 Welcome to this year's Fireline Safety Refresher Training. The purpose of this training is to reacquaint you with the standard safety principles that guide our fire line operations. It's our hope that once again, your safety and the safety of your co-workers will be brought to the forefront of your mind and you'll be persistent in following proper safety procedures throughout the upcoming fire season. We're going to do this by hearing from some of our fellow firefighters in the field. We're going to read a few articles, work through some real-life fire scenarios, and complete a few thought-provoking group exercises. As always, your active participation is the key to making this training successful. So as we go through this first exercise and the rest of the program, try your best to be a positive contributor to your group's effort. To get you started, let's go to Southern Arizona and look at the Nuddle Fire Complex that threatened a very expensive observatory near Mount Graham. In the last week of June 2004, there were two separate lightning-caused fires burning just southwest of Stafford, Arizona. The Gibson Fire was smaller and of less concern than the Nuddle Fire to the West. As the fires progressed, however, attention was given to the Gibson Fire as it threatened the Heliograph Peak Communication Facility to the South as well as the University of Arizona's Observatory just west of Mount Graham. On July 6, the Gibson Fire made a rapid run to the South and bumped up against Heliograph Peak. The crews scrambled to wrap the facility with fire-resistant materials. Although much of the site was successfully protected, some of the communication facility did sustain some damage. As the fire grew, resources and attention were again shifted to the Observatory where they had worked hard to put in place a protection plan. I'm Don Howard. I'm the Structure Protection Specialist for Daniel Trogie's Southwest Incident Management Team. We're in charge of protecting some of the observatories that are up in this area. There are significant tie-ins with the University of Arizona up here and there are astronomical tie-ins with the international community as well. So we're here to protect these sites. This particular item that's behind us right here will be the largest telescope on the planet Earth when it's completed in about five years. We did come up and do a survey here and build a protection plan for this, but at that time we didn't think that there was going to be much of a chance that we were going to put it to use. This Gibson fire, when it blew up in one afternoon, it changed the complexion of everything that we were doing, so we immediately began to identify resources, resource needs that we needed to have here at this site. This is a fuel model 10 throughout this area. It's very interesting. We had some photographs that we looked at inside this facility. In 1999, we didn't see a dead tree anywhere around here. Today we're seeing 75 to 80 percent mortality in a matter of five years. It's concerned to us with us being at the top of slopes on all sides for this observatory site. That was also a significant concern. The Southwest, due to the drought that we're currently in, the last eight years of drought has had tremendous impact, as has the bark beetle that has come in and impacted the forests throughout Arizona tremendously. We took some interesting measures to help us. First and foremost, the University of Arizona, who really manages this site for a lot of different groups, had put in a sprinkler system around this entire facility. It's a two-inch pipe that's run off of three different zones. It has 164 heads. We had them fire that up so we could understand what kind of value that had to us, which was somewhat limited. We decided that we needed to deploy some of our own trunk lines along with one-inch laterals. We developed an independent water supply here as well that included a couple 6,000-gallon pumpkins and several mark threes. We developed another line as well that helped protect a safety zone that we needed to build that was tied in with our dozer line that went around about 80 percent of the perimeter of this facility. We located this dozer line on a road that was already existing. It was a road that was put in during the Clark Peak Fire, the 507 Road. There was very little traffic since 1996 to now on that road so we did improve it and that certainly gave us a point then to develop a good firing operation. The weather forecast for the following day, July 7th, called for the following conditions at the observatory, which is at 10,000 feet elevation. A variable south wind at 5 to 10 miles per hour with gusts to 20 miles per hour, high temperatures ranging from 75 to 80 degrees and low relative humidity between 16 and 21 percent. Safety zones were established both inside the observatory structure and a secondary safety zone was constructed west of the observatory with a dozer. Now let's get into our groups and complete the exercise in your student workbook.