 Hello again. I hope that exercise was valuable and thought-provoking to you. One thing I picked up on is that if you guys didn't notice, as of this point Hector has done no work whatsoever as far as throwing a plastic on that fire. I can never turn down a chance to get a hold of my good buddy there. Anyways, now let's roll a video that's going to take us back to Colorado and show us what actually happened. Even though the fire was starting to lay down, at this time I did not like the idea. The crew had good intentions as they had not seen the fire when it was making its runs. At this time I was not comfortable with the idea and would postpone such activity until humidities and temperatures had changed dramatically. Since I was very reluctant to let them go into the impenetrable gamble oak and line these spots, I had them join up with the original crew of five and they would construct fire line around the right flank and smoke jumpers would go around the left. Both the smoke jumpers and district crew continued to cut line until about 1 a.m. The humidity increased and the temperatures dropped to the point where the fire no longer was continuing to grow. We discussed all the safety considerations and decided it was okay at this time to send the smoke jumpers ahead of the fire and grid some of the green. The small group of smoke jumpers gridded the green out ahead of the fire to find the original two spots across the ravine. Consequently they found two more. There was no threat of being in danger at this time of the night due to the increased humidity and decreased temperatures. The spots were lined and at first light we would have the helicopter and bucket work these spots. Thanks Hector. We appreciate you preparing that exercise for us and sharing your experiences from Colorado last year. Do you have anything to add to that? Yeah Teddy, a couple of things. First I'd like to emphasize the importance of good communication and collaboration with coming resources on a fire such as this one. The crew that I collaborated with there on that corner of the fire that we held up, they had good intentions. Upon their arrival the fire was pretty docile. It wasn't making any active runs. I think if I would have been arriving with them at the same time I probably would have had the same feelings they did. However they were very receptive to my judgment and I explained to them where I developed such a decision. Being that we had seen it from the air and the fire activity we had seen earlier and they were good with it. They joined up with their crew like I said in the thing along the right flank and did a tremendous job for us. The end story of this fire is we ended up getting all the resources we asked for and we were on this fire for three days. It was a fun fire. We all had a good time working together. Those crews and their people had to keep myself in the jumpers in line most of the time. Final acreage of this thing, 12 acres. Injury to sustain none. It was one of those we put to bed. One of a thousand fires that are typical like this every year. Good. How big were those spots by the way? You know the biggest spot might a tenth of an acre, a tenth to a quarter of an acre. But you did work them with the helicopter the next day. Yeah I'm glad you mentioned that too Ted. We aligned those spots real good that night, removed the heavies and such. First light in the morning we just put them to bed with the helicopter in the bucket. When I first looked at that exercise my first impression was that maybe you should, at first I was looking at well getting later in the evening I thought shoot maybe they could get out go underneath that the crew that was on the bottom end of that fire head over to the spots. At first I looked at a lot you could do that and put LCS in place look at it from an LCS point of view and I thought maybe you could actually accomplish that mission safely and pick up those spots but you saw some things and I just wanted you to kind of go over the things that you saw that kept you from sending that crew over. And obviously you had a bird's eye view coming in. Hindsight that decision it would have worked. Like I said my gut feeling at the time was you know there's a lot of unburned fuel between the head of the fire, what was the head of the fire and these spots and if the weather conditions did change you know not in our favor again that evening we would have some people in a bad situation. So you know I see why your judgment and why you would have opted for that. Well and that just the other interesting thing about this fire that I think that I saw was normally local resources in this case you kind of had the advantage because you saw the fire's behavior and you saw it take some runs before they showed up. Boy most of the time and you can attest to this because me and you are always working out a region. The local resources are a good resource for us. There's something that I usually ask them for local weather conditions, local weather patterns and the local knowledge that they provide is generally invaluable. So it's kind of interesting in this scenario that you got there and saw some behavior before they showed up. And you know on this particular fire itself we did use a lot of the local people for that. They knew the local protocol with dispatch you know they knew a lot about the weather in this area. They'd been fighting fire for you know several weeks in the close proximity to this fire so we did use them you know for a lot of local knowledge and they were real handy to have there. That was a good application of LCES and once again we're looking at a fire that didn't make the 6 o'clock news so it was a success. Anybody else have any comments on it? I actually do Ted. Hector I really like the way you set this exercise up and explained your usage of LCES but my main question is the proximity that you were into the Battlement Creek fatality site and the South Canyon site how did that weigh on your usage of you know your safety measures that you were in place putting in place? Okay to put that in perspective you know I think it's with any of the smoke jumpers that go down to a grand junction nowadays you hear that you're getting a fire call towards that country and immediately a big red flag goes off. You know kind of the conditions you're going to be thrown into. So you know first thought is okay we're going to that Gamble Oak country over there. Second thought when you see the big convection column when you're just off the ground at grand junction you know you've got a second red flag that goes up you know. So yeah it was a big consideration on why decisions are made like that in that country. And I think not only for smoke jumpers but I think that anybody that's fought fire in that country would agree with me on that. Good. Anything else? If there's got anything? I don't know. You answered my questions. Good job. I thought that was a real good real good scenario that you brought up and I appreciate you sharing it with us. So anyways why don't we go ahead and change our focus now and talk a little bit about another problem that the fire community is facing at probably an increasing rate and that is the urban wildland fire interface. This is the area of our job that seems to receive the most media attention as well as kind of raise the hair on the back of some necks for people. It's a very dangerous part of our job and it involves some complexities that are not found in strictly wildland fire situations. The nine urban wildland watch out situations are listed on page 11 of your notebook. Let's start by getting some comments from a person who works in this area and that faces it and faces this problem quite often and that is of course Nicole. Nicole what does urban interface mean to you? Well to me Ted urban interface is something you know it raises the hair on the back of my neck like you wouldn't believe. But it's something basically that's out there in the wildland area or abutting up to the wildland area that nature never actually intended. It's something that's man made whether it be a single cabin, an old logging mill maybe up in the northwest somewhere or whole communities actually. But I guess the actual definition as stated in S205 is that line area or zone where structures or other human development meets or intermingles with undeveloped wildland or vegetative fuels. But on the Las Vegas district most people there you know when they drive into southern Nevada they're like you know what kind of problems do they actually have? All I see is yucca cactus and pretty much smart you know sparse fuels. But however in reality we do have quite a concentration of mesquite, tamarus, salt cedar heavy concentrations of ponderosa in the mountains around there. Our urban interface problems lie pretty much in the fact that we are the fastest growing community in the United States at this time. And so we've got a lot of people that are moving out into areas that normally wouldn't actually be seeing this. Of course we're not facing the problems such as what Los Angeles or maybe the Bitterroot Valley up in Montana is facing. But we do have our own set of problems. We do have you know a lot of small farms and dairies out in the area. Multi-million dollar homes built up in the ponderosa in the mountain sides. And we do also do a lot of work with the military on military installations and bombing ranges. There in the Vegas area we work with over 17 volunteer departments or five different paid departments along with the military, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nevada Division of Forestry. In Nevada or actually in southern Nevada we currently are under one unified basically the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, you know us. We are under one single FMO and interagency FMO so we work really closely with everybody down there. Good. Boy it's going to be real interesting to see how the problem continues to grow and see how you guys mitigate it because the population isn't, it hasn't slowed down. It's still an expanding area and it's going to be real interesting to see what happens with that. How about the southern area, Lamar? You guys deal with a lot of cooperators and you guys have your own set of issues down there concerning urban wildland interface. Totally. Ted and I think the area, I think the southern area has done a great job of just educating the public on what's on urban interface. I think the relationship between the local agencies and federal agencies coming together and a great example would be doing the Florida fires. We had a whole, you had a lot of problems here. Initially you're bringing southern area resources to that area, to the southern area. We had a lot of things going on there. I think by going into those areas and educating the public on why we're there and what we're actually doing. Just dealing with just resources and trying to build some type of partnership between them. I think the southern area has done an awesome job of doing that. Let's move on from there for now anyways. It's going to be interesting to watch the scenario develop in Las Vegas and it sure seems like everybody has their own set of complexities that they have to face. To some it might be scattered land ownership and a lot of cooperators that complicate this problem. For others it's of course the presence of military bases like Nicole was talking about. For others it's just a large number of volunteers and landowners, ranchers, that you have to deal with and all incorporate into your fire program. Because of this we all have to ask ourselves, just what is the most common urban-wildland interface problem in your local area? Well Brad, why don't you take a crack at this one and talk about some of the interface issues that the boys faces? Well during the 1990s the frequency of fires involving wildland-urban interface began to increase within the Lower Snake River District. Due to the increased number of fires and different agencies responding it was determined that there was a need for mutual aid agreements and an avenue for interagency training. From that came the development of formalized agreements incorporating federal, county, city and rural fire departments for mutual aid responses and cooperation during emergency fire situation. Additionally came the formation of Southwestern Idaho fire training SWIFT which allowed agencies to collaborate and standardize training for firefighters who would be operating in the wildland-urban interface. Some of the problems which were not atypical to the problems experienced elsewhere in the fire community were communications, training, PPE and the limitations and capabilities of different equipment. Although not all the problems have been fixed, their large strides have been made. We have also been implementing some other unique training such as a yearly wildland-urban interface fire scenario incorporating federal, county, state and city personnel, helicopter dip sites throughout the Boise foothills in conjunction with FEMA and Boise City and the training and use of county and city firefighters on the Lower Snake River District hilltack crew. All these programs have been a real success, barriers have been broken, communication have developed, you have a face-to-face working relationship with your co-operators. Again, large strides have been made but not all the problems have been fixed. Sounds like you have a very SWIFT program being organized there. That's good. Actually, I do have a good question though. The scenarios, I'm real interested in scenarios because I think we don't utilize them quite enough in the fire community but you actually run a full-fledged interagency wildland-urban interface scenario and involve all the co-operators. Is that a big deal? Is that a huge production that you go through every year? Yes. Prior to the start of the fire season around May, we like to develop a scenario incorporating all the agencies that would be involved normally. Each year it's a different scenario. The players involved don't know what's going to be occurring. It's just like a normal dispatch. It's really a good way to get your mindset prepared for the upcoming fire season. I think that's great. I think there's a lot of that program that you're talking about. I think it could possibly be used by other fire communities out there that are just starting urban wildland interfaces and starting those programs. The National Fire Plan, of course, addresses that hazard fuel reductions around urban areas so I think this activity is going to pick up even more. The southeast, I mean they've been doing it for a long time, Lamar. Do you got any advice or anything that you should add that might help bring some light on this whole subject? Meaning in terms of RX burning and all that. RX burning or even just the past co-operations that you've formulated with state and local agencies. And that goes right back to education and actually going into some of the volunteer fire departments and actually sitting down talking to them and explaining to them why we burn. I think the South's been really perceptive to the whole idea of burning in their backyards. A lot of the refuges, a lot of the federal agencies. And there are a lot of major interstates that run through refuges in that area. I think that as a whole, the South does a great job of accepting fire and prescribe burn in that area. Anybody else have anything, Dan? I guess I'd like to add one more thing. When you're in that urban interface situation, the fire orders and the 18 watch-outs don't go away. You just additionally have other watch-outs which should be standing out to you which you should be noticing. I think another important point is when we are involved in that urban interface area, there's a tendency there where maybe emotions will maybe then overcome some of what we've been trained to do. And when somebody's screaming at you, you know, save my house, get my dogs out of my house, that's when you've really got to be on top of things and not let that emotion take over from what you've been trained to do at that point. That's a good point. And I don't see this problem getting any easier or less complicated in the near future. So let's take a look now at what can happen when the wildland fire is spread into the urban interface. Let's hear from some firefighters with recent wildland-urban interface experience. What happens in a wildland-urban interface situation like happens in a lot of situations? Another example is getting around a helicopter, which doesn't seem to connect right now. But when people get around a helicopter, they get in a frenzy for some reason. That's why they're very careful to have held-attack people to keep you from going berserk and running into the tail rotor. When you get in an urban interface situation and somebody's house is being threatened and some homeowner is screaming in your ear, you can tend to get in sort of that elevated panic situation and maybe take more risk than you normally would. This is just something that you need to be aware of when you get in that situation and make sure you stay focused on what your job is, what you've learned, and not what that homeowner is screaming in your ear telling you it's best for you to do. Keep your wits about you and keep thinking about your 10 and 18. My main concern with the crew and the urban interface is that you're losing control of the crew. You've got city fire captains, people that are used to giving orders and expecting whoever they yell at to follow that order. And if your crew is, the guy's got in his head and he wants to save the house, he wants to do a good job, somebody of importance comes up to him and says we need you to help carry this hose up this hill and losing control of the people I'm personally responsible for in that manner. That's my biggest concern anytime you get into a high, I guess multi-resource area with the crew where typically we're out on the fire line away from all the outside inputs and so it's much easier to know your crew's going to be where you expect them to be at. When I was kind of young and dumb I really had a feeling and it almost cost us some resources and myself maybe and it was on a hand-line crew and then also with engines that this happened so I think the urban interface as you grow older you start thinking boy that was stupid, what were we doing when we were in there originally it was have we got to protect everything that we can in the urban interface, that homeowner's going to lose his things. But to me it was after I gained some experience and after a couple close calls I'm thinking what I needed to be thinking was more about myself and my crew than about that homeowner who might have insurance or might not and his valuables because he made a choice, he made a choice to go and live out in that wilderness area or that urban interface area and especially if that homeowner hasn't helped us by doing certain things that we've been trying to get people to do out when they live out there I don't have any real heartburn. Now I come into it with a clear head about what I need to do and how to keep myself, my crew and my engine safe and if it isn't safe we're going to pull out and maybe some people are going to feel bad on the engine module but I know myself I've done the right thing because it was safety I was looking at for myself and the crew. What I look for in triage in an urban interface fire first of all access right off the bat because that's how you're getting in. Most of the homes in property we see these days they're off the road they're not right on the road you have to drive up a drive maybe a quarter mile back in there so accessibility is right off the bat can we get in there, can we turn around what size of our engines can we get in there it's too tight to get it heavy so let's get the light in here that's number one that's what you're looking for two would be I'm looking for defensible spacing give me the opportunity to help you as a homeowner it's a good old saying help me help you that's what I'm looking for if you don't take the time to create some kind of defensible area that we can get in and defend your home it's not manageable it's an easy decision right there no leave it we're going away some roofs it's amazing how many people are building these homes and urban interfaces and putting shake roofs on I don't know if it's cost or looks I think it's looks as if in Wyoming last year and somebody had built a jeez got to be a $400,000 cabin out in the woods and they put a shake roof on it and you know man you have that kind of money you can't afford to get some different kind of roof material and also debris piled up along the houses you know I don't want to have to come in with a crew and have to move four cords of wood away from the home you know that takes up time precious time if we do that to save that home we may lose the neighbors home and that's not fair to the neighbor when they've done their part at helping us any kind of water sources help out too you know swimming pools that makes it easy to set up an engine there it's a portable pump and three people and we're ready to go homeowners may not like it too much but you save their home and they'll understand so as you've just seen there are many additional challenges facing us when wildfire moves into the urban areas it's important for us to remember that we're not trained as structural firefighters one of our greatest strengths is knowing our limitations sound fire line decision making is made even more difficult in a wildland urban interface environment the best work we can do in this area should probably take place before fire ever starts in the form of prevention, public education, mutual training agreements with our structural firefighting comrades and establishing communication channels with cooperators but above all always remember that we want to keep safety first in this environment of course there are tools at your disposal when you find yourself in these situations the nine urban wildland watch out situations are in your pocket guide and they're in your workbook on page 11 so let me ask the panel some questions here Nicole do you have anything to add well yeah Ted there's a lot of good information that came out of the previous interviews there that I kind of like to talk about one of the things was one of the gentlemen was talking about helping us help them basically that goes that goes a long way to actually helping us because sometimes you have a matter of seconds maybe minutes to decide whether which house you're going to make a stand at and if they've taken the time to properly prepare their homes then we can make a stand there otherwise unfortunately we're going to have to leave that house another thing that Brad was talking about earlier is the ten standard orders and the 18 situations that shout watch out don't go away just because we're in the urban interface area in fact they're there present even more so but another tool we have to help us a lot is the nine urban wildland watch out situations of course these don't normally come as intuitively to us as what maybe the 10 and 18s would normally so I think it's a really good idea that we take out maybe take out our pocket guide and review those watch outs the urban watch outs before we take you know we take action again I think it's really important that we stay calm think clearly act decisively and stay away from that proverbial tail rotor that my boss Paul Bannister was talking about yeah exactly don't go berserk Hector you got anything to add on it yeah I do you know I believe that these urban wildland watch out situations should be taken to heart by all firefighters from all agencies on any jurisdiction you're fighting fire on you know my first few years of smoke jumping you know we'd hear the urban interface thing all the time and the nature of the beast back then was we'd go jump these fires out in these remote places and rarely did we ever come across any kind of humans much less a structure a home or anything like that times are changing it's becoming more of a common occurrence even with our job as smoke jumpers so just like to reiterate and re-emphasize it it really is important for everybody to take this seriously especially with the increase in Rx and prescribed burn programs that are happening I mean we're utilizing all resources not just for IA anymore but a lot of them are becoming involved in prescribed fire programs Lamar how about the southeast? and just like you were talking about Rx just a minute ago the same thing holds true I think that Selenarium does a great job in going into the high schools and educating the kids and what happens is that spills over to to the teachers and the parents and they tell the teachers and parents about what they learned in school we do a great job in our program in going to the colleges and explaining to them what we do and how important our probably helps out in your recruitment too big time because we get a lot of students and we go to and we go to a lot of the majority of black colleges and they're not as familiar with what we do, firefighting in general not very familiar with it but they're definitely not familiar with Rx burning and what we're doing there that helps out big time, we get a lot of students because of that I'm going to hit you with another question a firefighter from the west is heading over to the southeast on a fire assignment and you have an urban wildland interface situation going on what safety concerns would you want to let them know about that are specific to the southeast that they might not be aware of or may not have thought of when they were getting there? You know what I'm saying, we do things differently people come from the south you hear so much about the southern firefighters going west they encounter, same thing happens when you have western firefighters going back to let's say Florida, for instance there was a guy that told me a long time ago he said your hot shots better watch yourself out here what it meant by that was that they do things differently you can go to the wall all the way and all of a sudden you get these old guys are just steady going all day long you get these hot shots that are going down because of the heat or whatever and they used to doing things that way they use different means of fighting fire we use all tools in our hands quite a bit they use tractors, plows and that's the big difference between the two so a lot of firefighting is mechanical a lot of what we do is hands on so there are big differences there are big differences in the lingo I heard Brad and some of the other panelists talk about the lingo big big difference between a rise and a ridge so those are some of the things you got to be aware of yeah, the terminology I remember a guy from Florida asking me where Tom was Tom who? Tom, where can I get a Tom sheet? bad joke Brad, let's hear about some urban interface situations that you encounter in Boise well, you know we've pretty much hit everything that you could encounter throughout the region in the areas that wildland interface is going to occur some of the points that I would like to just end on is you really need to know your limitations in the areas you're working in understand the principles of wildland firefighters versus structural firefighters our job is to take care of the wildland leave the structure firefighting up to the pros other than that I think we've covered everything that needs to be covered you know, keep your head about you take a second to step back and look at the situation and you know, just remember what you've learned throughout this course here what about hazardous materials? I mean we breathe an awful lot of smoke in wildland situations what about when you come upon a vehicle fire or a structural fire can anybody just kind of elaborate on the safety issues concerned with that hazardous materials and smoke I think the major thing that we've got to remember is that we receive some training in hazardous materials but by no means are we experts if you're unsure of it stay back stay out of the winds stay away from it most of us at least on the engines carry hazardous materials guides that'll tell us a little bit about it but I'm focused with it and I'm uncomfortable with the situation I'm going to call back to my dispatch and say hey, you better bring in somebody who knows what they're doing here because I'm not willing to risk my people or myself in this situation Excellent comments that was real good at this point I think we'll give you a few minutes to work with your facilitator to discuss the urban interface issues that are specific to your area and how you can work together with your local departments this is also a time to talk amongst yourselves about your experiences and concerns you have in the urban interface situations that you've encountered so it's a good chance to share your own knowledge we'll go ahead and let you do that right now we'll be right back