Prescott Hotshots: The Yarnell Hill Fire, Investigation, and Settlement

On June 30, 2013, the Granite Mountain Hotshots were overrun by the Yarnell Hill Fire in a brush-choked box canyon southwest of Yarnell, Arizona, killing 19 of the crew’s 20 members and producing the deadliest wildfire loss for American firefighters since 1933. The crew was based at the Prescott Fire Department, and their deaths set off years of investigations, citations against the state, a bitter fight over survivor benefits, wrongful death lawsuits, and lasting changes to how wildland crews are tracked and trained.¹

Who the Crew Was

Granite Mountain was unusual. It grew out of a Wildland Division the Prescott Fire Department created in 2001, evolved into a Type 2 hand crew by 2004, and in September 2008 received official notification of certification as a Type 1 Interagency Hotshot Crew while on assignment on the Klamath National Forest.² That made it the only municipally sponsored hotshot crew in the country. Eric Marsh, a 43-year-old North Carolina native who joined the Prescott Fire Department in 2003, had spent a decade building the program and was the crew’s superintendent on the day of the fire.³ Of the 20 members on the roster that June, six were classified as permanent full-time employees. The other 13 were seasonal or temporary workers, a distinction almost no one thought about until it mattered.⁴

What Happened on June 30, 2013

Lightning had struck the Weaver Mountains west of Yarnell around 5:00 p.m. on June 28, igniting a fire that started as less than half an acre. Heavy brush that had not burned in more than 45 years, along with dry conditions, let it grow fast. By the morning of the 30th it covered somewhere between 300 and 500 acres and was gaining complexity faster than fire managers expected.¹⁵

At a 7:00 a.m. briefing, Marsh took the role of Division Alpha Supervisor with an assignment to establish an anchor point at the heel of the fire. For most of the morning and early afternoon the crew held a position on the southwest perimeter in the “black” — the already-burned area generally considered safe ground.¹

The crew’s youngest member, 21-year-old Brendan McDonough, was posted as the lookout. His job was to watch fire behavior and weather from a separate vantage point and radio warnings. During the afternoon the wind shifted 180 degrees and began pushing fire toward him. When the flames reached his predetermined trigger point, he radioed the superintendent, evacuated on foot, and was picked up by the Blue Ridge Hotshots at a safety zone.⁶

Around 3:50 p.m., Marsh radioed Operations Section Chief Todd Abel and said he was “trying to work my way off the top.” Abel advised the crew to “hunker and be safe.” Shortly after 4:00 p.m., the rest of the crew began moving off the ridgeline and down toward Boulder Springs Ranch, a possible safety zone. Marsh appeared to have gone ahead of them, cutting a path with chainsaws.⁷ No one else in the incident organization realized the crew had left the black and was moving through unburned brush.¹

At 4:30 p.m., thunderstorm outflows hit the southern edge of the fire. Wind speeds jumped, flame lengths grew, fire intensity doubled, and the direction of the run shifted roughly 90 degrees. The fire began racing south at 10 to 12 miles per hour.⁸ The crew was now in a box canyon thick with brush, caught between the advancing fire and terrain that offered no way out. They had less than two minutes to try to improve a deployment site. At 4:42 p.m., the fire overran them. All 19 deployed their fire shelters close together, but direct flame contact and temperatures above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit made the site unsurvivable.¹

Roughly 600 people were evacuated from Yarnell and Peeples Valley that day. The fire eventually burned over 8,000 acres and destroyed more than 50 structures before it was fully contained on July 10, 2013.⁵

The men killed ranged in age from 21 to 43. Several were military veterans. Several were second-generation firefighters. Many had young families, and at least two of the wives were pregnant. Captain Jesse Steed, 36, was a Marine Corps veteran who had joined the crew in 2009. Kevin Woyjeck, 21, was the son of a Los Angeles County fire captain. Grant McKee, also 21, had joined alongside his cousin Robert Caldwell.⁹¹⁰

The Sole Survivor

McDonough, in his third season with the crew, was the only member who lived. Prescott Fire Department officials said publicly that he did “exactly what he was supposed to do.”⁶ He struggled for years afterward with survivor’s guilt, PTSD, substance abuse, and depression, wrote a book called Granite Mountain, and consulted on the 2017 film Only the Brave. He later founded Holdfast Recovery, a substance abuse and mental health facility in Prescott, and as of 2023 had been sober for six years.¹¹

What Investigators Found

Three separate investigations reached notably different conclusions.

The multi-agency Serious Accident Investigation Team released its report on September 23, 2013. It found that the Granite Mountain crew was fully qualified and trained, and that no negligence, recklessness, or policy violations by individual firefighters or incident managers had been identified. The team called the crew’s judgments and decisions “reasonable” given the information available to them at the time. It did flag contributing factors: communications throughout the day were “brief, informal, and vague,” leaving other personnel unaware of the crew’s movements; the crew did not anticipate the outflow boundary or the fire behavior it would produce; radios had tone guard problems that required workarounds; and the fire had jumped from the lowest complexity level to the highest in under 20 hours.¹

The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health reached harsher conclusions. On December 4, 2013, the Industrial Commission of Arizona issued three citations against the Arizona State Forestry Division: one classified as “willful” and two as “serious,” carrying combined fines of $559,000. Investigators concluded that the State Forestry Division had prioritized property protection over the lives of more than 300 firefighters and had unnecessarily exposed crews to fire hazards, and that planning, communications, staffing, and fire behavior judgment all fell short of state and national standards.¹² A third report, prepared by Wildland Fire Associates for ADOSH, found that the State Forestry Division had failed to implement required extended attack guidelines, including a complexity analysis and risk assessments, and that incident managers had failed to consider disengaging from full suppression after initial tactics stopped working. It also pointed to fatigue and a “can do” culture that discouraged shifting to safer strategies.¹³

The Arizona State Forestry Division contested all three ADOSH citations on December 19, 2013. Federal OSHA records indicate the penalties were never reduced from the original $559,000, but the inspection record remained open. If the willful citation’s penalty stood, $475,000 of the fine was earmarked for the families of the nineteen firefighters, at $25,000 per family.¹⁴¹⁵

The Fight Over Survivor Benefits

The classification difference between full-time and seasonal workers turned into the defining aftermath of the disaster. Families of the six full-time employees stood to receive average payments of about $470,000 plus roughly $100,000 annually in ongoing benefits, including health insurance, life insurance, and pension payments. Families of the 13 seasonal workers were limited to a federal lump-sum payment of $328,612.73 under the Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program, plus workers’ compensation, with no access to the city’s pension or health plans.⁴¹⁶

The City of Prescott maintained that retroactively reclassifying temporary employees as full-time was “impossible and illegal” and that the seasonal workers had acknowledged their classification in writing. An internal city inquiry in August 2013 concluded that no improper promises of promotion to permanent status had been made.¹⁷ Families disputed that. Some said their relatives had worked full-time hours and had been led to believe permanent positions were on the way. Juliann Ashcraft, widow of Andrew Ashcraft, and Deborah Pfingston, Ashcraft’s mother, publicly challenged the city. Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin drafted retroactive legislation to close the classification loophole.¹⁸

The pension fight for three families in particular stretched on for years. The Prescott Public Safety Personnel Retirement System board argued that Andrew Ashcraft, Billy Warneke, and Sean Misner were ineligible for pension payments because they were seasonal. Attorney Pat McGroder represented the families through multiple trials and appeals. In January 2015, a Yavapai County Superior Court judge ruled in favor of Ashcraft’s family. The next month, the retirement board voted unanimously to award survivor benefits to the Misner and Warneke families. On March 10, 2015, the Prescott City Council voted not to appeal, effectively ending the challenge. The rulings created a precedent for those specific families but did not change Arizona law on how seasonal firefighters are categorized for state benefits.¹⁹²⁰

Wrongful Death Settlement

Families of 12 of the 19 firefighters filed wrongful death lawsuits against the Arizona State Forestry Division, the City of Prescott, and Yavapai County, initially seeking $220 million in damages. On June 29, 2015, one day before the second anniversary of the fire, the parties settled. Each of the 12 participating families received $50,000 from the state’s risk management fund. The seven families that did not join the lawsuits each received $10,000 from the Forestry Division. The total settlement came to $670,000.²¹

The non-monetary terms mattered more than the money. The state agreed to make a “good faith effort” toward reforms including enhanced safety training for command personnel, improved communication systems, and serving as a testing site for GPS tracking technology to address the crew-location-awareness failures that had contributed to the disaster. McGroder said the primary goal of the litigation had been to improve wildland firefighting safety.²¹

What Changed After Yarnell

The Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management adopted a satellite-based GPS tracking and accountability system called “DropBlocks,” designed to provide crew-location data in remote areas without cellular service. As of 2023, half of the department’s 12 wildland hand crews were testing it, with plans to expand to all hand and engine crews. The agency also placed greater emphasis on explicitly communicating operational risks and expected fire behavior to crews on the ground.²²

The Yarnell Hill Fire was folded into standardized federal training through the annual RT-130 Wildland Fire Safety Training refresher module, and a formal staff-ride program at the fire site began in 2017.²³ Investigators and safety advocates pushed for a broader cultural shift, arguing that incident management teams should develop redeployment plans and accept the loss of structures when firefighter safety is at risk rather than sticking with full-suppression tactics on fires beyond control.¹³

At the federal level, Congress passed a permanent pay reform for wildland firefighters in March 2025, replacing temporary raises first authorized under the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The legislation covers roughly 17,000 federal firefighters and includes premium pay for extended deployments and changes to overtime and retirement calculations.²⁴ A companion bill introduced in January 2025, the Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act, proposes mandatory mental health programs, paid mental health leave, a cancer and cardiovascular disease database, and recognition of PTSD as a job-related condition for workers’ compensation.²⁵

Memorials

The Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park, two miles south of Yarnell on State Route 89, was dedicated in 2016 on 320 acres purchased by the state. A trail climbs roughly 1,200 feet over 2.9 miles past interpretive displays and plaques telling each firefighter’s story, and a steeper spur trail leads to the deployment site, where 19 gabion baskets connected by a chain surround the area and 19 metal crosses mark the spots where each crew member was found. Over 120,000 people have visited the park since it opened.²⁶

In downtown Prescott, a memorial on the Yavapai County Courthouse Plaza was dedicated on June 30, 2024, the eleventh anniversary. It features a bronze statue of a lone hotshot and granite slabs inscribed with the 19 names. During the ceremony, the courthouse bells rang 19 times at 4:42 p.m., the moment the crew was overrun.²⁷ The Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew Learning and Tribute Center in Prescott houses artifacts left at Fire Station 7 and items sent from around the world after the tragedy.²⁸ The Eric Marsh Foundation, established in 2014 by Amanda Marsh, provides emergency financial aid, medical and mental health support, scholarships, and family care to wildland firefighters and their survivors nationwide.²⁹

1
Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Report. Yarnell Hill Fire Investigation Report
2
Prescott Firefighter’s Charities. History of the Granite Mountain Hotshots
3
Eric Marsh Foundation. About Eric Marsh
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NBC News. Yarnell Hill Firefighters Kin Say Theyre Being Cheated Out Benefits
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National Weather Service. Yarnell Fire 2013
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Wildfire Today. Sole Survivor of Yarnell Hill Fire Identified
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Wildfire Today. Discoveries in Yarnell Hill Fire Recordings Provide New Information About Location of Eric Marsh
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NWCG. 2022 Week of Remembrance Day 1
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Eric Marsh Foundation. Meet the Granite Mountain Hotshots
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Tucson.com. The 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots
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Arizona’s Family. 10 Years Later: Yarnell Hill Fire Sole Survivor Helping Others With Healing
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The Desert Sun. Report: Arizona Fire Response Riddled With Issues
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International Association of Wildland Fire. The Yarnell Hill Fire: A Review of Lessons Learned
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OSHA. Inspection Detail
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Phoenix New Times. Yarnell Hill Fire Forestry Division Penalty One of the Largest Ever for Workplace Safety Agency
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FireRescue1. Families of 19 Hotshots to Get Lump-Sum Payments
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USA Today. Officials: Firefighters Not Promised Full-Time Jobs
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Arizona Public Media. Law Changes May Ensure Hotshot Families Survivor Benefits
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Fire Engineering. Prescott AZ Wont Appeal Ruling on Firefighter Benefits
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ABC15. A Decade After Yarnell, Benefit Issues Remain for Arizona Wildland Firefighters
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Wildfire Today. Yarnell Hill Fire Families Settle Lawsuit
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KTAR. Granite Mountain Hotshots Yarnell Hill Fire Safety Arizona 10th Anniversary
23
NWCG. 2023 Week of Remembrance Day 1
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Federal News Network. Federal Wildland Firefighters Secure Permanent Pay Raise, but Work Is Far From Over
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U.S. Congress. Tim Hart Wildland Firefighter Classification and Pay Parity Act
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Arizona Highways. Granite Mountain Hotshots Memorial State Park
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KNAU. Granite Mountain Hotshot Memorial Dedication Planned for 11th Anniversary of Yarnell Hill Fire
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GMIHC Learning and Tribute Center. GMIHC19
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Eric Marsh Foundation. How We Help