AS I WRITE THIS, the California flames are finally coming under control. The winds have slowed, the air has cooled and the firefighters have the upper hand.
But for at least four of them, maybe five, it won’t matter. Those firefighters won’t be coming back. And of all the devastation, that may be among the hardest to take.
Who rescues the rescuers?
It’s never an easy thing to think about. We want our guardians to be invulnerable, to go into the jaws of danger and come back out again laughing. And when something happens to them — a sheriff shot, a firefighter caught in the blaze — our world gets a little more uncertain for a moment. It’s like the moment when a child discovers Mom and Dad can’t do everything, only worse.
It’s a moment I remember all too well from the day Storm King Mountain burned.
Unless you’re a firefighter or lived in Colorado at the time, you probably don’t remember much about Storm King any more. It made the national news, then faded out as new tragedies
took its place. But for those living near
the Rockies in the summer of 1994, it was pretty near unforgettable.
It had been a hot summer. Colorado is never all that humid, but things had been especially dry that year, with a lot of previous growth in the mountains turning to tinder. Worse yet, lightning storms were becoming plentiful. All the conditions for a bad fire were in place. All it needed was a match.
And in July, somebody lit a whole book of them at once.
Lightning strike followed lightning strike. Wildfire followed wildfire. And with everyone stretched thin, a July 3 strike at the base of Storm King Mountain, just west of Glenwood Springs, almost went unnoticed. It was misidentified, then given a low priority.
Bad mistake.
Smokejumpers parachuted into the area on July 6 — about the same time a dry cold front did. The wind created a chimney in the canyons setting off a chain of events that sent up a wall of flame ... and ultimately killed 14 firefighters.
The anger came later, that need to track down every last mistake someone had made so the public could decide who to blame. But the shock came first. It had happened so fast, so terribly fast. Most of us had never heard the term “smokejumper” before. Now we mourned them
a with a sense of disbelief.
They had been the rescuers. And now they were the victims.
It just wasn’t right.
California understands. Actually, after 9/11, so does the nation. And in a way, both of those may have been worse. Mistakes were made in the runup to Storm King Mountain, but ultimately the fire had a natural cause. But 9/11 was a deliberate attack. California’s recent wildfires have been deemed the work of an arsonist. In both cases, the firefighters who fell were murdered as surely as if they had been shot by a sniper.
How can you understand something like that? How can you try?
The world will move on. With luck, the arsonist will be caught and tried. And if there’s any cold comfort to be had, it’s that we now remember the risks our protectors take when they put on the uniform.
They’re not invulnerable. They can be hurt, make mistakes, even fall. But time and again, they go in anyway. Someone has to.
And that’s the fire that will never go out.
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com