 Now let's go back to Nevada and see what actually happened. Shortly after 1500, the squad was urgently retreating back to the Rock Creek. Immediately after ordering their retreat, one of the firefighters in his haste fell and broke his ankle. The squad boss and one other firefighter gave aid to the injured crew member by supporting him on their shoulders. Steep terrain, rocks and heavy fuels made escape difficult and slow. The fire was making a sustained downhill run with flame links in excess of 30 feet. While running downhill, the squad members split up and attempted various routes of escape. The fire began to outflank them on both sides and some of the firefighters were forced to retreat into the drainage. The squad boss and firefighter came to the realization that they would not be able to escape while assisting their injured coworker. Fire shelters did not exist at this time and were not an option. The squad boss is now faced with a moral dilemma. Should he stay with his crew member and be overrun by the fire or leave the injured firefighter behind? The squad boss and crew member leave the injured firefighter and move on. Shortly thereafter, the squad boss and remaining firefighter linked up with another injured crew member and try to help him. Their path through the saddle they crossed only an hour earlier is now cut off and they attempt to traverse over the hill just below the saddle. About two-thirds of the way over the gnom, they were overrun by the fire. The last crew member to cross the saddle and Rock Creek had broken his glasses and could not see without him. In his panic and confusion, he ran down through Rock Creek and up the adjacent slope. The fire overran him at mid-slope only 100 yards from safety. The remaining firefighters made it safely back to the truck. From the time of the initial wind shift to the time the firefighters made it to the truck is estimated to be 20 minutes. Five fatalities resulted from this incident. A monument was erected at the rest area just east of Rock Creek off of Highway 95. The Rock Creek scenario is now available in the Staff Ride Library on the leadership website. If you have a past incident on your local unit that would lend itself to a valuable staff ride, we encourage you to do the work that Mike Bland did and formalize those lessons to be learned for other firefighters and then share them with your local resources and local cooperators. The Leadership Development Program will be more than happy to add your work to the Staff Ride Library. The Rock Creek incident, although it happened a long time ago, still has lessons for us to consider today. After the Rock Creek incident, annual firefighting training became more formalized and fire shelters are now, of course, a required piece of equipment for all firefighters. The issue of crew cohesion, however, still leaves us some room for improvement. How does a crew boss manage a group of people that are obviously panicked and frightened? What do you do when an orderly retreat is not going to be fast enough and you're losing your ability to control the actions of your crew? Dr. Carl Weich tries to analyze this aspect of crew cohesion in his article, The Collapse of Sense-Making in Organizations, The Man Gulch Disaster. Dr. Weich tries to focus on two questions. Why do organizations unravel and how can organizations be more resilient? Part of the article is in your student workbook, but I suggest you read the entire article on your own. The article offers some possible insight into the mind of a person that is caught in the state of panic. Dr. Weich proposes that The Man Gulch Disaster was produced by the interrelated collapse of sense-making and structure. As he puts it, if we can understand this collapse, we may be able to forestall similar disasters in other organizations. A link to this article can be found on the leadership website's professional reading program. But for now, let's go back to Pat Withen for some more thoughts on building crew cohesion. Pat Withen-Well, we know that one factor that affects crew cohesiveness is the threats that they face. There have been studies done on this because these studies were done in relationship to the military and the police. They know when they go into battle that that does bring them together. I think when people think about that, they'll recognize that that once you're tested by battle, then all of a sudden you become a much more cohesive unit. And I think this is true with firefighters, too. So many times you hear crews come up and they go, well, we haven't had our first fire yet and they don't quite feel that they're together. They need to get that first fire, that first real assignment. And once they do that, they can tell there is a sense that they've got more cohesiveness. To build crew cohesiveness, one thing that can be done is just to start spending as much time together. So don't break the crew up into smaller squads and send them off for long hours apart right off the bat. Let's try and keep people together and let them work together. Prior to that, one thing you could do would be to set people down and just have them introduce themselves, talk about their experience. Experience is very important to all of us and knowing what a person's experience is really gives you a connection to them. You'll probably be amazed out of a crew of 20 people that they'll go, oh, yeah, I knew someone that worked on that district or I was on that crew back in 82. They're going to start building those connections of familiarity and people are going to have a sense of the crew that they know each other and that is perhaps one of the most important bonds that we have. So I would say the two most important factors for building crew cohesiveness are yet to know the other people on the crew personally and their work history and number two, spend time together on the task at hand. To build crew cohesiveness, have people identify with the name of the crew. Have them say, yes, I'm a wallow hotshot. I'm a McCall smoke jumper. I'm from the Sealy Lake District, whatever it might be. You know, identify with their unit and there have been studies that have actually shown if you take two groups of people and have one group give themselves a name and the other group you just let them do the task that the group that is told to give themselves a name will do slightly better on the task than will the crew that does not have a name. So identification is very important and then review of the mission of the task at hand. You know, we are the wallow hotshots and we will dig more line than any other hotshot crew in the Northwest. I mean this does give people something to home on, home into. It's useful for them that we'll start to build that sense of crewness. The role that crew cohesion played in the outcome of the Rock Creek incident is still being discussed and analyzed today. Could this type of situation happen again given our current training, crew structures and safety guidelines? The advantages of good crew cohesion can be seen fairly readily among many of our type one crews. But is there a balance that needs to be struck between not enough crew cohesion and too much cohesion? After all, cohesion is one thing, but crew bosses are assigned to crews for a reason. Again, let's turn to Dr. Withen for some insight on the possible downside to crew cohesion. There is a downside to too much conformity to too much cohesiveness and that's what many people would just call group things. So you get going in one direction and people are thinking well this is what the crew is doing and without even really questioning it they will go along. They silence that little dissenter in their head so there needs to be a balance. If people have something that they're uncomfortable with especially in dangerous situations that needs to be voiced. Now whether that can always just be brought up and talked about at that moment or not that's where I think really crew cohesiveness comes along that a person would know. Yes, this is the time to say this or no, let's wait till we have our break or we're having a briefing or we're talking about how things went and maybe our informal AARs. So there are processes where a really cohesive crew will know what to say and when to say it. It won't just be total conformity. With relationship to cohesiveness and just decision making in the crew the role the crew boss is critical. I think a crew boss should establish a climate where everyone feels comfortable speaking up but knowing when to speak up. So everyone understands their role as follower to the crew boss that they will participate. Because a good crew boss knows they cannot have situational awareness of everything all the time. They're going to be relying on the crew to give them information. But of course we know in wildland firefighting sometimes decisions need to be made very quickly. And so we can't have unlimited amounts of information coming in all the time. So a good follower will give information when it's useful and when it's critical. And that crew boss will establish that standard that yes I need information, I want information, but at times we're going to have to stop getting in more situational awareness and just go with the decision. To help crews assess their own crew cohesion the fire leadership development program is added to their website in the leadership toolbox a crew cohesion assessment tool. A copy of this assessment tool is in your student workbook but I encourage you to check out this website and become very familiar with all the various resources available to you. Now to conclude this module please get back into your groups and discuss what you can do this year to help foster positive crew cohesion on your home unit.