 Every fire has the potential to be a killer. I turned around and everything was orange. It was just really coming down on us. Nobody had any idea the amount of fire that would be coming up out of that hill. I was under a wave of fire. I was just hoping that I could outrun it. It was sheer panic. This one was so small, it didn't even appear funny. It was just basically going to be a little two-hour chore and back to the work center. And it was a day much like today. Timber Weller, a Florida firefighter, was in his work center when a call came in. Someone reported seeing flames in the woods near some homes. It was really a pretty nondescript low-activity fire. I reported to the dispatch center that I would, you know, I could handle it without backup. In Florida, it wasn't uncommon for a single tractor plow to be called in to control a small wildfire. Weller sized up what seemed to be a perfectly routine fire and began plowing a fire line. I hadn't been operating the tractor perhaps five minutes on the fire when I noticed the flame length began to increase and the fire really started to kick up. That wasn't particularly unusual for a fire to flare up and drop back down, but this one never dropped back down. Things began to go wrong, fast. And within a matter of seconds, the sky above me had already turned orange. My first thought was, you can't do that. I mean, a little two-foot flame in turkey oak fuel does not ignite the crowns of pine trees. It simply doesn't happen. But it did happen. A downdraft had struck, driving the flames 50 feet high and towards Weller at an extremely high rate of speed. He turned his tractor and made a run for it. The fire was moving so fast that almost as soon as I lifted the plow, the flames were already coming over the treetops above me. When it became apparent that he couldn't outrun it, Weller looked for a clear spot to deploy his shelter, but he couldn't find one. His instincts then told him to run. His training, however, told him to stay put, that he'd be running right into the hot zone. Instead, Timber huddled into his cab, covered his face, and did the one thing that saved his life. I took a deep breath as the fire was getting ready to hit me and because the fire was moving so fast, I was able to hold that breath long enough that the superheated gases had mostly passed by the time I inhaled again. Doctors gave him no chance to live. Thirteen surgeries later, he did survive. When someone's burned to the degree that I was, the 70%, they generally lose their ears, their nose, their eyebrows, their, you know, fingers, arms. I mean, I really didn't lose that much. I mean, there were a lot of skin, but none of the digits or appendages or anything like that. So for the amount of injury that I sustained, actually, I came out of it pretty well. Even the most routine fire can go horribly wrong. Accidents can happen at any moment. Firefighters have a job to do, but that doesn't mean they have to endanger their lives recklessly. Everyone has to take responsibility for his or her own safety and accept that fire is dynamic and can kill in a heartbeat. Overcome the idea that it can't happen to you. You have to believe that it can't happen to you in order to get up and go to work every morning. But you also have to make a rational decision to accept that it may. It's happened to other people. It happens almost every year people get burned over or killed. So again, it's an inherently dangerous business. If you keep fighting fire long enough, you're going to get into a sticky situation eventually. So convince yourself that it can happen to you and then train from that perspective. Because Weller attempted to contain the fire alone, he was unable to employ some of the fundamental safety rules of LCES. A lookout watches for sudden changes in the weather or the fire's behavior. Maintaining clear, open communications is critical for alerting firefighters when changes occur. Pre-established escape routes provide a quick way out when things go wrong and a reachable safety zone gives the firefighter a place to wait out the blaze. If Timber Weller had been able to implement LCES, the outcome may have been different.