 This has burned more than 30,000 acres and it's threatening hundreds of homes. Home has just exploded in front of us. More and more homes are being built today in wildland areas, which is complicating the work of firefighters. This team has been out three times this year. Every fire we've been on has been in the urban interface. Ten years ago in the southwest, you may spend a whole season fighting fire and never get in where structures were involved. As the number of communities jeopardized by fire increases dramatically, so does intense political pressure to save homes at all costs. Add to that the drumbeat of media coverage and its scorecard mentality of firefighting success and failure. You are looking at a catastrophe in the making already. Five people confirmed dead. Sixty homes destroyed. Thousands of people out of homes tonight. Thousands of people evacuated. This adds up to a distracting pressure cooker atmosphere for firefighters in the interface. Priorities can get confused and objectives become blurred. Are they supposed to extinguish the fire, to save individual homes, or prevent the blaze from getting out of control? Their job is further complicated as fires spread across jurisdictions, bringing multiple agencies together to combat blazes. Meaning that, more often than not, structural and wildland firefighters, career and volunteers find themselves working shoulder to shoulder. Each train differently and using strategies that are too often at odds with one another. The result is that miscommunication and safety lapses happen far too frequently. That is why many structure protection group leaders are rethinking the way they respond to fire in the interface. When a structure protection group arrives at a threatened neighborhood, the team leader must devise an initial attack strategy. The first thought is for firefighter safety. Are we in a good place? Are we in a bad place? The experienced initial attack will collect the crew, do a quick briefing. You don't just jump out of the truck and run. The leader's first job is to size up the situation. He or she takes the time to analyze the behavior of the fire in order to anticipate what it will do. The crew's resources are figured in, and then a safety plan is developed, along with a structure protection strategy. We have 160 homes threatened by the fire. Of those, about 40 are on the perimeter. The others are across the meadow and open. I am sending these guys around here first, and the foam truck is parking right there for those houses. We've got resources coming in. We're starting a dozer line to help us perhaps burn off of this afternoon. But how do we integrate the weather, the fuels, the fire behavior and our resources into generating a valid plan to save as many homes as we can in the sub-development? Too often, a fire in an interface situation can become confusing, even chaotic. Your information is sketchy. Crews are requesting orders, and smoke is confusing everything. The temptation can be to react immediately. Often, we can get the moth to the flame mentality, and we jump off the engine and we grab a couple of pilaskies and a hose and go after it, and there was never any chance we could catch it. The incident is treated like an emergency, and a just-do-something mentality takes over. It's hard to fight the impulse of first of not jumping out and getting after the fire, but you have to. You have to fight the impulse of getting right in there. During the initial incident, we can easily fall back on familiar but inappropriate strategies and work at cross-purposes. For example, structural firefighters trained to save lives and property may want to attack the fire quickly and directly, perhaps by entering structures. Wildland firefighters, on the other hand, are accustomed to containing vegetation fires by letting them burn out. Often, haven't received enough training to suppress structure fires. The most effective strategy for an interface fire demands a new approach, one that draws on the experience of both groups in assessing the fire's behavior and its likely impact on a community, and one that doesn't treat the incident like an emergency. The best leaders calmly take their time to develop the right strategy and tactics. They also make sure that everyone has proper gear and protective clothing before sending their crews in. They really don't care about the fire at that moment. They're charged with looking two hours down the road, eight hours down the road. They've got a radio, they've got a notebook in front of them, and it's the big picture view. You can see it in their eyes. They're not tunneling in on the fire. Your strategy in an interface fire should focus on three priorities. Your number one priority is to protect your crew and save the lives of civilians. Your second priority is to save property and structures based upon whether or not they can be saved. And third, it's your job to conserve your resources so that you can continue to fight the fire until the job is done. Once you've considered these priorities, you must then decide whether to adopt an offensive strategy to pull your crews back to play defense. This is the threat, not so much that even though that looks more ominous. There's a right time to play a short-term strategy of saving homes and a right time to adopt a longer-term containment strategy. If your assessment of the fire and your resources tell you that you have a good position, putty of time, and enough resources, you may send your crew to try to halt the fire before it reaches the community. In this case, you may employ a wildland strategy of suppressing the fire through containment. You would attempt to establish fire lines or even call in air support if necessary. On the other hand, if you conclude that little can be done to contain the fire, then you should adopt a different approach to protect the homes and the community. You usually go straight to defensive mode of defending the structures and you don't have the opportunity to actually get in and do suppression on the fire. Sometimes when you take the combustible yard furniture away from the house, it makes a difference. Sometimes when you close all the windows and, you know, jerk some of the combustibles out from under the deck, it does make a difference. A defensive position means trying to save homes through mitigation. It doesn't, however, necessarily mean trying to save every home. In fact, you may have to be willing to abandon some homes in order to preserve the neighborhood. We can't expect to save them all, so where can we have the most bang for the buck? And the reality is we're looking at maybe prepping, trying to protect three of the 40 homes. What we're going to do is we're going to go in, we're going to evaluate the buildings with the first two engines to go to the camp. Your success should not be measured by the number of homes you save, but by whether or not you stop the fire from becoming a full-blown disaster. You have to back up a step, take it all in, and you have to triage and make decisions on what's winnable and what's not winnable. By triaging structures ahead of time, you prepare your crew to work more efficiently once the fire does arrive. That way, you'll ultimately save more homes. So how do you triage structures? You usually classify structures into three groups based upon how successfully they can be defended. Homes that will likely survive a fire with minimal or no mitigation efforts are classified needs little or no attention. Homes that have a good chance of surviving if they receive mitigation and protection by firefighters are tagged needs protection. And finally, cannot be saved is given to structures for which no amount of mitigation or active firefighting efforts would likely save them. This is a great avenue for fire to get up underneath. It's all wood, combustibles on here, all sorts of areas for fire to just get into these cubbies and just push. And so we would have to write this one off and just say there's just no way to do it. Triaging a home requires making several key calculations about the structure, the fuels available to the fire, and your resources. You need to ask yourself, what is the fuel load like around the home? Is the structure built with materials likely to burn? Does mitigation make sense? Can it be protected from a surface fire? And equally important, do you have the staffing, equipment, and water to protect the structure? But the most important consideration is safety. Can your crews safely defend the structure? Are adequate safety zones and escape routes available and accessible? Never jeopardize your crew to rescue a home. Your attempt to save structures should be based upon if you can save them, not upon their financial value, political considerations, the pleading of residents, or any other external or emotional yardsticks. Make your decision and move on. You're going to have houses that you can't save. And you need to make the decision to move on, and you need to rationalize in your mind why you're doing it, and you just have to do it. Once a fire reaches the interface, the leader may find him or herself fighting two battles. The first is physical, the fire itself. The second is psychological. It's the mindset that says, we're going to stand and fight this fire at all costs in order to save our community. Before you enter a community, it's important that everyone realizes that structural fires in the interface differ from urban situations. A typical fire in an urban environment usually has multiple exposures with a fixed source. In the interface, however, exposure usually involves multiple fires. In the interface, however, exposure usually involves a flame front and multiple sources of ignitions. So as the fire enters the community, you'll have to make several crucial decisions. First, you'll have to determine if it makes sense to deflect the fire around the home. If small ignitions break out on the exterior of a structure, you have to decide if it makes sense to attempt to extinguish them. However, once the home becomes significantly involved, it's probably too late to save it. You'd be better off applying your resources to homes that stand a better chance of surviving. Never hesitate to walk away from a structure. If you're spending all your time and resources trying to fight the unwinnable situation, everybody's going to suffer, your crew's going to be in danger, and you're going to lose a lot more than you're gaining. Abandoning a structure can be the right thing to do, even though it may feel like admitting defeat. That's a pretty emotional decision when you realize that you can't do anything more and you have to move on. That's not what we're trained to do. We're trained to stop the fire there. But once you realize you can't do that and you get past that, it makes your job a lot easier, a lot safer, and a lot more efficient for everybody else. And never hesitate to walk away from an entire area with extreme fire conditions. In most cases, stopping an intense fire is wishful and dangerous thinking. Once a fire of this magnitude enters a residential area, there is little you can do. We basically can't allow firefighters to stay at structures at that point. And we're pulling them into safety areas, let the fire front move by, and then immediately return to do more of a patrol status. Seeing if they can get back quick enough to pick up the little things that may ignite it on the structure that if not dealt with, we'll take the whole structure. Sending your crew to a safe zone doesn't render them helpless. Usually the real work begins after a large fire has passed through. At that point, you can send your crews back in to protect homes by putting out spot fires. Common sense may tell us that little can be accomplished once an engulfing fire has swept through. But the reality is that few homes are destroyed by intense flames. The vast majority succumb to firebrands or spotting. If crews don't return to the interface, these lingering small ignitions may burn unattended for hours and ultimately destroy homes that could have been saved by something as small as a backpack pump. It's critical that the crew leader continually reassess the fire because circumstances change without warning. The lesson of how dynamic a fire can be is you have to be on top of it all the time. You have to know what that fire's doing. You have to know what the wind's doing, how fast the wind. Sometimes you get involved and you don't realize that the wind's picked up 5, 10 miles an hour and you have to stay on top of it all the time. Staying on top of a fire may mean altering your strategies and tactics in mid-course and quickly communicating your orders to your crew. Let them be in the corner. You guys support them on the south side, walk the fire down. The way you communicate your orders is just as important as the strategy you develop. It's critical to take the time to ensure that your crew clearly understands your decisions. Poor communications can lead to confusion and worse, tragedy. Once you establish your strategy, you'll then apply tactics to your fight. You'll need to deploy your crews in a manner that best utilizes their skills and resources and protects them as they work. Where you position your hoses, engines and water tenders is also a tactical decision. In each case, you want to place your equipment so that you can take full advantage of your resources. At the same time, set your apparatus in a way that ensures your crew's mobility. It can be a tactical trade-off. For example, hooking your engine to a hydrant allows you to access more water. On the other hand, it will slow down your crew if they need to reposition themselves quickly. Finally, the most successful structure protection strategies and tactics begin long before you even arrive on the scene. How well you communicate and work together at the fire will be determined by how well you have prepared and cross-trained in the months in advance. The more time you spend developing common strategies before the fire season begins, the more effective structural and wildland firefighters will be working together when a fire does occur. Mapping out risks and hazards, drawing up cooperation agreements, outfitting crews with proper tools and personal protective gear. Agreeing upon such basic things as common terminologies and sharing the same radio frequencies can make the difference as to whether or not you successfully protect your community. Take the pack off, release the straps, put it on its hose, put it into a circle and you can charge that and go on. With proper cross-training, you won't find yourselves working at cross-purposes. We can overcome the increasing complexities and pressures of fighting fire in the wildland-urban interface. But it requires rethinking what you've been taught about firefighting. It demands reevaluating your actions and objectives as you respond to an incident. Your crew's success will depend upon how knowledgeable you are about the latest thinking, about fire behavior and structure protection strategies and tactics. The more you know, the more likely you will be able to protect your crews and your community.