Residents of Arizona have been mourning the 19 firefighters who were killed battling a ferocious wildfire last weekend. The Yarnell Hill Fire saw the biggest loss of firefighters' lives since the 9/11 attacks.
The road from Prescott to Yarnell would, in normal times, be a joy to drive along.
It winds through wooded hills, each turn offering a new vista, the slopes rich in pine and shrub, and the blue skies stretch away on a scale that, to European eyes, is spectacular.
I realise I risk sounding like a spokesman for the Arizona tourist board.
But this is genuinely charming country and as we made our way through it, it was easy to forget, for a moment, what had happened here, and why we had come.
Yarnell is the little town where a forest fire raged unchecked last Sunday and destroyed half of the houses.
With his mobile phone, he filmed what looked like the aftermath of a bombing.One man who lived there, Pat Bernard, told me how he had moved his family out but then stayed a little longer himself.
Under a dark haze, dozens of buildings were alight. That was bad enough.
But what Pat did not know at the time was that firefighters, deployed nearby to create a fire break, found themselves at the mercy of a shifting wind.
What should have been a routine operation, of a type they had carried out at many other places, went horribly wrong and the fire they had come to stop overwhelmed them. Nineteen were killed.
Yarnell itself is closed now. The road towards it was so empty we wondered if we had got lost.
I first asked for directions. Just keep going, he said, and you will come to a police roadblock. He asked where we were from.A small truck was coming the other way so we waved, and the driver stopped. He was a utility worker, his vehicle carrying equipment. He looked exhausted.
I have to admit that I did wonder whether we really had time to chat - we were in a hurry with deadlines to meet.
But the man seemed eager to talk and when I offered some comment about the terrible news he sighed, painfully.
He had just come from Yarnell and one of the dead men was the son of a friend of his. Tears welled up and ran down his cheek.
I suddenly felt guilty. I was in a rush but he was grieving.
The roadblock was the closest we could get to the fire, the closest we wanted to get, because even from several miles away, we could see a vast cloud of grey smoke rising into the air.
The unnerving thing was that while it usually blew to the north, advancing steadily in one direction, it would sometimes switch and burn the other way.
When our camerawoman Maxine Collins used her most powerful lens, she could pick out a menacing orange line of flame.
An emergency official confirmed that the fire was still out of control.
0 Comments