Bringing Home Braden: The Extraordinary 'Rescue' of a Fallen Firefighter
Maybe he's still alive.
William Williams repeated the words as he thrashed down a steep slope of gnarled brush that bloodied his hands. Three hundred feet below him was a bulldozer, now 21 tons of crumpled yellow steel. The dozer driver had tumbled down the Merced River canyon while clearing a fuel break for the state's Cal Fire agency. He couldn't have survived.
But officials needed confirmation, so Williams, who'd been assisting the driver before leaving to get some equipment, headed down. It was early Saturday morning, July 14, 2018. Just hours earlier, a blaze dubbed the Ferguson Fire had started west of Yosemite National Park, igniting what would become one of the deadliest wildfire seasons in California. Among those who died were six firefighters — three of them dozer operators.
Williams punched through chamise and manzanita, then crawled along the bulldozer's side. He'd be the first on the scene of a recovery operation the likes of which the state had never seen. Over the next 2 ½ days, at a cost of $200,000, 59 firefighters and 34 state prison inmates would join in this improbable rescue, risking their lives to retrieve the driver's body.
"It was a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach to know we couldn't get him off the hill the second we knew that he had perished," said Nancy Koerperich, who was then Cal Fire's unit chief overseeing Mariposa County. "Firefighters knew what was at stake, they knew it was dangerous, they knew the fire was coming, but that's what firefighters do. It was truly a labor of firefighter love."
The man pinned inside the bulldozer, Braden Varney, had lived with his young family just miles away from where he died. He'd reported to the fire line to protect them, his friends and his neighbors. His colleagues were determined to deliver him back to them.
The previous evening, as a warm wind pushed through the oak and pine forests of Mariposa, Braden drove home from another fire zone in Yolo County. He lived with his wife and their two children in a one-story home inherited from his grandparents.
Braden operated heavy equipment for Cal Fire and ran a side business that offered customers help with "anything dirt" — grading roads, installing septic systems. He'd mastered the mini-excavator as a boy and designed his high school's irrigation system before graduation. To him, moving earth was an art. And at 36, he was proud of what hard work had brought him.
It was around dinnertime when he steered into his gravel driveway and parked his transport rig loaded with Dozer 4242. He'd just finished his first week back on duty after a nine-month medical leave. The previous summer, during the Detwiler Fire in Mariposa County, he'd torn a shoulder muscle pushing out a log that had jammed in his dozer blade as flames approached.
Now it was 8:30 p.m., his weekend beginning. His children, 5-year-old Maleah and 3-year-old Nolan, heard his truck's grumble, sprinted across the lawn and scrambled into the dozer's cabin.
"Daddy, where is the steering wheel?" Nolan asked.
"Bulldozers don't have steering wheels," his father responded, pointing to the levers that Maleah pushed and pulled.
Jessica Varney, 39, tiptoed in bare feet across the gravel, capturing the scene on video. She'd been raised by a single mother in upstate New York, and as she watched her husband and children play in the dozer, she felt lucky. They had it all: good health, stable income, love.
She and Braden had met at a wedding in Walnut Creek nine years earlier. Jessica lived in Oakland then. She'd moved there from New York at age 18 to live with a cousin, and worked as a medical assistant for a dermatologist. Braden was friendly and polite. Perhaps more striking, at first, was his size — 6-foot-6 and 277 pounds.
He friended her on Facebook and invited her to go fishing in his hometown of Mariposa. They dated long distance, spending hours talking on the phone. Jessica was drawn to his humility and generosity. Whatever he had, he gave away. He always tucked a $20 bill for gas in her palm before she made the three-hour drive back to Oakland.
In November 2010, in a snowy meadow near his home, Braden knelt and presented her with a diamond engagement ring. Three months later, they married in Pleasanton. He was 28, she 31. Jessica had to carry an umbrella to ward off a light rain. Still, it was the happiest day of her life.
Braden liked to joke that the honeymoon was never going to end. He hid Hershey's Kisses around the house for his bride to find: in the microwave, behind the coffee pot. They had moved onto the 9-acre property where his parents, Gordie and Lynn, also lived. He split their home's large, second bedroom in half to create a nursery.
He worked in Santa Clara County for Cal Fire until 2012. That was the year his father Gordie, who also drove dozers for Cal Fire, died at age 55 of what the state found to be job-related colon cancer. Braden took over the company they'd run together, Varney Grading. And he transferred home to fill his father's Cal Fire spot in Mariposa. The firefighters there had known him since childhood, the boy whose 72-pound pumpkin broke records and whose high school basketball team went undefeated.
Whenever he returned from the fire line, Braden swept Jessica into hugs, his neck smelling of salt and dust, ash in his blond hair. He loved what he did, so she didn't dwell on the danger. Once a year, though, after tucking the kids into bed, they sat in matching leather armchairs and discussed the prospect of his dying on the job. He took out life insurance and made out a will.
As Maleah and Nolan played on the bulldozer that Friday night, Braden's pager beeped. Sparks from a vehicle's catalytic converter had ignited tall grass near the Savage Trading Post off Highway 140, just 10 miles away. The Ferguson Fire had already burned 75 acres and was threatening homes in Mariposa and neighboring Jerseydale.
Jessica loaded a paper plate with ribs and macaroni and cheese. Her husband left in a rush without kissing her goodbye.
No one knew, at first, that the accident had happened. It was only when Williams returned that morning with his father, who was to relieve Braden on the fire line, that they found the trail empty. It was around 8 a.m.
About an hour later, after a helicopter crew spotted the gleam of metal in the brush, the younger Williams reached the crumpled dozer. His colleague's body was trapped in a vice of mashed steel. The discovery was horrifying. So was the realization that he and his father couldn't just pull Braden out of the gully. The Ferguson Fire was ballooning in size. Soon, the flames would reach this steep canyon. There wasn't much time to get Braden's body out.
"The dozer operator has sustained fatal injuries," a voice reported over the Cal Fire radio. "He was pinned in."
Later that morning, at a city fire station in Fresno about 75 miles south of Mariposa, word spread of a possible assignment. Cal Fire might need to summon the station's Urban Search and Rescue Team in what would be an unprecedented call.
The 16 members of the team had been trained to recover victims from urban disasters like the World Trade Center collapse and the Oklahoma City bombing. They used special tools to detect breathing beneath rubble and to extricate drivers from horrific vehicle accidents. But they didn't have the yellow fire-resistant suits or leather boots of wildland firefighters. They didn't report to wildfires, period. Yet officials determined it was too dangerous for Cal Fire to try to retrieve Braden's body. The agency needed the rescue team's expertise.
"There was a deep sense of duty," said Russ Patterson, 38, an engineer who had worked for Fresno Fire for 14 years and was part of the rescue team. "We had a brother firefighter that we needed to get out. Our minds and hearts are all about getting the job done."
As the rescue team began packing tools and studying the contours of a dozer like Braden's, Cal Fire arranged to send a liaison to the Varney home on Triangle Road.
Jessica was toasting bagels and scrambling eggs. As sunlight streamed through the kitchen window, she checked an app on her iPhone for her husband's location. The night before, the blinking blue dot marking his real-time position had registered in Sierra National Forest. But it had since disappeared from the map, replaced with "location not available."
Maybe his cell phone died, she thought.
Her landline rang. It was Jerry Lynch, a longtime friend and employee at Braden's grading company. "Don't freak out," he said. "I heard on the scanner that a bulldozer rolled."
He picked her up in his truck, and they headed first to John C. Fremont Healthcare District in Mariposa, checking to see if Braden had been admitted to the emergency room. Then they drove to the Cal Fire command post off Highway 49, 15 minutes away. A group of eight firefighters in crisp navy uniforms huddled in the parking lot. They stared at Jessica as she catapulted out of the truck and marched toward them. They had expected their liaison to reach her first.
Jessica recognized Jaime Williams, a public information officer who was friends with Braden.
"What do you know that I don't know?" Jessica said, her pitch rising. "Tell me. Someone tell me."
At first, no one said a word.
Finally, Jaime spoke. "You brought him to the Lord," she whispered, pulling Jessica into a hug.
"Jaime," Jessica shouted, furious. "Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me!"
"He's gone, Jess."
Jessica screamed, sharp and breathless. She didn't register the sound as her own.
By Sunday morning, the Ferguson Fire had grown to more than 1,000 acres, closing campgrounds near Yosemite and moving toward the canyon. The U.S. Forest Service had assumed command of the blaze, but Cal Fire was responsible for retrieving their bulldozer driver. Fresno's Urban Search and Rescue Team, having arrived in Mariposa, understood the challenge it faced in extricating Braden.
The specially outfitted truck the team would normally use for such a job, essentially an 80,000-pound rolling toolbox, was too massive to navigate Hites Cove Trail, much less negotiate the final 300 feet down the canyon to the dozer. So they packed a duffel bag of wrenches and screwdrivers, lubricants and battery-powered saws. They would have to make their way down the last of the trail on foot and in ATVs, then rappel down the slope.
The crew had stopped by the Del Ray Fire Station in Fresno County, which had the same model of bulldozer as Braden's, to examine it. They flew a drone over Hites Cove Trail to survey the landscape. Capt. John Morgan, leading operations, set up a command post in the dirt parking lot of an old school several miles north of Braden's home. Morgan, a onetime farmer with a cool demeanor, was agitated by how much time had passed.
"We felt like we were letting his family down," Morgan said. "Braden's family — his wife and children, his community as a whole — and that we couldn't make it to him in time. They were waiting. Firefighting is a tight community, and you don't leave anyone behind."
The Cal Fire deputy unit chief, Mike van Loben Sels, on vacation with his wife and three children, booked an early flight home from Mexico. Other dozer operators, including Williams, Braden's swamper, stationed themselves on the hiking trail, as close to Braden's body as they could get. Weary firefighters shuffled back to the canyon in their yellow Nomex suits streaked with dirt. A day and a half had passed since Braden's accident.
Progress was meticulous, halting; everyone was impatient.
"By God, we were going to do right by Braden and his family," Cal Fire's Koerperich said. "Our job was to get him home."
The Fresno rescue team hiked down the trail, leaning on hand tools like walking sticks, until they left the footpath and followed the scar the bulldozer left on its way down the ravine. They staggered and zigzagged, some sliding down on their butts.
River canyons are notorious for extreme fire behavior stoked by swirling air. As the recovery effort continued that Sunday afternoon, embers sailed ahead of the main conflagration and kicked up spot fires, forcing the team to rush out of the canyon. They pushed burning trees out of the dirt path as flames jumped the fuel break and flew overhead. Hot ash peppered the air. Morgan, the rescue team leader, feared losing another six people if they stayed.
"It was definitely a reality check," said Robert Garcia, 36, one of the Fresno rescue team firefighters. "These things happen and we hear about them, but actually being part of it makes it a whole different deal."
At the bottom of the canyon, the battered bulldozer was overcome by flames.
At her home on Triangle Road, Jessica walked past the ruts in the driveway etched by Braden's transport rig and across the yard to his mother's home. She held Maleah's hand. Nolan, too young to understand, played on the grass with his cousins and his toy tractors.
Jessica perched her 5-year-old daughter on the couch. Maleah looked so much like her father when she was born that the nurse exclaimed to Jessica: "You gave birth to your husband!" Maleah's golden hair spilled over her shoulders and her sneakered feet barely touched the floor. County Sheriff Doug Binnewies and a Cal Fire division chief, Bernie Quinn, stood nearby.
"Do you guys have any practice or advice with this?" Jessica asked the officers.
The sheriff lowered his head and didn't say a word. I'm going to have to do this on my own, Jessica thought.
"Maleah," she started. "Your dad had a really big accident at work. He's not going to be coming home."
"Yeah," Maleah said.
Jessica didn't think she understood.
"Maleah," she tried again. "Daddy died."
Maleah burst into tears. So did the liaison and the sheriff. Then, almost as quickly, Maleah's tears dried. Soon she was out playing on the grass with her brother and cousins.
In the coming months, Maleah would see a grief counselor. She would stroke the walls of her home, sobbing as she looked at framed photos of her father, remembering how he had tied her ballet shoes before her recitals.
Her mother would take the photos down, then hang them back up. As Braden's fellow firefighters tended to the Varneys' property, trimming trees, pulling weeds and chopping wood, Jessica would see her husband everywhere.
She would sell off his equipment, including the white, long-bed Ford F-250 he had specially ordered in Idaho, the one he had let Maleah steer down the driveway, her pink backpack on the driver's seat so she could reach the steering wheel, both of them laughing. One winter afternoon on the way home from kindergarten, Maleah would see the truck at a stoplight. She would ask: "Is Daddy in the truck?"
Another day had passed since the bulldozer crash. The fire had stormed through and moved on, but Braden was still at the bottom of the canyon. Jessica desperately wanted his body recovered. So did the Fresno search and rescue team. They returned to Mariposa Monday morning.
By now, people around the world had heard about the death of the bulldozer operator and the mission to retrieve him. A photo of the Varneys — Jessica and Maleah in matching blue-and-white chevron skirts, Nolan and his father holding hands — appeared with articles about his death. The governor ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in Sacramento, calling Braden "a man who dedicated his life to protecting his fellow Californians."
Capt. Morgan had hoped to hoist Braden's body out by helicopter, but smoke shrouded the sky. So on Hites Cove Trail, the team of rescuers set out again, loading equipment onto three all-terrain vehicles and driving down as far as they felt they could before hiking the rest of the way. Two crews of state prison inmates, 34 firefighters-in-training ordered in from camps in Lake and El Dorado counties, followed them down.
The fire had left behind only matchstick trees and carbonized brush. The sun baked the firefighters as they slid down the canyon to reach the bulldozer.
Everything inside the cab was burned. The aluminum radiator was a silvery puddle on the ground. Using a battery-powered saw, the Fresno crew sliced through the dozer door, shooting out sparks. It took a half hour and 10 blades.
Members of the search team carefully extricated Braden's remains, placing them in a body bag along with a few of his charred possessions. They tucked the bag into a 7-foot-long Stokes basket — a cupped metal brace used in rescue operations — and covered it with an American flag. A Merced firefighter salvaged the bulldozer's metal handle, which Braden had used to hoist himself into the cabin, zipping it into his backpack to give to Jessica.
The rescue team slid the flag-draped basket onto a metal backboard and secured it with an orange rope. The men stood in two lines on the hillside extending up to the trail — 34 inmates in orange, 41 firefighters in yellow — and passed Braden's basket from hand to hand, until his body reached the path. Then they scrambled up the hillside after him.
As the basket then made its way up the widened trail, they lined up along both sides, shedding their helmets. One firefighter played "Amazing Grace" on his cell phone, the bagpiped strains echoing through the canyon from a small Bluetooth speaker. For three minutes, they stopped to pay tribute to their lost colleague as his body passed among them.
Firefighters saluted with shaking hands and sweat streaking their faces. Many cried. Facing Braden's death meant facing their own mortality, and the growing risk that came with their jobs.
Williams, Braden's assistant, helped slide the basket into the bed of a white utility truck. He crouched beside the basket, his hands gripping the flag, as the blackened landscape gave way to green forest and gray highway. He hadn't left the canyon since the morning he'd found his friend.
The truck, driven by Williams' father, would serve as a hearse, taking the body to the coroner's office in Modesto. But first, it passed through Mariposa. More than 1,000 people lined the roadsides, waving flags and clutching hand-drawn posters.
They had been waiting for Braden to come home.
Source: https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2019/bringing-home-braden/
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