 Prescribed fire and wildfire are nothing new to firefighters in the southeast. With almost a year-round fire season, fire has been a big part of the culture and land management practices for many years. In fact, when we look at prescribed burning, the southeast has by far the most active program. Not including the state forestry departments or the military bases, which all have active Rx programs, the U.S. Forest Service and Region 8 ignited almost 1200 fires in 2005 and treated just under one million acres. In this module, we're going to first look at the various aspects of fighting fire in the southeast fuel models. Then we're going to reflect on the significant Golden Gate fire that took the life of a tractor plow operator in Naples, Florida. The Fish and Wildlife Service was the first agency to officially begin prescribed burning in the south, as we know it back in the 1920s at St. Mark's Refuge, when we had the first documented prescribed burn when no other agencies were doing it. However, fire in the south dates back to prehistory. In this area where we are right now, Deiberville sailed along the coast in 1699 claiming this land for France. In his journals, he talked about seeing large smoke columns inland nearly every day. When he landed, he would see signs where Native Americans had set fires. In fact, the first thing that he did when they decided to build their settlement was to set a fire to clear the vegetation. Fire suppression activities and prescribed fire activities to me go hand in hand. We use every prescribed burn as a training ground for fire suppression. We don't have all the personnel at any one station in the southeast to do the burning that needs to be done, generally speaking. So we're constantly bringing in detailers from other refugees or other agencies. So it's important to me, if somebody coming in here, whether it be a suppression or a severity detail or a prescribed fire, that they're willing to pick our brains and find out what's going on. Because when we have folks in, it's because we need help. And we do take a lot of folks from prescribed fire details to show them what we know about it, but to learn from them also because you can be fooled by the obvious out here. You can be out here every day working in the same environment year and year out and think you got it and there's something out there that you're not seeing. I also think that people can get knocked down when they're too big. Big pride does come before a fall. And I think I've probably been in that situation. Well, for sure I've been in that situation thinking that I had the answers and then fire humbled me pretty quick. Thinking I knew how to apply fire and I had it down right. And another good adage I'd tell you is that fire gives a test before the lesson. And that is so true. You think you know it and then it'll give you a question you've never seen before and you've got to scramble to come up with the answer right then. A real common misconception that people bring to the southeast in the United States from drier parts of the country has to do with the effect of relative humidity on fire behavior. And in the southeast things will burn at humidities where things would not burn in other parts of the country. For example, I've been on numerous fires where humidity is in the 80 to 90% range and we still have decent fire behavior. If you've got a decent breeze pushing it, you can have a fast running fire with humidity in the 60s. You get humidities down into the 40s and things start getting pretty dry. As a matter of fact, in most of the southeast, at least in Florida, Alabama and Georgia red flag conditions come in at around 35% RH. If you're going to have below 35% for more than a couple of hours you are in red flag conditions in the state of Florida. 35% doesn't raise many hackles if you're in Nevada or West Texas or someplace like that. Heck, that's a humid day. In Florida you get down into the mid 30s and things can get pretty dicey especially if you've got any wind. If you get humidity down into the 20s, things are critical. If you get humidity in the teens, things are explosive. If you've got any kind of wind and you've got humidity in the teens, in the southeast, in the United States, especially if it's been any time since the last rain you can have fire behavior that will astound you. So things start getting dicey in the 30s, things start getting critical in the 20s, things start getting downright dangerous when you get down into the teens. This fire in South Florida, Florida in general, is a wind driven phenomenon. The dispersion index is an indicator of the amount of stability or instability there is in the atmosphere. Obviously the more unstable the atmosphere, there go the higher rating, 75 or above, the more unstable the atmosphere, the more erratic fire behavior you're going to have and the more aggressive fire behavior you're going to have. The fuels here in South Florida, it's job security. The fuels grow back so fast. We can do a burn in the pine lens, fuel model 7 and within two years it's ready to burn again. Three years we'll have really good fire behavior out there, much beyond that at the four or five year age class and things are so, burn so aggressively that we try and keep things down on the shorter end of the time scale just for ease of control. A five year rough and fuel model 7 can burn really hot, real intense fire behavior. The thing to me that's often missed about fire in the east and I'm talking about from Maine all the way down here to the Everglades is the level of complexity and the subtleties. One of the things I observed as a firefighter out west is that the principles that we were taught are very, very solid. You can understand them very well. It's once we start getting into these environments like the Everglades and a number of other specialized environments that are no less important is that's where the subtleties, the nuances if you will, really come out and you must be an intense student of fire to pick up on those subtleties because they're the same principles. They just seem to be stretched and applied in very different ways. It's not unusual for us to get crews whether they come down to the prescribed fire training center or any amount of details that might get or on a wildland fire and we see them bail out of their trucks with the slurry on their hard hats, eight water bottles, the line packs with an assumption that they're going to be using the Pulaski to dig fire lines through eight-foot Palmetto. We usually have to have a little chat at that point that it's going to be a little different. Probably the most valuable fire tool that we have here is the drip torch and the tractor plow. In some landscapes where the tractor plow is the most appropriate, that's our hotshot crew. That's our 20-man crew. Firefighters here have to use a lot of different specialties. They're more generalists than specialists. You wouldn't just be on a hand crew. You have to be able to do a little bit of everything. The Western folks have an assumption that we don't see much fire or our fire is somehow different in its physical process than their fire. That's always comical. It's not unusual for us to see some of our Western colleagues lose their eyebrows to some of our so-called green fuels because the flame links surprise them sometimes. On the other hand, the hard work ethic and the organization that the Western folks bring us is always impressive. It's almost invariably impressive to our firefighters and our fire management, and it does give us a kind of raise of the chin-up bar for us in that way. Give you a little history here. This here on your right is a two-year-old rough. It's a southern rough fuel model 7, and it's two years old. It looks green as a gourd, but let me tell you something, it does burn. The southern fuels, mainly in the 7, the fuel model range has got a lot of waxes and a lot of resins in it. Even though when it does burn, it looks green right now, but when they start putting a little heat to it, it's like somebody just threw gas to it, and it will actually get up and walk. We've had folks from out west, from California, and everything coming here back in 89, 98, and 2000, and they're kind of looking at us saying, you know, this is Florida, what's going to burn here? This is all green. So I said, well, wait about a week and then tell me. Well, they were coming back to me saying, well, we need some new fire shirts, and our line gears got holes in it, and all that kind of crap. So this green stuff does burn. What we use for fire behavior, I use fuel model 4 just to get the intensities and the flame links on. Fuel model 7 does not give it to me. It just doesn't have it. If you look, the fuel model is saying, you got anyone from 3 tons per acre? I've estimated we got about 30 tons per acre. So when the fire gets started down here, you know it is flat ground. Everything is wind-driven, but when the wind blows, this stuff will walk the dog, and it's putting up some impressive fire behavior spotting out a quarter to half mile in front of it. The palm fronts here, the cabbage palms are probably the worst thing we've got. When the fire gets up in it, it just climbs right up in it because the boots have got a lot of fine fuel in it, from needle draping and everything else. When it comes up in it, it gets into palm fronts, and then once they get up into the column, they can spot that quarter to half mile in front of you. You don't even notice it. The other fuel model we got is a fuel model 3, which is tall grass. A lot of mule grass is saw grass, and it just burns hot. It's fast and furious, but it doesn't last long. What we've got a lot of is the grass moving into the palmetta, which is the shoulder stuff. Then you look out through there, you're starting to get a ladder effect. It doesn't take long before you know it's in the crown. And that's, as far as hand line works, you don't do it. We use a lot of tractor plows, swamp buggies like this. We get in behind the tractor plows, do a lot of burning out, but this stuff does, it's impressive. For flat ground, a boy one time told me from California, he said, man, this stuff looks like, if you had some elevations, it's really cranking. I said, I'm glad we don't have any elevation. This stuff moves pretty good on flat ground. Humidities that we deal with down here in Florida, everybody thinks it's real high humidity. It is during the summertime when we get a lot of rain. 95-100% humidity every day, 95-97%, or 97 degrees, and it's sweltering down here. During the spring and the fall, we can get down as low as 22-24%. Our parameters, once it gets below 35RH, all prescribed burning will stop them. It's out of Florida anyway. At that time we say it'll start burning holes in rocks, because the humidity gets to low, you have problems with spotting, that kind of thing. We go by the Keats Byron Drought Index, KBDI, and once it reaches over 500 or 550, it's all cut off, we start having problems with it then. Mainly with spotting, the intensities get more, the fire behavior starts picking up. Back in 98, it was up around 700 the whole summer. In 2000, 2001, it was doing the same thing. So a lot of our fires that are started down here are started by people. Florida is the lightning capital of the world, but there's more people than there's lightning bulbs out there, because they haven't wanted them to like the place up. What I'm standing right now is a prescribed burn that we did nine days ago, and the primary objective of that was to reduce the fuel loading. The second objective is to increase the habitat, which is now starting to re-sprout, because we can see it after nine days. It's already starting to re-sprout back up. The parameters for the prescription were such that we had winds less than 15, 20-foot winds, or at this time we're 12 miles an hour. So through the stand here, we're figuring we're getting five to six miles on our winds. That's a real key to us if we're going to try to protect any of the reproduction that's come in. Some of our recruitment of our stand for pine reproduction. As you can see, it pretty well knocked back the vegetation we have here. It didn't kill it, all it is top killed it. We're going to re-sprout at the bottom, which is beneficial to the wildlife. The RH for today when we burnt this was 52. It ran from 42 to 52. And this is kind of a key idea for us is we want to get it below 35. We want to keep it above 35. You get your consumption rates. You get your one in ten hour fuels consumed that you wanted, 75 to 95 percent, which we got. We did control some of the understory species, which is a lot of this hog plum and wax myrtle. We knocked that back so it'll re-sprout. And then on the other side of the road here, we can kind of talk about this is a three-year-old rough. With anything below 35 percent humidity, you can kind of see what kind of vegetation you got. Got a pretty good lateral right into the crowns itself. So the hazards of that is it's going to be running and spotting on you pretty quick. Flame intensity is going to be extreme. We're talking 25, 30-foot flame lengths. Possibly get into the crowns and start doing a crown fire. Even though it's not a continuous crown, it can't take out the crowns. The other hazards in here is that you're walking through a vegetation you can't see the ground. On the other side of the road, it was burnt. It was nice and clean. Versus this side, if you're trying to drag tools, trying to cut a line through this heavy vegetation stuff, it's going to tear people out. With the amount of humidity and the temperature we've had, that would kind of run folks down. I don't care how good a shape you're in. This stuff right here will work you to death. So we try to make sure that we use trails to do our fighting from. Use our natural areas. There's a buggy trail that we're on right here. It's only about 12 feet wide, but it's far enough. The BT is cranked out by this stuff is unbelievable. It'll flat blister you. If you didn't have a suntan when you came to Florida, you'll have one after you leave this fire. It is extreme. Each geographical area in the country has its own set of safety hazards that are unique to their area. The southeast is no exception. Let's listen to some good advice on what you should watch out for while working in this area. The most important thing, number one, I tell people in terms of critters is fire ants. Watch where you're standing. You don't want to get fire ants up your leg. They mass attack. And the only way to stop an attack is to identify the bugler and kill it before it can blow the bugle and they all bite. And nobody can do that. So if you do get bit, it's very dangerous. Some people can be allergic to the point of death and not know it till they get bit. And if you do get bit by fire ants, then you probably demobilize the rest of the day and hurts us. The second and very important item is how to walk through the woods with a briar. We have a lot of growth, a lot of vines, a lot of briars that will reach out and grab you and can trip a person up if they don't know how to walk. So I stress not stepping over but stepping on. Some folks actually carry hand clippers with them. If they reach, come up to a point of briar about half inch or an inch and a half and they just simply snip it and keep going. I'll raise drip torch so it quits dropping fuel and then turn and kind of back through the briar so it's against my pack and not tearing into my clothes until I get bite. And can't do that. I just back up and step on it. But that is the reason why we use aerial ignition so often is we don't like to put firefighters in those situations but on small burns in certain areas we can't use aerial ignition. We have to use that technique. Another important item in safety briefing is traffic on the roadway. We live in an urban interface, we fight fire, we burn in an urban interface so a very, very serious threat to our safety are the motorists and they're not watching the guys in the yellow shirts they're watching the fire on the side of the road and we have to watch out for them and be very careful on these public roads when we're burning up against them. Heat and humidity are also critical and there are a lot of elements down here. There's a reason why we work slow down here and it's not that we're lazy it's because that's the environment we work in. And if you take your time and do it safely and slowly you're going to get a lot more done in a day. Been many folks first day out that they collapse from heat exhaustion and we don't ever want it to go to heat stroke. You got to keep water, I bring extra socks, extra t-shirts and change to stay cooler and also another safety item I'm sitting here sweating now is that getting your feet wet people might come from drier climates in marvel at how we burn over standing water or the fire line is flooded and yet we're getting spot fires and 25 foot flame lengths as we set fire. So bring extra socks, take care of your feet bring foot powder, keep your feet dry make sure your boots are oiled up. Everybody likes to wear whites or nicks we all do but down here the soils are low pH 3.5 to 4 on the average and these boots weren't made for that so you have to keep it greased up snow seal if you can say a brand name just something we all do we have to keep our boots greased up to protect our feet because if we're walking all day you got to have good feet. The big things we caution about number one is the weather it's a pretty flat land everybody looks like it's a piece of cake to move around out here but when the summer temperatures are up or even in the winter time when our temperatures are up the temperature index can get really high and that really takes a toll on your body so you really need to stay watered up and a lot of water with you all the time the other thing that's a big thing that'll grab you out here is the lightning the thunderstorms will build up pretty unexpected we try to monitor that kind of stuff but the cells will build up here and they'll be dropping rain 5 miles away from you and you understand when you've got a cell that's built up about 40 to 60,000 feet over this system it can be raining lightning that's 7 miles away from that cell that's a real hazard other than that land is pretty level and you really can't see it right in here but Everglades here south florida is underlined with limestone bedrock exposed at the surface which is really treacherous walking I always characterize it as lava beds with no slope and grass growing out of it that's a good way for a westerner to kind of look at the pinnacle rock that we have down in here and then besides that we've got a whole host of things that'll reach out to grab you we've got four kinds of venomous snakes down here in south florida including the eastern diamondback rattlesnake most of those animals will stay away from you if they can but when your firefighters out there you always gotta watch where you're stepping over and stepping too watching where you're putting your hands because those kind of creatures will be out there ready to grab you and then the number one injury that we have to firefighters in Everglades national park statistically is exposure to the Florida poison wood tree which is it's the same family as poison ivy poison oak poison sumac it's a bush that'll grow up to about 35 feet tall and it's really prevalent out here not only in these hammock habitats but in the pinelands and in any place that hasn't had a lot of fire on it in the last few years in florida in particular sea breeze is a huge factor not only the breeze itself but how that sea breeze front affects the air mass that's in place you'll get an area right along that sea breeze front where you have very very high dispersion right at that convergence of that sea breeze front you can have some very erratic fire behavior if you're in the area you need to know the conditions that a sea breeze that starts kicking in when it's likely to come into play both the depending on cloud cover, depending on air temperature depending on water temperature depending on the prevalent breezes at the time you know your larger air mass that's taking effect and whether you're on a wildfire or prescribed fire you've got to be cognizant of the sea breeze almost anywhere in florida even in the florida peninsula you can have sea breezes that'll push all the way to the interior sometimes even across almost to the other side where the two sea breezes from each side will converge and cause thunderstorm activity, erratic winds fire whirls things along those lines first thing foremost is make sure you're here to map find out who's in charge second thing is we try to use the black as much as we possibly can there's some good areas here once the grass burns off there are escape routes into that we stress every time when we do a burn or doing a wildfire or safety lines or the cloud lines we try to make them at least two blades wide the cypress domes itself if they're wet those are real good spots to go to usually cypress does not burn just because there's nothing there for it to burn so those are probably one of the areas communications is probably one of the biggest ones we try a lot of the areas we have out here whether it be in the urban interface or out here in the wildland itself everybody needs to have communication and we make sure that if you do not have communication when you get here do you have somebody or you get one we make sure we have enough radios on hand so everybody's got one well when we dive into LCS from the get go we have something that's going to be inherently different because of our topography and the density of our fuels often the question I ask folks is where are you going to post your look out and a look out serves a very very different or it has to take very very different tactics here it's not like you can look down on a ridge and look down on your crew so things from the top of a type 6 engine or a hose reel to being extremely mobile on an ATV or on foot is the way that you mitigate lookouts so that from the get go to be able to see your crew, know your crew and know fire and fire behavior is going to take a very different strategy than what folks are used to the other in terms of fire order I think that well I like the one and this is one of the things that I encourage all people to pay attention to here is to initiate all your actions based on current expected fire weather and fire behavior because that's really going to dictate what you do being heads up and asking a lot of questions about what do these fuels do when the RH gets to blank should I be concerned when I have a probability of ignition of 40% those kind of things are fundamental basic fire behavior things and they're questions we always should ask when we get on a new piece of ground but here the fire shows itself so rapidly here and changes in fire behavior that it requires you to again have a really much higher elevated situational awareness and again if you initiate your actions on fire weather fire behavior I think you're still going to be safe