 In this module, we're going to look at the backbone of our fire line safety principles, the standard firefighting orders, the watch out situations, and LCES. These guidelines, along with many others, were designed to give the firefighter on the line a reference on which to base their actions. Now admittedly, if we put all the rules, regulations and guidelines together, the task of utilizing all of them during every fire line decision seems cumbersome at best. But how do we organize all these references in our minds when we're operating on a fire? How do we determine which ones are important and when? How can we process and analyze all the possible informational inputs in the context of the standard orders? How do we make sense out of all this? To answer this, we talked to John Krebs. John is a retired FMO from the Forest Service and has spent a good deal of his career as a fire behavior analyst. He's a true believer in the process of the standard firefighting orders. We caught up with John this last summer in the woods of northern Idaho. Let's listen to what he had to say. How do we instill in our young people this essentials of a good analytical process? That's a difficult question. How would I tell a young person now that I'm sending out on a fire how to address it? I think it begins right with your S190, right with guard school training, when you begin to instill in them the importance of saying, hey, man, I'm excited. I'm going on this fire. They can hardly wait to get out of the station if they happen to be there or leave a brush piling project to go out of fire. But you say, hey, first thing I want you to ask is what's the weather forecast? Now I want you to have that bell weather kit because you cannot monitor the conditions or verify the weather forecast until you monitor what's going on. Situational awareness is something that everybody is essential for firefighters to have an awareness of where they're at and what they're going to encounter. The 18 situations that you should watch out, to which you could enumerate many others as your experience grows, but those are the awareness parts of the 10 standard orders. They prompt you to go to the orders to say, man, I'm aware I'm building a fire line downhill. What I need to know to do this safely, immediately you turn to your analytical process, which is the 10 standard orders, to say, well, I've got to know what the fire is going to do. If I'm going to build fire lines safely downhill, I need to know what the fire is going to do. To know what the fire is going to do, I have to address the weather, the fuels, and the topography. And that's the very first order that you get into is know what you're keeping informed on fire weather conditions and forecasts. We haven't integrated the orders into the rest of the training, and that, yes, there might be 100, probably 200 ideas about firefighting awareness kind of deal. You've got to expect that. You have to expect that different people, because their experiences are going to have a different kind of awareness. There'd be more than 150 or 60 things to think about. But that's the idea of everybody having an expression in the awareness in and plugging that in to the analysis process, the fire behavior, the safety, and the operational control. And you've got all kinds of tools you can use, but you use them in an analytical process. I love talking to John about the standard orders, because he has such a comprehensive grasp on how they should be utilized. They're not a checklist to him, but rather a method or process on how to address an incident and safely control the situation. His decisions are based on a calculated analysis of current conditions, which is then used to determine tactics, mitigate his safety concerns, and then implement organizational control. Let's go back to John and listen to his final thoughts on this analytical process and a suggested change that he has to the last standard order. An aggression is kind of built into us, firefighter, because what are you doing? Pull up, push up, sit up, jogging, you know, change saw training, you pick out the most skilled people with O's, you learn how to use the Pulaski and the shovel and what have you, and you use it efficiently. It's built into you to be aggressive. Aggressive is something that every firefighter has to have, but the last fire order, I think, having spent 90% of your time training physically to use the different kind of resources you have, the least used resource is the mind, and the mind is why I'd like to see the 10th standard order change to say fight fire intelligently, having provided for safety first. We discussed this a little bit this morning because you've seen people go out and just be aggressive as Sam Hill and it was brought up by Bob, you know, where he said, hey, we know we're going to lose it this afternoon, we're going to attack the head of it this morning, and we already analyzed the fire behavior and it's going, well, we're going to be aggressive, we're going to attack it where it's burning the hottest. Hey, you can be darn aggressive and darn dumb, you know. So be intelligent with that aggressiveness. Aggressiveness is built into us. Any firefighter that's not aggressive isn't worth it, you know. You can get rid of them. Hiring a person like that is like losing two good people, but get a person that's aggressive and then get them to use their mind and that's what the analytical process is about, about using your mind before you use your body. Now let's get into our groups and complete the exercise in your student workbook.