 And welcome to this year's annual Fireline Safety Refresher training. This program is broken into various modules and is designed to refresh your memory on the basic Fireline Safety Principles. You'll be asked to study some real-life fire scenarios and complete a few group exercises. The modules are all standalone lessons and by no means are you required to complete them all. It's up to your facilitator to choose the modules that are most appropriate for your audience and introduce some local concerns or case studies as well. The video provides your facilitator with the basic framework needed to develop a more localized training program. Further refresher training material can also be found by visiting the Wildland Fire Safety Training Annual Refresher or WUFSTAR website. The main objective of this training is to get you thinking in terms of Fireline Safety again and to help keep you safety conscious throughout this fire season. To get us started, we're going to look at the CART Creek Fire that occurred nearly 30 years ago in Northern Utah on the Ashley National Forest. This scenario is similar to many recent fires in that the firefighters found themselves on an escape route that proved to be ineffective or too far from the safety zone given the unexpected and drastic change in fire behavior that actually occurred. As we look at this scenario and throughout the rest of this training, keep in mind that most entrapments and burn overs are directly related to the difference between your expected fire behavior and the actual fire behavior. Virtually all fire ground decisions are based on your expectations of what that fire is going to do. It is incumbent on all firefighters, regardless of our experience level, to continuously improve our ability to predict fire behavior given the conditions we observe. Let's go to Utah and take a look at the CART Creek Fire. At 12 o'clock noon on July 16, 1977, a lightning fire started just south of the confluence of CART Creek and Spruce Creek on the Ashley National Forest. The fire was burning in extremely flashy fuels, mainly grass and sagebrush, with scattered junipers, ponderosa pines, and clumps of bitterbrush. The elevation at the top of the bluffs to the west is 6,700 feet and 6,000 feet at the creek junction, which is about one-half mile away. The weather forecast for the day called for partly cloudy skies with scattered afternoon showers and thunderstorms. Winds lightened variable out of the southeast, driven by topography with considerable gustiness in the late afternoon. High temperatures were forecasted at 90 to 95 degrees in the valley bottoms and 80 to 85 degrees on the ridge tops. Minimum relative humidity 15 to 20 percent. At 12-10 the district FMO was on scene, estimated the fire at less than one acre in order to hell attack crew to respond. The local helicopter had just returned from a previous assignment and many of the crew members were still en route, driving back to station. Only two available personnel were loaded and delivered to H-1 about 1235. The helicopter then picked up the district FMO and one other firefighter and delivered them to H-1 where they met the first two hell attack crew members. The FMO ordered a retardant drop and 20 additional firefighters. The fire was spreading slowly uphill against the ground winds to the northwest and more rapidly, with the wind, downhill and west towards Cart Creek Canyon. One person was left to manage the hella spot and the other three walked to the fire and began an unanchored line uphill to the south. Other district personnel were attending a local rodeo when the call came in. They were to report to Cedar Springs Lagoon about one mile north of the fire and would be picked up by helicopter. At 1300, two more firefighters arrived on scene and joined squad one. The strategy was to continue line construction south uphill and then swing west to cut off the fire before it reached the ridgetop. They were working close to the fire and could knock it down quite easily. Meanwhile, the fire continued to move easterly downhill, causing them to relocate what was H-1 to H-2. At 1340, two more firefighters arrived by helicopter. While circling the area, they recognized the desirability of cutting off the fire at the ridgetop and they unloaded on the ridge. They made contact with the FMO and then started cutting a second unanchored section of line along the ridgetop toward the squad below. The FMO sent two members of his squad up to help the squad on the ridge. The helicopter unloaded three more firefighters on H-2 and they began walking toward squad one. When they arrived, the FMO sent them to join in with squad two but two members were called back when the fire became more than squad one could handle. There was now four members on squad two plus the squad leader and four members in squad one plus the FMO who was also the IC. The helicopter delivered more firefighters to H-2. Another squad of four people, squad three, was formed and instructed to proceed from H-2 to a point east of the initial attack point. They began a third segment of unanchored line. The fire by this time had burned east and outflanked squad one's line. Squad three was trying to cut off that segment of fire and tie it back into squad one's fire line. As the fire approached H-2, the pilot requested another helispot further east away from the fire's edge. A fourth squad was delivered to H-3 and were instructed to begin at the low end of squad three's line and build line downhill to the north. Squad four started walking to the fire. And I remember when we flew in, we flew basically over the fire down in this drainage here and our thought at that time was, wow, this is just a little fire, very little fire activity. It was just kind of creeping on the edges and our first thought was, man, we'll have this out and be back to the rodeo in Manila tonight. They proceeded to line us out and said basically that we're going to hike up across the edge of the fire here up over to where they'd started building line up above. And so we had no problem with that and we could see the fire just below us and at that time it was probably ten acres, maybe a little bit more, but the flame length was minimal, a foot and a half flame length. And so we were, I guess, what I'd call complacent. And so we were lined out to hike up to where we were going to tie into the other line and so we proceeded to hike across the toe of this steeper slope right here over to where we were told that the other crew had built line. And at that time we had no, we weren't even thinking about the fire basically because there was just so minimal fire activity. So we proceeded to hike up through there and as we were hiking, Gene Campbell was ahead of me and then myself and then Annette Rogers and then Dave Knoll. I remember Gene just ahead of me, he said, damn it, somebody left a plasque leaning against a cedar tree down there and he says, I better go in and get it and that was towards the edge of the fire and Dave said, you guys go ahead and I'll wait for Gene to go get that and then we'll come up behind you. And so we proceeded to hike on up there and Gene stayed behind. We need to remember that in 1977 fire shelters were an optional piece of equipment. All the firefighters on this fire had fire shirts and hard hats but no mechs, pants and fire shelters were not provided. Let's get into our groups and complete the first exercise in your student workbook.