 Hello, and welcome to Fireline Safety Refresher Training. This video will ask you to dust off some risk management tools such as the 10 fire orders, LCES, and the 18 watch out situations, and use them in some real life fire scenarios from the 2001 fire season. Hopefully this will jog your memory and provide you with some mental triggers that will help you recognize and mitigate safety hazards you may encounter this year. But before we get started, I want to share with you some startling statistics about our fire community. Safety stats are also outlined in your student workbook. At the time of this taping, there have been 809 reported deaths in wildland fire operations, 18 of which occurred in the 2001 fire season. Between 1976 and 1999, we averaged 70 entrapments and 43 shelter deployments per year. I don't know about you, but that sounds awfully high to me. And I have to ask, what have we learned from these events that can help us lower these numbers in the future? In 1994, 34 people were killed in wildland fire operations, many of whom were our highly trained type 1 firefighters. After that season, the fire community vowed to learn from those tragic deaths. We vowed to strengthen our training curriculum, stiffen our qualification requirements, and provide some standards for fire operations that would hold people accountable for maintaining firefighter safety. Safety first, 6 minutes for safety, safety grams, safe net, safety has been drilled into our heads at every level. Tragically, since 1994, 108 more people have been killed in wildland fire operations. What is it about there's nothing out there worth of human life that we don't seem to understand? There must be something out there worth of human life because we continue to see between 10 and 20 fatalities a year. Why are we here today, not among the 108 people who have given their lives since 1994? What are we doing right that they were doing wrong? Do we train differently, or is it just a matter of luck that we're still here? What are we doing to keep ourselves safe? What performance standard do you personally hold yourself accountable to? Do you consider yourself a professional firefighter, or is this just a fun summer job? Are we just here for the money, or do we consider ourselves students of fire? How seriously do you take this job? Because the truth is fire doesn't care how old you are, what type of resource you are, how big your organization is, what position you hold, what training you've had, or even how much experience you've had. Given a certain set of circumstances, which usually involves some element of human error, fire can result in your death. We at the BLM training unit urge you to take this training seriously, participate in the exercises with a desire to learn something new, and share something new with someone sitting next to you. Get the most out of the collective experience in your training groups. There's always something new to learn about fire. Try to advance your level of knowledge to the next level, whatever that level is for you. Actively seek out new information, and use it this year on the fire line. Good luck with this course, and with the coming fire season. It's a serious job, and the attitude of your crew is going to affect the attitude of your performance. If your crew is professional and does the job correctly, and at the end of the shift when you're back at fire camp, you can joke and laugh all you want, but the time you're spent out on the line, there should be a definite game face and serious attitude out there. If you have a winner to joke around, your life insurance policy out on the line is you're a 10 and 18, you're fire orders in your 18 watch out situations. As you all know, there is a huge bundle of reference material available for you to use when making decisions regarding fire. In this course, we will focus on the Interagency Incident Response Pocket Guide, or the yellow book as many people call it. We talked to Paul Hefner, who was one of the originators of this book. Paul started his career back in 1966. He's a Type 1 Incident Commander and is currently a Fire Staff Officer on the Payette National Forest in Idaho. I want to share with you his thoughts on this reference. Several years back, there were several of us here at the Fire Center that had recently come from the field. We were noticing a lot of development with pocket cards, wallet cards, different publications, that in some cases they all said the same thing. In other areas, we saw different regions of the Forest Service and units of BLM publishing this initial response pocket guide. They were doing it individually, and every one of them was just a little different from the other. As we all know, every firefighter fights fire in different areas, and to have that inconsistency around the country wasn't necessarily the best situation. Our initial thought was that the Fireline Handbook addresses quite well dealing with management situations, with position descriptions, checklists in overhead positions, and some ICS typing and some of those standards within the Instant Command System. It doesn't really hit very closely the tools that are needed for the on-the-ground firefighter. Our initial hit was to not duplicate the Fireline Handbook, although there are a few things that are in the Fireline Handbook that are also in the pocket guide. But this idea was to have it as a pocket guide for the on-ground firefighter. The Fireline Handbook could potentially be in a pack or in a briefcase for the individuals that supervise the on-the-ground firefighters at maybe one or two levels up. Then any other operational guides, example of the Standards of Fire and Aviation Operations, that would be the book that would probably be in the vehicle in the briefcase on the FMO's desk and on the line officer or agency administrator's desk as a guide, as a reference to what are the standards for fire operations. So it basically would be a three-phase, three-level reference. The green pages of the initial response pocket guide are operational pages. And we put those at the front of the book because they're so important in the way we do business. They need to be looked at weekly, daily during your six-minute for safety. They involve risk management. They involve tactical watch-outs, many different checklists of things that you may encounter every day, but things that you may encounter only in a rare event. It's so important that you put so much emphasis. You put a great level of emphasis on knowing what's in the green pages, and you practice these things that are in the green pages. If we teach the book, the book is included through our all our refreshers, our rookie schools, all those areas that we teach our firefighters or we refresh our firefighters. All the elements of the book are taught during that. I think the people will start to come around more and be able to use it as a tool instead of just handing it off to them. A seasoned firefighter will see the tools in the box and say, yeah, these are things that I can use. This is great. This is great. The beginning firefighter may not know a lot of the applicability because they've never been in these situations before. So again, it's so important that we teach the book and we make it a standard. This is part of your everyday life. This is no different than that driver's license that you have in your pocket that you have to take a test on every so many years. It will greatly, greatly increase the way we all consistently fight fire, whether it's a person from Alabama come to the west or we go to Alabama and help them fight fire. If we're all doing the same way, I think we can be a lot safer and more efficient. The other thing is that terminology. This also helps clean up some of our terminology in many different ways of saying the same thing. All these checklists have standard terminology, PMS, NWCG approved terminology. If we're all using this as a teaching tool and as an application tool, I think we better understanding from each other as we come from all different parts of the country together to fight fire. To help you get acquainted with this book, we'll ask you to use it while working through some exercises. You can use other references also if you like, but I think you'll find this book very helpful. It was designed to be used on the ground by working firefighters. So to get us started, let's put on our fire hats and go look at the fridley fire that burned part of Montana this last season. Welcome to the fridley fire and it's September 1st and just outside of Bozeman, Montana. The fridley fire is approximately 24,000 acres and it started about a week ago after a lightning storm. The fire exploded to about 15,000 acres in one day after a major wind event. Afterwards, the sporadic winds from all different directions have pretty much made the fire edge fan out in all directions. As a division soup, I came in and there was a major edge of fire along the division and I have this division lima and the division lima is approximately five miles long. The main edge of the fire came up from the north and it was a wind driven fire causing spot fires up to half a mile in front of the head of the fire. The fuel type is primarily sub-alpine fur and it's very patchy. Areas where the sub-alpine fur was contiguous pretty much maintained a crown fire during the whole event. As the fire hit the edges and came downslope it hit into patchier fuels and it caused spot fires throughout the whole area. Off to the east the fire has burned all through this area leaving islands of unburned fuels and also spot fires throughout the whole edge which we're trying to deal with now. Spot fires are throughout the whole area and if you notice the grasses in this area the meadows have not burned. Also if it was in a draw, most of the draws have not burned but the fire is carrying underneath and every once in a while will hit areas of sub-alpine fur, it'll torch and the gusty erratic winds we've been having the last week sends spot fires all over. We have two strike teams of engines which are primarily type sixes. We have two water tenders which are 5,000 gallons, a D6 dozer. We also have an item called the Proteus which carries 3,000 gallons and it's like a skitter. It can also shear and knock over trees as part of its capabilities. And we have two skidgings which are skitters of different sizes which can carry up to three to fifteen hundred gallons of water and six hand crews. The weather forecast was for hotter and drier. It's been in the 80s and it's going to be in the high 80s today which causes it to really heat up during the day. We also have relative humidity dropping down to the mid-teens between 15 to 17 percent as expected today. Our trigger point where we start seeing torching with the sub-alpine fur is right around 20 percent. Also with winds which is a critical element in the torching too that we found especially if it's going to carry in the canopy is around 15 to 20 mile an hour winds. And today's forecast was for winds in generally between 10 to 15 miles an hour but we're having gusts up to 25 miles an hour which is really causing sporadic torching throughout the division.