TV crews hook up microphones to Willis’ shirt as photographers fan out to take the first pictures of what wildland firefighters call the “deployment site.” This is where at least some of the hotshots, in a desperate attempt to survive the charging inferno, opened their thin aluminum mini-tent fire shelters and climbed under them, pushing their faces deep into the dirt in the hope of finding cool air as the 500-degree-plus fire approached. He had no experience as a hotshot and was not a member of the Granite Mountain crew he oversaw. Willis took over as Wildland Division chief in 2010, at $90,000 a year. He was rehired the same year to a $123,000-a-year position as Prescott’s emergency services director. Willis has worked for the Prescott Fire Department since 1985 and retired as its fire chief in 2007. Nearly all the rest of the 108 hotshot crews are attached to federal land-management agencies, with most operated by the U.S. Dressed in a black Granite Mountain Hotshots T-shirt and wearing sunglasses, Willis is the Prescott Fire Department’s Wildland Division chief and the direct supervisor of the nation’s only municipal-based hotshot crew. Ten yards in front of the fence, Darrell Willis awaits the press. Ahead is a chain-link fence surrounding the site where the men met their fate at the base of a U-shaped canyon opening to the east. Where once stood a near-impenetrable tangle of high-desert brush, collectively called “chaparral,” only blackened earth and a few charred stumps remain. “This crew was extremely faith-based, and they operated in the joy of life, and that is one of the ways we want to remember them,” Paxon says.Ī somber press corps hikes about 600 yards from a ranch house left unscathed by the Yarnell Hill Fire, thanks to large clearings on its perimeter that robbed the fire of fuel. A pyrocumulonimbus cloud erupts over Yarnell at the exact moment when the Granite Mountain Hotshots were deploying their fire shelters.
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