Our escape route has been cut off'

The chilling final radio transmissions from 19 'hotshot' firefighters were were killed in an Arizona wildfire in June reveal their last panicked moments pleading for water tankers to attack the fire that had surrounded them and cut off their escape route. 'I’m here with Granite Mountain Hotshots, our escape route has been cut off,' Eric Marsh, the leader of the group, tells supervisors over the radio.  'We are preparing a deployment site and we are burned out around ourselves in the brush and I’ll give you a call when we are under the she- the shelters.'It was the group's last transmission. Experts say that at that time the fire had entirely surrounded the 19 firefighters and that they likely knew they were going to die. The video was released Friday by the Arizona Forestry Division and it revealed that fire commanders overseeing the attack on the Yarnell Hill Fire didn't realize that the Granite Mountain Hotshots were even still battling the massive blaze - much less in mortal danger. The footage comes from a helmet cam of a firefighter who was far removed from the hotshots - but the microphone pics up the radio traffic of the group's final moments. All 19 of the hotshots - firefighters from the Prescott, Arizona, Fire Department, were killed after the inferno overtook them as they huddled in their fire shelters.The tragedy made it the deadliest fire in more than two decades and the most firefighters to die fighting a wildfire since 1933. Jim Furnish, a retired U.S. Forest Service deputy chief, told the Arizona Republic - which first published the video, that the hotshots realized that they were all going to die.'The sobriety of the last transmission is quite telling,' he said. 'They knew. They knew that this was the end. They had to get in their shelters - that was the last gasp.'Before the last transmission, Marsh - the hotshots leader - spent two minutes pleading with dispatchers to send water tankers to douse the flames in the area.'Breaking in on Arizona 16, Granite Mountain Hotshots, we are in front of the flaming front,' he transmits. 'Air to ground 16, Granite Mountain, Air Attack, how do you read?'Marsh asks three times for planes and helicopters to attack the fire that was surrounding them.The air-to-ground controller responsible for dispatching the air support doesn't realize the urgency of the hotshots' situation for at least two minutes.'Okay, I was copying a little bit of that, uh conversation uh, on air to ground. We’re - we’ll do the best we can,' the dispatcher says.'We got the type 1 helicopters ordered back in. Uh, we’ll see what we can do.'(dailymail.co.uk)ANN.Az