 Another potentially complex situation involves downhill line construction. To help us refresh on the safety concerns specific to cutting line downhill, let's look at the Little Joe fire this last season in Montana. On September 2, 2001, this fire grew during a wind event to approximately 860 acres. The fuel type was a mixed conifer, predominantly Douglas fir and lodgepole pine, with heavy accumulations of grass in the meadows. Ladder fuels are present in the understories. A strong north wind took the fire over the ridge and the fire started backing down the east slope. The fire behavior decreased to a ground fire but approximately 12 to 15 spot fires had been ignited about one quarter of a mile below the main fire. The spots were smoldering and creeping with visible smokes. Your job as the division group supervisor is to utilize the available resources to control this section of the line. The resources consist of six type 2 crews, two type 1 crews, which have already been flown up to the top of the ridge. Four helicopters, two type 1 and two type 2s, are available for you to use as needed but their availability cannot be guaranteed for the entire day due to other priorities on the fire. The time is 0900. The weather pattern recently has been consistently hot and dry with increasing afternoon winds. Temperatures have reached as high as 90 degrees and the relative humidity has dropped to as low as 20%. Winds are predominantly out of the southwest but some passing cold fronts have created some strong but inconsistent north winds. The forecast for September 2nd predicts temperatures at 83 degrees in the lower valleys and 73 degrees on the ridge tops. RHS should drop between 24 and 28% at around 1600 to 1700. Winds are predicted out of the north to northwest at 8 to 10 miles per hour with gusts between 16 and 18 miles an hour. With this information, I'll ask you to get back into your groups and complete the next exercise. Welcome back. Now that you've worked out a basic strategy for this scenario, let's go back to Montana and talk to Rick Vale who is the Incident Management Team's Operations Section Chief on this fire. This is Division I and what happened there? It spotted over the top with the north wind, drove it over the edge and it started creeping down. We also had about 15 spot fires up to an eighth of a mile below the leading edge of the fire. That caused real problems for us where we decided we had to go indirect and try to pick up all those spots inside an indirect line and then fire it out. That was the plan of the day. We had all of our resources in place to do that burnout. We had hot shot crews up on top and hot shot crews down below. What happened is we had a dramatic increase in humidity from about 25% all the way up above to 45% and then it started to sprinkle on the area. It got very cloudy. We had our resources in place. We were also confronted with two to three days away a major wind event was predicted and we knew we had to have this buttoned up before that wind event came because our primary charge is to protect all this urban interface below in the Yellowstone Valley. Once it got wet like that we tried a test burn just to see if it would work for our burnout operation and the fire, our test burn didn't burn more than a few feet and then went out. So the choice was then made that we needed to figure out how to go direct. We had hot shot crews chomping at the bit wanting to do that telling us they could do that. We had a division soup that wanted to do that and a couple other division supervisors that thought we could pull that off. The ops chiefs got together and discussed what are the possibilities here. We know that we're having problems with some of the situations that shout watch out and we got out our books and started taking a look. And one of the biggest ones was building fire line downhill. We had crews below and we had crews above. Most of our crews were up above. We also had spot fires below. The spot fire some of them were fairly big. Now none of these are burning very actively. They're just kind of smoldering around in the dark. So the decision was made to go ahead and do the direct and to come from both directions. Coming from downhill from the highest knob. So we posted lookouts. The division soup from division I was the lookout from the top. The very highest point up there. And the division soup from division C was down below where he had a good view also. We brought crews in from division C and started building towards the center. To mitigate downhill line construction and the fact that we had unburned fuel between the spot fires and the leading edge of the fire. We used a lot of bucket drops and we sent in four type two crews to go in and grid and line those spots as fast as they could. So they had a type one two type one helicopters and two medium helicopters that just hauled in a lot of water. We lined all those and they completed the construction of the line. Well that about does it for this section of your refresher training. Our objective was to get you acquainted with the incident response pocket guide and to give you an opportunity to apply some of the principles in that book to real life fire scenarios. We hope that your group discussions and review of the scenarios were interesting and educational. But most importantly we hope that when hazards present themselves this coming fire season. You will more readily recognize them and initiate legitimate hazard mitigation measures. It's up to you to help our fire community lower the average entrapment and shelter deployment rate. Wouldn't it be awesome to have one fire season without any entrapments deployments or fatalities. Now as much as we would all love to see that happen we still need to prepare for the worst case scenario. For that reason we still have one more thing to do as practice our fire shelter deployment procedures. But before we let your local facilitator run you through the drills. Let's listen to a few thoughts on fire shelters and some comments from some people who have lived through that worst case. Thank you for your attention. Have a safe fire season. Remember to maintain your situational awareness and please think while you fight fire. You know we got to take this seriously. You know that's not you know you don't go into your shelter laughing and joking. You know you go in your shelter you know in a serious mode and fully realizing that this this is some stuff that you have to pay attention to and be ready for. It's a worst case scenario and I mean this shouldn't happen. And I you know it's one reason why we're all back out here today is to make sure it doesn't happen but you know we are human beings and it's probably inevitable that this might happen again so the best thing you can do is just get as well prepared as possible for it. This is kind of an issue I've had all the season is not taking advantage of teachable moments and taking advantage of being in the field and pulling out a scenario in the field or say you're staging for 12 hours a day and you're you know you're just hanging out because that's kind of the way things work when you're staging. We'll take advantage of pulling out two hours, pull out your you know your your fire line handbook. You know get your crew boss make suggestions of trainings you want to receive or your squad bosses or crew boss trainees or whoever it is but taking advantage of that of those moments I mean just to get the training especially the safety stuff I mean you know it'd be a waste if you didn't take advantage of that. I think crew members sort of have to take some of their own initiative to ask for the training and sort of make some formal requests and say hey we need this provide it for us and I think if they're if the forum is created for them to be able to have that voice I think you know it's only gonna get better you know if the fire crews are gonna get better they're gonna get better trained and they're gonna have you know more leadership coming from the bottom up you know which I think is important taking responsibility. I would say that you know there's a time to joke around and have fun and make this job you know a good time to pass along memories and what not but when it comes down to it you know the people that are working next to you or you may not see them again if something goes wrong and it's a very serious job we have here and you know people will go their entire lives and their entire careers without deploying their shelters or being put in a situation that I was put in and I think people if people go into it knowing that you know knowing the outcome of mistakes and what not because never in my wildest dreams would I assume that this would happen and it came down to one day changed a lot of people's aspects on life because there's no real reason why I should be standing here talking to you right now with the events that happened here at 30 mile it's changed a lot of things for me and whatever safety issues can be brought up and addressed from this incident that's about all we can do with this