An elite crew of firefighters trained to battle the nation’s fiercest wildfires was overtaken by an out-of-control blaze in Arizona, killing 19 members as they tried to protect themselves from the flames under fire-resistant shields.
It was the most firefighters killed battling a wildfire in the US in decades.
The lightning-sparked fire, which spread to at least 809 hectares amid soaring temperatures, also destroyed 200 homes and sent hundreds fleeing from Yarnell, a town of about 700 residents about 137km northwest of Phoenix.
Residents huddled in shelters and bars, watching their homes burn on TV as flames lit up the night sky in the forest above the town.
The disaster on Sunday afternoon all but wiped out the 20-member Hotshot fire crew based in nearby Prescott, leaving the city’s fire department reeling.
“We grieve for the family. We grieve for the department. We grieve for the city,” Prescott Fire Chief Dan Fraijo said at a news conference on Sunday evening.
The National Fire Protection Association Web site lists the last wildland fire to kill more firefighters as the 1933 Griffith Park fire of Los Angeles, which killed 29.
The most firefighters — 340 — were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, according to the Web site.
Most people had evacuated from the town, and no injuries or other deaths were reported.
Hotshot crews go through specialized training and are often deployed soon after a fire breaks out.
Sometimes they hike for kilometers into the wilderness with chain saws and backpacks filled with heavy gear to build lines of protection between people and fires.
As a last-ditch effort at survival, Hotshot crew members are trained to dig into the ground and cover themselves with a tent-like shelter made of fire-resistant material, Fraijo said.
The hope in that desperate situation is that the fire will burn over them and they will survive.
Nineteen fire shelters were deployed, and some of the firefighters were found inside them, while others were outside the shelters, Mike Reichling, Arizona State Forestry Division spokesman, told the Arizona Republic.
US President Barack Obama called the 19 firefighters heroes and said in a statement that the federal government was assisting state and local officials.
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