 we got a couple spots across already. Okay, we've got Cedar City hot charts with the dozer trying to punch that little line in going down from pilot point down into the creek. I want to expedite that thing's closing in on the safety zone. So you're going to have to kind of keep a close eye on that column coming up the southeast side there if we need to maybe move people out of there. Does it look like it's going to hit that road pretty hard? Flanking off the off the hill parallel on the road but you know that could all change. In the process of we've evacuated the Hawkins hella base we're in the process of moving all the personnel over to a new hella base. It's going to be established. Make sure we pick up anything behind both crews that are burning that's probably the priority I was seeing in here right now. If we're going to have a wildland fire use program it can never be zero risk. If we want to take the easy way out and always say no we can do that. I mean it's probably not resource wise but politically it's usually easier to let it be a suppression action. We're always heroes when we're suppressing. We're less than heroes sometimes in this phase. I guess my perspective is when I come down it's not just to look over folks' shoulders and try to play gotcha at all. I try to come in and say what you know what support can I give you, what advice, what do you need, where can I fit in and hopefully I try to do that. It's not just the old joke about I'm from the IRO and I'm here to help you know. It's a bad feeling to really have something happen like threatening enterprise that when you started into the process you absolutely discounted that as a possibility. It got there on that aspect that south aspect with a wind on it ran from here to here in about 45 minutes, two and a half, three miles. So it it was very spectacular you know visible from anybody who was looking anywhere because that mountain's so high. Fine fuels but it was you know a lot of fire up on top and very visible. Reaction from the folks in town or our incident command team I was okay this is this is heading towards town. You know at that point it got to a level where I was I was uncomfortable because I could see the I could see the glow and as I think Gary described it it was still quite a ways away but it was there and in the minds of those people my credibility was taking a dive and the agency rep on at least three of them and then this one it was all suppression you know we were really dry things were burning between Randy and I we had been you know out here and talking to the ranchers and they were saying let it burn let it burn those kinds that's the message we were getting from them plus this community that you just came through enterprises is a wonderful wonderful community a very supportive community and in multiple use management and and understand the the the need to to change some of the vegetation out here it was just getting overgrown and and so forth so I in my feeling was we had a lot of support here when Brett told me that we had an option to use fire use that's all I heard I was I was really excited that when these guys called me and said we just got two fires going in the last peak area I'm going you know and then Brett had said we have an opportunity to use fire use I just was all all ears that's what I wanted to hear knowing this country and knowing what what we had between there and enterprise and not any in holdings and no structures whatsoever except this little cabin you'll see you know I just couldn't see why we would do anything different than let it go I'd like to add just one more thing well Bevin mentioned some of the cooperation with the local people there's three grazing allotments involved approximately 16 ranchers and we had been on the phone basically with the lead guy from each of the allotments and they all concurred that they wanted to allow the make it a wildfire use and let it go when we redid the NEPA for grazing permit issuance in 95 we did identify several burn projects thousand to 1500 acres in this country out west so they were on board with us when you approach these folks you were thinking on a 1500 2000 acre fire what kind of reaction have you gotten out of 35,000 a year before it had been in 2003 we had planned to do a burn in the lost peak and we had written a letter and had concurrence from the six ranchers on the bull valley allotment in the heart by lost peak that we were looking at 1500 or 2000 acres since it got so large and it burned pertinent near the entire heart out of the bull valley allotment which is where we're going to keep the cattle off for two years they don't like it but they understand it will be a hardship on them for two years but if they can get through this two-year period of complete grazing rest they'll have one of the best ranges on the on the ranger district bevin caught me at home and i was reacting not a whole lot different from bevin the the plan had been to do a prescribed burn out there we call it the greek peak project we tried to do it four or five years earlier had very limited success only got probably four to five hundred acres burned out of an 800 acre area division-wide resources had been on our case according to Doug meverly who's our regional manager up here in cedar city for 20 years trying to get a vegetation manipulation project out there for deer if you'd seen the country and maybe we'll see some pieces over that didn't burn the oak price was so thick the deer couldn't even walk through it is that bad blm had no no other issues in terms of private land structures or anything else this was a good area for us to take some fire we went into the office the next day made a lot of phone calls and in reality started to set in and there's a couple issues here that are going to come up from time to time when you have a boundary between the two agencies unfortunately our planning is never linked together like i think it ought to be where we get it all done at the same time that go no go checklist as you heard everybody talk about that conversation on the phone that night and i was at home and i get a feeling from all the line officers after i give them the input of what i think the fire is going to do the the things at risk try to describe those and get what they're thinking about the event now did i describe how many acres 35 000 potential no didn't describe that didn't think that was going to happen i think we talked a little bit about the 7 000 acre when inside this mental MMA of roads we talked about you know that's probably a really good realistic potential fire size so hopefully we displayed those all of those things go into the go no go decision on that call that night and with all the line officers making sure i'm telling them everything i know from the 15 years of doing fire in this area from doing prescribed fire on that peak you know in 1998 what i saw what i think the weather is going to do and that full range of this is what i think the outside limits going to be and then i sit back and listen and if i'm doing more talking than i do and listening then i'm not doing my job once they get that information and i hear jim or bob or bevin or whoever asking questions and following a trail on you know how big is it's going to be and i hear their concerns those are the type of things i try to identify and expand on with what i know or what i think is going to happen that's it seems like the only way to keep the information in the decision makers mind is to help them with all the experience that you have on doing that after spending time with breath that night i i set up a public meeting uh in enterprise the next afternoon um to start talking what we're doing to give them some information about um fire use and and it really paid off because we started getting a few people we had everywhere from two to 40 and we did it every night at the same time at the fire station we even had served hot dogs and hamburgers one night uh and but yet it was very important for them people to know why we were going to do this and it was amazing how much support we got um later on in the fire when it kind of started making a run then you know it was a little different but um they they were very supportive of it and and to tell them what we were doing and how we had planned to burn there anyway and and we were trying to hold it in that area that he talked about seven thousand acres was very important that we talked to those people let them know what we were doing all along the way now myself speaking as a range con that's been on the district i think 16 years uh you've got to get a feel for what the country has a landscape ecosystem what it needs and from my perspective the support that i had for implementing a wild landfire use program here was just pretty awesome i had support from uh the fmo ox and and the district ranger bevin uh from bret fey for supervisor on on up and and that was very good to have that support to implement something that is going to be is it's going to work on the ground it was something that needed to be done and that support is really really nice to have we worked well together even under some stressful situations and uh and actually in the long run it turned out well because we're lucky last year to have a national type one helicopter crane in sear city and we used it extensively one of my ideas is the reservoir behind you that's nice and full right now uh was not so full last year but it was still had you know lots of you know probably 30 acres worth of surface area of water in it our idea the short turnaround to this area you know we're talking a half mile three quarter mile and 1800 gallons and a type one helicopter you can slow down a fire pretty well for mitigation measures well about midday on the 29th after we got back on the ground we thought about spooling up the helicopter and started working if we needed to to support this road uh found out that um there the water in this reservoir was not available to us to be able to do that that was like a hand grenade i think is a term i used uh that day and you know i assumed what we did early in the spring with this helicopter is identified areas through the state to make sure that they're available to use this water because it's drop conditions water's very precious so we did that early season this was available well something changed uh the level went down um so we were informed we weren't able to use that which changed our tactics quite a bit with that air support who knows how that would have changed things and but um that was one of the things in my mind that was going to be very effective to be able to support the hotjack crew or whatever tactics we're going to use on this road and that first first couple day day there when you you know you said how you had things covered out here with the operations people running operations and you were fire use manager but that time too we talked in the scenario there's a lot of ia going on and you had some other large fires of suppression and you were the fire use manager who was providing that other oversight as for duty officer for the suppression stuff were you trying to do that as your fire use manager also good question rod yeah you know there was a lot of stuff going on another thing that i mentioned on the way out is our fire center manager who usually i really rely on for the big picture situational awareness when i i need to be concentrated on something was out the arena we tried to order in somebody to help and bolster that kind of shadow me to help with the suppression fires and everything else for this time period we weren't actually able to get it until patty showed up well we requested patty to come down and so with her coming down and to give me a little more horsepower on the wildland fire use i was able to back off on that taking my full concentration and maintaining communication with the duty officers around the forest for suppression operations i think it was about three or four days later we did get somebody else in to help in the center manager to take that floor officer i think we called it to look at the big picture with suppression fire use all the teams we had going on so it was in our mind we weren't in my mind it we weren't i didn't react to it as quickly as i should have had some people here to help us a little bit earlier than we did those of you who remember dav banell when he was the four service fire national fire use specialist he used to chide me on this all the time it's a thomas you're wishing for a fire and i always thought what he was doing with that was fighting my own group think you know what i mean and i'm not offering this as a critique but but i'm just wondering do you guys have a team a culture where if jim or somebody said hey i feel a little bit uncomfortable with this stuff that it can be surfaced you know what i mean in disgust and i throw that out not to put you on a spot but just thinking of that hro stuff because you know trying to get that discordant thought on the table so everything's on the table is a really hard maneuver in this business so maybe just a comment on that i listened to brett when we have a fire i listened to brian you know i don't know fire like you guys do i do listen to my people and when you when you have people telling you that this country needs this or this country needs that you you have that in your mind you think about it you put it through your mind and develop how would you react to the communities when you when you get that situation and you know like i said we had been fighting fire all summer and everything was suppressed suppressed suppressed and and then brett found a window and and so i was you know ready firing but at the same time i i don't ever do i never push him into a corner i let him call the shots and then and then i put in what i want done and how we'd manage it and how we'd get something done with it and how we'd get benefits out of it it's that was what it was all about for me is the benefit of what we would get and and yeah i if jim would have said no we can't we can't handle one right now then then i'd have minded backed off a little bit but uh there was no reason to with the setup that we had i'll just add from uh maybe a little different level or different perspective our color country fire organization is set up so that it managed by a board of directors that includes me and jim and the other agency managers down here that are partners including the state of Idaho and i think we do have a very good mechanism you know to surface those kind of things and deal with them if if in fact they come up and i and i agree with uh with debon that if jim would have said you know we just can't handle this right now i i think you know we it probably would not have happened i think if we had envisioned that this thing would be um you know would be involving private lands and had talked to the state and they would have said you know we just don't think this is a good idea i think we have a mechanism in place to to deal with that once the fire did jump the road the next question was where's it going and i just kind of i had to stop and pause a minute and it was almost a flip of a coin uh the general steam road progresses to the south and uh the next three miles south of here is where it did jump the road and it got into a lot of this steep oh nasty country here in what we call racer canyon the prominent peak there on the skyline is windy peak and of course this flat top mountain here is is called flat top mountain and that's the run it made on the i guess on the 30th and 31st but it got down into all this steep nasty volcanic tough rocky stuff was skunking around it would heat up we'd get some pretty good flames then it would kind of die out and and uh uh that was kind of where we made plans for the i guess the next day it was still a wildland fire use fire at the time it did across the road because we only had about three to four hundred acres across the road if i remember right and we really weren't guessing that it was going to come out of there like it did i was in town telling him that we're stopping it at the road and i appreciate bob reminding me that because that's what i was doing at that point i was not hearing really what was going on so i was going on with the public in my meeting at five p.m we're stopping it at the road it's going to be a place that where we could stop it so that's what i was doing and and then it did jump what while i was talking and the fire had moved from the point of origin and when we're flying about noon in here so it had moved a mile and a half pretty much to the east forecast was no west winds i mean that we had two conflicting forecasts but one of them said the winds would be shifting to the south so my mind at that point after we got on the ground okay it's going to move this way until mid afternoon 1400 and then the south winds come down slope towards the reservoir and the campground this is the point of concern and we'd have time to prep over here in the afternoon burn out in the evenings get that secured well you can see this train and every time i come out here it amazes me of how confused the train in this country is on how you know different aspects the wind channeling and etc does but generally there's a ridge that runs east west here from the point of origin all the way over into this canyon you know it's pretty prominent but it's fairly broken up difficult fire behavior tell you south aspects you know and the up slopes runs are the way it's going to go for some reason this fire decided to stay up on the spine of the ridge with the wind and travel all the way down towards this road not go with any sort of southwest winds if they showed up and head towards this point of concern brett's kind of laid out our options we i know we had a conversation with you patty on the phone and we talked about a lot of those options and found out that yes indeed we did have all those options under wildland fire use um and and so basically uh i was extremely uncomfortable with the direct uh approach that had been suggested and you can see why looking down in there just uh was of significant concern to me to put people down in there the other thing is i recall the smoke was such that we really couldn't get any kind of aircraft support for whatever we'd be doing uh you know we just wouldn't be able to operate down down on that end of the fire at all and so um you know it was my decision not to do that and and to go indirect but to keep it in in wildland fire use um at at that point um though i didn't really have to you know by protocol you know i started to think you know i really ought to talk to jack a little bit about what's going on out here you know especially when uh when we're telling the people in enterprise that we think we can hold this at the at the general steam road and then we are unable to hold it at the general steam road and um you know we've we've definitely moved into a different situation and so um so i gave jack a call at home and we talked about um we talked about that and what was going on in the region and whether you know whether that was a reasonable risk uh you know take to keep it in wildland fire use and maybe jack you want to take it from there right but i can share with you a few key thoughts i had uh the first one was uh just just setting stage here a little bit i think we were prepared to level three nationally i'm just talking with patty about that i know we weren't four and five or this whole thing would have come to the region for approval for starters anyhow so i'm thinking uh this is it seemed like the first time like three or four summers this late we were actually not in preparedness level four and five nationally which is a huge thing at my level that we have to think about in terms of available resources and what could happen in all you know all the pros and cons i am very supportive that hindsight was at the time with the decision-making process that went on with here the blm was involved and i was thinking even though we were in a long-term drought we were in preparedness level three all the things you y'all talked about if we'd have made a no-go decision here in my mind that would tell me that we would almost always make a no-go decision around our region bob and i did have a conversation about well you know what what about bad outcomes and we're you know where did this all go and we had the typical conversation because everyone in this in this agency and i assume it's in other agencies as well is worried about accountability and the risk and just the whole risk assessment thing with this this line of business so i remember talking about about two or three things one was uh if we're gonna have a wildland fire use program it can never be zero risk if we want to take the easy way out and always say no it's we can do that i mean it's i mean probably uh not resource-wise but but politically it'll it's it's usually easier to take the you know let it be a suppression action we're always heroes when we're in when we're when we're suppressing we're less than heroes sometime in in in this phase so so i just tried to reassure bob that where i was personally is it's not a zero risk game and that as long as we are comfortable we're doing what we said we were going to do in terms of following our processes i was very comfortable yeah i just wanted to re-emphasize um dave mentioned earlier about the group thing and make sure you're touching all the things that you can think of that can go wrong i think it was that day that patty showed up and you know we went into another room that was fairly quiet and this is what's going on you know give me your perspective on how we're managing things and she shook her head and said what the heck are you people no we talked a lot about options uh potential fire behavior this is the next step in the the fire progression what was going on unless we lose perspective of what was going on with pine park 2 how it related to this fire how close they were and the wilderness fire is over here and how to how to incorporate the the big picture into that decision but it's important to share that decision-making i think at every point that you're making or things don't go according to plan as jack says you know do you have a plan as a good plan well we had a plan we thought it was a good plan but things changed so the next challenge for us was to come up with another good plan for adapting to the new situation that's what we're trying to do okay i'm gonna i am going to talk about the 30th and that's when the wind started really coming uh we had a uh information person there who was telling me that people are calling and and saying that they can't breathe because of the smoke and just kind of really got me going um so i knew i needed to get out here to enterprise but my phone rang and i i stepped outside and this really happened um a retired forest service employee um mac tomsen who's down here if you know mac you know he's he's just the biggest jokester in the world but he wasn't joking but i didn't know that um he says so you know there's no golf courses in tonopah i said so he says uh you know you're almost ready to go to tonopah i says okay come on mac what do you thought he says i know rangers that got put in closets for what you're doing and finally i realized he's he's not kidding and um and i think he was just doing it to because he was my friend to make me realize what i what i was doing and i guess he was resting that all on me and and i was dumb enough to to not even know the implications of that but that happened and then i decided i better get the enterprise if people are joking and they can't breathe and they can't uh i i better get out there and as i came at you know the smoke was really laying down and it was looking bad and um i remember coming into enterprise and there was a big red ball right there uh above the fire station that looked kind of ugly and at five o'clock we had a meeting at the fire station um we that's what it had jumped here and was making a run to across flat top um and i said we really believe that the wind's gonna calm down anytime now when one lady spoke up said who the hell are you a tourist i realized where i where i stood right then and and so i i i had to come up with another tactic i guess and anyway while i was talking and while we were discussing and talking about a lot of things and the fire chief was there believe me he was right there with me all the time ret calden said we're we're uh transitioning to a type one team we're sending some heavies so i got phone i said you're going to see an air show now and within 10 minutes the first heavy came over town and it was like i just gave them all candy it the they just settled down and it was just like um we get well it it was like i gave them a sleeping pill they just calmed them down and it really uh all the difference so well in the meantime um gary's team was in place the type three team we took a lot of gary's resources to bolster the type three team we had i don't know how many engines out there and you know three hot-shot crews we were doing a lot of you know get ready to burn out to protect the the town so this between 1631 headed up here and across the top was a very busy time during the fire transition and made a lot of set up a lot of the decisions subsequent that evening on what happened here how visible it was there and was a meeting our objectives and how far out of the the second good plan on this fire that we had to hold it here and ready to burn this out now we're into trying to develop our third good plan and following it on this fire and again the time frame from here 28th of the evening to the evening of the 30th you know we're talking two burn days and about 10 or 12 miles of fire travel everybody was busy i was listening to voices everybody was doing their job they weren't strained back and forth um you know it was an exciting time though and at this point in this a little bit personal but i grabbed bob out in the hallway you know me telling him that you know this is a good fire you know the evening of the 28th signing the paper on the 29th bob it's gonna be good no problem and then convert it to a suppression event it's the last thing you want to tell your line officer so you're thinking of ways that why shouldn't we do this why should we keep it in wildland fire use but all the indicators we're telling you that this is not a good fire anymore that's the most difficult decision you're ever going to make is now we've got a change to a suppression mode but and i there you go again back to my thing the appropriate management response is what you went to and i think that's what you have to look at it i don't think it was a bad fire yet but you're right not a bad fire but in our community when you you plan on doing one thing here's the third plan that didn't go as planned and we're going into actually a fourth plan now and trying to make that successful so if you're looking at it from that perspective our plans have not worked three successive times and we're into our fourth one you know it is i think conceivable if we would have made and we did talk about this made the call to keep this in wildland fire use uh we probably from a resource standpoint and even from the standpoint of the town enterprise could have survived that decision well the thing i could i think we could not have survived was the public perception that we were still managing that thing as a wildland use fire while we were preparing indoor burning out on private property even though strictly speaking our fire was not on private property we were still within that mma at that point the question was did our burnout i guess along this show creek road and down toward cast springs and up toward pilot peak did the fire actually hit our burnout operation the burnout operation on this division no the fire never did progress that way it was wind driven this way from this point south and all the way down to here the fire hit our burnout it hit the line hard that was essential to controlling the fire from moving towards enterprise yes it was i don't care how it looks for region four or or me on this what counts is that we follow uh you know our our thought progression and when it's time it's time and one of the criteria should not be well how does it make the region look so i just wanted to make that point so i think i said yeah bob sounds like it was time to do that don't worry about it second point i wanted to make is going back and when i get briefed on these things uh going back remember this is preparedness level three when things don't go according to plan as they don't sometime we had access to resources and clear back from the very first beginning of this one of the reasons i told you i wasn't too stressed out was you know if things change we can get resources and and adapt as things change and they did happen and so i think that's a key point if this had been preparedness level five nationally and there weren't resources to help us i mean whole different deal the worry and stress level is going to get higher and the third point i wanted to make is just standing here watching this it strikes me and i think bob mentioned this to me that night some tremendously skillful work went on that day to do that burning out and it worked and all that happened before that type one team got here and so i think that is that's a true compliment to the people on the ground the two uh gary cone's team who's part of all that that we need to remember i did want to spend a few minutes though on that decision to go suppression and just give my observations we had conversations all day long once i got here and i know there had been a lot going on the previous day and i think anyone would say the same thing there's little red flags you know it goes sideways it goes sideways it goes sideways when when is enough enough and it's not a black and white answer and that's why i think we had so many discussions with our partners with the locals every everyone involved so there's just you know there's just a lot of feelings and you try to pick up on things and one thing i don't i don't know if it can come out in a setting like this is some of the emotions so i think you have to try to explain where what you're feeling and i was really trying to pick up on how people were feeling not just whether we're following policy and you know the letter of the MMA line and all of those things and and all those little things started adding up to me like the BLM you know it was starting to move south that day and they had a limitation of how many acres really met their plan and there was a little bit of not certain if if that really fit in quite right i i could tell at least from my perspective it felt like they would be more comfortable if we went to a confined contained strategy of course that meant by policy because we can't do more than one strategy on a fire that we would have to stop doing wildland fire use on our site so we had that discussion several times during the day um and i know a lot of us or at least some of us had had discussions and we know and feel and understand that we can do anything on a wildland fire use event that we do on a suppression event but i don't know that everybody's there and i don't know that our public is there but to look at it now i you can i think you can argue hey we could have hung on to that look it didn't there was just that one little piece of burnout you know but you have to understand where you were at the time and at the time it felt like we pushed it enough we pushed it we'd had discussion um decision points about three times that day plus one the previous day and it just felt like we're probably there and if and if we go any farther if that fire decides to take off towards enterprise or do anything unexpected the next day we'll kind of go back and i worried about us losing credibility with our public and with our partners and finally no one went to say when and so i felt good about uh where we came to that decision and you can hindsight i think you can you can make lots of discussions either way but my feeling at the time when we finally said yeah let's throw in the towel i felt like there was a collective sigh that went off in the room and and and i could be imagining things but i felt like there was just kind of a sigh and almost a well it's about time they came to their senses you know thank god so you know whether that's accurate i i got to think there was at least a little of that or i don't know that i would have picked that up but um i you know we're all going to be in different places and my where i was coming from is i don't know that it's failure to go from while on fire used to suppression as much as it is it would be failure to have something bad happen because you dig your heels in and and worry about what you call it i'll never forget that the evening that it actually come around the end of flat top between flat top and pilot peak i was with bill murphy at the time the county fire warden and as it come around the corner he looked at me says jeff this is your fire what do you want i've only been a fire chief for two years i've been on the fire department for a lot of years but we need to understand that we hadn't been faced with anything like the hawkins fire before when that fire come roaring around the end of flat top um in our perspective it was head right for enterprise but as it turned out we started calling in some resources actually bill started calling in some resources and um i started to feel quite a bit of relief right then i knew that i still had a lot of responsibility there we still had a lot of worry about um possible evacuations as time went on and i think randy was probably even talking about this a little bit this area right here that we're in right here we come up here to do some evacuations we've made the decision that we need to do some evacuations up here number one with the fire pushing this where the prevailing winds but also they were going to do that burnout right along the back of me right here and some people were really really good about it um didn't have a minute's hesitation other people really gave us some flak um did not want to leave matter of fact told us straight out that they were not going to leave and so we had to move on to the next one um but i can tell you that since that happened i have seen some of the people living on the outskirts of town doing some mitigation of their own they're starting to ladder up the trees and clearing out some of the trees um a lot of good has come from that when the hawkins fire was first reported to me and i was informed that it was going to be handled as a fire use fire my first question was didn't two or three weeks beforehand we spent an awful lot of money just south of there to make sure it didn't get up on here so i thought well i have to trust my partners and let them do what they want and they said it was 40 to 100 acres something on that magnitude and i i can't really honestly think that i ever got any additional updates i'm sure i must have but they didn't register with me one of the things that would be real handy is to be able to talk to the folks on this end but having been in that position more times than i care to remember my chances are getting ahold of brett and having any kind of conversation with him at that point in time would have been almost minimal because he was he was extremely busy at that point in time and i guess it goes down to lack of communication i really appreciate having had the opportunity to come here and hear the blow by blow events of what happened here because there was a lot of missing pieces i have a lot of trust of the folks down here but when you don't have those pieces to fill in the gaps sometimes you can create your own fiction and unfortunately that fiction sometimes what the heck are those dummies doing and that's not not my intent to do that but uh it helps to understand what the events occurred and that's one of the reasons i appreciate this with respect to this fire i i think that uh we had a chance to use a tool we made a good decision to use it and and as i said before i think that uh good people did the right thing here step by step we didn't end up with the outcome that we planned but i'm very comfortable with how people handle themselves in this process the most important part of this whole two days that we've been uh been doing this and that's the integration phase where we uh we try to bring uh a coherent view to everything that you've been reading and you've been thinking about and the talks that you had last night what you were thinking about this morning all the questions that are still unanswered and how you can bring this all together and i want to encourage you to be candid and open and honest we owe a great deal of thanks to uh to the Dixie for opening up their books and and showing us you know where they made mistakes where they did things right things that they may not be proud of and and things that they are proud of and you know i think it's incredibly admirable that uh that bob russell and brett fray in particular and bevin as well to just be so open and honest and that's how we need to conclude this is really be candid uh you know be respectful i'm not saying you know be disrespectful in any way be respectful but open and candid the first thing that really uh struck me about this trip was the commitment from the forest supervisor down to the local level um i come the bt know everybody says we have a pretty good program but we're still struggling to convince some of the line officers that that they really want to have fire used and and what happens there is when you have something like that is is that when things start to go wrong it turns into a panic and then it's always the fire people or somebody else that wanted to have the fire it's much easier to deal with things when they go wrong if you have support um it makes a huge difference one thing that i did notice that each of the stands was how adaptive this organization was to what was occurring filling in positions with maybe not the most um normal uh use of the uh fire use team putting them where they were needed merged them in with the type one organization so they were willing to adapt based on the situation that was out there which i think is not unique in the forest service but it's it's really great to see and it happens quite a bit in fire one thing uh that's changed for me a little bit my perspective and i've been involved with fire use for quite a few years now and i sensed it a little bit here is that uh there's tends to be a stigma or that we feel like we've failed if in fact we've made the conversion to a suppression fire and one thing that's that i'm changing my view a bit is that it's just and looking at it is just a continuum in the process of decisions and that there really was no failure and i i hope that our culture changes a little bit so that managers like myself can support fire people that that it's not a bad thing um i'm a little bit concerned if that stigma continues that the need to convert will have to be made and it won't be and then we'll get somebody heard or been burn up some some structures i didn't consider the fire a problem at all i mean you were what's dave talk about being resilient every time something went wrong and you had a curveball thrown at you you dealt with it and and what the other thing i saw is even after you decide to go to type one team you know sometimes the tendency is to just pull back and give up and you didn't i mean the stuff that you did that last day with a burnout basically you finally dealt with the fire and it's easy to give up it's easy after two or three failures to give up and uh and and just say well we'll let the team deal with it and you didn't and that's that's huge but the fact that you looked at this fire and you went forward with it you know that's okay maybe you were a little bit outside of where your comfort level was but now when you have other fires you'll have sort of a benchmark you know we talked about bringing a team in and the nice thing about bringing a team is you do have somebody you have some people that may be a little more dispassionate that look at things from a fire behavior standpoint i know patty came down and that really helps and i guess the only thing to you know maybe that you would have thought about is i don't know if you had somebody look at the fire not as a fire use manager but just as a fire behavior person that wasn't involved in the direct management that said you know have you thought about this or thought about that and that really helps i think you know patty probably did that when you came down but sometimes i don't want to say you fall in love with a fire but sometimes you get going on it as the manager and and sometimes you need somebody to come in and just say did you look over here or what if something like this happens and that's big from this event just from you guys coming and finding out that there's a lot more to you know the importance of planning importance of doing the right thing and making things happen that we want to make happen to benefit the the resource we're very busy on this ranger district with the very few people and and yeah it was good for us to come and let you experience what we we had last year i've learned from just your comments how important it is to do the right thing and i think we need to stop and reflect and say what did we do right and how what would happen if it would have went wrong and so you know this will help me prepare for the next time and and give me another layer of comfort zone out there that i can depend on because i've been there so i really appreciate you having this and again my first reaction was all not us but i appreciate that i got to be involved in this so thanks i really believe what bob and bratt and bevin and the whole crew down here have done in the last couple of days but before that is there they exemplify what an hro a high reliability organization looks like i mean if white can set cliff we're here they would applaud you guys have opened up your whole decision process to a group of people we had no idea you had no idea how it was going to turn out what people were going to think and and i just want to say to bob and you guys this is not common in fact it's been my experience working with these quote near misses jim you call them wake up calls that our tendency is my tendency to is hey we made it through we lucked out let's sweep it kind of under the rug you know we don't have to deal with it hell everything worked out in the end and and what we have done by doing that is we we're we're not learning we're not we're not as a as a team as a culture trying to pick up on the weak signals so i mean what you guys are doing in the model you're displaying for not only us but the rest of the region is this outstanding something else that i i thought might would be appropriate for for this crowd right here is to let you know what's happened since the hawk and spire um a part of my crew got to work right along this road here that night when they were doing the burnout these were fresh wildland firefighters had just got their red cards maybe a year prior to that um they learned a lot that night about fire and about fire suppression what it can do and we've had people spurred on and wanting to get further education simply because of what's happened right here on this fire but i can tell you that that's one of the the things that's happened from this fire that has in my mind's eye made the community a better community um we're we're getting better training we know now what it's going to take if a system a situation like this happens again and i think we'll be better prepared for that i i myself personally believe that 10 years from now a lot of the details about how this happened won't be as important as what it actually looks like on the ground and i'm not nearly as good as say guys like randy or brian who are veg experts here but from what i saw this morning i'm optimistic that 10 years from now these thousands of acres are going to be some of the best-looking acres around here the allotments are going to be some of the best allotments and that's what's going to sell the bringing back fire into its proper role