Three firefighters are dead. The news comes as flames continue to tear through the Colorado-Utah border, and as a British contingent of specialists prepares to fly across the Atlantic. We have become accustomed to these dispatches from the American West: the orange skies, the evacuations, the heroic lines of defence.
But when you hear that three have died, the scale of the tragedy becomes personal. It is no longer just a statistic on a news crawl. It is a car pulled over on a dusty road, a radio gone silent, a family in a small town waiting for a call that will never come.
The British offer of support is typical: practical, quietly brave, and tinged with that peculiar sense of duty that makes a firefighter from Yorkshire pack his bags for a blaze he has only seen on television. But what does it mean, really, to send our crews into this inferno? It means that the world is now interconnected by smoke.
It means that a fire in a canyon can ripple through a village in Lancashire. It means that the human cost of a changing climate is carried by the same few: the men and women who walk into the fire. For the families of the three who died, there is no geopolitics, no analysis.
There is only the unbearable weight of a flag-draped coffin. And for the British firefighters, there is the knowledge that the flames they will face do not respect borders. They respect only sacrifice.
