As a volunteer firefighter for fifteen years news like this catches me off guard still .
Been praying for their families and friends .
I've been through the same wild land training that these crews go through and the shelters that we are provided with are a last chance option , thinner than aluminum foil and if you pack them around a lot they start to get tiny holes in them . You have to remove all the fuel from around you ( brush, leaves, and your saws and their fuel ) then deploy your shelter and hold it down so that the wind does not blow it off . They are not designed for prolong or extremely hot fires. I've been in some bad fires that burned green postoaks off at the ground , the fires would burn a deep red instead of orange and cedars would burst into flames before the fire even got to them .
In Oklahoma we've had some bad ones in the droughts we've had but we have roads all over so we can get access to most of them and we have just protected structures until the fires went by.
As firefighters we put ourselves in harms way to give others a chance to get away and save everything we can , and things can get bad at times, and fires will create their own winds and make them unpredictable .
