Face of the fire: Operations chief recalls tough fight

Apr. 22—SEDONA, Ariz. — Jayson Coil's office chair is situated just beneath a wall map showing the plan for Allied troops during the D-Day invasion.

A U.S. Army veteran, Coil said there are parallels between conducting military strategy and fighting fires, which is his job as deputy fire division director in the Arizona tourist town of Sedona.

Just as American forces battled to take and hold ground in France nearly 80 years ago, firefighters facing the historic Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire last year struggled to advance — inch by inch at times — against one of the greatest threats the state has ever known.

"There's so many parallels," said Coil, a history buff.

The thousands of men and women who battled the 341,000-acre fire in the Santa Fe National Forest a year ago might argue just what the "Longest Day" might've been in the monthslong Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon disaster. But almost no one argues Friday, April 22, 2022, was the crucible — a day when two smaller fires started by prescribed burns merged and then roared into Gallinas Canyon.

From that moment on, an area that stretched from near Las Vegas to north of Mora would never be the same.

Coil was a key figure in the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon story, an operations section chief for the U.S. Forest Service who would help decide how — and sometimes whether — homes, businesses and entire towns could be saved in the face of the fire's awesome fury.

In retrospect, he said it was a job that often kept him up at night.

"Normally the stuff I worry about is what we didn't do — What have I forgotten? What am I not considering? What have I not communicated well?" he said.

When Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon merged, those fighting it had to quickly process a set of unpredictable variables — wind speed, the amount of dry brush, moisture levels and personnel.

When those factors weren't in firefighters' favor — and they weren't for months — forests could go from "being difficult to burn to going like gasoline on a stick."

And so it was with Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon, as town after town saw pieces of their histories — to say nothing of homes, farms, ranches, orchards, businesses and other structures — swallowed whole. They fell like dominoes: Sapello. Holman. Gallinas Canyon. Rociada. And many more.

For some, Coil, 53, became the face of the fire and of the firefighters trying to save Northern New Mexico. His twice-daily online briefings — replete with facts, figures and warnings, all burnished with an Army-issued buzz cut and unusually blunt straight talk, sometimes garnished with bits of philosophy — became must-watch video for much of New Mexico. Using Forest Service maps and an old hand's "been there, done that" knowledge, he plotted the trajectory of a fire that often defied description or experience.

Earlier this month, Coil reflected on a 25-year career of firefighting and his role managing the New Mexico blaze. Even as he spoke, The Associated Press was reporting officials in New Mexico and Arizona were warning dry, windy conditions could once again increase the risk of wildfires in the region, despite better-than-expected snowpack in both states.

During the crisis, Coil said the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire was unlike any he had ever experienced in terms of its complexity and unpredictability — often brought on by high, unceasing winds. A year later, he said he still feels that way about the conflagration. It was, he said, like being hit with "a combination of an IRS audit, a loan shark and somebody repoing your vehicle all at once."

And, he added "you're trying to avoid them all at the same time, and they're all out looking for you."

Though firefighters had struggled with the Hermits Peak blaze since it was set April 6, he recalled being "cautiously optimistic" crews could control the fire on April 19 and 20, despite the threat of high winds.

"We knew we were going to have to hold that ground through the wind event. We were also working very hard at that time to control the Calf Canyon Fire, which popped onto our list of responsibilities about that time," he said.

But on that terrible April 22, the two fires suddenly merged and quickly devoured almost 40,000 acres in one day.

"When that happened, there was definitely a moment of recalibration," he said.

That day, he wrote a note to himself. He still has it. "Flanks. Point protection. Prepare to reengage across the broad area."

The new indicator of success, he said, became "nobody dies. If everybody comes back and nobody in the community is killed, that's a good day.

"Everybody out there wants to put the damn thing out. But there's a moment when you realize, 'Hey, right now we have to worry about people.' And that was certainly that day."

It's about saving lives

Coil's father was a Green Beret who later worked as a civilian for the U.S. Army in Landstuhl, Germany, where Coil was born in June 1969. A photo of John Wayne in uniform from the 1968 movie The Green Berets is among the many images and artifacts hanging on the walls of Coil's woodworking studio at his home in Flagstaff.

At 17, he felt he lacked a plan for life. He talked to a U.S. Army recruiter about joining the military in the late 1980s.

"I said I really wanted to jump out of airplanes. The recruiter said, 'We'll send you to airborne school as a combat engineer,' " he recalled.

He took combat lifesaving courses while serving in the military from 1987-90 as an enlisted specialist. After leaving the service, he enrolled in firefighting classes in Springerville, Ariz. When he saw an opening with the Sedona Fire District, he applied and "was fortunate enough to get selected."

He has been with the roughly 100-member Sedona department for 25 years. Over time, he earned college degrees in fire science and business administration. He said the most important thing he learned along the way was to ask questions and challenge assumptions.

His experience in Sedona led him to become outsourced to the Forest Service during fire season.

As an operations team leader, Coil is part of two regional firefighting teams in the Southwest whose members have gained experience on the front lines of some of the biggest fires in the country.

He has worked some of the most notorious and difficult fires in the West: the Biscuit Fire of 2002 in Oregon and California; the Wallow Fire of 2011 in Arizona; the Rodeo-Chedeski of 2002, also in Arizona; and the Big Turnaround of 2007 in Georgia. All were bigger in terms of acreage than Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon.

But Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon was different, if for no other reason than it turned Coil into something of a household name for a time in places like Las Vegas and some other towns in Northern New Mexico.

"I've never walked into town and gone into a store and had people come up and shake my hand and say 'thank you' or want to take a photo with me," he said. But he was aware he was often the center of attention when people got the latest news on the fire.

"It was awkward, but it was flattering," he said.

Such communication with the public and media, he said, is vital.

"It's very important if you are tasked with that responsibility to commit the amount of effort necessary to communicate effectively with the public," Coil said. "You are that one person giving all those briefings, but you represent the actions of thousands of people in the field."

Buzz Lechowski, a battalion chief for the Sedona Fire District who has worked with Coil for about 25 years, said the assistant chief has a penchant for communication.

He said amid the loud din of fire management operations a loud, clear voice is needed, and Coil provides it:

"He'll say, 'Here's what I'm after, here's the path, here's the tools,' " Lechowski added.

Coil does not claim he, or anyone, can predict what a fire might do next. He said it is important to realize, in looking at fire complexity "small changes in the initial stage can have exponential changes in outcomes. ... We can't measure everything that needs to be measured. We can't control all the variables. So when we say we're going to predict what the fire is going to do ..."

His voice trailed off for a moment before he said, "I don't know. We can't predict it."

One thing that will not work, he said, is inaction.

"The easy way to do it is to say, 'Nope, too dangerous, might cause a bad day, and I don't want to be the one who ...' So you just defer, defer, defer and pretty soon, bad days are going to happen anyway."

The bad days, he said, are what lead him to want to do more to take on fires. They also lead him to ponder what fire experts need to do better to achieve success in the field.

"We need to be nimble — more nimble than we are," he said.

He said he'd like to see more city and regional fire departments release some of their personnel to take part in battling wildfires in other parts of the country so they can gain experience on a new front. By doing so, they also can gain understanding of communities affected by wildfires, as he learned when coming to New Mexico last year.

"Recognize that your value set may not be the value set of those stakeholders," he said, adding he had no idea what an acequia was or how important they are to the land until the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire.

"It's not just an irrigation ditch to the community," he said. "So if I apply my values protecting somebody's irrigation ditch to protecting somebody's acequia system that has been providing water to these farmers for hundreds of years, and they have to live off the land — well, that will get you a wrong answer."

Asked how long it may take a community to recover from the devastating effects of a fire, Coil at first said, "I don't know the answer to that."

Then he added, "I bet these scars can last at least generations, especially in a place where people are so connected to the land like in Northern New Mexico."

He recalled, during the fire, the governor of one New Mexico pueblo telling him, "This land is our home and the only place we exist."

"I imagine there are a lot of people feeling the same thing," Coil said.