“It was a fight that the families couldn’t fight alone, the forester couldn’t fight alone, ADOSH couldn’t fight alone,” said Juliann Ashcraft, the widow of firefighter Andrew Ashcraft. “It had to take all of us coming together in a global resolution to even start talking about what we can do to prevent these things from happening again.”
The 19 Granite Mountain Hotshots died on June 30, 2013, while fighting a fire about 80 miles northwest of Phoenix after a thunderstorm caused a wind shift.
The crew members had been in a relatively safe position on a ridge top. For an unknown reason and without notifying anyone, they moved down the mountainside through an unburned area where they were trapped by a wall of flames when winds shifted the fire in their direction.