 Prevention teams are similar in many ways to incident management teams. They are made up of specialists, often from different agencies and different parts of the country, who come together and apply their individual expertise on a team to accomplish one or a variety of missions. They provide a fresh approach to public education programs and their ability to reduce human-caused fires in any given area makes them a valuable tool. While incident management teams come in after the fire occurs, prevention teams tackle the job of preventing and preparing for fires in high-risk areas. They help save time, resources and money before a fire ignites. Prevention teams are quickly becoming an effective resource in fire management. Basically, we're problem solvers when we come to these assignments using the collective information that we've gathered over the years of our doing business. These teams are not designed to circumvent or replace a local prevention effort. Instead, their mission is to enhance local programs. Prevention teams are used for a variety of purposes, such as addressing unusually high fire danger in an area or an isolated problem such as campfire ignitions. Also, events from one-day off-road vehicle rallies to week-long annual gatherings attended by hundreds of people. The teams are adaptable, flexible and effective. One of the greatest advantages of having a prevention team come is they can extend your capability to get the message out and help prevent and avoid fire ignitions without impacting the time of your resources that you have on hand. Particularly if you have a small program like we do and don't have a lot of funds to invest in prevention, then this is a way that in a short window of time we can have folks come in that have experience in training, being able to look at a prevention program, make some recommendations for things that we can do as well as take ons in prevention activities while they're here and really bolster our capability without us having to take time away from the tasks at hand for us. I think that the ounce of prevention that we do in the short assignments that we have is definitely worth a pound of cure. It's hard to measure how many fires we're preventing, but I'll tell you what, all we have to do is prevent one fire and we've more than paid for ourselves. The team started back in 1996 due to a very severe situation in the southwest portion of the United States and they called in a group as an assessment type team to see what could be done, what the real situation was because of the high occurrence of huge human cost fires down there. This assessment team showed that work could be done with prevention and mitigation measures such as public service advertising, such as people going out with campaigns to make the general public aware of what the situation was and how they could help. We tried to enlist a change in behavior and it was very successful in the southwest and the first time in history we had statistics that proved what the prevention work could do to lower the rate of human cost fires. Prevention team members can be ordered to suit your area's specific needs. Evaluate your needs and get creative. For instance, you may only need two team members to prepare for an upcoming weekend event, but you may need a team of five or more to deal with a severe drought situation that covers multiple forests. The neat thing about prevention teams is their adaptability. My experience on a prevention team was actually working on an arson task force and you just kind of mobilize and you just hit the ground running with whatever needs to be done. As all my experience with national teams is they come with people who are very energetic, they're good ideas and they're multi-skilled. Quite frankly, in 2003 Montana couldn't have done without the national fire prevention teams and the skills they brought to the table. And again, the locals have the skills but they're just so overwhelmed with the fire activity that they weren't able to put all their attention in fire prevention and we certainly needed it. Before we transitioned to a national team, we had something like, I would say, two-thirds of our fires were human cost and that turned around within three weeks of the national team being in place to very minimal human cost fires. Once you have identified your need for a prevention team, the next step is funding. In most cases, teams are paid for out of severity funding. When conditions have you considering or requesting severity dollars, that's the time to also weigh in on ordering a team. Even if additional suppression capability is needed, consider the cost benefits of what a prevention team can accomplish. Once you have the funding in place, prevention teams can be ordered just like any other resource. You place an order through the local area dispatch office, the geographic area coordination center, or the national interagency coordination center. Use the code PETL, further defined as team leader, IOF1 and IOF2 as information officer, and PETM as prevention team member. Place the order with a resource order form accompanied by the pre-suppression detail request form. Assign the team a liaison that will brief the team on the area as well as its political and social issues. Define written objectives and timelines. Have contact lists for local personnel who can be helpful. Set aside some office space including computer access and additional phone lines for the team. Gather other equipment and office supplies the team might need. Finally, identify or arrange for the team's lodging and transportation needs. If these needs are considered, teams will be able to start working right away. The host unit is responsible for preparing a comprehensive delegation of authority to ensure a successful operation. 400 individuals go through prevention team training and each year dozens of teams are mobilized drawing on that expertise from around the country to meet a variety of local needs. I think probably the biggest thing with having an interagency prevention team around is the fact that we can rely on national resources. A lot of times local units don't have people that are involved with the media or whether it be print or whether it be press and when you bring in a national team you're bringing in people that already have expertise in that area and a lot of times just making those local contacts is so much easier and the work goes that much faster and it's very professionally done. The good thing about the teams is we've got a wealth of education and experience and I think this team in the San Bernardino we have about 110 years experience in fire suppression, fire prevention, pretty much all aspects with anything from federal to state agencies to local communities. And we always try to do more than we're asked to do or to put a little bit of a different spin on what we're doing. So we need people on these teams who can be very creative, they can follow instructions to the T, they can meet deadlines. No matter what your concern, high fire danger, campfire starts, OHV use, drought or upcoming events, educating and creating awareness is essential. Prevention teams are a valuable resource and proven investment. We were planning for some severity action because of the conditions that we have. We discussed whether it would be better to bring on additional suppression resources like have some crews on standby or engines on standby or consider the potential of having a prevention team come and we decided that it would be a good investment to have a prevention team come and help us that the additional effort that could be put into avoiding having a fire start would be worth the money as opposed to having another crew on standby. The soaring cost of fire suppression is a concern across the nation. When you add up the cost of crews, engines, aircraft and support it just doesn't take long for a fire suppression effort to become costly. By contrast, an investment in a prevention team for a couple of weeks only costs a fraction of a suppression operation. If a prevention team prevents one fire they've paid for themselves several times over. Prevention teams also boost morale and relationships between agencies and the public. This goodwill is unmeasurable and benefits future projects. They can open lines of communication. For example, this team that is just completing its assignment here in Salt Lake City has opened up some new communications with our parks and recreation department that hadn't been there before. Prevention teams are a creative and economical alternative for addressing a fire problem. They mobilize quickly educating and creating awareness developing not only campaigns and strategies but relationships communities rely on. Being an ex firefighter if I can contribute to this way and the cost to prevent fires maybe we won't have to have people out on the hill getting hurt, getting killed and along with public safety too maybe somebody won't lose their home if our team can prevent a fire. The program you have to really believe in you have to just have the strong feelings that education can change people's behavior and it can change people's thoughts about what they can do to help.