Wildfire photos tend to feature pillars of smoke, walls of flames, and the scorched remains of trees and homes. Josh Edelson breaks from this tradition with an unusually poignant image of firefighters respectfully, almost reverentially, lowering an American flag as the forest beyond Oroville, California, burns.
Beyond the inherent drama of the scene, the image stands out for how it references, intentionally or not, iconic war imagery. The flag sits dead center, much like the flag in Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. The firefighters echo the soldiers raising Old Glory at Iowa Jima in Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph and later at Ground Zero in Thomas E. Franklin’s 2001 image.
Edelson happened upon the scene Saturday, July 8, while chasing the Wall Fire near Oroville. The blaze in Butte County has scorched 6,033 acres and destroyed nearly 100 homes and buildings since it started July 7. Edeleson saw the flames advancing toward a neighborhood on Peak View Drive, and jumped out of his car to get some shots. A squad from Feather Falls Station 51 was pulling a "bump and run," dousing the undergrowth around homes in an effort to stop the inferno's advance. Before dashing off to another house, one of the firefighters spotted the flag. Within seconds, two of them hoisted Kris Garayalde high into the air to retrieve it.
"I shoot a lot of fires," Edelson says. "When I saw them take the flag down, I thought, 'This is different."
He posted the image to Facebook and saw it quickly rack up more than 4,400 likes. “It was a cool, positive moment in the sea of devastation these wildfires can bring, but I didn’t expect the photo to go viral as it did,” he says. “Maybe America is desperate for some heroic positive moment like this that reminds us why our country is great.”
Now, as nice as it is to attribute the moment to an overwhelming sense of patriotism, Cal Fire battalion chief Russ Fowler says the firefighters also had safety in mind. "If that flag had ignited, it would have been a serious threat to that house," he says. "They removed it because it was a threat to that house and also because it was a symbol of America’s freedom."
Edelson returned to the house the next day to find the grass charred right up to the driveway, but the house untouched. The firefighters had moved on, but not before returning the flag to the pole. “It was quiet,” Edelson says, “like nothing had ever happened there.”
