 This next module is broken into two parts. The first part will look at the five common communication responsibilities for all wildland firefighters. The second part will explore extreme fire behavior conditions in Southern California. We'll look at the Cedar Fire of 2003 and we'll see how both fire behavior and communications played a role in the eventual outcome of that fire. It's hard to ignore the fact that communication problems show up as a causal factor in far too many fire line fatality investigation reports. For the sixth time in the last seven years, communications has been the leading cause of safe net submissions. The fire community continuously tries to improve our fire line communications by keeping up with latest technologies. To hear the latest updates in the radio world, let's listen to the radio communication professionals at the National Interagency Fire Center. One of the things that has come up with the proliferation of new and different radios, for years we've been so used to having the King Radio as our handheld. And you went out, you learned how to use the King Radio the first time you went out there. That's all you ever had to deal with. You never had to learn anything. Now we have, in the cache, like I said earlier, we have King Radios, EF Johnson's, Datron's, Ray Cal's, and you're seeing the same thing on your home unit. It is your responsibility as a radio user to know how that radio works. If you don't know how it works, go and talk to your local radio tech. Or another avenue of getting information is through the radio website that has been established. It is www.fireradios.net. If you go to fireradios.net, it's basically the same website that we talked about last year with radios.nifc.gov. And as a matter of fact, you can still go to radios.nifc.gov, you will be redirected to fireradios.net. You will see some basic information, frequently asked questions. You're going to see icons for each radio and you'll be able to click on that and it will tell you about each individual radio, what some known problems may be with it, how to mitigate those problems, just general radio usage also. One issue that has come up with all of the new radios that are coming out now is they are all software based radios. Bottom line, your radio is a small computer and there are software upgrades that are constantly coming out. Your basic programming of your radio, your basic operation of your radio will not change, but some of these software updates will actually improve the operation of your radio. So one of the things that will be on that radio website that I was talking about, the fireradios.net, will be a listing of what the current good software program is, because as with any software program, if it's loaded in there, if they haven't checked for all of the bugs, all of a sudden we have a software update, it may actually cause more problems than it cures. Last year we had a problem on some incidences with people having their radio cloned. The password was transferred over to their radio and then when they went to leave the incident, they couldn't change the programming in their radio. One thing that you need to do when you're getting your radio cloned is to find out what the password of the radio, the master radio that's going to be cloning to your radio is. All of the radios within the cache this year will be all zeros for passwords, so that will do away with that issue. You can count on the fact that if your radio is cloned from a cache radio, it's all zeros. One of the things that really needs to happen on an incident is that when you arrive there, you need to know what the incident is operating on. Always be clear on is your radio programmed up or is this channel programmed up for narrowband or wideband. And if your radio won't work with the existing system, go to the communications unit to check out a radio that will. One issue that is coming more to the forefront is the differences in radios. 800 megahertz as opposed to the VHF radios that we historically have used on fires. If you're in an urban interface, specifically if you're in Southern California, you're going to find that more of your local users have 800 megahertz systems. Those two radios are not going to talk to each other. Then the need comes for us to provide radios from the cache to be able to give to those folks who are using 800 megahertz radios, just as we would provide them to some of our local units out in rural areas who are still using wideband radios, whereas our radios can operate in both narrow and wideband. One thing to keep in mind when you're out there, not only on a fire, but also on your home unit. Knowing how your communication system works is your responsibility, and you need to be able to mitigate any problems that may arise. When we're operating in the country that we normally operate out here in the West, we've got deep canyons, high mountains. You may actually find yourself in a situation where you don't have coverage. That's when you need to let the communications unit leader know there's not coverage out there, but also you need to mitigate that at the time, which means send somebody up to a high point where they can hit the repeaters and they can act as a relay for you. Remember, communications is your responsibility as well as the responsibility of the communications unit. One of the issues that comes up every year is the fact of maybe not enough repeaters on an incident, not enough frequencies, not enough tack frequencies, not enough air to ground frequencies. It's always an issue. Part of that is not so much a problem of shortage of equipment, it's shortage of frequencies. We do not have an unlimited bucket of frequencies that we can pull in. It's not a real problem when you have just a few fires in an area, but when we start to look at complex situations like we've had over the last couple of years, you look at what was happening up on the Payette this last summer and in other areas, you look at what happens in Southern California where you have multiple incidents with multiple repeaters, it becomes an issue of frequencies. One of the ways to take care of that is through paying attention to what you're going to say when you get on the radio. We've got all kinds of people out there who want to talk, make your transmission short and to the point, don't get on there and start talking and never give anybody else a chance to get in. In high-risk environments, one of the best ways to prevent accidents is by exercising effective communications. This, however, is easier said than done. Effective communications begins when a sender transmits a relevant message through some medium to a receiver. The medium can include face-to-face interaction, a phone call, radio transmissions, or even by using a messenger. The receiver, then, must first be listening to the message, second, accurately understand what the message means, and third, provide some feedback to the sender. There are a lot of ways for this communication chain to break. Let's listen to some radio traffic that was captured this last year on the Venus Fire and you try to determine if this message sent was actually received and understood. We are suggesting that you know we've been the pack to the north end of the fire. I will try to contact them directly after I... Copy that. Let me know if you can hold them. We break with Milovina's ICP. You're pretty much unreadable to me. If you can copy that, just try to find a place downriver from the fire on the north end and try to stop the pack. Okay, I believe that Unileave copies to stop their way down, upriver. Will Venus ICP, Black Hills, and Carter? I copied that. It sounds like Unileave got stopped. If you heard, it sounded like Unileave did copy that message, but they were pretty broken for me. Well, if they get to a point... Okay, I copy. Black Hills clear. In your IRPG, you'll find the five communication responsibilities. In one form or another, these show up as common doctrine in almost all high-risk environments. In the wildland fire community, we state that all firefighters should brief, debrief, communicate hazards, acknowledge messages, and ask if you don't know. To help you formulate your briefings, the IRPG offers you the briefing checklist and the size-up report. The after-action review or AAR page will help you debrief your actions. And hazard identification references are throughout the book. Being an effective communicator entails more than just selecting an effective medium. Assuming you have good radio reception and an open, uncluttered frequency, knowing what information is relevant to share, how to say it, and when is vital for effective fire line communications. As a receiver, you need to provide feedback to ensure that you are receiving the message accurately. If the message received is unclear or incomplete, or it's not the information you need for your assignment, it's your responsibility to ask for clarification. Ask if you don't know. Please keep these communication responsibilities in mind as you go through the rest of the module and throughout the rest of the fire season.