This PDF is a grim one, but it's remarkable in that it is one of the most thorough investigations I've ever seen of a single death. I'm not sure exactly why it was done to this detail, probably some combination of "federal money" and "lawsuits," but it becomes a weird sort of biography of a man's last day on Earth.
[I'm not using his name here because this feels a little like gawking and I don't need it to turn up in search results for him.]
At 12:46 PM on October 2, 2004, a firefighter working on a controlled burn in a national park was struck and fatally injured by the top falling off a burning snag (a tree that was dead before the burn). This report contains every detail of that moment.
It opens withs something you don't usually see in these cold bureaucratic reports, which is an obituary, written by his friends, with stories about his life and a picture of him alive and smiling. The following report details an investigation that involved 14 investigators plus subject matter experts in entolomology, plant pathology, forestry, tree work, and GIS. They concluded that the cause of the incident was wildfire standards and policies that did not provide firefighters adequate protection from snags.
They also investigated, and documented, every factor: there's many pages dedicated to the analysis and history of the tree that killed the firefighter, and several more for the helmet he was wearing. (Conclusion: the helmet broke but no helmet on Earth could withstand the force he was hit with.) There's a lot of snag hazard policy discussion, which makes sense, because that's the part that will actually be useful to future wildland firefighters.
And then there's the narrative of the firefighter's last few days. The night before, he had dinner with a coworker, and a long phone call with his girlfriend. He had Wal-Mart store brand ibuprofen on his shelf and name brand Tylenol in his toilet kit. He was wearing a blue cotton t-shirt and a bandanna under his fire gear. He was carrying a water bottle and a red Gatorade. It was a cool, dry day with a light breeze. The forest was a mix of conifer species--white fir, Ponderosa pine, giant sequoia. He and another firefighter were standing 5 feet apart when someone yelled a warning. They both started to run but he'd only taken a few steps when it hit him.
By the time they got him to the hospital he had already been pronounced dead. All but two members of his fire crew went into the ambulance bay to say goodbye.
This PDF is a frozen image of a moment, parts of it focused on the errors that led up to that moment, other parts just... filling out the picture. I don't fully know why it exists. It does.
