This is terrible. God Bless and help their families after this loss. I’m not sure that homes are worth the loss of life in this instance.
Is protecting the loss of any property ever really worth loss of human lives? Thats the risk a firefighter lives with daily though and sadly many have perished for that very reason.
Usually hotshots are fighting fires somewhere else, if not another state, at least normally the big ones have not been too close to home (until recently again) these guys lived less than an hour down the road, pretty much in the direction the fire was burning toward... they were protecting their neighbors and their property PLUS trying to stop a fire from racing across very dry arizona wilderness... it sounds like it should have been a relatively safe day for this team, as the fire was going the other way... this team was cutting a worst case scenario fire line, to protect yarnell exactly when the worst case happened. They were out of radio contact and probably had no idea it had turned around until it was too late, as some of them did not even make it into their emergency shelters...
Estimates are 250 homes/business’ lost so far in this fire... this is a SMALL rural community and that would amount to about half of it so far.