Yarnell is a town of 650 people, an hour and a half north-west of Phoenix, the state capital of Arizona. It sits below the 6,000-foot peaks of the Weaver Mountains and 2,000 feet above the Sonoran Desert. In times past, Yarnell was a gold mining town. On Friday 28 June, lightning brought on by the early monsoon season struck a hill on the crest of the Weaver ranges, which overlooks Yarnell. The fire quickly overwhelmed the town's modest natural defences. The parched scrub oak and brush, which border the town and had not been burnt in four decades, were ignited like a fuse. The strong gusts of wind whipped up the fire until it burned over 100 acres and jumped across protective lines and out of human control.

By Sunday, ferocious winds had whipped the fire into an inferno. As the 700 residents of Yarnell fled for their lives, jettisoning their possessions as they ran, the Granite Mountain hotshot crew was called in. Hotshot crews are the trump cards of North American fire brigades. They are small squads of specialised, highly trained firefighters dispatched to meet oncoming fronts. Headed by a captain, they include in their ranks the smoke jumpers, who parachute from cargo planes into the mouths of small fires; sawyers, armed with chainsaws to cut undergrowth; and swampers, who clear of the debris which is left behind. The job of these crews is, in essence, to stare the fire in the face without blinking.

The Granite Mountain crew was the jewel in the crown of the Prescott Fire Department. They were America's only solely municipally funded hotshot crew, and they were loved and respected by the communities they helped to protect. They had attended 26 fires from April to late June, but the Yarnell Hill fire was something entirely different. Even a squad of firefighters as tough and as well trained as the Granite Mountain Hotshots were vulnerable to conditions so fearsome.

The Blue Ridge Hotshots, a crew out of the Coconino National Forest, had arrived on the scene that morning, and they were coordinating their firefighting efforts with the Granite Mountain crew. Granite Mountain would keep building line—and I will explain line in a minute—on the fire's eastern edge, while Blue Ridge used their chainsaws to widen an old road that stood between the fire and Yarnell. If the winds shifted and the blaze ran towards town, Blue Ridge could set fire to the brush between the road and the wildfire, robbing it of the fuel it needed to survive.

At approximately 3.50pm on Sunday 30 June, as the crews were establishing barriers and building line (the term I used a little earlier) the wind began to shift. The dry thunderstorm stopped sucking in air and started blowing it out. The fire began running up a ridge on the eastern side of the valley towards Yarnell, expanding and accelerating and consuming all in its path as it went. It hit the trigger point identified by the Granite Mountain crew, and they fell back to a clearing they had created earlier that day.

With the fire now heading towards the town they were tasked with saving, Eric Marsh, the captain of the Granite Mountain crew, had to make a decision. Was he to order his crew to ignore their training and fall back to the black edge, consigning the town to oblivion, or climb down the valley and save as many homes as they could? The decision to head down towards the town and into the valley inadvertently led the crew into the belly of the beast.

As the crew moved further down the valley, the heat rose and the smoke thickened. They were cutting through thick scrub with heavy packs at unimaginable temperatures. The fire was approaching the crew at a frightening pace. Upon reaching a ridge above a basin, the hotshots had two choices for their escape: the ridge on their right or a 15-minute hike down a defensible space near a ranch house, and they chose the latter option. As they reached the basin floor and the house, the flames appeared from over their left shoulders, flanking the 19 men just metres from safety and an escape route. Slowly, the Granite Mountain Hotshots came face to face with a fire that had just burned four miles in 20 minutes. From this terrible realisation there was no escape.

The crew's best chance of survival was to deploy their small aluminium fire shelters in a depression on the basin floor where the brush was thinnest. A clearing would be formed with the chainsaws, which would then be discarded, along with the crew's gear, so as to not cause injury when they exploded. The crew deployed their shelters in a clearing 20 metres on each side. Professional to a fault, the senior hotshots would not have entered their tents until after the rookies and the seasonals. They would have encouraged and comforted each other in these moments.

The 19 men, unfortunately, perished. Among that number were two 21 year olds—barely men—and their 43-year-old captain. Yarnell Hill was the deadliest bushfire for American firefighters for over 80 years and the largest loss of life in the United States since the September 11 attack. In an instant, one-fifth of the Prescott Fire Department was lost. A lone crew member, who had acted as their lookout and had returned to the station, survived.

To put the terrible power of this fire into local context, the largest bushfire during the last South Australian danger season was the 6,200-acre fire at Bundaleer North. The blaze in Yarnell burned over 8,400 acres before it could be tamed. Arizona lost 19 firefighters, but it also lost sons, fathers, brothers and carers. Almost half the crew had children and several were engaged to be wed. They left behind wives, fiancés, families and friends. Americans were reminded in the cruellest way imaginable that the provision of their safety sometimes comes with a high cost attached. There is a global communion of firefighters joined by the invisible bonds of service. It is a community which commiserates its losses just as it celebrates its triumphs: united as one.

More is at stake here than the verbal recognition of a tragedy: there are lessons to be learned from the Yarnell Hill fire. Questions will be asked to determine how the conditions which made a disaster of this scale were possible. These questions will only be intensified in the wake of the revelations of the Tasmanian emergency services during their January bushfires.

The Country Fire Service has a valuable role to play in this reflection. There is no better way to honour the memory of the Granite Mountain Hotshots than to learn how such tragedy can be avoided in the future. An investigation may well reach the conclusion that the conditions of the Yarnell Hill fire were similar to those which instigated the Black Saturday fires of 2009 and the Eyre Peninsula bushfires of 2005. The topography of the land, dryness of the heat and capriciousness of the wind were all eerily reminiscent of these tragedies, which inscribe themselves on a community’s psyche the same way as Yarnell will in the United States.

With the New South Wales bushfires fresh in our minds and the significant contribution of the Country Fire Service, the recognition of the Arizona tragedy serves to remind us all of the tremendous contribution our volunteers make to our protection, both to our person and to our property.