 Now that we understand a little bit about how our minds work and the mental tendencies we employ on a daily basis, let's try to apply that to a fire scenario. While we go through this, it may be helpful to refer to the human factors, barriers to situational awareness and decision-making in your IRPG. On July 7, 2007, at 7.45 p.m., lightning started a fire near Hot Spring, South Dakota. The origin was located at the north end of Alaba Canyon, just below the Pine Shadows housing subdivision. The weather conditions in the southern black hills were unusually hot and dry. Al Stover was the local fire management officer and was called in as the IC. He entered Alaba Canyon from the north and proceeded south towards the fire. He found the fire working its way upslope to the east and down canyon to the south. They anchored the heel of the fire in the bottom of the canyon while air attack and two single engineer tankers made drops on the east ridge of the canyon to stop the fire from going into the subdivision. The fire continued to increase in intensity as it moved up and across the east wall of Alaba Canyon. The fuels were heavy on the slopes with very low crown base heights. After coordinating the initial plan, the IC drove back out of the canyon and around to the Pine Shadows subdivision. When the IC happened to live in the subdivision, he was also getting fire updates from his wife on his cell phone. The fire worked its way south on the east side of the canyon and made a big run out of the canyon towards the south end of Pine Shadows. By 2048, the IC had local volunteer fire department personnel in the Pine Shadows subdivision and had requested a Type 3 incident management team. These are the first two houses that were really impacted by the fire run up out of the canyon from this direction here. This is the subdivision I live in. I live on the north end of the subdivision. This house here was where my daughter was just prior to the fire coming out of the canyon. Very intense fire. We had a firewall hit the backside of that house and melted the siding off of it and just spectacular fire behavior coming up out of the canyon behind this house here. As a member of the local community and a homeowner in this subdivision, Al obviously had more on his mind than just being the IC. Let's listen to Al talk about how the elements of human factors played out in his decision making and what lessons he learned from this experience. I've never had this happen to me before, but I've been on fires where structures have been lost at risk. A house is a house until it's your house. That's the thing. When my wife called me up when I asked her if she could see anything in the canyon because of the concern, she calls me up and says it's right below the house. It's different at that point. Air attack, I talked with them and they said it's going to hit the structures very hard. These are my friends, my neighbors. If it was somewhere that I didn't have such close ties, it's lots easier to make those decisions objectively versus trying to separate the emotional ties to things. It's very similar to doctors. You don't operate on a relative. You can't make that decision making process and things like that when you're attached to the patient. If you find yourself in that kind of a situation, probably the best thing to do is get out of that command position, whether it's operations or IC, and become an advisor to someone else. You know, turn it over, sit in the truck with them, you can brief them with your local knowledge and things like that, but they can make that objective decision and not have the emotion that it's impossible for you to separate yourself from. After assigning resources to protect the first two houses, the IC moves south along a dozer line that had been completed from the subdivision to the flyway road. Local fire department personnel burned out the dozer line. At approximately 2130, the IC ordered a Type II incident management team. The IC arrived at a large safety zone on the north end of Flyway Road where he met with more incoming resources and gave a briefing. Here's what we call the Flyway Safety Zone, and we had moved from Pine Shadow Subdivision. There was some line put in with the road grader, Kat, and burnt out with local fire department engines, and we had black all the way to here. When we got here, we started to gather up with some of the overhead and fire department's local resources that were here. We pushed this safety zone immediately with the dozer, get some bare ground in. This became basically the ICP for quite some time. One of the main concerns was getting people out of here. This thing came out of the canyon very rapidly. Of course, at night, some of the residents are sleeping. It's more difficult to find the houses, and just the sheer number of houses that needed to be evacuated very quickly was a problem. Kind of an objective was to try to keep hurting the fire south and keep it as close to the canyon rim as we could. If we could work our way through the grassy knobs and use the lighter fuels with some dozer line and burn that out, we'd eliminate fire from impacting more structures. Eventually, we're going to end up down to the highway. The backup plan, we're going to have to back off to the Flyway Road and take it all the way to the highway, burning out around structures and doing the best we could. Before the plan could be implemented, a spot fire was seen on the east side of Flyway Road. Also at the briefing were Grant Gifford and Jay Kurth, both of whom had been dispatched as division supervisors. Jay Kurth was then reassigned as the option section chief type 3. While we were briefing, this patch of timber here is where the spot was. About that time, we started getting impacted with winds. And this spot takes off. And at the same time, we started getting fire coming up out of the canyon. It's torching this tree and throwing additional spots across over here. We had come up with a plan to try and put dozer line along Alabaugh Canyon and keep the fire from coming up out of the canyon. And that came out and put us in a position of trying to hold the Flyway Road. Last ditch effort, trying to catch the spot. There was a road blade here and I grabbed it and I cut the fence. And this is that maintainer's line where they took off trying to catch the spot. The fire came across the safety zone and over Flyway Road and got hit by the wind and immediately was going too fast to even be caught with road graders. From that point it put us in an entirely defensive situation and we knew that we had structures throughout the area. The fire was increasing in size and intensity in all divisions. It broke through containment lines and spotted throughout the Pine Shadow subdivision. It continued to move south down the Alabaugh Canyon and was now spotting across Flyway Road. The one radio frequency assigned to the incident was completely clogged with traffic and chaos was how many of the firefighters described the situation. Once we had this spotting and the adverse weather you know it gathered everyone up in this area into the safety zone, the hand crews and some of the engines. Same thing was going on on the other divisions and they were all gathering up into safety zones. I called this, I don't know what structure engines were on it I called this first house and told them that they were going to get impacted shortly with fire. They pulled out and me and Jay were sitting in the safety zone and you could see there's another house just down here on top of the ridge and you could see the lights from the volunteer fire department that were set up on it and you could see the fire was going to impact it before long. Sent the ops and division soup went on a scouting mission to see what options we had for the new plan because the old plan was no longer going to work with the spotting. Because the operation section chief was less familiar with the area the division supervisor got into the operation section chief's vehicle as they started back down Flyway Road. One of the four service engine captains took over the division supervisor's command vehicle and would shortly thereafter be promoted to task force leader. Role changes on the fire line are very common and necessary during emerging incidents. However, they can also act as one of the barriers to situation awareness. Throughout the rest of this scenario we will periodically visit with Dr. Ted Putnam to hear how various elements of human factors have the potential of working their way into our thought processes. Whenever you're given a job your mind tends to focus on that and because of autopilot then you start to lock in attached to whatever that job is. If you change jobs rapidly like in a fire you have a lot of experience it's easier to do it but there's always kind of a little inertia of lag where part of you is still trying to do the old job and the new you is trying to pick up and see the different perspective. And if you don't change fast enough usually your job changes to take on more responsibility and if you hang on to the old responsibility that interferes with seeing the bigger picture you're now assigned to provide leadership under. As the operation section chief and the division supervisor left the safety zone the first house was now unstaffed and being overrun by fire. Down the road local volunteers were coding the second house with a fire protection gel. The task force leader and two engines would eventually go down Flyway Road and end up at house number three. The IC stayed in the safety zone for a short time and then made his way back over the dozer line to assess the fire run through pine shadow subdivision. The operation section chief and division supervisor arrived at the second house to check on the volunteers. When it became apparent that the fire was making a strong run towards their position they ordered the volunteers to leave. Interagency cooperation is very important. Familiarity with who you're working with buys you a lot. We told the structure resources that it wasn't a good place to be and it was time to pull out and had no luck. It took a lot for Grant and I to convince them that it was time to go primarily because they didn't know who we were they didn't know what our authority was on the incident and stuff so one of the engines, the gel truck, knew us and we said time to go and he bugged out immediately it took a little convincing to get the other two engines to pull out and head out of the area. I think some of that human attachment was there and it typically is with the volunteer fire department engines because they're committed to a structure, that's their role and so a lot of times in wildland incidents when you give them a specific house to defend, they're going to defend that house. The thing that got us the opportunity to break through that was when we mentioned the structure protection specialist, Rick Lehman from Rapid City Fire Department as an assistant chief and they knew him and when I said he wants you to come down and tie in with him they were more than happy to respond. Another barrier to situation awareness listed in your IRPG is the stress reaction of target fixation or locking into a course of action. Let's listen to Dr. Putnam share his thoughts on this element of human factors. Volunteer fire departments historically have a lot more attachment to the local homes. It's in their community and the results of whether it burns or doesn't affects them more personally than if you're from out of the area. Once you start to prep a house you get more and more involved in it and therefore you have more ownership, more attachment, more resistance to leave. So as the division suit and night ops start to leave they look back and nobody's moving from the volunteers. So they go back and this time get right up in their face and said they had to physically grab a hold of them and pull them to communicate, you know, staying isn't an option. You need to leave and leave now. And it could be with that break and what they would have done if they stayed on the autopilot response of protecting the house, shaking them up, literally shakes up both their body and their mind and now they have a chance to look anew. After evacuating house number two, the operation section chief and the division supervisor started down the road to the third house. They were unaware that the fire had made its way further south in the bottom of Alabao Canyon but had not crested the ridge line. As they made their way to the third house they had to stop four different times because fire was jumping back and forth across the road. By this time the task force leader with the two force service engines had arrived at the third house. It was extremely dark. You couldn't see what we were actually calling and adequate safety was actually a really big safety zone. It was a big, probably about five acre field. But as we got in there we determined we were going to fire out around the structure and once we had started that we were just, we as the two engines that were in there and myself had come up with the plan that we were just going to let fire it out, let the main fire pass and then we'd move out as needed. The task force leader had the crew members run a strip burn around the house, up the driveway, across the road and back to the house. Just after midnight the operation section chief and division supervisor pulled on to Cascade Springs Road. The conditions were dark and very smoky. As we rounded the corner coming into the third house we weren't going to stay on it. We were going to grab everybody and run. From here my initial impression was there was a lot of heat in and around the structure even with their fire on the ground. It had stayed on the ground but you could tell that there was a lot of heat built up and I didn't even know if the house would make it. As I approached we got closer to the house. I guess my opinion started to change. To me it looked like they had done a really good job keeping the fire to the ground. It was now moving away from the structure and then you get into the whole deal that these two engines I had worked closely with over the years and I had a higher comfort level with them. Things were doing really well and I remember Grant and I talking thinking that with the firing that they had done the only thing that was going to get the house we thought was direct flame impingement rolling over out of the canopy and onto the house and the canopy was close enough to that house to where that could have occurred pretty easily. Operations and me talked and we pretty much instantly knew that we needed to at least try to fire the remaining patch of this timber island out and then we'd pull off and go to the next house. We knew that if things changed we were standing in a big safety zone stubble grass surrounded by black underneath it and the opportunity that we were talking about and the burnout that we were talking about was 30 to 40 feet long up and then right back down a 5 to 10 percent slope. Right here is where operations and myself had stopped and we're talking and looking at what we want to fire out. Basically we just wanted to take a strip up and then follow this natural little gentle slope back out to this point and wrap it and we're going to pull the resources and go a minute to a minute and a half it should have taken. Once again let's refer to the human factors barriers to situation awareness and decision making in the IRPG and listen to Dr. Putnam discuss the human elements that may have played a part in this situation. And when they come in and all the people there this is the first time everybody's they're all Forest Service people so there's more likely to be bonding and these are people you work with you know off and on anyway so it's like everybody's you know or people you know you understand so when you come into that environment then you see what your own people are trying to accomplish it's easier to relate to that so you shift more naturally into the position of saying well what is it they're trying to accomplish here and they're trying to burn out around that house so they've gone from this conclusion that they saw so clearly with the volunteers they come in with their own people buy in to what their own people are doing and now you know what can we do to help. By this time the task force leader was in the safety zone with the Forest Service engines 663 and 664 Josh Lang a crew member of 663 had completed the original burnout around the house and was asked to burn out some mowed grass around a travel trailer parked on the northeast side of the driveway. After we did the burnout around the house I went and talked to Dolman and he asked me to go and strengthen the line on the east side of the house by putting down some more fire the grass in that area was mowed grass so it wasn't carrying fire at all so I started making my way back towards the engines and that's when I ran into Grant and Jay. When the division supervisor and operation section chief arrived at the house they got out of the vehicle to assess the situation in doing so the division supervisor left his radio personal gear bag and gloves in the truck so when they jump out their first thing that they're engaged in is doing the assessment should we do anything like that or not and in that role the culture is like when you're getting out of a rig as a supervisor you're going to make a quick assessment you don't put on your PPE because it's going to be quick you're going to jump back in the rig and you don't want to be buckling and unbuckling your gear so that was one of the things that they were going to do then they decide that the thing to do is to shift gears now and they need to hurry up and get some more fire on the ground so they have a crew member nearby ask the crew member to come up and the division soup now says that he'll take that person and show them where to lay the fire and watch actually be a lookout for that person because the main fire is still on its way and going to be there fairly soon times of the essence but at that moment in time the division soup shifted from being a planner where the original plan pulled everybody out the next plan is maybe to lay that strip but as soon as he shifts gear he should have had the realization that I'm no longer a supervisor I'm now going out and I'm going to go tactical and implement the action which is to lay the strip of fire so he loses that focus it was okay to jump out without your PPE for the one thing but not for the second but the one thing that I didn't look at or didn't recognize in my mind was I was focusing on Grant's face and talking about the things that were going on and I never looked at him physically to do you have your fire shelter in your pack and do you have your gloves and all of your PPE and it's something that just never registered in my mind and the reason you failed to note it is because autopilot takes you shifts you into that new role and earlier I mentioned when you shift into a new role a lot of times things get lost because part of your mind is tugging at you to be what you were and what that's really saying is that part of that limited cognitive capacity is being eaten up by the roll shift and so you have less awareness to look at what the new situation is and because they're parked in a safety zone there really isn't any concern from the main fire and because there isn't concern from the main fire part of that may have transmitted into when the division soup goes up into the timber the fact that that big safety zone is right there and he doesn't wait 40, 50 feet away that we're okay here and he doesn't then there's no plan for if anything unexpected happens and maybe a false sense of security due to that huge safety zone The division supervisor instructed the crew member from 663 to follow him into the timber to complete the secondary burnout while the operation section chief went to the safety zone to talk to the task force leader that Grant and Josh started the burn operation I stood there long enough to make sure that the fire that they were putting on the ground was sucking over and into the initial burnout when I saw that was occurring I moved over to talk to Jeremy Dolman the task force leader and let him know that we had grabbed his crew member and that they were doing a real short operation and we're going to be coming back into the safety zone The division supervisor and the crew member started the burnout and took note of a small spot fire in the meadow at the edge of the timber they were still unaware how far the fire had moved south in the bottom of Alabaque Canyon At this point Josh is having a hard time keeping his torch lit due to the winds everything's sucking in pulling into the fire around the house well that was the first time I turned back I was ahead of Josh as we progressed his torch starts staying lit and I would say somewhere in this vicinity I turn around again and I'm noticing more of a flanking out pattern from his firing it's sucking in still but it's wanting to flank away from it as we continue I'm seeing a massive glow coming out of the canyon it's very evident at this point in time and as I'm starting to get over here I can see fire on the backside of the ridge the fire around the house is really hot at this point so I know there's no option to cut to the left The wind goes slack at some point in there and I recognize that and then open the door to my vehicle and all of a sudden a wind gust hit us and about knocked the blew the door out of my hand and I thought it was going to blow the door off the car so when I looked up there was an exponential change in fire behavior that had occurred As I entered there was a really small spot kind of off at the point here in this timber and between our fire and it I think it just button hooks around us and at that point we're cut off As I look out into the meadow I got a continuous line of fire out in the meadow most of it I'd say is four to six foot flame links there's a finger that's jetted back that has like two foot flame links it isn't with the rest of the front and you can just basically draw a straight line up under this little slope here and at this point we got four to six foot flame links all the way underneath us and that's when I turned Josh and I said we gotta make a run for it now get rid of your torch we're running for it I pulled his radio out of his chest harness and I called operations told him we've been cut off we gotta make a run for it that was the only transmission I made and at that point in time I thought our best chance was going for the finger with two foot flame links through the grass I didn't want to stay in this timber patch I knew that I didn't want to tell that whatever was coming up out of the canyon wasn't going to be a good place to be either when he stopped and he was like alright we're going to have to start a different direction I kind of tell the urgency in his voice that we need to go and we need to go now but at that time it was just like alright we'll be out of here we'll find a way out and so at that point I'm not really too nervous about what was going on I was just falling my officer at that time I didn't feel uncomfortable about it at all right here is where I knew I could see this was a good straight shot and we start running and as we come out you know we're at a good jog and the wind is starting to pick up a bit as we progress towards that direction our urgency just built faster and faster every couple of seconds we started moving at a quicker pace we're still headed for this finger that's right out here that has two foot flame lengths on it right out in here I'd say it's four to six foot still in the grass unburned knee high grass somewhere right in here I feel a really strong downburst I grabbed Josh by the shirt collar and I told him he felt the down draft and so like you said grab hold me alright let's hold here for a second we got to see what it's going to do I didn't get the words out of my mouth instantly this is now 30 foot flame lengths laid running at us at that point my focus really went into concentrating on what Grant wanted me to do and to follow his orders to a tee so at that point it was about keeping track of where he was at because that's where I was going I just did a quick scan turned around and just about where this tree is right here there's four to six foot flames and I told him that's where we're going we got to run through it and at this point that's a dead sprint this is chasing us as quick as we're moving he was right in front of me before our lives at that point we're putting everything we got into it we run towards the flame front he jumps and covers his face and I do the same and we end up in the black and at that point he has me get low because the smoke's extreme at that point tough to breathe little to no visibility once we come through it to me it was dark it was only smoky I couldn't see all this timber I thought I was standing in a meadow and I felt that it was going to be a hot smoky safety zone at this point we might have been here for a minute or two at tops and there was a tree that torched over here and we got some radiant heat from it and we felt the embers hitting us with the wind and the first it dawned on me I thought it was weird because I originally thought we were in the grass we're in a meadow and at that point in time I grabbed Josh and I told him we'll just bump over out of the way here and we'll just get away from the radiant heat from that tree we started moving around and he was just keeping us away from any of the radiant heat off any of the trees that were torching and at that point I was like we'll probably just ride it out right here and then in a matter of seconds that plant changed we get here we get Josh back low on the ground and we're maybe here for five seconds just an instant blast of hot air I can feel the skin on my right side of my face I was standing about like this Josh is right here by my knee and as I feel the skin start to burn on my face I can look over and I can just see a huge wall of glow and it's starting to raise into the canopies then suddenly we got a heat blast and we both could feel it and at that instant that's when Grant said get your shelter out we got to deploy I yell at Josh to deploy a shelter and I say I'm burning, I'm burning and at that point I cover my face and my airway as soon as I bring my hands up around my face the skin on my hand starts to run is how I describe it it felt like somebody was pouring water off you could just feel the skin bubbling and coming off at that point in time it was weird there's this surge of adrenaline I think it's your mind telling you you're burning at this point I had this immense power in my legs telling me it's time to run and as I was burning I could remember almost a football stance chopping my feet just instantly wanting to run but my mind's telling me no you're not running you gotta stay put and then the adrenaline kicks in 100-fold right there and you're like alright we're actually doing it this is life or death right here we're getting in this or we're not and he's struggling getting his pack off he's in the kneeling position he struggles with the top buckle and he can't get the bottom buckle undone he finally gets it he opens his pack and as he gets the shelter he's pulling these gloves off and he tries to do the strap around the shelter and he misses it and it won't pull I honestly don't remember actually taking off my gloves until you know revisiting the site and seeing my gloves there and I think it was because you know the mobility trying to get the tab off he finally gets it and as he flops it out with the new generation shelter he missed the left and right hand tabs and he couldn't get the shelter open I reached down because I could see him I told him he missed the hand tabs and I grabbed it and I just shook it once and it instantly opened up and I just put the stick with the wind and I put it over his head and as he was getting in I asked him for me this is the toughest part of the whole deal here I am without my PPE and I have to ask a young man to share his shelter with me there's a lot of guilt that goes with that endangering his life because I didn't have my equipment he graciously said yes and as I'm crawling in the shelter I can tell that at this point this is a full crown fire and everything is starting to want to suck right up to us from all directions you can see the end rafting in that building and that's when I crawled in inside the shelter I expected to be laying on top of Josh's legs or not having much room and he had kind of gone into a ball in a fetal position at the front of the shelter and I ended up sitting down cross legged because I felt that I could use my butt and my legs to hold the shelter down because I didn't know how much heat we'd get impacted with and I didn't think my hands were going to be able to do it once I was in there it just became purely for me it was all about just praying as soon as I started praying it just put me at ease I was in a life or death situation right there and so I was getting myself right and just put a calming effect on you and then I started talking about his burns how he was doing and he thought that his airway was closing at that point in time and I thought that he'd taken heat to his airway and that we needed to get out and call Mayday I told him to stay in the shelter I crawled out the radio that I had I dropped right near the shelter because I couldn't hold on to it when I was being burnt and I picked it up and tried to call emergency traffic Mayday, Mayday, emergency traffic there's been a deployment I couldn't break through the radio took several times just before operations and other 2-4 service engines could hear it just down the hill from us here and at that time we could just barely see Jay said he couldn't see us and I just told him keep coming and we could see him driving straight north and I told him you know we're off your back quarter panel at a 45 degree and he just started backing up and we told him to stop and we picked up and ran towards him Josh wasn't going to let go of the shelter for anything and took it with him and I threw the radio down to Mark where we actually had deployed The Alaba fire was contained 5 days later on July 12th after burning over 10,000 acres During the first 24 hours the fire burned 5,000 acres destroyed 27 homes The final investigation report can be found on the Lessons Learned website At this time, let's take a break and read part of the summary Dr. Putnam wrote in his analysis of the human factors on the Alaba fire