Unforgettable FIRE

On July 10, 2001, the Thirtymile Fire claimed the lives of four U.S. Forest Service firefighters: Jessica Johnson, Devin Weaver, Karen FitzPatrick and Tom Craven. This event, while being tragic enough for the family and friends of the fallen firefighters, has been made even more notorious by the investigation report and later the legal actions that are still unfolding almost six years after that fateful day in the Northwest woods.

Ellreese Daniels, who served as a crew boss and incident commander on the fire, has been charged by the U.S. attorney in Spokane, Wash., with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and seven counts of making false statements. The trial is scheduled for later this year. To our knowledge, this is the first time in the United States that a wildland firefighter has faced prison for making mistakes on a fire.

A survey of 3,362 firefighters conducted by the International Association of Wildland Fire in February of this year showed that 36% of the full-time wildland firefighters surveyed will make themselves less available to be assigned to wildland fires as a direct result of these manslaughter charges. Firefighters are now being advised to “lawyer up” before talking to investigators if they are involved in a serious accident on a fire.

John Maclean, author of Fire on the Mountain, True Story of the South Canyon Fire and Fire and Ashes, spent months in Washington state researching this story. Reprinted here with permission of the author and publisher is a chapter of Maclean's new book, The Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal, which is currently featured at www.iawfonline.org/books.
— Bill Gabbert, Executive Director
International Association of Wildland Fire

Nothing brings out the best in rural folks like a shared tragedy. People rush to offer help, toss folding money into donation jars, pin on purple ribbons, and perform the unaccustomed task of expressing powerful emotion in public. Such acts of belonging testify to the unseen ties that bind isolated communities in ordinary times. It helps, too, if the nation joins in and offers its sympathy, as happened at first after the Thirtymile Fire. The story commanded national media attention. A network television crew arrived to compile footage for a documentary special. President George W. Bush, invited to a memorial service in Yakima in late July, declined only because he had to be in Italy for a trade conference that day, his aides said. Two of his cabinet secretaries did attend: Ann Veneman, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, parent agency of the Forest Service; and Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.

In a familiar ritual, fallen firefighters took their last journey home in a smoke jumper airplane. A prop-driven C-23 Sherpa carried the caskets of the three Naches Ranger District firefighters to McAllister Field in Yakima, just as smoke jumper aircraft had flown home victims of the South Canyon Fire. Families and friends gathered at the field in silence. As each casket appeared, a Forest Service representative read out a name: Karen FitzPatrick, Jessica Johnson, Devin Weaver. The day before, Tom Craven had been taken by station wagon hearse to Ellensburg, though the town has a small airfield nearby; some friends sensed a slight. Four private funerals were held in as many days. At Craven's service, so many people showed up in yellow shirts, green pants, and purple ribbons that young T'shaun cried out, “Hey, Mom, they're wearing yellow shirts just like Dad!”

“Yes, Son, they're wearing yellow shirts just like Daddy,” Evelyn replied.

“Hey, Mom, they have ribbons on their fire shirts. Daddy doesn't wear ribbons on his fire shirt.”

“No, Son, Daddy doesn't wear ribbons,” Evelyn said, and wept.

Karen FitzPatrick's funeral marked a turn for the good in the life of her sister, Jaina, who had been bedridden as a consequence of medication prescribed to control bipolar disorder. “I was not going drugged to my sister's funeral,” she said later. She stopped taking the medication, rose from her bed, attended the funeral, and started down a long road to more normal living. For the next four years Jaina tried different doctors, therapies, and medication; she adopted strict eating habits, went to the gym regularly, and lost much of the eighty pounds she'd gained as a side effect of the drugs. “Today she is a size twelve, looking bright and feeling good,” Kathie said of her daughter. “She is now the girl Karen would remember.” Her struggle was so successful that her doctors nominated her for a paid position counseling others with bipolar disorder.

A memorial service for all four victims was held at the Yakima Valley SunDome, which is big enough to stage rodeos. More than three hundred fire vehicles from station houses across the nation paraded along a six-mile route to the SunDome. Thousands stood in tribute along the way. “Remember Our Heroes,” read placards held up by teenagers. The SunDome filled with a checkerboard of fire units, each in uniforms ranging from the wildland badge of yellow shirts and green pants, to crew T-shirts in many colors, to crisp dress blues and ties. The service was strong on fanfare. A four-man military unit performed precision drill with rifles. The Forest Service provided an honor guard, which conducted a flag ceremony, and a chaplain-escort, Steve Seltzner, a fire veteran who had helped organize a standing memorial team to deal with line-of-duty deaths for wildland firefighters. “Outside people don't really understand what it's like,” Seltzner said later; firefighter families, he had found, “need a shoulder, not a sermon.”

Those who spoke included Washington governor Gary Locke and Chief Bosworth, both of whom had learned enough about each of the four to use their first names. Tom had been a standout athlete and devoted family man who mentored young firefighters. Karen, voted by classmates most likely to be the next Martha Stewart, had a devout faith and forgiving nature. Jessica had inspired friends with her high spirits and problem-solving skills. Devin, quiet and gentlemanly but with an edge to his humor, had found his best friend in his father.

“They were in the very best sense of the word Westerners,” said Governor Locke. “Not the mythical Westerns of the cowboy and gun-slinging movies, but real Westerners, men and women who search and dream, plainspoken and honest, and independent and resourceful.”

Chief Leitch of the West Valley Fire District, where Johnson had been a cadet, perhaps best caught their common spirit.

“We are an extended family, all with the last name ‘firefighters,’” Leitch said. “All four were athletes, strong challengers, fierce competitors — all understanding the importance of a team. Firefighting is a team sport. They were there on that mountain as a team, there for each other. They died as a team. These young firefighters did not consider themselves heroes. They were well satisfied with a day's job done well.

“These four were high on the fresh Cascade Mountain air. They were high on life and all of its challenges. There were no drugs, gangs, or rap sheets. There was college, family, friends, God, and good times. They didn't wait until dark to see the world. They were future teachers of our children, future leaders of our battles. They represent the best of what America has to offer.”

At the conclusion of the service, a fire bell was rung, and then the eerie electronic tones of the Last Alarm sounded: all units were home, the message said, and four firefighters had failed to answer roll call. The memorial service put a temporary cap on public events as the community stood back to await the release of the official fire report. Chief Leitch had remarked that investigators should not seek to lay blame, but rather to learn the lessons necessary to prevent another Thirtymile Fire. His generous sentiment was not universally shared; many people looked forward to a day of reckoning. With national and regional media on the alert, pressure built for a public accounting.

Then an event occurred that took the name of catastrophe; the date was September 11, 2001. The network television crew dropped the documentary project on the Thirtymile Fire and headed, as best they could with a national air traffic lockdown, for the East Coast. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and at the Pentagon in the nation's capital did not simply dominate subsequent news coverage; for many months, the 9/11 disaster and its aftermath were virtually the only stories given prominence by national media. In the new age of terrorism, a fire report from the rural Northwest was off the radar screen. Interest remained high, however, in both the wildland fire community and the Northwest region, where there was much at stake: reputations, careers, lessons for the future, the need for justice to be done, and the desire to find healing in remembrance. When the fire report was unveiled at last, a month late on September 26, the impact on those directly involved was undiminished.

Furnish knew that he was the bearer of unwelcome news for the families. Yet he had not lived through the South Canyon Fire at the ground level of the wildland fire community, and neither had key members of his team: Kern, the human factors specialist, had been in the Air Force in 1994; Chockie, the professional investigator, in the private sector. That circumstance may help explain why Furnish and his team badly underestimated the uproar their findings would cause, not only among the families but also within the broader fire community.

The day before the report was to come out, a private briefing on its contents was held for the fire's survivors. The same courtesy ought to be extended to the families, regional Forest Service officials argued, even though the hour was late.

“The people on the Forest were adamant we have this meeting — they were being sensitive to the families,” Furnish said. “I said, ‘Something about this whole setup doesn't feel good to me.’ But I got talked into it. The sense of hostility in that room was palpable. It was toxic. There was no way we were going to please the families.”

An hour before the report was to be unveiled publicly, at the Yakima Civic Center, Furnish appeared before the families and a few of their close friends in a meeting room nearby. When he told them what was to come, the families were unbelieving.

“If my son was told to come down out of the rocks, he would have done it,” Will Craven told Furnish. A Craven family friend, Kay Evensen, lashed out at Furnish: “And the next time you have a firefighter fatality, you have someone come to the door. No phone calls.” Evensen had been with the Cravens the night of the notification.

After having his say, Will Craven became the least outspoken of the parents. He took out his grief by building an elaborate brick and stone memorial over his son's gravesite in the Roslyn cemetery, to which he kept making additions, working there day after day, year after year; Will and Virginia packed in paving stones for the job by hand. The cemetery isn't easy to find, but it's not unusual today to see a fire crew pull up in a rig to pay their respects, and have a word of greeting with Will Craven.

Others, too, spoke out at the meeting. “My daughter was not like that,” said Jody Gray. “She was out to please. If Ellreese Daniels told my daughter to come out of the rocks, she'd have jumped.” Tammie Blevins, Jessica Johnson's aunt, remarked on her way out the door, “We came here to get answers. I'm walking away from here just disgusted.”

“Everyone just wanted to scream,” Evelyn Craven said later. “When they briefed us alone, it sounded like Tom disregarded a direct order. It sounded like they were trying to put the blame on my husband. Tom disobeying an order? That's ridiculous.”

“That's a lie, a bullshit lie,” Ken Weaver later told the Yakima Herald-Republic newspaper. “None of those rookies would even propose to disobey an order from an incident commander.”

Furnish cut the meeting off after an hour. “We have a press conference; we have to go,” he said, curtly. He told the families they were not to make statements at the public meeting, but many did so afterward. Furnish tried to put the best possible face on matters years later. “The meeting with the families went as well as could be expected. It was respectful — no open hostility, shouting, or yelling,” he said, though others who were there say there were many raised voices. “But it was very tense. There were tears. It was loaded with emotion — a lot of cynicism, suspicion.”

The Thirtymile Fire Investigation Report was released to the media with a supportive word from Chief Bosworth, who attended the press conference. The report portrays a management fiasco that violated every basic safety rule in the book and a majority of the standing safety cautions. From the first moments, the report said, fire managers failed to appreciate the potential of a fire burning in a narrow canyon on a hot day in a time of extreme drought. Never mind the number of rookies; the veterans displayed an astonishing lack of situational awareness throughout the day. Too many people gave orders. Nobody was sure who was in charge. Orders were not enforced. The crew couldn't keep a set of relatively simple water pumps running.

The leadership stuck with unsuitable tactics as the fire grew in size and intensity, and failed even to properly communicate those tactics. Nobody bothered to ask for a weather update, and the dispatch office, which had an afternoon forecast, didn't bother to pass it along. There was no lookout posted after 3:00 pm, the most dangerous time of day for fire. The air observer who was supposed to keep watch couldn't see all of the fire because of smoke. When firefighters attacked the fire head-on in the afternoon, a mistake in itself, they fought it blind: they couldn't see the main fire, had no adequate escape routes or safety zones, and had “no viable strategy” to fight the fire, the report said. Once the entrapment occurred, preparation for a burnover was nonexistent. When a civilian couple unexpectedly showed up without protective clothing or gear, nobody paid them much attention, with the notable exception of Welch.

The report offered a detailed account of how every one of the venerable Ten Standard Firefighting Orders was violated, and how ten of eighteen Watch Out Situations were disregarded. The standard orders cover basics such as keeping up with weather conditions, knowing what the fire is doing, posting lookouts, identifying escape routes and safety zones, giving clear instructions, and maintaining effective control of the fire crew. The Watch Out Situations are safety issues that can be tolerated if cautionary steps are taken. If the basic safety rules had been followed, Furnish told the news conference, no one need have died. “The fatalities were preventable,” he said.

Furnish made a couple of positive points for balance. Daniels had acted wisely by not trying to run the white van and its passengers through flames once the fire crossed the road. Daniels had chosen the only survivable place in the upper canyon to ride out the fire. He had correctly identified the road as a good place to be. The rescue effort had been “quick and effective.”

But the mistakes by Daniels and others were so numerous as to be overwhelming. Leadership was “ineffective” and “indecisive,” the report said, adding a secondhand judgment about Daniels: “Crewmember testimony indicates that the IC was not a forceful leader and that may have impeded his ability to command the situation at the deployment site.” Every member of the investigative team interviewed for this account, however, said without equivocation that Daniels should have acted more forcefully throughout the day, and most especially during the entrapment.

“I was around Ellreese, and he's pretty easygoing, pretty casual, not real directed, tough, or firm,” Furnish said years later. “I think the crew sensed that. The order should have been conveyed convincingly, without question or equivocation. A leader would have gotten people to do as requested.”

The report also contained a section devoted to the role played in the fatalities by human factors, mainly sleep deprivation, but which also offers a psychological insight. “At the deployment site, the crew's attention was ‘turned inward,’” the report said. “The time and attention of experienced crewmembers was channelized almost exclusively on two non-fire issues. The first was keeping less experienced crewmembers calm and the second was the low key conflict between the IC/Crew Boss and the two squad bosses about coming down out of the rocks. This occupied the crew leadership and lowered the vigilance level as the fire approached and prevented any serious preparation from being accomplished at the site.” While the remarks are illuminating in some ways, the criticism of the squad bosses, Taylor and Craven, for failing to make “serious preparation” seems to miss the mark. The “low key conflict” began when Taylor and Craven tried to talk Daniels into doing precisely that, and he turned them down, an episode that is only alluded to and not described in the report and its supporting documents. What contributed most to lowering the “vigilance level,” it seems with hindsight, was the misjudgment repeated over and over as though it were a mantra — and especially between Daniels and Jasso — that the fire was going to pass by harmlessly.

The human factors section identified fatigue as a major underlying cause of the catastrophe. “The single overwhelming physiological factor that impacted upon this mishap was fatigue caused by sleep deprivation,” the report claimed. “This may help explain a series of uncharacteristic lapses in judgment.” Work hours and tours of duty for firefighters had been shortened after the South Canyon Fire, and were looked at again after the Thirtymile Fire. Some effective changes were made: for example, crews were to be called out after a full night's sleep and in daylight hours, when possible, rather than traveling overnight before starting work. But the accuracy of the data used in Kern's analysis was challenged by at least one of the fire's supervisors, who said he had a full night's more sleep than the report says, which undercuts the report's conclusion about the extent of the role played by fatigue.

The controversial finding that Craven's group had ignored a direct order from Daniels has a strong military flavor, as though it were a charge in a court-martial proceeding. It reads, “The firefighters on the rock scree were ordered to return to the road; however, these orders were disregarded.”

The challenge to that finding was immediate and had a devastating effect on the report's credibility, and on Furnish. The day after the report was made public, three survivors — Dreis, Hurd, and Rutman — held their own press conference and said the charge wasn't fair or completely accurate.

“I didn't hear it [a direct order],” Dreis said. “I talked to other people there. They didn't hear it.”

“They weren't disobeying,” said Hurd.

“It's disrespectful to the people who passed away, to their families,” said Rutman, in a milder dissent. He did not deny that he had heard Daniels call to the people in the rocks. But he flatly contradicted another claim in the report, namely that Daniels had given an order to deploy shelters when the flames arrived, though the report credits Daniels with saving lives by doing so. The only order Rutman says he heard Daniels give as the fire approached — and he was right beside him when it happened — was “Get your shelter out and cover your buddies.”

What most offended the three survivors was the report's implication that the victims were to blame for their deaths. “They're not here to defend themselves,” Dreis said. “Somebody's got to stand up for them.”

Both the Thirtymile and South Canyon investigation reports have been tainted by the charge contained in each that firefighters were partly to blame for their own deaths. If such a charge is true, it should be pointed out and lessons learned. But even then the charge is sure to cause agonies for the living, and should be based on an unshakable foundation in fact. In the case of the Thirtymile Fire, there is no serious doubt that Daniels told people at the entrapment site several times to stay on or near the road. Numerous survivors heard him say those things early in the entrapment.

There is considerable — though less conclusive — evidence that Daniels indeed did tell Craven and his group to come down from the rock scree, but it's unclear when he made those remarks. Daniels thought he said it repeatedly. That's the story he told in the first hours after the fatalities, when he was emotionally distraught and unlikely to be concocting a fiction. According to Sheriff's Sergeant Dan Christensen's report on his interview with Daniels, conducted immediately after the fire, “Craven's group was up on some rocks and Daniels told them to get down on the road.”

In Daniels's first interview with Furnish's fire investigators, he did not mention calling to Craven's group, though surely he would have done so if he was fabricating a story to save his own skin. When reinterviewed by Kern and asked direct questions, however, Daniels told the story the same way he had told it to Sergeant Christensen. Kern did not have an audio recorder, but there is no real reason to doubt the essential accuracy of his written summary, which has Daniels saying, “I told them several times — at least three — I said ‘Come down out of the rocks, that's not the place to be.’”

Daniels, then, almost certainly said something to Craven's group about coming down from the rocks. But was it an order? Was it heard? Was it deliberately ignored? The answer to those questions is essential to determining how much responsibility, if any, the four victims had for their deaths.

In fact, Daniels never claimed that he issued an order. He is quoted as saying only that he “told” Craven's group to move; nowhere in the official record does he say that he “ordered” them to retreat. Normally a directive from an ic is the same thing as an order, but in this case Daniels had not functioned as ic for most of the day, and at no time did he aggressively assert his authority. Daniels told Kern that he was certain he was heard and ignored, but he did not claim that anyone in Craven's group responded with so much as a word or a wave off. When Kern was questioned on this point years later, for this account, he said that Daniels based his assertion about being heard and ignored on eye contact with Craven's group. Eye contact is hardly irrefutable evidence for an accusation of this much consequence.

There is no independent, unchallenged testimony to back up Daniels's account in its entirety. Two survivors from Craven's group, Emhoff and Welch, maintain that they did not hear Daniels call to them. The official interview with Emhoff was botched, but Emhoff said years later for this account what he sketchily said then: if Daniels called to Craven's group, he didn't hear him. When Welch was interviewed for this account, she emphatically denied hearing Daniels call to her or anyone else in Craven's group. Granted, by then she was well aware of the denials by other survivors. But Welch is an unlikely liar. She proved her moral courage when she saved the lives of the Hagemeyers. The relevant exchange with Welch for this account, which was sound recorded, reads:

Question: Did you ever hear Ellreese Daniels say, “Come out of the rocks”?

Welch: No. He never said that. He never did. I don't think he talked to us the whole time. Like this stupid report says, he told me to come out of the rocks and it saved my life? He never did. I just think it was basic instinct or God telling me to come down.

The investigation team placed much weight, Furnish said later, on the testimony of one other witness, Rutman. But Rutman now says that his account to investigators, the one that he signed but that was not sound recorded, is wrong. In a series of interviews for this account, Rutman said that he, like many others, heard Daniels tell everyone to stay near the road. “The thing I remember hearing, Ellreese wanted us to stay together. That was early, when we first got there.”

But when asked about Daniels's later communication with Craven's group, Rutman said, “If Ellreese told them to come down, I didn't hear it.” This contradicts the signed notes of Rutman's interview with investigators, in which Rutman has Daniels calling to Craven's group ten minutes before the deployment. When Rutman was read that passage during one of the interviews for this account, he flexed his eyebrows Groucho Marx fashion and remarked, “They should have taped it, shouldn't they?”

Furnish and other members of the investigation team believe that Rutman and perhaps others changed their stories under peer pressure, and perhaps some did. “If there's ever a case study in how one witness influences another, it's this one,” Kern said years later, bitterly. But the picture in the report of Daniels repeatedly issuing an order that was heard and then deliberately ignored by Craven's group is contradicted by every key witness — Emhoff, Welch, and Rutman — and even goes a step beyond what the soft-spoken Daniels, who never used the word order, claims happened. Further, in the judgment of Thom Taylor and others, Craven's group had good reason to think they were following Daniels's early instruction to stay on or close to the road. The place where they had gathered in the rocks is but ten steps up from the road; it was almost like being there.

“Where Tom was, that's on the road, well within the normal spread zone of a resting crew,” said Tony Craven, one of Tom Craven's firefighting brothers. “I don't see how you consider it off the road. Tom knew Ellreese. We had worked with him since 1990. We knew and trusted him. If Ellreese had told Tom to come to the road, Tom would have come to the road.”

About a year after the event, when he was mostly recovered from his physical injuries, Emhoff returned to the entrapment site where he offered this assessment of Daniels: “He never stood up and said, ‘Hey, listen to me, we need to all get together and do this and this. We need to do something, even if it's picking your nose, as long as everyone's doing the same thing.’ He never said that. He wasn't a verbally loud person. He was quiet and not really reserved, but shy about a lot of things. So if he ever asked us to get down off the rocks, we never heard it.

“And why would we disobey it?”

Emhoff's final question raises the issue of character. Was anyone in Craven's group likely to disobey orders? There is no scientific way to measure character, but the four victims had well-formed personalities that provide their own answers.

Craven embraced the fire world's rules and rewards, passing up his father's advice to use his education to pursue a safer career path. FitzPatrick chose a life of faith, discipline, and sacrifice, forswearing worldly temptations to follow the narrow way. Johnson had turned her life around only the weekend before, walking out on a damaging relationship and taking up a Spartan lifestyle in a fire barracks. Weaver was the forever faithful son, even in his dark period, always striving to fulfill parental expectations. Tom, Karen, Jessica, and Devin had bowed to authority in their lives. Though they could no longer speak for themselves, they had left traces of character in their final moments.

It never occurred to those trapped there at the bend in the river that conditions could change so fast and so catastrophically. One second the sky was blue, the sun was shining, and the wind was wafting the flames away from them. Then in the blink of an eye the sun disappeared, the sky turned black, and a thousand tiny particles of burning light raced toward them. The wave of superheated air that met Craven and the others as they started for the road was nonnegotiable. The road that had seemed a step away faded like a broken promise into a swirl of embers and darkness.

They turned around and clambered desperately up and away from the heat, sometimes on all fours, grabbing at rocks to help them upward and away from the firestorm. Their awareness of mortal danger ebbed and flowed. Several dropped their packs and other gear during the climb. Afterward, Detective Sloan found the debris and concluded that it was a sign of panic; in fact the opposite may be the case, though surely they were shocked and frightened. All four arrived at the deployment spot with the essential item: a fire shelter. They were trained to throw away their packs, with their fusees, and run with just their fire shelters in their hands. Managing this under calm conditions is a simple exercise, but a feat of considerable self-control with a flame wave hard on your heels.

Taylor, high above them, heard them call out in bewilderment, “Deploy? Deploy?” No place appeared safer than any other on that exposed, rocky slope. Taylor shouted down, “Deploy! Deploy!” and watched them shaking out their shelters.

What if they had started for the road seconds earlier? What if they had managed to struggle just a step or two higher, as Emhoff did, out of the heat wave's fatal footprint? The moment for such questions had passed away forever. Their world had shrunk down to a slight depression in the rock scree, the fire shelters, and the coming fire.

No one who lived heard another word from Craven after the shelter deployment began. His failure to anticipate the worst had been everyone's failure. But Craven had backed up Taylor's attempt to persuade Daniels to prepare for a burnover. He had kept his squad calm and together in the rocks. If he had lived, he likely would have gone on doing the same sort of things, bossing a fire crew, being head of a family, holding people together. Craven was the farthest one up the canyon and likely the first to be hit by the full fury of the heat wave. Perhaps because he led the way, he had not taken the time to jettison his pack and its deadly fusees; or perhaps he simply could not manage or forgot to throw off the pack — no one will ever know. Slag from the fusees, which burn at 1,500 degrees, was found under his body. The fire burned hard and long where he was, but his lungs were unmarked by soot, which indicates that for him death came within seconds.

The heat that struck Craven full-force overlapped Johnson as well, though it took perhaps a second longer. Johnson, who was right next to Craven, was able to exchange a word with Emhoff — “Hey, who kicked me?” — before she entered her shelter, fulfilling her presentiment about the level of danger. Next to Johnson was Weaver, who prepared for the flames in textbook fashion. He stretched out flat on his belly inside his shelter, gloves and hard hat in place. He was spared the most intense blast of heat, even though he was but a few feet from Johnson. When his body was found, he appeared as though asleep.

Afterward, Detective Sloan told Ken Weaver that his son had acted well in his final moments. “You could write the manual on shelter deployment by the way Devin deployed his shelter,” Sloan said. “Your son did not lose his cool. I tell you that because I would have been proud of my son if he had acted the same way.” Ken Weaver drew comfort from the words.

Last in line, FitzPatrick shook out her shelter and drew it over her back. She, however, did not lie down inside her shelter in the prescribed manner. The story spread afterward as a rural legend, but witness statements and photographs confirm it: FitzPatrick was found inside her shelter bowed on her knees, her hands on either side of her head, in an attitude of prayer.

In seconds, an unkind destiny forged the final link in the long chain of errors and betrayed the bright promise and changed lives of four young wildland firefighters.

From the book Thirtymile Fire: A Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal by John N. Maclean. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company LLC. Copyright © 2007 by John N. Maclean. All rights reserved.