 There are many safety measures firefighters take when conducting prescribed fires or fighting wildfires across the country. There are additional precautions they take when working near the border because of illegal immigration and drug smuggling. First, let's listen to the importance of briefing resources on current border issues. Common part of our in-briefing for personnel who are coming to the refuge, we give them a really thorough sit-down briefing for quite a length of time about the ins and outs of what you could expect and what could happen and how we would deal with it and that seems to help a lot because people don't like to get blindsided by individuals running out of burn units and so that seems to help quite a bit. A lot of the guys that are from the district here kind of have that heightened awareness and that's kind of what we give our severity resources, a briefing before they come in and brief them on a lot of the hazards and some of these severity resources are really astounded. You tell them you're going to run into people, they'll see maybe six young men in black walking south who have already have smuggled drugs and are looking for a ride back to Mexico. Last year we told this engine crew a lot of the same things we're talking about and they, you know, about two hours later they were driving down this road right here and they saw eight guys walking south and they said you were right, we just saw eight guys over here and you know, they get to where they, people do get educated but it is, it's a long education process, we usually take about two hours, have a good two hour briefing for the severity resources. So this is a briefing I give all incoming resources. We have laminated border watch out cards that are text on one side and a map on the other side that show the three areas levels of concern, you know, most dangerous near the border and then certain miles A, B, C and I give everyone who comes in one of these laminated pocket cards because I want people to be thinking about this all the time because it's an issue that catches everyone by surprise usually. When we can get engines from other places we'll usually marry them up with a local engine for a few days, show them the area and then once they're familiar with it then we can kind of put them on their own, you know, we let them know that they could run into illegal immigrants or they could run into these bundles of drugs and we tell them they will run into the trash and it's just something that they need to be aware of when they come down here that they, there are going to be situations they're not used to. Firefighters indicate having a law enforcement presence on fires is critical because the officers can deal with any drugs or illegal activity that shows up. We are very, very sensitive about going into fire without law enforcement with us. If we're fighting fire we have to pay attention to fire. If we get a bunch of illegals in there then we basically will instruct our ICs take their firemen off the line and so if we have enforcement there then they can go ahead and deal with that and then our fire people can continue to do their job. If we have people sometimes watering through the fire sometimes we do have groups of people that come close to the fire. Law enforcement is usually on site and they will contact Border Patrol or the correct authorities or if we don't have law enforcement on the fire we'll just call our dispatcher and maybe give them a GPS location and just let the proper authorities deal with them. We don't confront people or try to apprehend people at all. It's not part of our job to put ourselves in more harm's way. We've had firefighters out on the line doing suppression work and then had illegal aliens come and vandalize and burglarize the vehicles so we tried to make sure that we have a presence with the vehicles to deter that. Two years ago every fire that we had out here in the San Rafael Valley had illegal drugs in it in one way or another. We get pretty wise to that situation and we know that we're going to be watched and have the potential to have problems so immediately we try to get law enforcement heavily engaged in that situation. Last February we had severity resources from Montana here and Wyoming and they were out on a fire. We left them there overnight with law enforcement and law enforcement was kind of sitting on a road and about 19 smugglers with backpacks on their back and marijuana walked up the road that led to the fire that the firefighters were on and so a couple of them dropped their bundles and they ran off but if we hadn't had that law enforcement presence they probably would have walked right into our firefighters. One thing we're still struggling with in a safety aspect of it, first of all a lot of law enforcement people are not firefighters either. So for an IC it's an extra burden on that person because you not only have to worry about your folks you've got to worry about the law enforcement person and whether they're paying attention because if the fire all of a sudden comes a problem for you as an IC then you got to start looking for your law enforcement person and not only worrying about your own folks but then you have to worry about that person too. Fighting fires at night can be very risky along the border. For this reason most crews are pulled off the line or follow special protocols. Before a night time operation check to see what protocols are followed in your area. Early in 2002 we brought in some crews from South Carolina and somewhere in there and we put them up on one of our mountains up here overnight in the spike camp where during the night a load of drugs went through and about 25 UDAs walked through their camp and that was the first time we really realized we had a really really serious problem. On this district we do fight fire at night as long as we have law enforcement on the ground we do fight fire at night and the reason we do is because down here in the desert temperatures are cooler they get some humidity recovery we provide extra protection through our law enforcement people and border patrol. Night operations require special considerations that would seem to come alive at night here with people and I think that's basically why we don't fight fire at night anymore unless we do have a lot of security with us you know it's just a different world at night and we all need to realize it. Maintaining communications along the border can be a challenge but it is critical firefighters try to keep their lines of communication open. Our radio frequencies are usually have a lot of traffic from Mexico on and especially our air to ground and we haven't really found a way to solve that problem so just about any channel we use it seems to be the ranchers and the ranch hands use the frequencies and taxi cabs in Mexico the smugglers also have radios so we have a lot of interference from Mexico and it does interfere with our operations if air to ground gets too loaded with that stuff we usually try to order another air to ground but a lot of times we just have to deal with it. At times we're on fires we'll be on the radio and we'll get bleed over from Mexico and it's usually taxi cab drivers and bleeding over and we'll just have to change frequencies but at times you know you get that bleed over at the wrong time and if it's our air to ground frequency which it can be then that's generally the biggest problem on a tack channel we can go to another tack channel but bleed over is a concern also with cell phones you'll dial a number and somebody speaking Spanish will answer it and so that's also another concern. Generally what we'll do is if we can't talk to air attack we'll go through dispatch and let them try and get it. Most air attacks will be listening to the tack channel that we're using on the ground they'll be monitoring the air to ground and your forest net or district net and you have to stop and get that communication back. Because of all the air traffic along the border it is essential everyone keep their eyes open for new aircraft in the vicinity of a fire. The law enforcement agencies around here are excluded from a TFR which are temporary flight restrictions and so a lot of times they'll fly right close to our fires and so then we have to slow down our air traffic that is coming in and out or stop it for a bit until we get contact but lately we've had a good working relationship with those agencies usually call when they come in but there is usually some type of intrusions into our TFRs. We've had border patrol helicopters just above our fire flying which has been a problematic concern when we have air tankers flying in the same area and they're looking for people that either could have possibly lit the fire or they saw crossing the border somewhere and so that throws in another concern with fires is letting our air attack or our tankers coming in helicopters that we do have law enforcement over the fire at times which is border patrol and we don't have communication with the border patrol when they're flying over our fire so that's why we have to let our side know and generally what we do is we stop all flights any kind of air resources coming to the fire and along the border here we have border patrol flying we have the National Guard flying we also have ranchers that have small helicopters that are flying around all the time too so there's a lot of air traffic we like to have everyone keep an eye out for other aircraft because our pilots are not always going to be able to see them so if anybody sees anything please bring it up to their supervisors because you might be the only one that sees it as illegal immigrants and drug smugglers cross the land they leave huge amounts of trash and sometimes even drug loads at times these catch on fire affecting firefighters health bring trash is an issue act in some places what gets particularly difficult with firefighters is that a lot of our fires are right on some of the heaviestly used smuggling routes and some of those layout points that various coyotes will use with groups can literally be anywhere from ankle to knee deep in old clothes and and water bottles and synthetics and materials that you don't want to you know inhale the smoke from when you're burning through a field of trash that is toxic smoke so I mean that's something else to consider when you're on the fire line get out of that smoke get around upwind if you can we've had situations where our firefighters have been exposed to large quantities of marijuana smoke on the line and not even though it was there yet because we're working our way around we've worked on a fire part of one afternoon and oh probably just that dark around 7 38 o'clock at night we come on a huge load of drugs and they're on fire and many times what we'll do is we'll back off and we'll get away from some of those spots and let them pretty well burn up before we'll actually go in and suppress the fire right there finally firefighters try to protect the lives of illegal immigrants by taking extra precautions before they light prescribed fires we try and get prepared for the prescribed fires by notifying the locals and that includes both on this side of the border and the other side of the border that this is something that we're going to be doing and try and get them to steer their traffic around this area to minimum and head it off before they ever actually get here during that planning process we've actually gone so far as to have fliers created in Spanish and distributed on both sides of the border and areas where we think that the message will be spread we've posted messages on potential burn units and high traffic areas saying you know that this area is going to be involved in a prescribed fire and that you know you don't want to be in here when it happens and just trying to describe the the dangers associated with doing landscape level burning and how fast fires moves and things like that closer to the operation beginning we coordinate with our law enforcement folks really tightly and other agencies as well the border patrol most notably I've kind of an elaborate search routine that we go through it starts just before the burns we try and identify areas where we think are likely to be lay-up areas for illegal aliens or folks traveling through maybe even go out and scout them out and see if there's sign of people coming through there or spending time there this area has been swept for over a week before we started burning in here they bring agents in here and they walk every trail early morning late night and then they start putting up a barrier if you will almost a human vehicle barrier they run the roads to the south of here very heavily and try to force the illegals to move up and around here they may not see them but they see the border trolling and they'll flush up into the higher elevations on the day of the burns have law enforcement go out and do kind of a grid based search of high priority areas and then the rest of the burn unit in addition we do a grid based search an aerial search with a helicopter that we contract with that's a very slow low level flight depending on the size of the burn unit can take anywhere from half an hour to an hour we had a couple of burns this spring that we had border patrol doing sweeps through we did everything we possibly could to make sure that the area was clear before we started our ignitions and not 40 minutes into the burn I heard from you know back further down the holding line that we had 16 travelers coming out of the black that was barely cold and all I can think as they they got down into a rocky wash and just held it out and thought they would sneak on out after we'd gone by with our ignitions but it makes me sick to my stomach to think that we could possibly be harming somebody if they're stuck in the middle of this bird I just hope that in my tenure here on these this border forest that I don't end up inadvertently killing somebody either by wildfire or you know backfire prescribed bird that's something I think about quite a bit quite a bit we can't possibly stem the tide of individuals trying to cross this refuge and their motivation for getting into this country has very little to do with us or nothing to do with us and so we really can't have an impact on their decision to come across here or not so it's a greater national issue that we can't deal with at this level and until it is dealt with at a different level we're going to be constantly exposed to this problem the most important thing to remember from this module is that fighting fire along the border is different than anywhere else in the country firefighters in this area can come upon illegal immigrants drug smugglers and drug loads this requires them to take special precautions to maintain their safety and the safety of others while fighting wildfires or lighting prescribed burns