LA County's fire chief remembers Kevin Woyjeck in this post: “Grant McKee is Another Fallen Arizona Hotshot Crewman with Orange County Beach City Roots.”
Among the 19 Granite Mountain Hotshot Crew members out of Prescott, Arizona, killed in the 8,000-acre Yarnell Hill wildfire was a popular former Los Alamitos High School track athlete.
Kevin Woyjeck, 21, also grew up in Seal Beach, attended Santa Ana College and was the son of Los Angeles County Fire Capt. Joe Woyjeck.
]
Here is a release LA County Fire sent out this morning (hat tip to LA Weekly's Dennis J. Romero):
Kevin Woyjeck Information
Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD) confirms that Kevin Woyjeck, a Granite Mountain Hotshot Crew member based out of Prescott, Arizona, killed in the line of duty on Sunday, June 30, 2013, is the son of LACoFD Fire Captain Joe Woyjeck. Kevin Woyjeck is a former member of LACoFD Explorer Post 9 and also once worked for Care Ambulance Service in Southern California.…Funeral arrangements will be announced as soon as they are finalized.
As the fire believed to be sparked by lightening quickly spread and trapped the Hotshot crew members, they apparently dug holes they covered with aluminum shields. The 19 bodies were found inside and outside these temporary shelters that wildfire fighters deploy as a last resort.
It marked the largest single day loss of firefighters since Sept. 11, 2001, when New York City lost 340 fire employees, and the biggest loss in a wildfire since 1933, when 29 firefighters died trying to stop a blaze in LA's Griffith Park.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.