The heat of last summer’s deadly Twisp River blaze has been replaced with the snow of a Montana Christmas, but for Daniel Lyon Jr., the sole firefighter to survive the tragedy, it’s like it happened yesterday.
Reached Saturday at his parents’ retirement home outside Missoula, the 25-year-old reflected on his progress a month after being released from Harborview Medical Center and his struggle to come to terms with the wildfire that killed three others.
All it takes is the smell of wood smoke or burning toast or the sight of the number 19 — the date the accident happened, Aug. 19 — to trigger a flood of crystal-clear recollections.
“I remember everything about that day,” Lyon said in a telephone interview. “I remember jumping out of the truck, I remember running, I remember the fire, I remember going in the ambulance.” Lyon is spending four hours a day, five days a week in physical therapy to recover from the third-degree burns that covered nearly 70 percent of his body. It’s grueling work, he said, but the mental effort is even harder.
“Remembering what happened, knowing that there are buddies I lost,” he said. “The only question I have is how I made it and those guys didn’t. More than anything, I wish I could have turned around and seen those guys running behind me.”
Strong wind abruptly fanned the wildfire near Twisp in Okanogan County that Wednesday, part of Washington’s worst fire season on record. It sent walls of flame and smoke toward the team of four U.S. Forest Service firefighters, obscuring the road and forcing them to retreat blindly down a dirt road until their engine ran off an embankment, a joint federal and state report found.