My question is if they were properly trained, and if the one in charge should have noticed the unstable winds.

You are doing no one a favor by using deaths to promote your political ideas.

The fire potential is exacerbated by the past policy, beginning around 1900, of putting out all fires. Fires are a natural way of clearing out the underbrush. With that natural rhythm disrupted, the flammable material piled up, so when it did catch fire, it ignited a giant fire that burned hotter and wider.

Is this not exactly what I have been saying?

“…One of the deadliest wildfires in a generation vastly expanded Monday to cover more than 8,000 acres, sweeping up sharp slopes through dry scrub and gnarled piñon pines a day after fickle winds and flames killed 19 firefighters.

gusty monsoon winds where the Colorado Plateau begins to drop off into the Sonoran Desert continued to bedevil about 400 firefighters who were defending 500 homes and 200 businesses in the old gold mining villages of Yarnell and Peeples Valley.
…
Scientists said those blazes and 15 others that remained uncontained from New Mexico to California and Idaho were part of the new normal — an increasingly hot and dry West, resulting in more catastrophic fires.

…

“The fire season has lengthened substantially, by two months, over the last 30 years,” said Craig D. Allen, a research ecologist at the United States Geological Survey station at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico.

The fire potential is exacerbated by the past policy, beginning around 1900, of putting out all fires. Fires are a natural way of clearing out the underbrush. With that natural rhythm disrupted, the flammable material piled up, so when it did catch fire, it ignited a giant fire that burned hotter and wider.

This total-suppression policy began to ease as early as the 1950s, when scientists began to see fire’s role in ecosystems. It was completely abandoned nearly two decades ago.

But in the 1970s, the Southwest entered a wet period, part of a climate cycle that repeats every 20 to 30 years. “That wet period helped keep a lid on fires,” Dr. Allen said. “And it also allowed the forests to fluff up.”

Since 1996, the climate pattern, known as the Pacific decadal oscillation, has swung to the dry end of the spectrum, and the region is caught in a long-term drought….”

As an additional note: People (especially denialists, since this is complicated) often conflate policy related causes. The suppression of the early and middle 20th century is an issue but this was recognized in the 80s as a bad policy, and over the last several decades that has been addressed (addressed does not mean fixed … that may take another century … but fixed in some places). The more current suppression related policy is not wild land management related (directly) but rather related to development. Land under development in remote areas and adjoining wild lands demand suppression because people are allowed to build fire-damagable properties in fire prone area (note: This is not necessary, there are parts of the world where people don’t do this).

1. Fire management practices have led to the decline in fires, especially from the 1930s and 1950s. (see my reference in Post 10) This has led to more accumulated fuel, and, as one paper puts it, puts us in a “fire deficit”, that will come back and bite us.
2. The Forest Service (not just the US, but Canada as well), are going back to a “let it burn”, especially undergrowth.
3. There is much more development at the “urban-wilderness interface”, as Revkin calls it. This means more property damage, and more risks taken to protect that property. In this case, the 19 died trying to protect nearby homes.

While I admit that future climate change could exasperate the above points, I find it difficult to reconcile present fire numbers with any evidence of an AGW fingerprint.

Both series show current fire numbers and extent are much less than recent years, and a huge decrease in historical context.

Anyway, I can see there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of the fire situation, and that is in part because it is a complicated issue. That complexity also makes it easier for yammering denailists to blow smoke. For this reason I’ve decided to write a more detailed blog post that will be helpful for those who want to engage in an honest and well informed discussion. The tl’dr: Global warming matters to fire frequency and extent, and it is a matter of concern.

But it is complicated. Complicate, however, does not mean as many science denialists claim either too hard to understand or too whacky to be relevant. Complicated does not mean that fire frequency and extent is determined by the wing flapping behavior of a butterfly in Mexico.

If the current number of fires YTD is less than the 10 year average, and the number of acres is less than the 10 year YTD average, then you can’t say that an increasing trend of fires and acreage is repsonsible for .this years fires, because this YTD is well under the average. If you can show me the YTD average prior to 2003, I would be happy to see that.

But, in the US, fires used to burn 50,000,000 acres per year. Even in the 1950s, it was nearly 20,000,000 per year. Now, a bad year is less than 10,000,000. According to the PNAS article I quoted, it will be 2050 before we get back to 1950 levels. According to models.

See Fig 5.

http://www.fs.fed.us/pl/rpa/amforest.pdf