 From one moment to the next, our environment is changing. Most changes are small and seem insignificant, but each change sets off a ripple which intersects with other ripples, and so on. As they build and intersect with one another, they can develop into one unexpected dramatic change. Many of these changes go unnoticed by us until they intersect, building enough momentum to get our attention. Consider that our environment is more than just the fire environment. It includes humans and equipment, all setting off ripples. So it isn't hard to believe that the perceptional blind spots and degraded situation awareness will happen. With that said, you can safely conclude that the organization will eventually be surprised. When that happens, it is imperative for us to respond and bounce back swiftly and effectively. This is what happened on the Indians Fire in Central California last summer. A giant fire role worked its way over the top of a group of firefighters creating an environment of complete disarray. While we can look back at what happened and identify firefighter oversights, the outcome could have been much worse. Despite the chaos, firefighters demonstrated resilience and ability to adapt quickly to an unforeseen event. On June 11, 2008, at approximately 1630, members of the Fulton Hot Shots and Los Padres Engine 7-1 found themselves standing on Melpitas Road in disbelief at the fire behavior event they had just experienced. No one could explain how the fury of the giant fire world had dissipated to nothing just as quickly as it had overrun them. The day of the fire world, temperatures warmed quickly into the 90s and relative humidity dropped to single digits. Firefighters were told to expect spotting and sustained runs that would test containment lines. No red flag watches or warnings were issued for the area. The fire had grown to 5,000 acres. Jim Smith's Type 2 Incident Management Team was in place. By 0800, Division Charlie was fully staffed. At approximately 0900, crews began a burnout operation to establish a safety zone near the Charlie Delta Division Brake. By 1100, they were done. One of their incident objectives was to keep the fire north of the San Antonio River. To ensure this, crews were instructed to burn east along Melpitas Road. This is where we'll pick up the stories of the Fulton Hot Shots and Engine 7-1. Okay, the resources that were in our division on June 11th, we've worked with before in prior years, so we all knew each other. We all the captains knew each other, the soups knew each other. Our vegetation types were much like you see here. This grass component right here, knee high, we're actually in part of the fire area. Across the road here is one of our contingency lines. It has the same fuel type, same kind of oak overstory canopy. And then as you get higher up, we get into a brush component. Some thicker chaparral, chemise is scattered throughout here, but predominantly what you see here is our fuel type that we're conducting the firing operation in. We understood the plan was to take fire from the crews that are working up the road here and pick it up from them and head east along the Melpitas Road. We started off with briefing the guys. We're going to use the black as we went for our safety zone. I personally contacted Division Soup air attack and Division Soup contacted operations and everything was a go on firing. At approximately 1200, the Fulton hotshots initiated their section of the burnout operation with the main objective to carry fire east along the Melpitas Road, staying ahead of the fire. The burnout was to be supervised by Louis Arrasco and Josh Acosta, both foremen with Fulton. Josh has the main fire now, the firing heading off in this direction. The main activity is still up on the slope and it's moving this way. Right along parallel with our operation. We stayed even with it and somewhat just a little bit ahead of it if we could and just kept the firing going down the road. It was doing pretty good for us. We had winds at our back and we had pretty good communications with Ron on what was going on out in front of us. We got Fulton bringing fire down the road here to try to get out in front of this. This is coming to hit the road, but we're dragging fire this way towards us to try to get out in front of it to slow it down. We're talking the same thing, 535? Yeah, or a light, you know, a light for an aerial platform just to be eyes in the sky, can tell us where some spots are if they end up farther than we can see them. Okay, I understand. Very good. I can do that. During this whole operation, I never really felt in an unsafe situation. And when I started, when I took the firing show from Josh, I know I saw the activity was increasing. It's one of the biggest fire worlds I've seen. Look at it turning on itself. It goes away all the way up. Ron Boyer and the Engine 7-1 crew are now just west of the corrals. Louis drags fire by them, moving east on the Opetis Road, still outflanking the column. Josh and his squad are further west, holding on the road. We're coming down the road to the light and ripping off. Trying to get out ahead of it. The wind that this column is creating is unreal. He had another spot initiate about 150 yards down the road here. Engine 7-1 Captain Roberto and me were standing here. His engine was facing this way and we made eye contact. I mean, right next to each other, we knew what needed to be done. He knew he rounded up his guys and he went to go engage. We had a spot down the road about 300 feet. I took three of my firefighters with me. First, I had one of the firefighters back the engine up and from there, the firefighter caught up to us. The engine followed behind us. It was a 10 by 10 spot right off the road. Very easy to handle. Just squirt a little water on it and would have been done with it. Got about 150 to 200 feet from the engine. No further than that. And that's when everything just came at us. So we went and turned the truck around. Frankie and I turned the truck around. I was going to pull up and get behind Frankie. And the winds just laid over. The smoke just laid over. And all of it just started pulling in towards where the guys were. So I finally got straightened out in the road and this was within seconds. All this stuff just happened so fast in the road. There was a big land that almost got plucked right off the tree and landed in the road and threw in little spots right off the road. And then as I was going towards where the guys were, I got on the radio and tried to get a hold of Bert and say, hey, there's a spot behind you. And I couldn't really hear. At that time, I couldn't even hear myself talk. It was so windy. It was shaking the truck. Rocks and everything. The wind was flying around. It was hitting the truck. I mean, the wind's so powerful it couldn't even hear the engine behind us. It just got dark all of a sudden and windy and hot. My concern was to try to get out of there. I looked to the left out in this field here and I mean, within seconds, it literally was area ignition. And I've only seen that once before and that was a long ways away. And so I proceeded past the limb into the smoke. I couldn't see anything. It was so black and dark. I couldn't hear anything besides all the rumbling and stuff just flying around hitting the truck and chaos in there. I wasn't getting any response back from Bert and all them so I didn't know exactly where they were. So I went down and tried to get them because the flames weren't big. They weren't touching the truck. They weren't going across the road. It was just all radiant heat or convection or whatever you want to call it. It was hot. The giant fire world has reached wind speeds of an F1 tornado. Its smoke and heat filled center lays over the top of the engine 7-1 guys as they struggle to escape. The two Fulton hotshot squads were experiencing the effects of the fire world in an entirely different way, dodging debris and fighting to get back to their trucks. Once the winds picked up to what I guessed to be 80 miles an hour, we had branches of oaks, you know, 10, 15 DBH branches coming off the trees and flying across the road. We had a couple of my guys on the crew out ahead of me about 40, 50 yards. I'd walk back to tie into one of our guys and as they were coming back to us, I remember telling them to hurry. I was yelling at them to hurry up and come back towards me and get by the trucks and they were trying to run and they couldn't even run because the wind was so strong. At that point, I immediately from directly due east, it's crystal clear, I'm in unburned fuel and I'm getting hit by, I'm not sure what it is. It feels like a thousand bees hitting ya. Not stinging but just getting pelted by dime size or quarter size stuff and I'm looking straight into the blue sky and I'm going what in the heck? Everything's back here and all of a sudden I get hit and I'm getting hit with thousands of them. One goes down my shirt and I go, oh, that's hot embers. So the column was, it appeared to me to be sucking for more oxygen. It was pulling itself out of this drainage back behind us, pulling everything out, coming back through here and then drawn back into itself. At that point in time, I looked up and the column was now starting to lean. As I tried to work my way back to the truck, I had to bend down and hang on and go because I'm in the green here 40 feet from the truck. I'm thinking I got to get to the truck because I don't want to be in the green especially with hot embers going everywhere. I'm telling ya, limbs are blowing off, it's 80 mile an hour winds and I said, it's in the report. If a cow flew by, it wouldn't have surprised me. I am dead serious. It wouldn't even have phased me. I mean, big things were in the air. Yeah, the smoke was, you know, real hard to see where the blind couldn't see anything. The heat, it was extreme, you know, hard to breathe. Yeah, I was just trying to figure a way out, you know, how to breathe in there, you know. It was tough. Yeah, there was, you know, I thought that was it there, you know, because it was so hard to breathe. There was, you know, I thought they were gonna pick us up off the ground there, off the pavement, you know. I mean, you know, hands were burnt, you know, hands were burnt, you know. Felt embers on my neck. Just, you know, I looked at the pavement and thought, you know, I guess this is it. This is it for us, you know. You know, what a present, what a present to the family, you know. And after that, I just, you know, just remembered my training and, you know, for our shelter training and, you know, started breathing calmly and taking short breaths and we couldn't hear anything, so I just pulled my shelter, showed the guys the shelter, so they followed after me what I did. So we decided to wrap them around ourselves and walk out with, you know, put them over ourselves, over our heads, and that was a big relief, you know. At that time, I was able to breathe and it was cool underneath the fire shelter, so we just turned around and just started walking back with it. And at the same time, I was looking back, looking for my other firefighter that wasn't around. As the crew is caught in the chaos of the fire world, Engine 7-1 crew member, Chris Lyons, finds himself separated from the group and runs back down the road, struggling to open his fire shelter. I finally got to a point. It was probably about 50, 50 to 60 feet after the limb that was down back here. And that's where I picked up Chris Lyons. And I couldn't see him. I almost ran him over. He was running out of the smoke because there's some reason I got a break in the smoke at that time. And he was running out and he pretty much ran into the bumper, looked at me. I could see him. He'd draw everywhere. He couldn't barely breathe. And he ran to the passenger door and swung it open and jumped in. And as soon as he opened that door, it felt like someone just turned and it was so hot, couldn't even explain it. I told him to shut that door and lay down. And first things out of his mouth is he gets up out of here and I just kind of looked at him and there's a where's guys. And he's all, I don't know, they're back there. And I was like, how far? He's all, I don't know. He's all, where'd you leave him at? I don't know. Just get out of here. I was like, where's the guys? And he didn't want to answer me after that. And so I just, I paused there for a second and kind of looked in front of me. It was like driving through a tully fog. Can't see nothing. So I couldn't, I didn't know what to do. I had another guy with me and I don't know what's in front of me. I just kind of land behind me and get me stuck where burns the truck up. And I can't see the guys. I don't know if they went the opposite way that Chris did. He had no clue. So I just made a decision there just to back out. Meanwhile, the division supervisor has a compelling urge to drive east on Milpitas Road. As he drives through the firewall, he finds it difficult to see in the dense smoke and flying debris. There's a flash of light from his headlights reflecting off a fire shelter. He pulls alongside Roberto and his guys and yells at them to get in. And the division suit called and asked me how many people I had and I said one and myself. And then I seen them come out of the smoke and I wasn't told to leave by then because I seen all three of them sitting in there. What scared me the most was when they came around the truck and I can see that they were burned. I didn't say anything to them. I wanted to make them freak. And a couple of them jumped in the truck and I see Burt kind of walk off a little bit and then he asked me to take his gear off so I took his gear off. And that was it. I didn't see the medic and the line medic that was right down the road here about half a mile and then he told us to get to the ICP and we went down there and they got treated and they took them down, took them away in the ambulance and that was pretty much it. The fire world quickly lost energy as it moved from the higher brush filled slopes into the grassy flats. It dissipated rapidly. The fire behavior and spread dropped to nearly nothing. This camera didn't do it justice. It came like a tornado came through here which it did. It shredded huge limbs like that one just dropping out of the trees. I mean it was so short a time span that it all happened from the time that I walked from my truck, walked 40 feet out and walked back. That's how much time that took for everything here to unfold in that precise moment. So probably my time span would say for everything to unfold two minutes? Well snicking at that point was my main thought is it's not just me no more. I got Chris in the truck and by going further I don't know what else is going to happen. You know, I back out and try to save one person at least and get out of there or just try to go in and get the rest of the guys and not knowing which direction they went it's kind of hard to make a decision like that. But it was, I mean at one point it was pretty easy to back out and as I was backing out it was getting pretty hard until I heard the vision call me on the radio and it was that made me feel a little better once I knew they're okay. A lot of people were wondering whether I would do anything different. I would have to say no. You were saying why? Well because I had communications set up only had one other person that I was talking to he had a radio, I had a radio I was his lookout we had the escape route safety zone was a black we were pulling with us we had our truck with us so we had everything set up to meet the objective continuous meeting objective safely. We came up here we came up with a plan to fire off the horseshoe and the Milpitas road and it was the support of the objective we got from the vision and we were doing it safely we had black with us we had good communications we had good weather for us to be burning in that situation I look back and I've tried to look at it from a bunch of different angles and I can't come up with anything that would make me change tactics it just brought home the fact that the closer I have my module together in that situation the better off we are. What we witnessed here and what I saw if I was to encounter that again plan for worst case really make sure your resources are tactically positioned and ready for engagement and everybody's aware of the deteriorating conditions. We're probably about 100 feet away from the spot down here we never made it to the spot it could have been real easy to let them go down and take care of that by themselves I had a first year firefighter the other two had two seasons so I decided to go jump in there with them I'm not sure what the outcome would have been if I would have sent them by themselves This story was intended as an opportunity for you to learn from the experiences of others We hope that you're able to place yourself in their boots and think what would I have done? Using the talking points in your student workbook discuss your perceptions of the Indians fire