State wildland firefighters added a big tech advancement to their toolbox this year, a GPS tracking system called DropBlocks. Tiffany Davila with the Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management says these state-of-the-art satellite-based devices allow supervisors to locate crews more precisely while they’re on an incident. That was a challenge 10 years ago after the Granite Mountain crew was initially trapped in the canyon. “Often times our crews are deployed to fight fire in very remote locations, sometimes with little to no cellphone service, so these devices (DropBlocks) provide us another communications channel to reach them,” Davila said.

Here’s how fighting fires in Arizona has changed since Yarnell Hill tragedy 10 years ago