Tom Foreman: What did you think when you looked up on that mountain?
Sebastian Junger: Well, you know, I hiked up there and everyone says this, but it looked like a bomb had gone off. I mean it just was a completely incinerated landscape. And that was very powerful to think, "My, God, people were stuck in this." That was really horrifying.
Tom Foreman: It was so steep.
Sebastian Junger: Yeah, and the amount of gear that those guys carry. My article, my assignment was to try to figure out if it was avoidable. And what I wound up concluding was that the science is sophisticated enough that we can predict fire behavior pretty well, and what happened at Storm King Mountain was predictable. If you had the information they had the day before, feed it through the math, and it would have told you what happened.
Tom Foreman: I know one of the questions that has been raised in other circumstances where firefighters have gotten into trouble is that even the people who are trained to be safe, many of them want to be there
Sebastian Junger: Right.
Tom Foreman: and there's a tendency to push too far, a tendency to say, "This is where it's happening, we'll jump in and be the heroes."
Sebastian Junger: Right, and at every level the management, they're dealing with hundreds of fires throughout the West, and maybe this small fire they're not focused on the dangers of it. It's totally regrettable, but understandable, right down to the hot shots on the ground who have a bit of a swagger to them. "Hey, we can handle this; this is nothing." So at every level there are people saying, "You know it's not that big a danger, let's just do it." And that's exactly what happened at Storm King.
Tom Foreman: What is it out there you most want to do, briefly here?
Sebastian Junger: I want to keep doing foreign reporting, and I want to write another book, I mean, not a collection of them (news stories) but another real nonfiction book.
Tom Foreman: Is this danger thing a young person's game?
Sebastian Junger: I hope not. (Laughter.)
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