 You are not from this area, you just flew in from several states away two days ago to help suppression efforts on this late July 15,000 acre wildfire in the northern Rocky Mountains. A timber fire burning in steep and rugged terrain. A fire that has been challenging firefighters with extreme fire behavior the past seven days. You know that these same very dry and very hot conditions are expected to continue again today. In fact, all fire season you know that this entire region has been experiencing extremely dry conditions and severe burning behavior. This afternoon flames, heat and smoke on your division will suddenly force you into your fire shelter for almost 20 long minutes. Why did this happen? What can we learn from your close call? And on future fires, how can we prevent such a close call from happening again to anyone else? If we don't learn from this experience now, maybe next time the outcome won't be a near miss. The result could be serious injury or even death. Every firefighter must know the interconnection of LCES. And then at all times on every fire, select lookouts, establish communications, choose escape routes and identify safety zones. Sounds easy, right? Please listen up. As a wildland firefighter, if you think ensuring that these four vital, interdependent LCES elements are correctly in place at all times on the fire lines is a relatively easy, effortless process. Think again. Inside the often complex, sometimes volatile, wildland fire environment, LCES is an easy to remember, extremely helpful process that importantly focuses on the essential elements of the standard fire orders and watch out situations. But to ensure that LCES is successfully used at all times on every fire, every firefighter must know the LCES system is properly in place before their safety is threatened. Here's what many wildland firefighters forget. As fire conditions change, every LCES element must also be continuously reevaluated, reestablished and fully maintained. During all fire line operations, this LCES reevaluation process should be automatic. As you're about to see, if complete LCES had been more thoroughly and accurately applied on the Ahorn fire, chances are good that this shelter deployment would have never occurred. A firefighter's life would not have been jeopardized. You make the three-hour walk into Division Z by yourself. The only person assigned to this division, you are to monitor fire spread on many spots burning for several days now in the thick timber down below your ridge line. And help direct helicopter bucket drops onto these spots. Do you have adequate lookouts? To get a good panoramic view of your spot fires, you position yourself in a meadow area above the spot fire activity. A nearby Forest Service Fire Lookout Tower, now staffed by a walking wounded firefighter, is really your best available lookout. However, this person is not in a very good position to fully perform this critical task. Therefore, a clear relationship and communications are never established with an adequate lookout. This should have been a top priority of your action plan that day. Do you have adequate communication? You never establish a consistent clear line of communication with anyone, especially because you are working alone. This should be a top priority. Direct communication with leadership should be established, either with the branch director, operation section chief, or neighboring division supervisor. And, because you are alone, regular pre-planned check-in times and updates should have also occurred, should be part of your assigned duties on this day. Do you have adequate escape routes? As you move into a better position to watch the spot fires, you determine that your escape route is to move back up your grassy meadow. However, when the fires beneath you blow up, you don't have the time to make it to the meadow's top. And the sudden, extreme fire blow-up activity, heat and smoke cuts you off from the lower third of this meadow. We must all remember that an escape route's distance to safety must be balanced with the potential rate of spread and fire intensity. Steep, rugged slopes and dry fuels threaten this life-saving equation. We must also remember that our escape route plans must always take into account the changing and expected, and yes, even unexpected, fire behavior. Do you have adequate safety zones? The narrow meadow that you initially choose for your safety zone is comprised of light, flashy fuels that have not been burned off. As the predicted afternoon fire activity escalates in the timber below you, you wait too long to recognize that you are now in a bad, compromised situation. Being from a different part of the country, this oversight might be because you aren't familiar with the fire behavior in this particular fuel type, especially under the current extreme conditions. And even though initially on this day you believe that you have a good pre-selected safety zone area, you must always be thinking, where will this fire be in 20 minutes or even 2 hours? Where will I be in 20 minutes or even 2 hours? Remember, to succeed on the fire line, you must constantly be updating and adapting all 4 elements of your LCES system. At midday, air attack informs you that your bucket helicopter is being reassigned to another part of the fire. The division supervisor on your neighboring division Y is somewhat aware of you, but is working on a different tactical radio channel. As the afternoon heats up, this person basically loses track of you. During mid-afternoon, just as it's done on previous days, the fire activity below you becomes more active. As this fire activity increases, you decide to move up the hillside meadow to your identified safety zone. As the surrounding heat and smoke intensifies, you realize that you need to deploy your shelter immediately. You relay this decision and action over your radio. At that point, I started thinking about, should I really pull the shelter out or not? I thought about a number of different things. One is, am I overreacting? I thought about the whole process of going through investigations and all this happening very fast. Then I also thought about what I know about 28 years in the fire business, what fire can do, and some of the mistakes that have been made. I decided that it was a prudent thing to do to remain calm, go ahead and get the shelter open. Then it occurred to me that I should try to maybe scrape the ground a little bit with my combi. That not being the tool that was designed for the kind of conditions I had, I realized that that was not time well invested. I needed to go ahead and throw my tool down, get my pack off, and get the shelter out and get into it. That all went very well. Once I had decided that I threw my tool down, the training that I had gone through and the training that I had also provided as an instructor through the years just took over and things were very automatic. I felt very good that it calmed me to know that I was acting in a manner that had good knowledge of what to do and had knowledge of what to expect. You remain in your shelter for 18 minutes and receive no injuries. Unsure of your situation, adjacent forces begin to prepare for a medical rescue, which it turns out is not necessary. A helicopter returns you back to the incident command post. You apologize for causing this distraction, but everyone assures you that your health and safety is by far the first priority. If you are a wildland firefighter, thank you for your service, and thank you for watching this. From this moment forward, on all of your future wildland fire assignments, always remember to fully engage with the four interconnected elements of LCES. And for you and your crew's safety, don't forget, as conditions change, change your LCES.