 You're up against natural forces now and you need to pay attention to the standard operating procedures or the few standard orders, the ten standard orders that give you a good basis on which to keep yourself safe in that environment. There's not very many times when it's worth people getting hurt in a situation to save a little bit of forest. And so we really need to be aware of our assignments and just, I think, evaluate once we get them to say, okay, is this worth it, basically? You know, there's things that can happen on a quarter acre fire then. You know, if someone does get hurt, a snag could fall on them or something. It's a real danger that people get too complacent and not worry about establishing communication. I don't think it's possible to safely fight a fire without having lookouts, communications, escape routes, and safety zones. Maybe if it was a smaller fire, you wouldn't really need to look out. I think every situation is a little bit different, but for the most part I think that they all for need to be at least a part of your decision-making process when you're on a fire. I think often on a fire, the helicopter pilot is not really viewed as a firefighter and I think that if that pilot is viewed as a firefighter, it's going to be that much more cohesive as far as working as a team and being able to have the same objectives. And I like to think of myself as a firefighter. I have a different tool. I have the helicopter instead of a Pulaski or a chainsaw. But first and foremost, I'm going to fly the aircraft, but I'm using the aircraft to fight fire and I do consider myself a firefighter. I think if more of our people on the ground would understand that, I think that the helicopter could be used even more effectively in the future. There was a tragedy in Southern California where an engine crew had gotten on a fire, the fire blew up and everybody escaped to safety, but some of the personnel went to a different area than was everybody supposed they were supposed to. The supervisor of course went back to check for that person and then became a fatality. And that's where my biggest concern with the shot crew is that, you know, as that safety zone moves, did everybody get the message clearly and cleanly so that when we get there we're all there? Because, you know, sometimes we are scattered about. I guess when I first started fighting fires, there was a lot of things I didn't understand. There's a lot of lingo flying around in fire that only firefighters know and that made it really hard kind of at first was, you know, I'd hear all these terms and things that I'm supposed to go do and a lot of times I didn't even know what that meant, but, you know, I felt kind of stupid to ask. So I guess along the same lines of what I, you know, if I was going to tell a new person, kind of along the same lines, don't feel dumb ever to ask questions and figure out what's going on because I don't like to not know what's going on as far as, you know, just to feel comfortable. I like to be in the loop a bit, you know, what I'm supposed to be doing and so that was actually one of the things that when I started fighting fires I wished someone would have sat me down a little bit and kind of explained the whole how things work. You tend to see plans on, like you said, or like flashy fields and stuff when you're looking at safety hazards and stuff or looking at anything even before you start a plan, you always have a plan A, a plan B and a plan C. You know, you go in with just a plan A and that plan blows up and you put in, you know, you've got X amount of crew members underneath you that you're going to be put into a hairy situation. So when I go into the strategy I always look at, you know, two to three different plans that are going to work or if plan A doesn't work, you know, you can't go in there with the attitude that this is a plan and it's going to work. I always go in there with plan A, plan B and plan C because it comes back to, you know, you watch how situations, if the weather changes, you get a wind or you're in different fuels than you thought you'd be, you know, the fuels were drier than you thought they'd be, then you've got a plan B, you know, you back up and you look at it and you say, well, let's bump down to the next road or let's do something different that's not going to put this crew into a situation. Hi, I'm Larry Sutton, BLM Training Unit Leader at the Fire Center in Boise. We put this program together to provide you with another tool for refresher training. There's some things out there that people have seen a lot of times and we wanted to put something new out there and our concept was to have it be like a conversation among all of us, kind of like you'd have on a fire where you're talking to people, sorting through things, figuring out what's going on and maybe have that conversation a little bit earlier in the year. We all know that physical fitness is really important in firefighting and I guess we need to consider that mental fitness is just as important and that this is one way to get your head back in the game is to go through this type of program and think through what's going to happen when you're out there this summer, how you're going to do things safely and operate in the kinds of environments that we get into. A lot of times you'll hear people tell you to be safe out there but what does that really mean? What are they really getting at when they say that? Maybe they don't know but we need to as firefighters. So I think you'll get a lot more out of this program if you participate in it. We can all learn from each other. You can learn from your peers both that are in this program and that are sitting around the table with you. So I hope you enjoy the program and have a safe season and make lots of money. The Bureau of Land Management Fire Training Program presents Fireline Safety Refresher Training and now the host of your program, Ted Mason. Hello and welcome to BLM's Fireline Safety Refresher Training. In this training session we're going to explore many of the aspects of safety on the fire line. We're going to help you brush up on your basic safety awareness and take a look at some real-life examples of lessons learned out on the ground. Throughout this course you'll be working with your local facilitator to complete the exercises that we've kind of cooked up for you here and to facilitate some discussions on fire line safety. Your participation is key to making this training successful so please don't just sit there. But before we go any further I'd like to introduce our panel of safety experts who will be joining me as we look at some safety in fire operations. From Las Vegas, Nevada we have Nicole Halisey. She's an experienced engine captain who has some unique perspectives to share with us on fire safety. Welcome Nicole. Thanks Ted. I'm excited to be here working with you, the panel members and everyone out there. I hope I can indeed offer some unique perspectives on fire line safety and hopefully some insight into engine operations. Good and from Boise, Idaho to discuss helitack operations and what we'll need to keep in mind as we head out into this coming fire season is Brad Bolin. Brad, thanks for being here. Hello everyone, it's a pleasure to be here discussing fire line safety with everyone. And also from Boise to provide the smoke jumper point of view is Hector Madrid. I believe you have a recent story you're going to share with us and involving the use of LCES. How you doing Hector? Glad to be here Ted. Hopefully today I can offer you a different twist on fire line safety from the smoke jumpers perspective and yes we'll be discussing LCES a little bit more later on. Good and completing our panel from Jackson, Mississippi to provide us with some real on the ground perspectives is a good friend of mine Lamar Lydell who is the superintendent of the Jackson hot shots. Hello Ted. I'm excited to be here and offer a perspective from a hot shot point of view. Good. Looking forward to it. In order for you to complete this refresher training you'll need to have a copy of your course workbook which your facilitator should have passed out to you. Your workbook contains our training objectives, information on the topics we'll be covering and some training exercises and then at the end also an evaluation. To help you follow along we'll be referring to pages in your workbook as we discuss the many aspects of fire line safety. And in your workbook on page 3 you can also find some biographical information on our panelists and some of the key speakers you'll see in our videos. One final word before we get started. This is called refresher training for a reason. Although you have probably heard a lot of this information many times before humans have a tendency to store or file away information that they don't use on a regular basis. The purpose of this training is to pull this information back out of that filing cabinet in your brain and make it readily available for you to use during the approaching fire season. The panelists and myself will do our best to help you retrieve this information but we realize that the best resource for this task is probably yourself and perhaps the people sitting right next to you right now. No two fires are exactly the same. Everybody has their own unique set of experiences and knowledge. I urge you to share your knowledge and experience while you participate in these exercises and discussions that will follow. I challenge you to leave this training session with at least one new awareness or mental trigger that you can take with you to the fire line that's going to assist you in keeping fire line safety foremost in your mind. Whether you get this from the panelists or from the person sitting right next to you is really not that important. What is important is that during this training you actively seek out new information that will make you, it'll help you make sound safe decisions on the fire line. Now the first thing we're going to review is the 10 standard fire orders. They are listed in your workbook on page eight. Everyone knows that these are also in your fire line handbook and in this incident pocket guide that we all carry on the fire line I'm sure. But remember that using and understanding them is what's really important not just memorizing them. This past winter I had the privilege of sitting down with a man named John Krebs. You can read all about John in your workbook. He started his career in 1958. He spent many years as a FMO or a fire management officer on the St. Joe National Forest and he was a fire behavior analyst for 21 years. John kept me extremely entertained when we were talking about his outdoor adventures in Idaho, his apple orchards, and a black bear hunting story that I'll never forget. But when the subject turned to firefighting things got real serious. Although recently retired John still has a real passion for the 10 standard orders and he was around when they were first initiated into fire service. In your workbook on page five you'll find a reference to a letter that John wrote. In it he talks about the original sequence of the standard orders and why they were written in that order. In the tape you're about to see John will share with us the original grouping of these orders. The first three orders pertain to fire behavior. The second three orders pertain to safety and the third pertain to organizational control. The last order which is now of course listed as number one is fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first. Talking with John gave me a new perspective on utilizing the 10 standard orders as a useful tool during fire operations. Let's take a look. The 10 standard orders, the original 10 standard orders were developed as a result of the man gulch fire in 1949 and I think the chief of the forest service was responsible for assembling a team. They came together these were people that had their feet in the fire that were the old fire horses shoveling plasky people and they came together and they tried to develop some orders that would help the firefighter whether it be a large fire or a small fire and so they they began with what they thought was most important when considering fire suppression and that was fire behavior and we all we always know that one of the most influential things on fire behavior is the weather so the first the orders were grouped fire behavior safety and and an organizational control. Well they started out with the fire weather and the first one they said was keep informed on fire weather conditions and forecasts. Now there's two parts to that. The first deals with the conditions. U is imperative in all of these orders meaning U the firefighter the lowest grunt on the ground. Keep informed on fire weather conditions. Now the forecaster doesn't give you the conditions he gives you the forecast the meteorologist gives you the forecast. The conditions are your responsibility. For instance you might have a forecaster that says you're going to have strong southwesterly winds and you're on the lee side of a ridge and you know those winds curl around over that ridge top strong winds and you get a wind out of the northwest or northeast. That's your responsibility. You've got to measure the condition. You look up and see a cumulus cloud or cumulus castellatus clouds. You know there's instability aloft. That's observations that you make on the job so you keep informed on conditions and then don't forget to ask about the forecast. Nobody has the responsibility to give you a forecast. You have a responsibility to ask for a forecast and I want to just emphasize that time and again if you review fires you'll find that this is one of the things that's often overlooked. Failure to obtain a forecast. Failure to keep in mind the weather conditions with belt weather kits and observations. The second of those fire orders that deal with fire behavior has to deal with knowing what your fire is doing at all times. You observe personally, you use scouts, lookouts, whatever to try to keep a handle on how your fire is behaving and then you ask keep base all actions on current and expected behavior of the fire. So you've analyzed this from the weather, you've analyzed it from the topography and time of day and all this to base those actions on what you see currently and what you anticipate will happen and that also brings in fire history because what did the fire do last night for instance is very important when evaluating what the fire is going to do in the heat of the day when the humidities are much lower and the weather completely changes. Well then it goes from that Ted into the orders that deal with safety and we know orders that talk about you know maintaining a lookout when there's possible danger. It says post a lookout when there's possible danger. You post a lookout when there's possible danger. Not somebody else, of course you might not be the person in charge meaning you say hey a little problem that this snag over here is burning and I've got a big fire line I think I need a lookout if there's a limb going to fall out of the tree or if you've been falling trees that have fire in them you know you got somebody there to tap on your shoulder with a branch if there's an ember coming down from above it's going to give you some problems. So that's posting the lookout when there's possible danger. Have escape routes for everyone and make them known. The supervisor is usually the person that has escape routes making them known as his responsibility. Knowing them is your responsibility. You ask that person hey where's the escape route? Do we need it? Well you might not need an escape route if you've evaluated that fire behavior and the conditions are such that the fire is not the threat. So you might not need that. The next one has to deal with keeping alert you know be alert keep calm think clearly act decisively. Really that's hard to do after a 24-hour shift and you're out there and you know one of the 18 situations that shot watch out if you feel like taking a nap near a fire well how do you be alert keep calm think clearly and act decisively when when the sun is just beginning to shine in on you after spending all night on the fire and you think oh man I've got to have a little nap here. Well you do this because you've analyzed this fire behavior and and so you've got an analytical way of looking at things and that helps you to put that down in writing to stay alert when you really your body is saying hey man I can't do this anymore. So those three deal with safety and I know you can elaborate on those from your experiences and then we get into organizational control and organizational control means maintaining control of your forces at all times. Now how do you do that? Well Pulaski in the 1910 fire did it with a revolver and he kept 40 some people in a cave on the fire well you don't need a revolver if you've analyzed these fire behavior orders because that helps to maintain control of your people they feel free to ask questions of the supervisor to collectively look at what the fire is going to do so maintaining control becomes a thing that's a whole lot easier and then you talk about maintaining prompt communications with your men your boss and adjoining forces something that has to be done in order to to know what's going on one way to know what's going on but it's a two way street when we talk about about maintaining prompt communications or giving clear instructions and being sure they're understood that's two ways and I give clear instructions you give clear instructions the receiver doesn't understand the thing they need to ask I need to ask if the instruction is not clear again analysis looking at the situation you're in when you take a break that's important and the instructions will become clear when you do that I think the grouping is really summarized when you talk about the first of the fire orders as compared to the last of the standard orders the 10 standard the first of the fire order said fight fire aggressively but provide for safety first now you can't fight fire aggressively until you've analyzed the fire behavior until you've looked at it and said hey I'm not going to be bitten by by this kind of action you know you can't know what kind of of escape routes lookouts what have you until you've evaluated what the fire behavior is going to be so those things follow sequentially and then when you get to the last order again fight fire aggressively having gone through this method of evaluation my thought is article is really I related to it well and the way he divided it up the the process that he goes through hits home a lot more for me and the best part of it is the is the last part where he says fight fire aggressively but providing for safety first I like that the best it's key something in my mind rather than but provide for safety first I definitely like providing for safety first I think that they're being utilized people don't consciously think about it because it becomes ingrained it becomes intuitive and in the back of their mind I think they're thinking about it it's in the decision-making process and you go through that analysis type thing then then it's being considered but but in terms of of just consciously clicking through one through ten or trying to use the new monic I don't think that happens but I think all decisions are the majority of the decisions that are made they are the foundation they are the fundamentals and I think they're being considered well we we've always had a standard to abide by a guideline to remember to protect ourselves to help each other all pretty much rolled into a heads up situation these are things to look out for and so on and so forth and more so than anything with with myself it's a matter of common sense now did I have that common sense when I was 18 no but through a period of time and a certain amount of fires I suppose you you come to grips with the the necessity and the importance of the guidelines and of the the firefighting orders it just comes about as a stark reality that all of this is is extremely important and and a number of them will probably be tested every fire in reference to the fire ten standard fire orders I believe that they are utilized on a daily basis on fires as a way to make decisions no go go no go decisions I also believe that they are the standard I believe in those standards because I came from an organization that people lost their lives and that's where these came from the El Cariso hot shots and the Cleveland hot shots both had incidents that the 10 and 18 came directly out of so I'm a firm believer in them I know I use them both to to evaluate a situation and also to brief people that I may be supervising on the fire line and as a reference point to make sure that I have covered my bases and then I'm running a safe operation when I'm out in a fire edge fire line and for using the tins it's uh oh just I don't want to say instinct but you just they use all my senses throughout the operation period of what's going on how it's going they play off each other when you're out there it's um something can happen you don't know why your decision came up but it's it'd be one of the tins something will have changed your mind without you thinking about it directly or reading it it just comes up when you're out there for a while you just you just learn and me the schooling helps don't get me wrong and learning stuff but when you're out there after a while you get common sense and that helps too and they can't teach that those are some excellent comments it certainly makes sense to me to group the standard orders in the manner that John Krebs explains but no matter how you remember them the important thing is that you understand them and that you use them when you're on the fire line making decisions next we're going to go ahead and discuss the 18 watch out situations let's talk for a second about the difference between the 10 standard orders and the 18 watch out situations I'd like to ask our panel members for their thoughts on this one Nicole what do you think is the actual difference between the 10 standard orders and the 18 situations a shout watch out you know Ted a lot of times people refer to it as the 10 and 18 like they're one entity but in actuality they are different concepts with different applications the 10 standard orders are just that they're orders they can't be bent or broken and they must be adhered to at all times the 18 situations that shout watch out or something they should be looking for on the fire line while you're out there they can be compromised if actions are taken to mitigate the risks at the time but one thing you do have to realize is the more 18 situations that you compromise you surround the greater risk of actually compromising or breaking one of your 10 standard orders so that's true good comment anybody else Lamar you got anything Brad you know Ted uh it doesn't really matter to me how you remember the fire orders or the watch out situations as long as you do understand them and apply them correctly Lamar and I agree with Brad also but you know I said you're listening to the to the discussion and field interviews and takes me all the way back to what John Chris was saying about the the order and and the way they're grouped and that's that's really important to me not to say that one's more important than the other uh the thought process is really important and it's easier for some people to remember them the way they're revised but also I think the big difference one of the differences in in the 10 and 18 is that the standard orders are are a guideline for developing our day-to-day operational plans those 18 watch out situations along with lces look up look down look around all are merely tools to help us reinforce those 10 and 18 and that takes us right back to what John Chris was saying and one order that stands out to me more than anything is fire order number six and it speaks of stay alert stay calm think clearly act decisively and I think that's something that we'll look at throughout the the rest of this field at these what we got going on today good comment and I agree with you on that if I like running through the 10 orders as a process the way that John explains it and by doing that that number six stay alert stay calm by being alert that's where you're really seeking out and looking for different watch out situations that might be present think clearly act decisively that's where you're mitigating those 18 situations so to me the 18 kind of play right into that process of running through the 10 standard orders but you know the important thing is everybody has a different way of remembering them important thing is is that you do understand them and you do use them when you're making fire line decisions well let's uh let's take a look at what some other field personnel that that we've interviewed this last winner have to say about watch out situations the 10 standard orders are rules that are there for us for us not to break not to widen the gaps and and adjust them to the way that they fit our needs they're there for a reason people have lost their lives to teach us those and it's our responsibility to honor those folks by learning these and not making the same mistake that they did they are there to help us be aware that we're getting close to breaking maybe it's one of the 10 standard orders we definitely can fight fire you know while breaking 10 or not 10 but say three watch outs that's fine as long as you're thinking about them because we do it as hot shots constantly it's just the name of the game and the job we do but they're there just to to keep our mindset to hey we're getting close to the line now and maybe it's time to open up our eyes a little bit more and really take a little bit better look at the situational awareness that we have right now think that the 10 standard orders are guidelines that keep you safe while you're on the fire line and i've always kind of looked at the 18 standard watch outs is like reality i mean it it's the nature of fire behavior i mean wildfires you're always going to have something that happens i mean you're always gonna you know have be not always but you're going to be working a line downhill or you're going to have stuff rolling out or it's going to get hotter and drier or the winds are going to pick up whatever you know that stuff just happens that's just the nature of fire it seems it seems that there's a connected series of watch outs that to me are the most often it's not that they're misunderstood that they're probably the most often unmitigated and safety zones and escape routes not identified not timed not flagged correctly not communicated not updated and then also instructions and assignments not clear that's the connection there if we're given vague assignments and instructions the escape routes and safety zones are kind of also vague we're not really sure where we're supposed to be going therefore we're not sure where we shouldn't go and then also we're uninformed on strategy tactics and hazards this seems to be the little triangle of miscommunication here that most often leads to to crews getting in trouble and by trouble i mean they get in too far they don't have time to react they don't have time to mitigate the hazards and then they're reacting to the situation rather than proactively saying since we know we're supposed to go here and do this we know our escape route to our safety zone is here and we're all comfortable and and we're proactive we're able to to be aggressive to suppress the fire because we have provided for safety yeah you know one of the things that i see um especially in that transition between say a type three incident and type two incident are kind of administrative watchouts and uh they have to do with the complexity of an organization kind of outracing um outracing people's knowledge of the situation maybe so you have a type two team maybe replacing a type three team you have a whole bunch of resources coming in yet the new management team isn't yet up to snuff on what the fire is actually doing uh it can be the same thing transitioning from initial attack to a type three incident you know you have type three structure coming in to take over yet they don't really know quite what's going on yet yet they've got all this stuff coming in and they're under you know under the gun to really get stuff rolling and to get this fire put out so i see that there should be some kind of well i wouldn't i wouldn't suggest adding it to the list but i think i do see it a lot when we transition from i to type three or type two that there's this administrative watchout that always occurs to me it's like watch out somebody else is taking over this fire and they don't really know what's going on yet there hasn't been a good briefing uh you know some of the stuff is covered in the other watchouts but to me it's the it's the management team is coming watch out and i know everybody's seen it you see it when it goes from type two to type one and every time you transition it it occurs but uh that one i see all the time those were some great comments we just heard and if you're like me you have a lot of comments uh to piggyback on top of what we just heard from those people with their feet in the fire as john would say but i'm going to open it up to the panel right now and does anybody have any comments on what we just heard on the 18? Hector? I sure do Ted um one of the people interviewed said can you break a watch out situation and it's points well taken um yes i feel in a roundabout way and not jeopardize what i'm trying to say here but yeah in their certain circumstances where a watch out probably can be broken let's take for example your station in the middle of Nevada flat rolling terrain, cheat grass, environment, what have you middle of the night your crew gets a call that there's a fire burning somewhere out in the desert in flat rolling country and your assignment when you get there is you tie in with the incident commander he says he wants you and your crew to punch the line along the certain section of the line well you can go down the watch out list and now you're going to find something there that says fire not seen seen or scouted in daylight you know in this particular circumstance the situation may not be that bad and you can proceed with your assignment on the contrary say you received assignment and you were somewhere in the middle of Idaho and a call came into the pay yet and now you're on the salmon river breaks and you know you've got rolling rocks and timber and such you can see where that watch out would now apply so i think a lot of it is going back to common sense and using it as a guide to kind of mitigate a whole lot of measures like that I agree with you it gets back to what John Krebs was talking about as far as it's your responsibility i love how he said that there's a you that's imperative there that it's your responsibility to control and monitor conditions and conditions change depending on where you're at what time of day in fact they're constantly changing whenever you're on a fire operation anybody else well let me ask the panel this when do you know you've broken a number of these watch out situations when do you know is the trigger to say hey i need to step back anybody it's a good question i don't know i think a lot of it like you were saying is common sense uh you you kind of know when you when you kind of cross that line and say well i you know i think uh me and you were talking one time you were talking about Paul Gleason and going through those doors you can't back up well sometimes you make those decisions and you can't back up and you have to keep going with it but if you can you you need to you need to say man i'm we're gonna hold up here this is it all right we've broken too many rules with we've i've seen too many watch out situations and and and we're gonna step back and let this go and i think uh most management teams will understand where you're coming from and and decide to go along with what you're saying okay we won't do this we'll wait till tomorrow Paul Gleason you were talking about that uh those are decision gates who's talking about and once you walk through a decision gate and it happens all the time on a fire line that there's certain spots where you make a decision to go or no go and at that point since you walk through that gate those gates sometimes lock behind you and you can't turn around and reverse that decision uh the watch out situations are in place so that they are to remind you that these conditions are present and we need to try our best to mitigate them and if we can't mitigate them on the spot step back reevaluate situation and look at it with common sense and all the other tools that we have available to us before we make our decisions good job now let's take a look at some recent fire situations one involving a guy named scott sugg off of the boys national forest i believe this has to do with the hilltop fire and brad you were on this fire as i recall but let's go ahead and take a look at the tape right now and see what kind of situation scott found himself in the hilltop fire was located just off of highway 21 about 10 miles from boise, idaho the fuel type was grass and brush the fire started early afternoon and our crew arrived approximately about 15 30 on september 24th we worked with another hella tech crew on the west flank of the fire as they got later in the evening the fire behavior calmed down and the crews began to mop up approximately about 100 feet at about 200 or dusk we had a shift change due to some duty limitations so our crew was headed back into boise to return first thing in the morning while some engines and the instant commander would patrol and monitor the fire throughout the night on our way back to boise we could hear radio traffic about a spot fire caused by winds changing down canyon at about 20 to 25 miles an hour so we radioed the instant commander and asked if we should return he said yes so we headed back up highway 21 to hidden valley road and tied in with him with our type 6 engine our crew was going to be responsible for the north side of the spot fire while the engines would work off a hidden valley road we also tied in with two engine crew members which brought our total to six firefighters at this time we had a briefing about some safety concerns such as spotting wind shifts and lces the spot fire across hidden valley road was headed south southeast towards some structures we anchored into the cold black and off our type 6 engine which was working back towards the road our crew proceeded west on the north flank of the spot fire across the ridge tops with the prevailing winds at our back at about 20 miles per hour which allowed us to use a direct attack method we continued west eventually we would like to tie back into the hidden valley road as we were attempting to make the corner to head south towards the road we came across drainages which the fire behavior and terrain would not allow us to use the direct attack which we have been utilizing this direct attack was not effective because we attempted to use it many times and had had to pull back into our safety zone so at this time the crew had a discussion about building fire line downhill with fire below what strategy and tactics to utilize and potential hazards some individuals wanted to keep it tempting to use the direct attack which at this time was not a real option so we pulled back to our safety zone and watched to see what the fire would do the fire was more active because of the topography and was making runs up the little drainages as we made our way uh as the fire made its way up the drainage it was burning towards lighter fields and near the ridge top where the wind would influence the fire behavior again this would allow us to go more direct or use an indirect method and and drag fire with us to black line our line as we headed south towards hidden valley road we we kept in countering drainage after drainage which presented the same problem again and again so every time we came up to a new drainage we'd have to stop evaluate and look for tactics which could be more effective and as we came up near hidden valley road to the last drainage we heard on the radio that a type 6 engine was working its way towards us and we could see that they were running a hose lay down the office side of the drainage and that's where we would anchor in together Scott made that scenario look pretty darn simple but in fact it was rather a tricky situation he did a good job of keeping that situation from becoming a disaster it's funny but the best decisions on the fire line always seem to be the ones that nobody ever hears about they never make the news but let's ask our panel what their thoughts were on this brad you were on that fire well you know what impressed me the most was the fact that next morning when I was getting the debrief from Scott doing the recon flight I noticed several potentially hazardous situations that they were faced with throughout the night while they were constructing their fire line and as Scott told me what their actions were to mitigate these hazards you know it came clear to me that they were really using a thought process they weren't just going direct or or attacking this fire without making sound judgments and you know that's why I brought this scenario to this group so we could discuss it because it was one of those instances where you know they did everything right and we averted a potentially tragic situation good any other comments Hector yeah you know I'd like to you know confirm what you said about good decisions not making six o'clock news hats off to these guys on this fire it was one of these fires we've never heard much about good sound judgment calls however on the contrary should things have gone bad someone would have been injured or fatalities occurred remember an investigation team would have been there and guarantee they would have been looking into the 10 and 18 they do use those to I mean you'll find those in every investigative report you read that's the first thing they judge your fire tactics on they'll pull those out and look at them so that's a good thing to keep in mind anybody else you know Ted getting back again to basically back to what John Krebs had said you know look at what Scott Sug did here he was updating his tactics continually what worked for him in one drainage may not have worked again so he was continually updating those he was basing everything off of the 10 standard orders in the 18 situations although I really doubt he was pulling out as a you know his handy dandy little card there and checking them out he was probably doing it all intuitively he made good sound decisions and you know we wouldn't have heard about this unless Brad brought it to us and I think more of these situations happen than we realize you know most of our fires are done right the ones that we have a problem with or something goes wrong those are the ones that end up making the news but yeah Scott did a good job I thought of evaluating as he went he didn't just make a plan and try to stick with it that was one of those situations where you dig 50 feet of fire line and you're reevaluating and thinking about the whole situation again and then doing it again every 50 feet and every ridge line he came over he was faced with different set of circumstances so he was monitoring those conditions as John Krebs puts it you know he took his time he took his time and it's exactly like what we're saying in fire over number six took his time he made good sound decisions and it's a reason why he did that Ted training background and training you know he trained under Lamar but he did a great job and I'm not surprised that he did what he did well if he trained under you then I got to give him even a double hats off if he manages to come that so he's doing pretty good anyways thanks to our panel for for those comments those were good so to conclude this section let's remember that the 10 standard orders and the 18 watch out situations are used as benchmarks for accident investigations as Hector was mentioning as well as being very useful tools in fire line operations the standard orders and the watch out situations were created to help you make sound safe decisions on the fire line but they'll only help you if you know them understand them and use them in day-to-day fire line operations and decision making this is a big subject in a matter of how long you've been working in the fire program you never really know at all one thing I do know from my own experience though is that without a break once in a while our ability to absorb information kind of gives way to a you know that need for a cold pop or a bathroom visit so let's take a 15 minute break right now before we dive into the principles of LCES