 This started out as a controlled burn. Soon it turned out of control. The Pinebush Preserve Commission was trying to clear a small portion of its land, but high winds pushed it into an adjacent area and it spread. 150 firefighters from Albany, Gilderland, and Colony called in to fight it. I couldn't tell. The winds were probably gusting 25, 30 miles an hour today and it just pushed the fire every which way and we finally got it contained on the north side, pushed everything to the east. At one point the fire jumped the throughway near Route 155. Buildings in Washington Square even turned on their lawn sprinklers to help the firefighters. By the time the fire came down the hillside, they had gotten here. I don't think the building was ever in danger. All the while smoke shut down much of the throughway between exits 24 and 25. Overhead helicopters dumped water trying to douse the flames. The wind continued to be a major factor in the battle. By nightfall, the blaze was pretty much out. About 75 acres charred. With the windy dry condition, the big question is why have a controlled burn on a day like today? Well, the Pine Bush preserves is they were well within their protocol when they made that decision. It says humidity, moisture levels, and even the wind were within their proper range when the burn began. Our forecast was within prescription and the winds were forecasted to hold within that prescription and the winds picked up later today and that was probably one of the issues that we were dealing with. The Pine Bush Commission says it will regroup and assess its protocol after today's fire. There were no injuries or property damage in the blaze and the Pine Bush says vegetation should start growing back within the next two weeks. And burns aren't that unusual at all in the Pine Bush, they do it a lot. You see controlled burns almost every year. Human factors thing and we're asked by the decision makers, don't be afraid and feel free to ask people. How are you feeling? How did your emotions play into this? How are people around you acting? That's fair game. Remember it's all about the learning. That's why we're going out there is to learn from other people's experience. What's different about this staff ride from many other staff rides is a lot of the learning is going to come from positive examples. Quite often we're going out doing a staff ride on something where somebody got burned over, killed, whatever. And most of the learning comes from negative examples. A lot of the learning in this staff ride will come from positive examples. But I also want to make sure that you understand it wasn't perfect. I mean obviously you didn't set out to have a 75 acre burn. You didn't set out to close down the New York State throughway at Rush Hour. There are definitely things that went awry here and we want to learn from both the positive and the negative. And then on every one of our burns, of course we have the objectives of learning, learning, learning about smoke behavior. Particularly in the urban interface here, smoke is a huge issue for us. And then fire behavior in these fuels. We want to learn as much as we can and looking back we learned a lot. And so we basically want to know what pitch pine scrub oak barons will do in different weather conditions and fuel conditions. As far as unit preparation, I'm just going to go over real quickly a little bit of how we set up a unit prior to a burn. Basically the north line we mowed a fire break and the south line we mowed a fire break. This line here pretty much stayed, what you see today is pretty much what it looked like. Maybe a little more trimming along the edges of some of the fuels but generally a nice sandy trail works pretty well. But the north and south lines we mowed much wider than required than prescription. Prescription requires 6 to 12 foot wide. We mowed them about 35 to 40 foot wide with a hydro axe. We did that because we knew that adjacent fuels were very volatile and also very receptive and that going after anything in them would be difficult. And so we gave ourselves a much wider break along the edges of our unit. The organization on this particular burn, like I said, I was the fire leader as a trainee. Chris Hawver was a line boss on the north line and also the burn boss for this burn, keep that one in mind. And then the south line Neil Gifford our conservation director was the line boss there. And then the rest of our crew, we have the 13 on crew would be assigned to one of the two line bosses. And we burn this unit as a typical for ring fire scenario where each crew is both holding and ignition. So we didn't have a separate ignition team or crew. We basically light the edges of the unit and if we needed interior each line boss would coordinate that with me and we do any interior that we need to do if necessary along the lines. We also have a smoke spotter who was out along the through way. And then we also have someone who's obviously taking weather for us every half hour during the burn, who's on one of the lines but is generally put in a low level role because they're going to be pulled out a lot to be taking weather for us. As far as our contingency plan, which of course is always a part of our briefing, our plan prior to this event was pre-bear bones as far as contingency. We talked about fall back lines, we would talk about what we would do in the event that something slopped over but not in a lot of detail. And if we had anything that we felt we couldn't contain ourselves, we would call 911. And the way it works here for us is once that 911 resource in this case like the city of Albany Fire Department gets here we would turn command, well I and Chris would turn command over to them and they would actually manage the event and we would become a resource to them. We don't have the ability in-house to manage the big picture situation and so we actually would turn it over to them and then become available to help out wherever they put us as a crew. We were in prescription with wind speeds, we were in prescription with our fuel moistures, we were in prescription, even though they were low and RH was also on the low end. We were in the 31-32 range, bottom of prescription is 30. Squirrely winds are not abnormal for us. In fact I've never burned here in the Pine Bush without having squirrely winds. Because of our dune formations the winds are going all over the place and then we put fire breaks in and these trails tend to catch the wind also and push them all kinds of funny directions. So that wasn't abnormal to me, it wasn't abnormal to Chris or to Neil. None of us felt really uncomfortable with that. We had a dominant wind direction going and that's what we're always looking for on the day of a burn. But little shifts here and there, that was typical. So at 11.52 a.m. which was a little early for us, a lot of times we wouldn't even start till afternoon because we're waiting for the wind to settle in at some direction. We lit a test fire right here behind where you're standing. And it was similar in that it was a lot of blueberry and huckleberry minus the leaves, because remember we're in April, but still very volatile, very flashy. And we basically tested in the shade, we tested in the fuels that were here and then we tested out under this slightly south slope here with our test fire. And the test fire was about 15 minutes. We watched, saw what was happening. It was definitely lively, it was definitely burning well. But we always, we were kind of used to that, I guess in a sense. I wouldn't say I was necessarily comfortable with it from the standpoint of I've never been comfortable with a burn here in the pine bush. But it was something that we'd seen a lot. And so it didn't put up any red flags for any of us at that point in time. I mean, the weather forecast, they hadn't predicted any of these winds even later on into the evening or the next day. Not the best of my knowledge. Basically what we did, we didn't all have cell phones back then, but we did have a bag phone in our one truck, remember those things? Yeah. And so we would call DEC meteorology just before the test burn and basically get as close to a spot with our forecast as we could get. And they didn't give us any indication at that point in time that there was anything kind of different happening. The other thing I will say though is that I don't remember a pine bush burn that didn't have winds coming from other directions during the burn. It's just standard. So your weather observer, was that person moving or taking weather in a consistent location? Good question. If you notice on a little sheet, at the beginning they took one on the ridge and they came down into the valley and stayed down here for the rest of the burn. So was that person picking up the winds? Possibly not, very good point. At that point, what was the familiarity and I guess experience level of the burn crew that you had out here? Were they familiar with the area and what was their experience? And yours? We had some seasonal staff on our fire crew. Some of them had quite a bit of experience. Some of them, I remember I think there was one of them who was quite green, not a lot of experience. We had Neil Christen myself who, I guess, mediocre experience at the higher side. We had a DC forest ranger. So I guess what I would say is it was kind of a mixed bag. Subject of weak signals pretty hard in the last day and a half. And I don't mean you specifically, but you the team, looking back, were there weak signals up to this point in the burn that you could have picked up on that you didn't pick up on or you didn't pay attention to? I think honestly at this point there wasn't much that was really making me think this is quite different from a lot of other burns. I've been on a lot of burns here. I had burns turn 180 degrees and go downhill. The first burn I was on took out 10 acres in about two minutes. Sounded like a freight train. I knew that wasn't normal or good based on the noise on the radio. But on the other hand I've seen a lot of that sort of thing. That's what these fuels do. That's what happens. So no, I don't think there was a lot that was really keying me into something different for this particular day. Do you think that anybody else was uncomfortable with anything about the burn? Well, after the fact I know that there were a couple of folks who were. As of my actually picking up on something, I would say, no, I wasn't aware of that. Well, it was within norm. As we move around the corner, you'll notice that you're kind of in a draw there between two dunes much like here. And you'll see this as we go down and I'll point it out. But in these low areas here we get these frost pockets that develop. We get repeated frost in the spring that kill back the scrub oak. Then we have a lot more grasses and wildflowers down in there. And this was dormant season so we had a lot more dry cured, fine dead fuel. We had pretty grasses and wildflowers around that point, you know, around heading up the slope to point I. As we moved through there we had to slow down considerably because we had several spots in those fuels. We had grassy, fine dead fuel in the unit and immediately outside the unit. And that wasn't unexpected necessarily. We were in that draw, you had radiative heating, you know, preheating all those fuels as we moved along, plus little embers that would come up, you know, pieces of grass. We think we had between three and five spots. None of them were bigger than a garbage can size lid. But in hindsight, red flag scenario, right, multiple spots outside the unit. But they were all right, you know, in the, more or less in or immediately adjacent to that, to the fire break. So we moved up here to J and that went relatively well and the fire behavior was well within what we would normally see. Prevailing winds were west, northwest coming at us like this. From that direction Pluma Smoke was rising several hundred feet and moving on. All in all, the fire behavior, smoke behavior was within what we had grown accustomed to seeing in these fuels in the dormant season. I was here, the north line was well behind me, so I was well ahead of him, moved through this, backing fire went well. Pluma Smoke going up, you know, with this draw here we would occasionally get a little eddying of smoke, kind of that residual low smoke. The main plume was still going up and out, but you would get residual smoke. And we had a crew member on the line that day who was on the nozzle who was an older gentleman, and he was getting smoke. The smoke was pretty light at that point. And I didn't know this the first time he did it, the second time I did. He was leaving the nozzle and backing off and getting out of the smoke to clear his lungs. And then he'd come back, and in the meantime the person in the engine would be outside the cab, ready to apparently use a nozzle if need be. So that was kind of a red flag for me in hindsight, that he was backing off. And then coming back when he felt when he felt that when we got his lungs cleared. So we moved along with igniter, first water holding person in the engine. And I had the engine behind the igniter assuming that if we got a spot it would be immediately adjacent to the line and the engine would be here to deal with that. At the time all we had on that engine, kind of a standard Type 7 engine, but all we had was the booster line. We didn't have any hose packs, any accordion or anything else that would help us get to reach out there. So as we moved along, backing fire had moved into that clump of pitch pine there. This was black well to the top of the ridge line here and slightly beyond. The north line was still well behind me, so effectively we had a backing fire and black. And then this flanking backing fire moving across the slope this way as we went along. Which was working really well and at this point we were thinking we were nearly done. I could see where he was, he could see where I was. At the time I was beyond this clump of pitch pine here and maybe 50 to 80 feet from the point that you walked around. When we had that easterly wind gust that came in at just the wrong time. All of those pitch pine were preheated from the backing fire that was still working through them. We had I think one or two trees, the whole clump of pitch pine didn't go up. It was just a couple of trees that torched. Set an ember, probably a pine cone, 200 feet from there into this unit behind you. Between these two snags and the highway, down in the bottom of that draw, 200 feet off the line. When that happened, that easterly push, this whole little gully here at the time was full of smoke. We held up, we had torching on the line, which was never a good thing. We held up ignition, waited, that wind event lasted all of a minute, maybe two tops. Smoke, everything moved back that way with the prevailing winds. Almost all the smoke cleared and it was obvious there was still smoke coming up out of there. At that time, my first holding person then we realized there was smoke coming out of there before we could communicate anything. Took off, bush whacking through the thick scrub oak, which was a no-no even then. It was a tall, heavy, thick tangle. You wouldn't want to walk through it anytime, let alone when there's fire on the ground and you've got a full metal Indian can on your back. It's easy for this stuff if you've ever walked through scrub oak. You'll probably reach out and grab you and snag you because you get hung up on it very easily. So he went down and when he came back out reported that there was, it was down there for several minutes, seemed like an eternity, that he reported a spot that was initially the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Did he have a radio? I don't remember if he had a radio or not. I think he did. Do you remember Joel, if he had a radio? So he said that he proceeded to put out the backing part of it, create some black, jumped into that and started working around the flank and by the time he got around the one flank to start dealing with the head, the head was already getting too big and moving away from him and he knew enough to come out. We saw how big the fire was. In between there and this ridge, it went from four to six foot flame lengths to flame lengths that were probably almost twice as high as those pitch points you see behind you. The initial attack wasn't going to work. We had a person on my line, the bag phone at the time was in my engine, so he called 911 and then my crew went out to 155 basically straight out and waited for their instructions as the rest of the crew was doing what they were being instructed to do here. In between the test fire and where we're standing now, we had three radios go dead, one of which was the Burnboss trainees radio. Do you remember how you got a radio? Because you had one again. I assume you swapped out with somebody. I swapped out with somebody, but it took a while, I think that's what happened. At the time, radios were expensive, we were still gearing up. Initially it used to be the Burnboss and the line bosses had radios, the smoke spotter would have a radio and the weather person would have a radio and then as the program grew and we had a little more money, we bought more radios but we didn't have replacement batteries, there wasn't a replacement on you. Now everybody on crew has a radio and all those key people at least and now we have enough batteries that a lot of extra people have extra batteries but all those key people, the Burnboss, the line bosses, the weather, smoke always carry an extra battery that's been fully charged in their chest pack. In the last couple of days we've been talking a lot about weak signals and red flags. In retrospect, can you think of any things that you might have picked up on that would have warned you that this was going to happen, that you didn't react to? Not used specifically, but the whole recording? Yeah, there were a number of things. I and several other people that day, you know, it came up in the AAR. I don't know if you've ever been on a burn, you wake up in the morning or anything, any kind of thing, you're going to a wedding or anything. You just wake up and you get that weird feeling like, you know, today's not going to be a good day. That was that feeling that I had and I couldn't put my finger on it and apparently there were several other crew people that day as well. They said, you know, they were relatively new. So they, you know, compared to Joel, Chris and I figured, well, what do I know? I'm new. So they didn't speak up. I didn't speak up because I didn't have anything specific. It wasn't like, okay, you know, the engine's not working or the engine's not working. We don't have smoke signs to an extra two hours to set up. It wasn't, you know, just strange feeling like feel off is what I remember from that day and other people mentioned it as well. So in hindsight, and now in our briefings, we ask people, you know, is there anybody that wants to, does not want to participate, wants to decline participation? And then, you know, we might have tried to get them to pinpoint specifically. Today we'd really evaluate that differently. And, you know, we learned a number of things that day, but now we don't do that. If we aren't able to burn, we aren't able to get in here within five years, we'll assess it. If it's too tall, too dense, we won't let it match until the whole thing has been mowed again with a hydro-axe. And actually we've went through a pretty big paradigm shift in just how we burn here. Getting away from dormant season burns and this stuff to growing season, mechanical and fire treatments in combination in a single season. So in June, once it's green, bring the hydro-axe in, mow it down, let it green back up. Then we've got all that fuel now on the ground. And we've got live fuel moisture a month later. And then we put fire on the ground and we end up with a relatively intense, moderately intense, but highly severe fire that moves very slowly. And we're meeting ecological objectives like we never did before. But also we've got fire that's actually manageable. Set the scene a little bit for you. There was none of this aspen here that you see behind you or over here. But there was about between like, I don't know, six and eight foot tall scrub oak. Very thick all around. It was all behind you and all here was all scrub oak as well. So I'm going to pick up the story. Back up where you guys were with Neil at that location. About five to ten minutes before the wind event and spot happened. And at that point in time, about five or ten minutes before that occurred, my radio went dead. I was concerned about it, but I wasn't overly concerned about it for a couple of reasons. One reason was we didn't have enough radios back then to always give a radio to a crew member. So I had been on burns before where I didn't have a radio. And you just team up with somebody else. So I communicated to Neil that my radio had died. And I just, you know, notified the person next to me that my radio was dead and I'd need to get communication from them. The other reason why I wasn't overly concerned about it at the time was we were just a couple of minutes from being done. We were getting ready to tie it off and it would be finished for the day and I didn't have to worry about it because it was only a couple more minutes. So that's another reason why I wasn't overly concerned about it. So go ahead ten minutes after the spot occurred. The next communication I remember receiving is from Neil that I was to go and meet Brent at the FAV. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second at the FAV. So I remember the next thing I remember thinking is well maybe I should turn around and go back and grab a drip torch. But then I didn't know why I was going to meet Brent. I didn't know what we were going to be doing. I figured, and I figured wrongly of course that there would be one on the truck when I got there. So I didn't, I just continued down the trail to meet up with Brent. Brent and I met up at the Frost Pocket and I'm sure these guys pointed out the Frost Pocket to you when you were coming around. We both got into the truck and started driving along the trail to this location. I remember as we're driving in the truck I remember saying to Brent, so what are we going to do when we get there? And what I heard Brent say was we're going to stop it. What he probably said to me was we're going to assess whether we can stop it. But in my mind I heard we're going to stop it. So I'm under the mindset that once we get there we're going to have to stop this thing coming over the hill. So Brent and I continue in the truck and we continue to this location right here. And we parked the truck facing this way. Now the FAV was called that it's short for fast attack vehicle. It was a 1975 or 76 Army surplus vehicle. It was hard to start. Once you got it started we usually kept it running. But it was a catch-22 because if you kept it running it sometimes overheated when you had it running that long. And it had a slip-on unit on the back and usually we kept extra tools in it and stuff like that. During this firm there was no extra drip torches on it which now is standard procedure for us to keep extra drip torches on the trucks. Whether that would have helped us or not, who knows, but there wasn't any on it. So Brent and I ended up stopping at this location. We got out of the truck. I believe at that time started the slip-on unit just to have it running. And we turned and looked towards the location of the spot which is right behind you that way. At that time we had to stand here for a couple of minutes because we just saw a little bit of smoke coming up. We couldn't really tell at that point in time what was going on. So we waited for, it could have been like two or three minutes. It seemed like we were standing here for an hour just waiting to see what was going to come over the hill. I was under the impression when I left the line up there that that was the point that everybody was leaving and that they were calling 911. I didn't find out till later that when the fire came over the hill and Brent saw it, that's when he called Chris and that's when 911 was notified at that point in time. So the fire started coming over the hill, you know, about where those tall pitch pines are. It was a little bit in front of that. At that point in time is when we first noticed our very first spot fire over here and behind us here on the other side of the trail. The moment that Brent called to tell Chris to call 911 is probably when we should have left looking back on it. But for some reason we stayed. I don't know if it was still under the mindset, you know, there's a huge wide break here. It's coming down slow. Maybe we can stop it. You know, if there's just a couple spots, but Brent grabbed a tool and ran into the scrub oak over here to assess the spot, maybe to see whether, you know, how big it was if he could stop it. At the same time, I was kind of under the same mindset. So I grabbed the hose and started dragging hose out to go into the scrub oak. As soon as I got to the big wall of scrub oak though, I stopped because there's no, there was no way I could walk into it, drag the hose through it, be any sort of effective with it. And I kind of knew at that point in time we weren't staying to stop this. When I was winding up the hose on the reel and waiting for Brent to come out of the scrub oak, my goggles had fogged up because I had these kind of big old goggles and they were too big for my face. So I took them and put them up on my helmet. And when I did that, I started getting burns on my face. So I had gotten the hose all back up into there. Since Matt had just lit that off, I ran, got Brent and told him under no circumstances were we staying here that we were going to get into this truck and leave. So Brent and I came out of this scrub oak at the same time there was a fire world happening right here on this corner right behind those pitch pine trees that was about three quarters of the way as tall as that pitch pine tree. It was too hot for us to get in on the passenger side. So I went and got in on the driver's side and Brent was running behind me and got in on the driver's side as well. From that point, we just drove straight out of here to 155 and there was fire here. There was fire over here and there was fire at this time on this side of the trail. We didn't know when we got up to that bend what was happening beyond our vision. So kind of thinking about what do we do if there's a crew standing in the middle of the trail because we were driving out of here pretty much as fast as we could on the occasion. Even if you don't think something is important to tell the next person up in the chain, just do it anyway. I think for myself it would probably be a little more assertive when you have a hunch about something or think about something. How much of a factor do you think complacency was? I've heard a few times people say we've done worse, we've done a lot more. I think a lot of the weather was normalized, I think, by the staff a little bit. Especially the squirrely winds, as they recall, because we see it all the time. It may have sent up a real red flag to someone that wasn't familiar with the area, but I think we could have normalized it a little bit. A little city of a great state of New York, we have a lot of political activity here. We're very much in the political eye anyways, where we are and who we're involved with. So we had a number of politicians on site here, right at 155, a lot of Blacksadans, the mayor of the city, executive staff from state agencies. One person in particular I remember yelling and having fired. The governor, got the attention of the governor, the governor came out later that summer to see and to evaluate the site. I've said that every other group, burning a long linear unit with steep topography at the top of the slope, endormant pine barrens fuels, low R.H.s, significant day sensor rain, created a lot of things that we do now in those situations. And Craig mentioned burning here is challenging because of small units. Small units are very dangerous, because you have so much fire on the ground and such a little black on it. They're very challenging. Remember I mentioned this point about this post-burd questionnaires that we'd send out? But for the most part, most people said that you need to keep burning. The pine bush needs to burn. You need to burn to reduce the chance of wildfires in the future. And then they'd usually say, comma, but be careful. What you was thinking was very compelling. I think we had a lot of fire investigation reports and everyone knows that's not the whole moment where you realize that it's gotten past you. The other thing that fascinates me about that is that the idea of those holes in the cheese lining up, you can, the whole idea of preoccupation with failure is that you can never predict what an individual's reaction is going to be. And the fact that she was sitting in that corner and her only communication was out of communication with her and another person comes by, she has no communication with that. Those three individuals interacting with no interaction was a really key point, I think, to that whole scenario. There was a real key point in there that most people in this business come from a biological science background or a technical fire background and would tend to approach fire as a technical and biological thing. And it's a human thing as long as we're out there doing it. And the point that you can never predict what an individual is going to do or how individuals are going to interact with it. When we got on the second station where the fire went to Ridge and where she spotted down the line, the thing I got from that is, and it seems to be a common theme every time we lose a fire is that's when the burn was wrapping up, everything was looking good, the headless thing is a bag. And that's when a lot of fire is when you lose it. When you're at that point you figure this is done and we do aerial attacking, you know, you think we've got a line around it and say, okay, it's done, a lot of time that's when she jumps the line and it's gone again. So it seems to be a common theme on a lot of fire. At that point maybe it's reluctant to simplify. You think you've got it in the bag, you let your guard down and that's when you get away. That's one thing I know. I like that, I like that, I like that you link that to a life is to simplify. I never really thought about it that way that you're having. You don't, you know, we got it in the bag. You just simplify a day's activity into a couple of words. I think that one of the things that I was really struck by in talking to everyone was the fact that when stuff started to go wrong and people started to get really kind of panic and emotional, the thinking and response just seemed like sometimes people started acting without really thinking about what they were doing. And when adrenaline is pumping and people start to get panic, that can happen. So it seemed like it's really important to have a really detailed and well-planned contingency plan so that responses are almost second nature because in a really highly charged atmosphere, if things aren't second nature, it seems like that's kind of a weird thing started as well. One of the things that struck me as we were going through the stations, a couple of people said, a couple of presenters said that they were uncomfortable before the burning started. And I think one of the things that that points to is that a lot of us are uncomfortable before a burning starts. It's a nervous thing to do because something could go wrong. But I think it's really important for us to really search to get to what our discomfort is because you might identify something before the burning starts that could prevent something from going wrong. So really getting to the part of those weak signals. The other thing I wanted to mention is that as bad as these incidents are for the people that are involved and I hate to say it's good that they happen occasionally, but I know that all of us learn a lot from the things that go wrong and I know so be especially from the water and the sapphire that I learned a lot from it and I know everybody did the concerns they did to me so there's always a gold lining in everything. Certainly very impressed. My initially soldered organ to what was done and how quickly things were captured. Certainly that's very impressive and that sort of definitely shows the commitment to the working partnerships you've had and the resilience of the crews. But also having after walking around the line and certainly seeing the different areas for field types hearing the different stories. It brings home the importance to make sure you don't have an over reliance on resilience and that I'm saying in terms of we're all pretty flexible, pretty talented individuals and obviously it's shown through on this one here and I'm sure many folks on a different wildfire advance and describe burns where a lot of guys are skilled and they can figure this one out and that comes into balancing the resilient nature with also making sure you fully work your way through at looking at the total pre-audit page with failure in terms of the looked at it there. We may get the spotting may happen they even had crews pre-positioned in a containment area but was it planned what was going to happen ahead of time if the spotting occurred? It didn't sound like that was there because everybody ended up sort of becoming incident commanders themselves and so we're going to rely on the incident commanders that when this happens you know it happens with us we say oh it gets over kind of the containment area not a big deal we'll deal with it then as opposed to saying when it gets in the containment area what are we going to do and that way you could be looking at okay now it gets out of here okay where these guys over here are going to do when this happens well I can't do anything. We're going to back burn off this and I guess that's really important because we can learn some major steps in our organization we can describe fire and wildfire and I think it's really important to sit down look at the potential scenario make sure you run that incident command system back one through it to make sure that not only if you looked at the big picture and what the potential but now what would you do if that happened and are you set up to deal with that in terms of people qualified to manage that. Interesting point about kind of over commitment to resilience the folks that were at the movie night last night know that I believe that all of these principles have a flip side a dark side what I sometimes call taking them to the psychotic extreme and fire organizations are resilient organizations by nature they have to be and we do rely too much on our ability to bounce back you know that oh well if bad stuff happens we will you know we'll overcome it because we always do and when we see you know you look around at the tragedy fires that is part of our mindset and that mindset gets us in trouble. When you saw you know expertise fail, technology fail, tactics fail but relationships didn't, or at least the importance it was some very important relationship to them it was able to work through that and that was really based on that pre-work with the partnership concept I was thinking how important partnerships is not just your outreach in your community but within your own workgroups and within your own organization with your TNC partners to help build resiliency and how important it was in all the HRO principles to have various levels of partnerships to enhance that and the other thing that really struck me is how important AAR is I would have liked to have heard more about because there was a constant repetition of we did three AARs and what you learned from that and how that helped you build an HRO organization that really just struck me and what we could do for ourselves and for our own organizations to look at AARs before in a sort of a backwards way of preoccupation with failure. The thing that I've learned the most is from an administrator who looks out the window and rarely ever gets out is I'm going to be a lot more comfortable saying no I did it with one of our crews this fall I just wasn't sure about it, the supervisor was going to be missing not a part of the incident command at all but just a supervisor for the burn was and I just said no, you're not going to do it just find another window, find another opportunity to do that and part of that is it comes out there is still this need at a level above operations to be able to see things and sometimes just say no we have a feeling there's some issues here and I say that to you, not to aggravate you but to basically say how important it is to have all your ducks in a row and even keep looking for new things out there to take into consideration just because everything has worked for you in the past and yes we are making certain improvements doesn't mean you or we are missing something real big on the next burn that we're going to look at so again I'm going to be more apt to say no but I think that's going to push our people burning and certainly in my organization the burn was to be that much better at what they do and much more focused on I guess I've taken a lot in from all of you listening to the different comments and I've just been writing notes and insuring a lot of the goals of my life and a lot of them are really good, all of them might have been good I've been trying to figure out, we've been focusing on okay what age-old concept is this, what age-old concept is that I got halfway through and I realized that sometimes we may fall into the rut of individualizing the concept I think sometimes we need to realize that they might be interconnected we heard when I was watching some of the pre-work for this conference workshop there was one segment in there about how when things go bad human nature is the fallback into a position that we're comfortable with that we know and so in order to have a difference of expertise you need to have those folks at a trained level that can handle the situation when it happens so that to me ties into sensitivity of operations that we need to make sure that we keep our people trained we don't just train until level, we constantly engage them in the training repetition and work on that so that we don't have so that we can then also recognize preoccupation with failure so to me it's like this web of interconnecting the comments about being the new person coming in looking at a program and seeing weak signals this gave me the opportunity to do so and think about what happened but also I think there was a comment about the difference of expertise going both ways and I think that the sensitivity of operations can go both ways too because not only are we potentially going to be the new person coming in and looking at a program like myself but we're also someday going to be that person who's been there for 10 years or 20 years we also need to be mindful and open to allowing that new person to come to us and say are we doing okay, what do you think we can do better to improve our program so the reluctance to simplify and I'm using the five words on how to rewrite them so for us to be reluctant to simplify and allow the feedback from other people so we can improve our program so thank you for all your comments