 Every year the interagency fire community treats right around 3 million acres using either prescribed fires or wildland fire use. In 2005, over 7600 prescribed fires were ignited and we managed almost 500 wildland fire use fires. Although these fires were well planned out and managed, many of the same safety hazards exist that you find on going wildfires. The needs still exist for situational awareness, adherence to your safety principles and guidelines, clear intent and careful planning. In this module we're going to look at the fire behavior characteristics in and around the Great Lakes and then look at a prescribed fire that escaped control lines in Minnesota. This is going to lead us into a discussion on contingency plans. To get us started we talked to a few firefighters from the North Central United States. Let's listen to them talk about fighting fire in their area. We have a definite spring season from sometime in the middle to end of March until the first part of June when we start greening up. And then again in the fall after the ground freezes we have a shortened duration fall fire season. The problem with the fall fire season is the days are much shorter and our burning windows are smaller. But we definitely have a spring fire season but we also during drought years we can have fires in the summertime as well. January and February are months where we as employees spend a lot of time in training keeping up with NWCG curriculum that we need to. Going through simulations with our initial attack folks. We use simulation with initial attack and our incident management team. We usually have training sessions in the winter months prior to fire season. With our external partners we set up training sessions in January and February particularly with the local volunteer fire departments. I decide in the fall of the year prior to the fire season what training is going to be given and try to perfect that. Get it into a format that's interactive and helps them learn easier through simulation. A lot of simulation both tabletop. We haven't used sand tables but we use computer images and things like that. But simple tabletop exercises as well and try to simulate wildland fires as best we can in January and February. In Wisconsin we've developed a very close relationship with our volunteer firefighters and I think that's essential to our mission and goals to suppress forest fires. We have a lot of forest fires in Wisconsin. We have thousands every year and we do not have the resources nor the capabilities for structural protection that they have. So we depend heavily on the volunteer firefighters here and understand that they are a very key component to our fire suppression efforts. And really we couldn't survive without them. We depend heavily on them. And in having that close relationship with them we develop trust and an understanding of what roles they play and what role we play. And how best to accomplish the goal, the objective of suppressing forest fires. Basically it's a common reoccurring theme at any type of emergency incident that the issues are usually organization and communication. And those are all things that we can work on before the event occurs. I don't know of any event that works perfect but there are certain things that we can do to prepare ourselves to be more organized and certainly have the communications down before the event occurs. The way that I would explain the zone concept as we use it here in Wisconsin is it's basically a predetermined geographical area cluster of structures that has been pre-mapped, tallied on how many structures it's been named with a unique name convention. And the idea is that very similar to like a division concept it's a geographical place on the ground, a group of structures that in the event of a forest fire we would expect that structural protection would be occurring in that zone. It's a way and a means to communicate and be able to organize our volunteer firefighters to be able to provide structural protection. In the state of Wisconsin we experience fast-moving fires and sometimes we're looking at a type 5 fire early on and we hope to get containment within that say 15 to 20 minute window. If that doesn't occur a lot of times we will be moving into extended attack and if that prolongs and moves into project class type fires the expectation or what we try to accomplish is to have a type 2 team up and running within 2 hours to help organize and manage the incident from a large magnitude of resources both being LE structural protection and wildland protection resources utilizing air resources as well. In the state of Wisconsin most of our fires are wind driven. We start to see a fair number of our fires escape from the typical cause which is human cause and the winds pushing in the team category anywhere between 15 and above. We start to experience some problems. RHS probably would be anything below 30 we start to see fire activity start to pick up and roughly 20 anything below 20 we are preparing for extreme types of giving conditions or we start to really staff up much heavier with those perspectives. I mean in the event that we would push into the team category we'd be potentially looking at bringing on additional heavy dozers putting on additional crews that would be available in the state. Tractor plows we have roughly 76 of them in the state that provide a quick initial attack and have the ability to suppress a fire relatively quickly. Unlike the west we don't deal with the terrain nor do we have a tremendous amount of type 2 type 1 crews in the state of Wisconsin and tractor plows augment that for us to suppress fires basically in the field types that we're looking at right now. State of Wisconsin suppression actions basically revolve pure and simple anchor and flank of fire and pinch the head. That involves establishing strong anchor points then burning out the line for escape routes and safety zones back into the black and continuing along the flanks until we actually overcome the head and usually that's dependent upon the field type and in most cases if it's a project class fire we'll catch it with the evening weather cycle of higher humidity's lower temperatures and lower winds. Yeah the Hudson Bay High I guess that one of the you know if you look at historically at our large fires they're set up by Hudson Bay High that comes in dries things out we go two weeks without any rain. Our sandy soils dry out quickly with the pine cover type in the spring of the year the live fuel moisture bottoms out at that time of year we got pollination going on you know third week of April first part of May is the worst time to fight fire in this region of the country that Hudson Bay High comes in it gets established you get very little wind it kind of lulls you to sleep and then when she exits hold on to the horse because you know you're going to get you're going to get winds in excess of 20 miles an hour we're going to have wind driven fires that will travel you know one to three miles an hour spot a mile plus and burn up you know anywhere from a couple thousand to 15,000 acres based on fire history in the last 50 years as part of the state or as part of the country. The 10 standard fire orders I have to say yeah they're I mean they're valid everywhere however we have to look at it from our perspective in our eyes you know one of the big things you know in the orders and LCS is lookouts well you look at our landscape there is no place where we can put a lookout on the ground to see over a large area the landscape just doesn't allow for that so what do we do if we have a tactic that we're doing that is maybe a little bit risky we got to find a way to get a lookout and mitigate that risk and most of the time we have to look to the air and we'll have to have a patrol aircraft that we will dedicate to be a lookout for this group of resources on the ground and if we can't get that we don't do it. So the 10 and 18 again it's you know just like I said with the S courses they're really geared towards a hand crew type situation so we've got it in terrain and we've just got to look at it with you know our eyes and but still very valid very valid rules. Fire behavior characteristics are different all across the US it's our responsibility as firefighters to gather this knowledge whenever we find ourselves in unfamiliar fuel models or climates. Now let's look at the Mississippi Meadows prescribed burn that was conducted on the Marcell Dear River Ranger District of the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota.