 Yeah, it's an interesting environment that we live in, because never have we had more emphasis on prescribed fire, water line fire use, as we've had these in the last number of years, especially since the signing of National Fire Plan and now HFRA. And yet the reality is there's a high expectation for success, and we operate with a natural environment, with a natural process on the ground, and yet there is an extremely little tolerance for failure, and that comes from the public. If you look back to year 2000, most people don't really remember a fire season in Montana, but they remember Sierra Grande, and they view that as a failure because we made a mistake and things got away. Things will happen. That's just the nature of working with a natural environment. The water line fire use programs here, it's not going away. There is greater and greater emphasis on it at the political level, the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, expects us to use a greater amount because they see that as a long-term cost savings in regards to suppression costs. And yet if you look at it on hand, there's not a real carrot and stick for a line officer to make use of water line fire use. There's a lot of risk that potentially is there, as opposed to just going to a simple confinement strategy under suppression. It takes dedication from a line officer and wanting to do the right thing to let fire work its natural role in the environment and to try and manage it, but we need to be ready that you can't run a 100% risk-free environment, not when you're dealing with fire. Does HRO have applicability for wildland fire use program? I think it's one of the best places to employ the techniques, and I call them techniques because that's how they should be used, is dealing with unexpected events, highly reliable organizing and the process that is developed from aircraft carriers to aircraft controllers, these people deal with very potentially unexpected events has proven itself and it's a technique. Now it's not another checklist. It's not something else you pull out of your IRPG and go down the list. It's a way of doing business. It's how you think about a problem and how you prepare for the problem doing things differently. Yeah, I think there's very few tools better suited for wildland fire use at this point. Wildland fire and all the elements involved with it is an ever-changing and never the same sort of situation whether it's pressure and wildland fire use prescribed fire. You've got things going on that are changing your need to adapt. Any sort of technique that helps me to be able to learn and adapt to those situations I'm going to latch on to because otherwise it's just your destined not to be able to have a system to help you improve what you do in these unexpected cases. You'll be lucky, you'll probably be unlucky unless you have some sort of formula that helps you go through a process of how do I learn, how am I missing things within this and do little key checks throughout those unexpected events. A couple of things I would recommend if folks have faced a similar situation in trying to employ especially the HRO or thinking about unexpected events and how to plan for them. I try to take stock on a regular basis of what's going on, what things are priority, what things I should be paying attention to, take yourself out of the environment for a little while, however you need to do that and step back and get perspective on priorities, safety being one that should be there all the time. If you don't do that you can be the person on the train going down the tracks and you never get an idea where things are going so that's a conscious thing usually after coffee in the morning I'll do that and right after that I pick up weather which helps me calibrate for the day and then spend a little time in the evening thinking about okay where are we, what's the potential, what's the worst thing that can happen and what am I not thinking about. I'm predicting what a wildfire or a wildland fire use fire is going to do is a risky business because there's just so many variables. You can think about some of those variables like fuel type, like what you think the weather is going to do or what the weather man tells you the weather is going to do but there's just so many other things that can come into play or somebody can be wrong about what is going to happen and so you always need to be I think vigilant, you need to pay attention and be vigilant and be ready to change your plan at the right time. The most important thing as a decision maker is to be involved and watch what's going on and know when it's time to change your plan and communicate with the people who know more than you do communicate with your boss and understand again that it's okay and you will be supported if you make a decision and it goes differently than you had predicted and you make some other subsequent decisions that deal with the new situation at the right time and in the right way and that's I think what we did on Hawkins. The main thing I like from a line officer is to be able to sit down and talk with them and then taking the information I give them and asking questions that are appropriate for the situation. If I'm getting that kind of dialogue and communication from a line officer then I know we're a team working together on this incident. If I'm just feeding information to them and they're saying they're shaking their head, yeah, yeah, yeah, well I'm in a little bit of an uncomfortable position because I know they may not necessarily be getting the ramifications of the decisions they're making. So that effective communication back and forth that's constant and if they have something come up in their mind that's bothering them about the decision they're on the phone with me they're coming to find me and we talk about it so communication is the main thing. Communications as we know it's very important in every organization it's even more important in an emergency. Employees as well as publics are fearful in a fire situation. The more we can have transparent open communications internally and externally the better things are going to work. In this particular case I felt very well informed through Supervisor Russell. Bob called me two or three times at critical points so and I had talked to Mike Dudley our you know fire and aviation director and so when the whole organization pulls together or communicating together I think there's more confidence we're going to be prepared to do the right thing. I think we have to be very careful to get lulled into what we think the fire is going to do you know there we do need to look at what do we think the fire is going to do and and run that out but it's almost like a dual path we also need to be looking at what if it does something different because it's like having a tiger by the tail once it gets up and running and so if you haven't gone there because you thought it wasn't going to go there you're going to be way behind the planning curve. So it's very critical to assume that you don't know everything about this fire and you need to be you need to game it you know and people a lot of I know they did it on Hawkins it's just common you'll sit down and go well what if it went this way where would we look what about here what would we be able to do how long would it take to get folks in there if we're going to get folks in there under what conditions would it work to take this action and you just need to just keep gaming it because if you think you got it figured out you're gonna get caught by surprise. Well one of the things that I like to brief people on when I'm on assignment is the fact in my mind the way I look at these events is they is they're a pulse event and so you got to be careful about being lulled into you know they're burning X number of chains a day or you know that it's a persistence model like that you might look at in suppression because very often when we're not taking any actions on these fires what they do is they sit there they roll around they back down they position themselves but it looks to the outside observer as if not a whole lot is happening well look it's been hot and dry four days and the fire really hasn't done anything and so we have a tendency to think it's not gonna do anything tomorrow well when it finally gets positioned and it and it has fuel in its path and it's ready to make that nice run uphill or we get a little cold front it's suddenly not the same fire we've been watching for the last two weeks so we have to be prepared for that thing to make those little to make those small or large pulses it doesn't grow in a nice little even manner like the farsight program per you know for instance would run it would would grow a fire the only way you get good at this program is you have to do it continuously and you have to do a lot of them and that's where experience is the key and so that's probably the last critical element is having the people in place trained and get them to experience they need that they can successfully manage these now line officer has to be vigilant present be a reassuring presence have the confidence and training and be prepared so all those things kind of go to being to being a line officer that's ready to handle that I I think that the more again the more and more we have line officers that have experienced it the more the program will grow and they have to have faith and trust in the staff that they have that the plans are there the plans are in place and are done well and that they understand the plan they need to be involved in that level to know what they're getting into and what they're signing off on they also need to know that they have to support from their supervisor and the regional office in general so that if something does go wrong they don't have to worry about anyone breathing down over their shoulder about process essentially line officer position be at a district ranger and in particular for a supervisor in this day and age as is a harder job as you're going to find anywhere and if you take a look at the manual as of late they are responsible or accountable for just about every piece of action that goes out of there in that piece of ground to get a line officer that can then is extremely knowledgeable while in fire use and can understand the indices and be involved is it's nice when that happens but I don't expect that not with what they have to do what I expect from a line officer is just their involvement and asking questions that's all it is and having faith in their staff to provide them with the answers and when they can't get those answers or they feel uncomfortable that's when I should get the phone call with some questions but it's a tough job in a line officer I don't envy it would I do another while in fire use event yeah you bet I mean that's that's what I enjoy about my job that the uncertainty of what we deal with in fire and trying to predict what it's going to do and what it's going to hurt and what it's going to benefit is one of the things that keeps them coming to work every day when you're recommending to a line officer that this is a good thing or a bad thing you'll remember those times for a very long time what sort of information you gave that person to do that and the consequences did you take all those into account or not all of those things are you know they're they're great things that's what most people do fire management for it's the operational side of stuff all the planning all the NEPA all the stuff we've gone through for all the years goes into that moment of the go no go and if you've got your act together you bet tomorrow yeah give me the opportunity to say go or no go it's not always gonna be go and that's another key point because you can find yourself wanting to always say go because you've done seven years of planning and the conditions seem pretty good not the best but they're pretty good but be professional enough to be able to be objective with that too. The future of wildland fire use you know it's it's it's one of the tools in the toolbox in fire management you know it's it's not the end all of what we do but if we lose it if we don't use it effectively if we aren't using HRO as a principle to improve what we do and the reason I think that's key is this is new for a lot of folks you can count the people in the country that have done much wildland fire use effectively and each one of those people have learned something from it. The the future of it I I'm hoping that we can get a lot larger cadre of people that know the intricacies of how to manage an unpredictable event like wildland fire use get out of front of it use HRO to be able to plan a week two weeks three weeks six months well hopefully not six months out ahead of it. The future I'm hoping we get a lot more experience and knowledge in how to do these things right because to me it's a lot of ways in its infancy outside of wilderness especially how do we describe that we've met our objectives how do we get more people mentored into a program so they can be following around the the Bevan kill packs the Bob Russell's and and watch how they go through it somebody that's done it before but I'd like to see a few years as we've got a lot more than that handful that have done it and that network keeps improving as if we're not able to do that then we'll always just be a pretty small portion in the backwoods of the program but with our fuel treatment that we needs to be done with our firefighter risk and safety every time we expose people to suppression events if we aren't able to use wildland fire use more and effectively with a good experience based and we'll be losing that great opportunity to reduce fuels to expose less people to the fire we will sooner or later probably have a wildland fire use operations that go in a negative way and we'll get a lot of publicity for that and I think that if that happens to us we've got to make sure that we we deal with it truthfully honestly quickly and we learn from those lessons and we ratchet up the competence of the program or in the long run the program will go down rather than up now I'm an optimist here I think this is such a good tool that it's that it's going to go up and we're going to see more wildland fire use because it can be a safe cost effective efficient way to achieve a desired result on the ground I look forward to region 4 having a wildland fire use program that's larger than it is now in a safe efficient cost effective way we manage vegetation and we improve safety and we do it in a way that we're that we're prepared and trained to do and I think that's the path that we're on and I just encourage all of us in region 4 all of our line officers to take advantage of of a tool that we just we just must have