On the morning of Sept. 9, 2016, the inbox of the superintendent of the Flagstaff Interagency Hotshot Crew pinged with a new email. The subject line read: Your Hotshot Crew Behavior. The superintendent, the head of an elite corp of firefighters deployed by the Forest Service and National Park Service to battle wild blazes across the country, had been alerted that morning his team was needed to help with the Soberanes Fire, which was eating through more than 130,000 acres in central California near Big Sur.