FL Forestry Official Explains Inferno Prescott Firefighters Encountered
MIAMI (CBS4) - Monday in South Florida, the Division of Forestry left their flag at half-staff in memory of the Granite Mountain Hotshots killed Sunday.
Wild land firefighters consider themselves a small but tight knit community. Typically you'll find them on the front lines and rarely in front of cameras.
Last week, though, Cronkite News in Arizona captured the unit training for a worst case scenario. The news crew captured the hotshots training with fire shelters, tent like structures built to let a fire literally burn right over you.
A week later the young men on the tape are dead, killed inside their very last hope -those fire shelters.
As Gabriel Llamas, a senior forest ranger with the Florida Division of Forestry described it, it was a horrific way to die.
"The preheated air collapses your airwaves so your last breath, when you take in that hot air, it collapses your airway so now your suffocated and at the same time you are burning to death," Llamas said.
While Llamas has worked Florida fires for nearly two decades he has been on the front lines of Western fires.
"It's a different ball game. It's a different technique as far as fighting the fire out West than it is here."
Here in Florida, where the land is flat, most wildfires are battled with heavy equipment like bulldozers. Out West, where it is mountainous, it's hand to hand combat.
"It's just, take a lick and go. One scarp, bump it over. One scrap, bump it over. And they do miles of this hand line," Llamas explained. "It's very hard work, not to mention the lack of humidity, the altitude, and you're going up and down mountains. It's very, very hard work."
To be a hotshot, you have to pass the pack test. A 45 pound bag strapped to your back. You then have 45 minutes to walk, not run, three miles. The standard is needed because Western fires climb fast.
"Heat rises. So if it starts at the bottom of a mountain it's going to run up toward the top." Llamas explained.
On his first deployment, Llamas saw it firsthand.
"We had to literally drop everything and run out of there. And we went back a couple days later to retrieve whatever we could as far as tools, hose whatever. It was gone." he said.
This time though a lot more was lost.
While Florida is a long way away from the fires out West we soon could be seeing our very best headed there. That's because the Division of Forestry has made our firefighters available for federal help.
