up is some simple thing. It's all black and white. You just spout it out when the time is right, but ... but in reality, in the reality of those moments when it really, really counts, it's not quite so clear. So what can you do as leader? What you can do as a leader is to build the kind of communication on your Crew that you need and that you're going to want in those moments when it really counts. And the key thing that you can do is start building clarity. You can start building the clarity now so that it's there when you need it. And I just want to just sort of ask this question, so what is the ideal, right? What is the kind of the end state, if you could have perfect communication, what would it look like? I just want to acknowledge, well, one idea that has been very popular is that what you want is open communication. Everybody says whatever's on their mind, they express their thoughts and feelings. And if that always happened, accidents would never happen. This is an idea that some people have. I disagree with that. I don't think that is the ideal. I think the ideal for true communication is that the people that work for you know how to serve you as a leader and as a decision maker, and they give you the information that you need, that you want, how you want it, when you can easily so that you can make better decisions for your Crew. So how do you get there?
"And by the way, that might look different for different leaders and different crews. How do you get there? You need to answer four questions. We're going to go through these one by one, and I'm going to warn you right now, they are going to sound so simple that as you hear it, you're going to go, oh yeah, we got that covered. I can promise you, you don't have a COVID. Ask these questions if it's clear in your mind, then just write down the answer, and then ask one of your crew members to also write down the answer. And your ... it's going to blow your mind when you realize that this, these questions are there. They seem so simple, so basic, and yet this is a basic thing that we... it's been right under our noses, and we've missed it. Okay, so question number one, when do you want your people to speak up? Do you want them to speak up when the problem is clearly defined ... it's right in front of you? You can define it by, you know, as a textbook. This is exactly what's wrong. I know it's do you want that you want them to speak up when they think there might be something going wrong. It's not a problem yet, but it might be a problem. Now, here's the tricky part. Whatever you decide if you want people to speak up early, you can get more information, but it's going to be more fuzzy, and some of it's going to be incorrect, right? If you want them to speak up late only when it's clear, you'll get less input. But even if it's done perfectly, if you have people waiting to speak up till the problem is absolutely crystal clear, what's that gonna be tonight in your spacious La Quinta suite. Your eyes could use a break after a long day of scene,???ufect answer to this, but the challenge is for you to think clearly for yourself, for your crew, where do you want to draw that line? Where and when do you want your people to speak up? And try to think of it from the perspective of your crew, not from your perspective as a leader, but from their perspective. I'm supposed to speak up when? What? How would you define them?
"That's question one, question two. One of the things that I noticed interviewing Firefighters after close calls and after accidents is they'd, you know, express something about they wish they spoke up, but they didn't, or this, they this sort of thing, right? And one of the things that I started to notice is that, is that I would hear people say, Well, I just, I wasn't sure exactly what to say, right? I wasn't sure when to say it, but then I wasn't sure exactly how to in the moment. Right? Now that that issue doesn't make sense when you're used to working in a safe, stable environment, then it's obvious what to say, right? But when things are dynamic and things are changing quickly, and you got to make a decision now, okay, if I'm going to speak up, what exactly am I going to say? If you have a whole bunch of ambiguity, and it's wishy-washy and you're not really sure, right? If you can't figure that out in a cool, calm office or training room, how are you going to do it in those moments when it's all hitting the fan, right? And so what you can do as a leader is give your crew the script, give them the first few words. This is how you do it when you have a serious concern, when we've crossed whatever that threshold is, when I want you to speak up to give me the information that I'm asking you for right now, the question is, what do you want them to say? How do you want them to start. Don't leave it to chance.
"Don't tell them if you see someone say something, that's good advice, well intended, but it doesn't, it doesn't give people the clarity and the certainty that they need about how to approach it. So that's the second question is, how do you want your people to speak up to let you know that something's going wrong or might be going wrong? How you answer that question depends on your personality. I was doing a class on this with a group of, a group of Firefighters, and one of the, some of the Truck guys were in there, one of the Captains. Truck Captains said, my guys, just say, I don't, nothing like this. Alright? And then next to him was, was a Parapet Captain, and he had a different approach for how he wanted his people to speak up. Did another class or a group that included that the response area include a lot of inner city responses, some of the warning signs that they were dealing with was like weapons in the home, you know, and people hiding behind, you know, right? And so they, they wanted a way to speak up that didn't alarm the people that were around them, right? So each of those three Captains had a different way that they wanted their crew to speak up and let them know that something was, was amiss, right? And it was their way. If you work for that Captain, and you talk how that Captain, the Truck Captain, if you talk like that, working for this other Captain in the inner city, may or may not be the right way, right? Alright, so that's up to you. That's up to you as a leader is to decide and to define, how do you want your people to speak up? How do you want them to convey this information to you? The third point is, how can they expect that you're to respond. Again, this has a lot to do with your temperament as a leader. Some leaders will [be] the kind of like textbook. Nice answer to this is, you'll hear people say, Oh, well, we'll stop the operation until we address the concerns, and then once we've fully addressed all the concerns, we'll reengage. That's a perfect answer in a 4S Safe, Stable, Straightforward environment, right? Is that a realistic answer in a fire environment that's dynamic and big, it's risky and complex. Can you stop everything? Every time somebody is a little, little unsure? No, you can't. So what are you going to do? How are you going to respond? So think about that as a leader. And the reason this is important is that whether you act on a concern or not, your crew needs to know that they, that you heard what they said and you handling it, so they did their job. You said, Speak up, do it in this way at this time. And when you do this is what you can expect from me. Some leaders are going to say, you can expect me ... If I heard you, I'll tell you I copy.
"Some leaders are going to say, and in certain environments, this is correct, this is the right answer, and this may be the right answer for you, and it's probably something in between. Some leaders are going to say, We because of complexity of the environment, we will stop, we will have a conversation and work out what the concerns are before we press forward. Sometimes that's the best approach. Another approach. There are some leaders that say, I don't want to hear your concerns until the After Action Review, wherever you land on that I'm not going to tell you what the right answer is. What I am saying is you've got to decide for yourself. As a leader, when your folks bring you a concern, what can they expect from you? How do they know that you heard what they said?
"Right? This matters because one of the things that happen consistently in, in accidents and near misses is, yes, there's this issue that people don't speak up, but there's another issue, which is they do speak up and their valid concerns don't get heard, or they don't get recognized. But, but that's really complex, because in the moment, you don't know if they heard you, if the boss heard you, they dealt with it. They've thought through that, and they're moving on because there's a bigger problem, and that's what they're working on. You don't know if it's that, or your idea was dumb, or they just didn't hear you because they're focused on some other thing, or their radio wasn't on the right thing, or just as you were talking, somebody else broke in, or your batteries on your radio, right? There's all these different things. So you need to, you need to establish for your followers a clear response that they can expect from you. And then the next thing, and this is the fourth question. This is the final thing, is, hey, I kind of already alluded to there. I kind of already described this is, it would be nice if we, if the way it worked, it's every time somebody has a concern and they frame it in the right way, and then they articulate it appropriately in the way that the leader wanted. And every time that happened, the boss heard them the first time. How often do those concerns, even when they articulated perfectly, how often right versus how often do they get misinterpreted or lost, or somehow slipped through the cracks? So this is the fourth question. Is, ... when your crew member brings you this piece of information, raises the issue, when they don't get the response that they are expecting, what should they do next? What's the next step, and again, that's up to you. Do you want them to say it again? Do you want them to say it again in a different way? Do you want them to say it to someone else? What do you want them to do when they're not getting the response that they were expecting? And just understand that much of the time they're not going to get the response that they're expecting, right? That's the nature of a complex environment.
"So those are the four questions for you as a leader, to think about for yourself and to clarify. Well, what do you, what do I want? So, just a couple thoughts here. Don't think of this as you know, there's this idea sometimes when people talk about upward voice or speaking up about risk, it's often framed in a sort of almost adversarial thing where the crew member has the right to speak up, and they should be able to tell the boss when they see a house. But honestly, I talk to a lot of Firefighters and leaders, and I don't see that adversarial mentality in the leaders that I talk to. They want communication. They want good communication that's going to help them make better decisions.
"What they don't want is chaos. They don't want is more confusion and already confusing moment. And so I suggest the way to think about this as a leader, it's don't, is not to think about it as, as a power struggle, but to think about it as you're in charge, and you, this is about defining from your crew the kind of information and the kind of communication that you want from them. So that's the first thing. The second thing that I just want to point out is understand that at each step of the way, things are going to be complicated. They're going to be difficult. It's not going to happen, right? We so often train and we talk about communication, these idealistic, simplistic ways, that's not reality, right? It ain't gonna be perfect in the moments when communication counts the most, those are the moments when it's hardest to communicate effectively." (End of the 2024 San Diego Wildland Fire Safety Summit Otter.ai transcript)
Did Mayhew consider sharing his USFS Federally funded SAIT-SAIR information for the "official" (NWCG) "52 minutes from Blow-up to Burnover" provided on the June 2013 YH Fire and GMHS debacle in Fig. 6.?
Figure 6. Blowup to Burnover poster Source: NWCG, WFSTAR
Obviously, according to Fig. 6. the GMHS spent at least 52 minutes watching the YH Fire and "discussing our options" before they left their perfectly good SZ to hike down through the unburned chaparral and into a deadly bowl while ostensibly ignoring Watch Outs No. 3, 4, 7, 9, 11, 15, & 17 at the worst possible time! WTF!? It is as if the GMHS were on their first wildland fire on their own home turf! WTF were they thinking!? (YHFR, 2023, and this author's comprehensive Academia.edu. PowerPoint, 2016)
Pastor Mayhew continues stuttering at times: "So we just have to understand that has to be baked into the equation, is that there's gonna be these breakdowns all through the system. And that brings me to the third point, is that the kind of communication that you need is not something that you just get it in place and then it's there. This is we're talking about building communication on your crew. It takes time. It takes time to build those, those pathways. It takes time to build those communication practices and to build the kind of trust that comes with that, right? This brings me to my next point. So you've answered four questions, and I want to invite you, that I wrote a little ebook. It's available for you on ... it's a training guide called How to Build Risk Communication Protocols. How to Build Risk Communication Protocols. It's a training guide. It's available for you. I wrote it kind of for the Company Officer level leader, and in that book, we kind of walk through each of the four questions. Show how different people answer them, how different people think about them. But by the time you come in, once you've answered the four questions you've actually created for yourself,
"At least the first rough draft of a framework that you can use for structure and communication on your crew by answering the four questions you've created, like a rough draft of risk communication protocols for your crew. But the thing is, we all know that you can have the greatest protocols, the greatest idea, the greatest system on Earth, and it will fail you unless you train with it, unless you practice it right. So once you have this system in place, you got to incorporate that into your drills, so that, so that, you create these situations where your crew in training has to bring you information that's important that, you know, that's part of the training, right? And so then the idea is to build up these reps, right? And then the idea is that ... that this, this kind of communication, communication, isn't some big, dramatic moment of, you know, hand-wringing, you do I don't, I will. I will, right? It should just be, look, what do you call it? A water drop. And the helicopters come in, and you see some power lines. You don't fret over how do I tell the pilot about the powerlines. You just tell them, hey, there's power lines, you know, out your right door, right? You just tell him there's power lines there. And then he goes, and when he comes back with his next drop, what do you do? Do you go, I don't know if I should tell him about the power lines. I don't want to embarrass him. I don't want to, will he be offended if I met? No, no, you just say, yeah, there's those power lines that you're wherever they are, right? Why? Why is it not a big deal?
"Because we have a system for communicating about power lines. We know that that's how you talk to a pilot, is you call out the hazards, even if you think he already saw him, even if he said it before. That's just the system. It's not a big deal. The system is clear, and we've trained to right, so it's not a big deal to call out those issues, right? So that's the kind of communication that you're seeking to build on your Crew, and the way you do that is through getting the reps in, so that if you're in those moments that count, you don't, at that moment, create the kind of communication that you already got. That communication you built it on your Crew, so it's there when you mean it. So, does this guarantee that you're never going to miss anything ever again? You know? Does this put you in a position where you're going to have perfect communication? Nothing is going to go wrong. And so I was going to say it doesn't, but what it does is it gives you a fighting chance that if you're in one of these moments with your Crew, then it's time to make a big decision. You at least got a fighting chance to get the information that you need. If there's somebody there that sees something important, that they know how to articulate that to you in service to you as the leader and the decision maker. Thanks. Thanks, whatever you do," Transcribed by https://otter.ai.
Consider now this very comprehensive Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy cogent research paper (2015 & 2018 substantive revision) germane to the issue at hand, titled: "The Definition of Lying and Deception." From the bevy of insightful and germane YH Fire research papers: "Questions central to the philosophical discussion of lying to others and other-deception (interpersonal deceiving) may be divided into two kinds. Questions of the first kind are definitional or conceptual. They include the questions of how lying is to be defined, how deceiving is to be defined, and whether lying is always a form of deceiving. Questions of the second kind are normative - more particularly, moral. They include the questions of whether lying and deceiving are either defeasibly or non-defeasibly morally wrong, whether lying is morally worse than deceiving, and whether, if lying and deception are defeasibly morally wrong, they are merely morally optional on certain occasions, or are sometimes morally obligatory. In this entry, we only consider questions of the first kind."
Likewise consider Josef Pieper's, 1992, Abuse of Language - Abuse of Power germane and trenchant quotes "Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes." and further "This lesson, in a nutshell, says: the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow and get ready, so much so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. The degradation, too, of man through man, alarmingly evident in the acts of physical violence committed by all tyrannies (concentration camps, torture), has its beginning, certainly much less alarmingly, at that almost imperceptible moment when the word loses its dignity."
Given the Abuse of Language - Abuse of Power quote above, it's a perfect time to delve into the Mayhew-involved and influenced Modoc NF (2013) WLF LLC Saddleback Fire Fatality alleged convoluted word-smithing.
Pupulidy, I. (2015). The transformation of accident investigation: From finding cause to sensemaking S.l.: s.n.
The YH Fire SAIT Asst. Team Leader Mike Dudley's YouTube (2013) video addresses the Utah Unified Fire Authority discussion, strongly suggesting the GMHS's utilization of the well-known, hazardous Normalization of Deviance, when Dr. Diane Vaughan of Columbia University coined the term in her analysis of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. In her book, she explains it is the process by which deviance from correct or proper behavior becomes normalized in a corporate culture. (Vervint, 2020).
Figure 6a. YH Fire SAIT-SAIR Authority Delegation Source: SAIT-SAIR
Figure 6b. YH Fire SAIT-SAIR signature page Source: SAIT-SAIR
For the majority of history, the burden of proof rested on the shoulders of those few individuals who viewed free expression as valuable. Unsurprisingly, institutions of power have been quite comfortable with the idea that “dangerous” expression must be censored for the common good.
Nina Katarina Štular '22, DePauw University
Consider now this 2017 InvestigativeMEDIA (IM) post titled: Yarnell Hill Fire deaths were avoidable if crew had followed wildfire safety rules, mentioned research paper concludes. "Two former Interagency Hotshot Crew supervisors have published a research paper on the Yarnell Hill Fire disaster that concludes human errors were the primary factors that led to the death of 19 members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots on June 30, 2013. “Did they all perish in a predictable, and therefore, avoidable death-by-fire incident? Indeed, per the conclusion of these authors, they did,” Fred Schoeffler and Lance Honda (RiP) state in the paper. ... The paper, entitled “Epic Human Failure on June 30, 2013“, was published by Springer Inter. Publishing AG. The authors state that the crew’s leadership failed to follow well-known wildfire safety rules and that directly contributed to disaster. ... “This was the final, fatal link, in a long chain of bad decisions with good outcomes, we saw this coming for years,” the paper quotes an unnamed Hotshot crew superintendent as saying during an October 2013 [site] visit by wildland firefighters to the box canyon where the men died. Mr. Schoeffler was at the gathering.“ The Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) link offers many more human factors article options.
Consider now the alleged implications of Mayhew regarding his YH Fire alleged "investigation" with Robert the Second (this author) replying to WTKTT posted on InvestigativeMEDIA (IM) on June 22, 2019 at 3:37 pm “But the SAIT did NOT look into the “Human Factors” regarding the personalities, reputations and decision-making habits of the individuals involved from the ’causes’ of the tragedy. And chose instead the “No violations of negligence, policy, protocol, or procedures” conclusion. Or maybe they did, and it scared them so bad they abandoned all of it. One of the [SAIT] SMEs told me early on that they had so much information that they could not and would not [to] release the public.” (edited for spelling & grammar)
Consider this amazing, free, always about 50% accurate Internet Archive Wayback Machine recovery of a South Dakota News Center article (2017) noting the importance of the alleged lessons learned from the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire titled: "Inside Fire Camp: Part One ... Before the start of every fire season, the U.S. Forest Service firefighting division welcomes a fresh group of new prospects hoping to join the team. ... Instead of throwing them out on the line right away, the students attend the Black Hills Interagency Fire School at the Boxelder Job Corps for a week-long, hands-on camp. There, the new firefighters get a taste of what the summer will be like — from camping out in cold temperatures to spending hours on the fire line. ... But none of the firefighters can work on the line without first obtaining their red card, and that requires passing tests on content taught in camp. The first and second-year firefighters, who haven’t seen it all, they’re the ones that are really asking the questions,” said Chris Stover, assistant fire management officer for fuels with the Mystic Ranger District, a sector of the Black Hills National Forest. “So, if we can build up their knowledge base, so that they learn the questions to ask, that is huge for us.” ... The fire camp starts with three days of classroom instruction. New firefighters learn concepts like fire behavior, the chain of command, and of course, the importance of preparedness and safety. ... “They emphasized a lot, if you see something dangerous, don’t be afraid to speak up about it or ask questions if you don’t know,” said Walter Bordewyk, a student at the 2017 Black Hills Interagency Fire School. “Emphasizing that two-way communication, I think that was a really big thing that I didn’t think about.”... Stover, who was one of several instructors at the camp, stressed the importance of knowing your surroundings when fighting wildfires.“If you don’t have situational awareness, you can get in trouble in a big way,” he said. “So, I think that’s probably the most important thing we’re doing.” That message, he said, is key, because a lapse in situational awareness can turn an already risky job into a crisis. ... “You hear about all these people that have been doing it for years, these elite hot shot crews, that you know, just something small went wrong, and they’re gone now,” Bordewyk said. ... Take the Yarnell Hill Fire outside Yarnell, Arizona, in 2013. Nineteen Granite Mountain Hot Shots, a hand crew consisting of highly-trained wildland firefighters, died when a shift in winds changed the fire’s path toward them. ... This tragedy, in addition to several others referenced in the class, highlights the importance of firefighter safety. ,,, “Those stories, they really bring a human element to it,” said Robert Cota, assistant fire management officer for the Boxelder Job Corps, who also served as the fire school’s incident commander. “We’re not trying to scare anybody. We’re just trying to keep it so they have a knowledge and something of what to expect of what could happen, and maybe they can avoid that situation.” ... That’s why every firefighter carries an incident response pocket guide. Ten standard practices and 18 watch out situations are listed on the back cover — all derived from an incident gone wrong. ... “I don’t really like to sugarcoat stuff so much. I just want to try to present the facts as best as I know them, so that a person can be as well-informed as they can be,” Stover said. ... It appears the message was well-received by the students, too. ...“I think it’s important to remember that and keep that in mind, and learn from those things that happened.” [So then, given all that cogent and experience-based discussion, in reality, are we honestly learning accurate, meaningful, and truthful lessons, or what?]
Consider now this LinkedIn Mike Mooney (2018) post titled: Making Change With Storytelling, How to ensure the message, meaning, and momentum of your organisation's change journey lasts the distance. "What if you framed your organisation as the world for these heroes (employees) to journey through? Like all epic journeys, it will be full of risk, uncertainty, and danger—but equally full of countless opportunities, rewards, and glory. It is a creative and inherently human way of communicating that what is required for this kind of journey is not solely head-smarts, but heart-courage combined with head-smarts. The most important value that needs to be genuinely lived to make this journey a success is the one where every employee must find their courage, and lean into their personal journey of progress and transformation. ..."
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises
himself as an angel of light.
2 Corinthians 11:14 (NKJV)
Yarnell Hill "has been claimed by the current generation. This is their fire. They know it, they're learning from it right now. I would like to be clear what's being learned from it (through more investigation)."
Author John Maclean
Consider delving into some of Brad Mayhew's insights below within the online 2018 Outside article titled: What We Learned from the Yarnell Hill Fire Deaths. One of the worst tragedies in the history of firefighting prompted little change to a culture that regularly puts young lives at risk. A few seasoned veterans are working to fix that. Outside (Oct. 30, 2018). It is written from Former Santa Fe HS Kyle Dickman's perspective with interspersed Mayhew comments:
Outside online. Kyle Dickman writes: “All of a sudden, all this other chaos happened. The clarity, the certainty,” says Brad Mayhew, tossing his hands up like he’s throwing confetti. He served as the lead investigator on the report commissioned by the state forestry division immediately after the fatalities. This fall, he agreed to meet me in Yarnell and walk the hotshots’ final steps. It was late afternoon and 100 degrees on September 11. We sat where MacKenzie had shot the video, looking out at the long valley. In the years after the fire, the valley has regrown green but is not yet shaggy. Surrounding us were pyramids of small rocks stacked atop bigger boulders. Mayhew, who is 38, with a salted black beard and a voice that’s deep like that of James Earl Jones, pulled up MacKenzie’s video on his phone to confirm our location. It immediately became clear that somebody had piled the rocks to mark where the ten hotshots had sat or stood in MacKenzie’s final video. “It’s somber,” he mustered." [These were piled there by the two local knowledge area hikers Collura and Gilligan in July 2013].
“Just talking about Yarnell became radioactive,” Mayhew says. A warm wind was pulling up from the desert and blowing across our backs. “How can this profession make progress if people aren’t comfortable talking about it publicly?” In January 2014, 11 veteran firefighters from the nation’s biggest fire agencies—the vanguard of fire, as they were described to me—met in Yarnell. They hiked along the route the hotshots had likely taken from the ridge into the canyon where the 19 died seven months earlier. They arrived at a startling conclusion. “We could see ourselves making the same decision they’d made,” said Travis Dotson, a member of the Wildland Fire Lessons Learned Center, a federally funded organization that helps firefighters improve their performance. Around the time of the field trip, Dotson and others formed an underground group called the Honor the Fallen. Included in its couple dozen members were some of the highest-ranking firefighters from the various agencies in the wildland fire business: the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Park Service. Their goal was to make sure Yarnell Hill, the most publicized event in wildland firefighting history, forced some much-needed changes to the job’s outdated culture. Three years later, they tried to spark “an age of enlightenment” in wildland fire. As Dotson distilled the shift in mindset, “Before Yarnell, it was about getting better at fighting fire. After, it’s been about getting better at accepting death.”
"Some context is needed here. Since 1910, more than 1,100 wildland firefighters have died on the line. “There has never been a fire season that we’ve escaped with no deaths, and many years reach well into the double digits,” says Dotson, who used to be a smokejumper. “Making it through a fire season without a death is a statistical impossibility.” Historically, fire agencies responded to fatalities with investigations that sought to understand what happened. Since 1990 [Dude Fire - AZ TNF WLF LLC], when a blaze killed six firefighters on an inmate crew, those investigations seemed intent on proving that dead firefighters broke rules—sometimes in ways that were criminal. This fervor peaked in 2001 in Washington state [Thirty Mile Fire - WA ONF WLF LLC], when a fire killed four and the incident commander was charged with involuntary manslaughter. Traditionally, the agencies used the investigators’ conclusions to develop new learning tools, scientific labs, and, mostly, rules. Fatality fires spawned the “18 Watch-Out Situations,” the “Ten Standard Firefighting Orders,” and the ever-growing 118-page Incident Response Pocket Guide that most firefighters keep in their pockets today. Need a reminder on unexploded ordnance safety? That’s on page 27. A refresher on the alignments of patterns for dangerous fire behavior? Page 73. Best practices for a media interview? 111. It’s an astonishing document that matches problems to solutions, but it’s also something like the pamphlet a scout leader might hand a Boy Scout before dropping them into the Alaskan bush. Over time, the relationship between tragedy and rulemaking sewed into the culture the belief that firefighters die only when they break rules.
"From the outset, the members of Honor the Fallen understood that Yarnell was unlikely to result in any official change. For one thing, Mayhew’s investigation was of a new wave that borrowed from the military’s tradition: They tried to understand what the firefighters knew in the moment rather than seeking fault in behavior. Instead of chasing “the instant gratification of new rules,” as Mayhew put it, they put the onus of making change on the fire agencies at large. But the approach seemed to fall flat. Granite Mountain was the rare unit operated by a municipality, and the big wildland firefighting agencies did all they could to publicly distance themselves from a tragedy that wasn’t their own. “We treated this whole thing different because Granite Mountain had a different color blood,” Dotson says. [And yet the Federal USDA Forest Service paid for both the SAIT-SAIR and ADOSH investigations, resulting in Federal control of everything YH Fire and GMHS related.]
"Yarnell did prompt a modest update to the fire shelter, the flimsy aluminum heat shields the hotshots had died under, and the development of a new phone app that helps firefighters get weather updates in real time. But as Honor the Fallen predicted, it led to no significant policy changes.
"Back on the ridgetop, Mayhew plays the video MacKenzie shot here five years ago. There’s a moment where the video jumps that looks like an edit. “People seized on that and said we’d doctored the clip,” says Mayhew, shaking his head. “They discounted the entire investigation because they thought they’d caught us in a lie.” In fact, it was two separate but complete clips edited into one. Many firefighters don’t trust investigations. History gave them good reasons."
No kidding Brad! In fact, the Mackenzie video is factually two separate, exactly 9.24-second video clips approximately 47 seconds apart, according to WTKKT. In a word, who takes 9.24-second videos? Consider WTKTT's numerous amazing and edifying Google Earth overlay YHFR and GMHS YouTube videos in this link. (https://www.youtube.com/@wantstoknowthetruth1553)
“That’s because for a long time they went out and created reasons to blame workers,” Mayhew says. As an independent contractor, he has made investigating fireline accidents his career. The team’s reaction to Mayhew’s investigation was particularly strong. He thinks that’s because their investigation did what few others have before. They acknowledged that firefighting is high-risk and people sometimes die doing it. In the final report, they didn’t cast blame, which made it harder to learn from the deaths and angered many people.
[Right! They pre-established their "conclusion," stating in the USFS-funded SAIT-SAIR that the GMHS did everything right: "The Team found no indications of negligence, reckless actions, or policy violations."
"Around the time that Mayhew’s investigation was released, in the fall of 2013, online discussion boards cropped up that attracted fire professionals and hobbyists. One blog still active today has tens of thousands of comments. Too many of them are overseasoned with vitriol or dedicated to conspiracy theories—somebody ordered the men to leave the ridge; a backfire sparked by a homeowner killed the crew; the hotshots were amateurs. These commenters often accuse Mayhew of being a conspirator in a government cover-up. He calls the accusation patently false. But what bothers him is that some of those ideas have infected the fire culture, and he’s constantly having to correct dangerous misperceptions. “It’s comforting to think, ‘I never would have done that. I’m not like them,’” says Mayhew, who was a hotshot and still works as a firefighter. “They were just firefighters, and we’re just firefighters.”
"Mayhew and I left the overlook and began hiking when the sun slipped below the Weaver Mountains and the peaks’ shadows stretched into the valley below. We followed the thin road that Granite Mountain took to their deaths. It was steep and rutted, and we both kicked rocks that tumbled downhill. We soon reached the point where the hotshots opted to drop off the ridge, through the canyon, and toward the ranch. We stood there for a moment. A turkey vulture rotated overhead. “Doesn’t it look like it’s right there?” Mayhew asked of the ranch we could see at the head of the canyon. “Like you could be there in five minutes?”
"The uncertainty behind what drove those men, in view of that terrifying fire, to drop into a wickedly steep box canyon has generated the conspiracies that still haunt wildland firefighting today. In hindsight, it’s a hard decision to fathom. For his part, Mayhew tries to stay out of the swirling theories. He thinks the way to learn from Yarnell is to ask firefighters to put themselves in Granite Mountain’s boots and ask what could have lured them to make the same choice. On this point, he’s bullish. “They were trying to save lives,” Mayhew says. “They knew people were threatened down there. That must have weighed on them.” [Clear violation of tried-and-trued Rules of Engagement & Entrapment Avoidance Principles]
"Whatever it was that pulled them off that ridge, after years of making necessarily risky decisions on the fireline, Granite Mountain missed something on Yarnell Hill. And the numbers simply caught them. Mayhew grunted and set off down the hill, hiking toward 19 crosses five minutes from a ranch." [Mayhew appears to contribute the GMHS demise to a statistical error rather than alleged human factors failures and alleged threats by Marsh]
"The risks of injury or death are manifold, with entrapment by fire, smoke inhalation, falling trees, chainsaw mishaps, and vehicle or aviation accidents, to name just a few. Given the rising occurrence of forest fires in inhabited areas, today’s firefighters increasingly face the potential of witnessing human tragedy, including death, and loss when homes and communities burn." Special Report: Wildland Firefighters—Hidden Heroes of the Mental Health Effects of Climate Change. Psychiatric News Vol. 58. No. 5. (2023) Robin Cooper, MD & Riva Duncan.
"American Fire Saga - No. 4. No Precedent - Brad Mayhew - Feb 08, 2023. 30 June 2013, nineteen firefighters from the Granite Mountain Hotshot Crew lost their lives on the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. This tragedy was unprecedented in many ways.
"First: unprecedented numbers. The Yarnell Hill Fire was the greatest loss of American firefighters since September 11, 2001. As wildland fires go, this was the greatest loss of professional firefighters ever.
"Double-digit wildland firefighter fatalities are almost unheard of. The last was the South Canyon Fire, where fourteen were lost. That was in 1994, two decades before Yarnell. Three decades before that was the 1966 Loop Fire, where we lost twelve. Never in American history did we lose a hotshot crew.
"Second: unprecedented mystery. In any accident, it’s normal to have some gaps in your knowledge of what happened. Usually, there are enough pieces to put the puzzle together and know what you’re looking at.
"Yarnell is the opposite. The most important details are still unknown. It’s like you have a few pieces of the puzzle, but huge areas are wide open. And the missing pieces are the most important ones. [Mayhew is allegedly setting the stage for him to be the only one to provide this.] “The most important details are still unknown. It’s like you have a few pieces of the puzzle, but huge areas are wide open. And the missing pieces are the most important ones.”
"Third: unprecedented lack of learning. After major tragedies, firefighters always get stronger for the future. They innovate; they create breakthroughs in operational learning. They find a way to make things better. This tradition of learning and innovation is unbroken through firefighter history.
"Until Yarnell. The American Fire Service has never learned less from a major tragedy. Not ever. We will change that. Note to reader: I’m glad we are on this expedition together." [Do you mean “glad we are on this expedition together" because your alleged investigation is shoddy, less than factual, and you are financially making a handsome profit from it?]
"Note to reader: I’m glad we are
on this expedition together."
Brad Mayhew
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary
the devil prowls around like a roaring lion,
seeking someone to devour.
1 Peter 5:8 (NKJV)
Well then, Mr. Mayhew, the reason we've learned less from this fire was because of you and your alleged cover-up mentality and your Federally-funded venue to accomplish “this expedition together." And your alleged dangerous journey on The Dark Side. All that at the grovelling behest of the U.S. Forest Service. See our YHFR website post titled: "Part 7 - Do our Wildland Fire (WF) Instructors foster "complete" lessons learned in the WF culture?" (YHFR, 2023) to find at least some of the information on the USFS funding the SAIT-SAIR and ADOSH issue. Here is an email to Arizona Republican Congressman and former Navy SEAL Eli Crane's Director of Constituent Services & Office Manager Julie Schreinder's response to my "Help with a Federal Agency" request after my five year journey with the odious USDA, USFS FOIA Requests blatant incompetence, delays, and classic shell games: "Good morning Julie, Your assistance finally paid off. The USDA USFS finally emailed their five-year delayed June 2013 financial records, consisting of 1800 email threads of the Serious Investigation Team and AZ Occupational Safety and Health records. On first blush, these records have revealed very little on the Federal funding requests, and the majority about manipulating and wordsmithing the Serious Accident Investigation and Report. Go to our YHFR website for examples. Very revealing. Please thank your Boss, Rep. Crane, for his and your assistance revealing more of the truth about the June 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire and GMHS debacle, the biggest cover-up, lie, and whitewash in wildland fire history. Best regards, Fred J. Schoeffler."
Conformist education stifles independent thought. It's apparent that Mr. Mayhew allegedly opposes fostering diverse perspectives in those who disagree with him. Thus stifling innovation and resilience, and ensuring future leaders following his tenets thrive in the world of Party Liner, Groupthink, and Kool-Aid drinking minority landscapes. And his allegedly arrogant statement immediately below.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Yarnell Hill Fire was the accident of our time. I saw our investigation as the first step in a big learning process, and I knew that in the long run firefighters would be better off for it."
"But in the years following the accident, the major breakthroughs never came. So I decided to take up the mission of learning from this tragedy once again, this time with a new approach."
Brad Mayhew