 Our plan for this afternoon is we're going to talk you through some more kind of the last phase of the preliminary study for this staff ride that we're going to do, which you're already underway. The pre-reading that you did was the first part of it already, and this afternoon will be the second part of that preliminary study. And so we're going to take you through a little more background. Our idea with this staff ride is that we get to use it as kind of a case study to apply HRO2. So you might say, well, why do I need to know all this information about the I-90 TARCHEO FIRE? And it's so that we have a piece of common information that we're all studying together that we can use to practice applying these HRO principles too. What I was asked to talk about was what were the sort of the political happenings, the behind the scenes background noise that was going on during this fire. What led a lot of this land is Corporate Timberland. Along with their interest in or the way they treat their lands and the slashes that was left after their harvesting practices, they were very, very concerned about burning the seedlings that they had actually replanted after the fires of, was it 03? And so they had a big investment in this land, and there was a lot of pressure to help protect their trees and protect their investment. In addition, we were one of the only large fires happening at the time. We had visitors galore beginning with OIG or the Office of the Inspector General, which is one of the investigative branches of government, and they were here following us around auditing or looking at our decision making processes on large fires. So as we were making decisions, as we were going through WUFSAs, as we were working with the team, the Office of Inspector General was sitting side by side with us for several days. Both of the senators from the state of Montana visited this fire on separate occasions, so we had a lot of show me trips and discussions about what we were intending to do and how long this fire was going to go and that sort of thing. We also had a new governor at the time, and I believe this was the first large fire he ever visited, so we spent some time with the governor explaining how fire works. There was a big issue at the time about contracting with private engines, and the governor was very concerned about that, so we had lots of discussions about were we using government equipment or were we using contracted equipment and sort of just a lot of things that sort of brought you away from the fire to work on issues that were related but not really related to suppression of the fire itself. On about the 7th, I think it was about the 7th of August, a few days after this fire started, one of our smaller lightning fliers got to a point where we really could not handle it and we actually called in a type 2 team. So just down the road from this fire we had another large fire that we were managing concurrently. We also had, as is our policy, a large fire cost review on this fire, so as we're working on suppression and what are we going to do, we were trying to figure out how much everything was costing. But I think all that aside, the most important political issue or thing that was going on during this fire had to do with the Bonneville power line. I'm sure a lot of you have been involved in fighting fires in and around power lines and other than the fact that it can be a hazard to firefighters, there's a lot of political interest in what happens. And so what happened in this fire, it was a 500 KV power line that basically provided power to the states of Oregon, Washington and California. Just a few people lived there and could have been affected. At the time there was a big heat wave across all those states as well as in Northern Idaho and Montana. The BPA folks told us that there were electrical loading records being set. The power lines had never actually carried that much electricity and they weren't too sure what was going to happen. They talked about if the power line itself was bumped, so to speak, it would likely cause rolling blackouts through Oregon, Washington and California. And if it was burned to the point where the lines were actually melted, that it could have a significant effect affecting things like hospitals and national security and all these horrible things and people were going to die and the sky was going to fall and it was pretty awful. And it would take at least 10 days to bring it back up again if it melted. They also talked about the fact that no matter how many days it was down, it was over a million dollars of lost revenue per day, plus the cost to bring the line back up. And so in and of itself that was a pretty big issue, but when you add that to the fact that the senators and the governor and the under secretary of agriculture were all very personally interested in this power line and what was happening. And we were getting pretty frequent if not daily calls from Washington, D.C., from other places around the state of Montana. What's happening with the power line? Are you guys going to be able to protect the power line, slow down the fire, cool off the fire or whatever? And a lot of sort of undertones of if you can't do that, this really could affect national security and it could affect people in a really big way. So all of that sort of was swirling around and as we were having discussions with the incident management team, it certainly colored the kinds of discussions we had and the kinds of tactical decisions that the team was making, which I'm sure you'll be hearing some about the rest of today and tomorrow. We had a lot of some pretty interesting things. Because of the power line, we actually put together a separate agreement that I signed and the incident commander signed and BPA signed that basically spelled out what we would do when we hit certain trigger points. And I can say it's the first time I have ever experienced having an air tanker at my beck and call. It was a pretty scary thing. And if the fire got to a certain point, which it did eventually, then we were to have one of the air tankers in the Northern Rockies diverted no matter what it was doing to our fire. But again, it was just a really, really big issue that had national attention. It was on CNN all over the country that California could be going through blackouts because of this fire in Montana. And again, that really discolored how we were thinking about things and how we went forward. The fuels within the fire area were dry. Our ones, 10s and 100-hour fuel moistures were running between 3 and 7%. The 1000-hour fuels were 5 to 8%. And the live fuel moistures that the district was pulling was 90% in the 9-bar, but in some micro sites we had 50% fuel moistures for our lives. When you go out into the field, these live fuel moistures were showing a lot of signs of stress. The leaves were red, things were starting to crinkle and crumble. It was almost like a month ahead of what you would normally see at the first part of August. The topography we had within these areas, as you can see the drainage is, especially that Namote Creek drainage here, and then also West Mountain drainage. They funnel the winds. This is the West Mountain drainage. It's very typical in these areas. Any alignment with the winds, you really get a funneling effect up in those drainages. If you're talking to the locals, things are very squirrely. It wasn't uncommon to see a lot of dust devils. In the wintertime you'd see snow whirls and stuff as they bounced along the ridge line and stuff. When we come into the fire area on August 5th, you take a drive, and even though the fire really hadn't gotten back here on this backside of the ridge, you already had big dust devils dancing down the ridge. It's from the turbulence of the wind and the topography and the way things funneled through there. The weather that we had, the snowpack was about 40% of normal for this area. It was abnormal thousand-hour fuel moistures. There was a wet spring conditions that had come through. They had high moisture content going through April and May, and then going into July. They had about 700ths of an inch of rain, which is about an inch below normal from what they normally had during that time of year. There was a big dry, stable air mass sitting over the area from about August 5th to August 11th. We typically had inversions throughout the area. The smoke would settle into the valley bottoms, and then the inversions would break about 11 to 12 o'clock in the afternoon. When those inversions broke, you had a distinct drop in your RHS. It would be between 35-40%, and then it would drop down to about 15-12%, typically bottoming out at about 1700. Then it would start to come back up at about 2100. Typically with these inversions, we also had a distinct thermal belt that set in. We had a continual burning throughout the evening. Within that thermal belt area, typically we'd get only RHS in the 30s, maybe 30%. Especially when it got established in that activity slash on the back side in West Namodi Creek, it actively burned throughout the evening. The Tarquio fire was recently harvested. The Timmerground had a lot of red slash. The winds were very squirrely, and we were pushing a lot of spots across the line. It was really tough to hold the fire in those areas. A lot of dust devils. Again, it was just real squirrely winds. We had about 1700 on the 8th. We had a spot fire that one of the other F-bands noticed, and it was back on the back side of the ridge. It was about 25 acres. It got pretty well established, and we were concerned that if it got down into the bottom of that drainage, it had a pretty good fuel bed to take a run up to the top of the power line. This is where we had a heavy fuel model 10. A lot of insects and disease. Hadn't been no timber management and really occurred in there. There had been some timber harvest units at the top, near where the power line was, but nothing down low. Once it got established, it would have had a full head of steam up until it hit the ridge top.